It's Sunday

On Thursday night in Castle Rock, Colorado, a group called “FEC United” (FEC stands for faith, education, and commerce) held a “town hall” meeting that featured a potpourri of GOP candidates and election conspiracy theorists. Most notably, the event included John Eastman, the Claremont scholar who authored the notorious legal memos that purported to justify the decertification and reversal of the 2020 election results [...] , but perhaps the most ominous aspect of the evening was its location—a church called The Rock.

If you think it’s remotely unusual that a truly extremist event (which included more than one person who’d called for hanging his political opponents) was held at a church, then you’re not familiar with far-right road shows that are stoking extremism in church after church at event after event.

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Last week, the New York Times’s Robert Draper wrote a must-read profile of former President Donald Trump’s one-time national security adviser Michael Flynn.

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During the Biden administration, he’s taken his show on the road, launching a “ReAwaken America” tour that features conferences that combine “elements of a tent revival, a trade fair and a sci-fi convention.”

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[T]he tour is sponsored by Charisma News, a charismatic Christian outlet. The next thing you should notice is the list of upcoming venues: Trinity Gospel Temple in Ohio, Awaken Church in California, The River Church in Oregon, and Burnsview Baptist Church in South Carolina.

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MAGA Christian nationalism is emotional and spiritual, not intellectual or ideological. While a number of scholars have done yeoman’s work in identifying the basic tenets of Christian nationalism, I’m still partial to Baylor University historian Thomas Kidd’s formulation of the ideology as “more a visceral reaction than a rationally chosen stance.” Kidd provides a telling example:

I recently saw a yard sign that read “Make Faith Great Again: Trump 2020.” I wondered, How can re-electing Donald Trump make “faith” great again? What faith? When did it stop being great? No coherent answers would be forthcoming to such questions, but that’s the point. The sign speaks to a person’s ethnic, religious, and cultural identity in ways easier to notice than to explain.

But a MAGA Christian nationalist will read that sign and know exactly what it means–when Trump wins, America wins, and the church wins. The man, the nation, and the church are the movement.

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It’s no coincidence that Paula White, a pentecostal pastor herself, was Trump’s spiritual adviser.

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MAGA Christian nationalism is often rooted in purported prophecies. I’ve spent every single day of the Trump era living deep in the heart of Trump country, surrounded by Trump-supporting friends, and attending church with Trump-supporting Christians. If there’s anything I know by heart, it’s the “Christian case for Trump.” I’ve read all the essays. I’ve heard all the arguments. It’s in the air out here.

There’s the pragmatic or prudential cost/benefit analysis—he’s a bad man, but his judicial appointments are good. There’s the cultural argument about threat—the left has grown so terrible that we have to punch back. But there’s also another argument entirely, one that’s impossible to discuss rationally—that Trump is divinely anointed by God to save this nation from imminent destruction.

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It’s possible to overreact to this, to paint with too broad a brush. Michael Flynn is not speaking for the Evangelical mainstream. Millions of Republican Evangelicals have likely never even heard of the ReAwaken America tour. They dismiss “prophecies.” They’re legitimately aggrieved when they’re lumped into a movement and an ethos they find strange and appalling.

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For all the (legitimate) talk of cancel culture from the left, many Christians self-censor out of fear of the right. They know Michael Flynn is dangerous, but saying so out loud carries a cost. So they remain silent. They stay in their anti-left lane.

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But underreaction can be dangerous too. We know that fanatical religious subcultures can do an immense amount of damage to the body politic. We know that they can be both deadly and destabilizing. A Christian political movement that’s so focused on the threat from the left can often unwittingly facilitate the rise of radicals.

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[W]e have to know what we face, and what we face is an Christian subculture that is full of terrible religious purpose. The seeds of renewed political violence are being sown in churches across our land.

  French Press