We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that is what this is all about…We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.
As Ron Brownstein noted, this is the kind of apocalyptic message Republicans have been using for at least the last decade.
When each election is presented as life-and-death for the country, it may not be surprising that more and more Republican voters and leaders want to maintain power by any means necessary. The claim that any Democratic victory will irrevocably reconfigure the nation taps into a deep fear among key components of the Republican coalition: that they will be eclipsed by the demographic and cultural changes that have made white people—especially white Christians—a steadily shrinking share of the population.
Brownstein goes on to point out that, in a poll conducted last year by Vanderbilt University political scientist Larry Bartels, more than half of Republican voters strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”
I was reminded of the first piece I wrote at the Washington Monthly back in November 2014 titled, “Understanding the Threat of a Confederate Insurgency.” I had been struck by an article in which Doug Muder compared tea partiers to confederates. Even though the South lost the Civil War, they mounted an insurgency that “used lynchings and occasional pitched battles to terrorize those portions of the electorate still loyal to the United States.”
Six years later, the tea partiers have morphed into Trumpists, but Muder’s comparison is even more starkly real than it was back then. Here’s the glue that binds:
The essence of the Confederate worldview is that the democratic process cannot legitimately change the established social order, and so all forms of legal and illegal resistance are justified when it tries…
The Confederate sees a divinely ordained way things are supposed to be, and defends it at all costs. No process, no matter how orderly or democratic, can justify fundamental change.
Notice how that aligns with the view embraced by half of Republicans who are willing to consider the use of force to save “the traditional American way of life.”
Christian nationalist are very comfortable with that kind of apocalyptic message, as it has always been part of their tradition. So it should come as no surprise that, alongside white supremacy militia groups, Christian nationalists were an integral part of the insurrection on January 6.
Thomas Edsall talked to Samuel L. Perry who, along with Andrew Whitehead, wrote the book Taking America Back for God, about the role of Christian nationalists in the insurgency. Perry stated that their involvement:
reflects a mind-set that clearly merges national power and divine authority, believing God demands American leadership be wrested from godless usurpers and entrusted to true patriots who must be willing to shed blood (their own and others’) for God and country. Christian nationalism favors authoritarian control and what I call “good-guy violence” for the sake of maintaining a certain social order.
As Katherine Stewart documented in her book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, there has been an unholy alliance between white supremacists and Christian nationalists throughout our history. But the most recent iteration has its roots in efforts in the 1980s to merge religious and political identities to form movements like the Moral Majority. As Gerardo Marti, a professor of sociology at Davidson College explained to Edsall:
Their goal is no longer to persuade the public of their religious and moral convictions; rather, their goal has become to authoritatively enforce behavioral guidelines through elected and nonelected officials who will shape policies and interpret laws such that they cannot be so easily altered or dismissed through the vagaries of popular elections. It is not piety but policy that matters most. The real triumph is when evangelical convictions become encoded into law.
That aligns with what Stewart suggests when she says that this is not a culture war, but “a political war over the future of democracy.”
[Christian nationalism] is a political movement, and its ultimate goal is power. It does not seek to add another voice to America’s pluralistic democracy, but to replace our foundational democratic principles and institutions with a state grounded on a particular version of Christianity, answering to what some adherents call a ‘biblical worldview’ that also happens to serve the interests of its plutocratic funders and allied political leaders.
The bad news is that, even as the ranks of evangelical Christianity continue to decline, the militancy of Christian nationalists becomes more extreme. Robert Jones, CEO and founder of Public Religion Research Institute, told Edsall that “the more a group believes it is under siege from the larger culture, the more activated it becomes.”
But it is also important to keep in mind that the insurgency is a backlash to the fact that America is changing. As I wrote a couple of years ago, it has been fueled by this country opening its doors a bit wider to tell people who have been marginalized that “you belong.” That kind of change has always posed a threat to the Confederate mindset and sparked an insurgency aimed at maintaining “the established social order” of white male supremacy.
Serious question: would Christian nationalists consider church-going African Americans to be ‘Christians’? How would they rate Mormons? How about Catholics? Seems like racism (certainly) and a degree of religious intolerance are already baked into the cake. Which becomes a challenge for logical consistency.
Mormons and Southern Baptists have not historically gotten along very well. Competing missionary movements.
Yep; many Christians from older denominations don’t consider the LDS to be a Christian church…or consider it heretical.
I can tell you that my Evangelical brother and his wife stayed with me last Summer. I was stunned at how casually they hated lots of things. But I was really stunned that they hated most of their neighbors – because they were Catholic.
It’s always worth remembering that in the 1920s, KKK leaders preached that the organization stood for undying opposition to “Koons, Kikes, & Katholics”. https://masscommons.wordpress.com/2021/01/23/not-a-catholic-nation-the-ku-klux-klan-confronts-new-england-in-the-1920s/
In the 1920s, one of their slogans was “100% Americanism.”
I recommend “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation”. https://kristindumez.com/books/jesus-and-john-wayne/
I’ve not read the book but can see already that I agree with the premise. These folks have twisted Christianity beyond recognition. For hundreds of years many Christians have made it into a personality cult. In recent years, evangelicals have added other idols in the form of, first, Goldwater, then Reagan and now Trump. They imagine these people to be whatever they want them to be.
Imagine if they came upon the real Jesus. A Semitic middle easterner, a light shade of brown with dark eyes, curly hair and a dark beard wearing simple peasant clothing and preaching love. On a good day, he’d pass unnoticed. On a bad day he’d probably get crucified.
No, on a good day, they’d get in his face and yell “Go back to your country!” (but with much more profane language). And on a bad day, they’d not just crucify him but dox and harass his entire family.
I don’t consider most southern baptists to be real Christians. First of all, the sect was birthed of white supremacy. Second, they believe in salvation by faith alone, which to my mind is bullshit (and also contrary to much of the NT, see James).
So they believe they can be shitty, hateful people who act badly but as long as they believe in their sky-God, they get a free ride. Explains a lot, doesn’t it?
I’ve never been more happy to be able to say I am a former Southern Baptist who is now an atheist.
Adherents to Christian dominionism walk hand in hand with the far right terrorist network of the KKK, Proud Boys, and the militias. They are all on the same team, with the same overarching goals. It’s become mostly a political movement as opposed to a theological one.
I had this sort of hybrid background – one parent Southern Baptist (although ambivalent about the denomination as I grew up, and still seems to be now) and another who was already a die-hard atheist and even more so now in his twilight years. Made me a bit a of a questioner and searcher for a bit, but ultimately atheism was an easy call for me to make. Something about the Southern Baptist services rubbed me the wrong way. Got the same vibe when a number of my peers got caught up into mega-churches that I imagine were more dominionist than anything else. In other words – power over, not communion with. Not a scene I wanted to be part of.