Tag Archives: Christian nationalism

How Red is Indiana?

Wow…Just wow.

At the party’s convention on Saturday, Hoosier Republicans rebuffed their gubernatorial candidate’s choice of a lieutenant governor candidate in favor of an out-and-out, well-known Christian Nationalist–despite the fact that Braun, the gubernatorial candidate, had prevailed upon Trump to endorse his less-known-to-be looney choice.

The victory of Micah Beckwith exposed both the current rifts in the party and the degree to which the party faithful have succumbed to extremist culture war and Rightwing grievance.

The GOP’s choice led to yet another “schism”–this time, in my family. While all of us find Pastor Beckwith horrifying, we’re split on whether his selection really reflects the beliefs and bigotries of Indiana citizens. My youngest son thinks this extreme culture warrior is “in sync” with Hoosier voters; I believe his addition to an already terrifyingly extreme GOP ticket will hurt Republicans in November. (My son says he desperately wants to lose our bet on this issue, but he long ago lost faith in Indiana’s electorate.)

What do we know of Pastor Beckwith’s ideology?

We can begin with his statement that his choice by the delegates was “divinely inspired.” Presumably, he is confident that he is God’s choice…Indeed, Beckwith has been a constant voice for his rather unique views of “godliness.” He relishes the fight against “wokeness” and “woke indoctrination”–by which he means genuine education, efforts at inclusion or support for a social safety net–not to mention hysterical opposition to reproductive choice, women’s rights and–of course– church-state separation.

He also opposes freedom to read. Beckwith’s previous public service was as a member of the Hamilton East library board, where his efforts to censor hundreds of books generated a huge blowback from local citizens and triggered an eventual return to previous library policies.

I’m unsure how any of these extreme culture war preoccupations equip him for a position tasked with increasing tourism (!) and supporting agriculture…

Beckwith may be the most extreme example of the state GOP’s lurch to a very unAmerican far right, but he really does fit well with the rest of a state ticket on which Braun is arguably the least scary, which is really saying something. (He at least gives occasional nods toward sanity.) I have posted numerous times about Jim Banks--aka “Focus on the Family’s Man in Washington”–whose culture war positions include support for a national ban on abortion with zero exceptions, unremitting attacks on education, support for permitless carry (because that’s so “pro-life”…) and vicious assaults on trans children, among others.

I’ve posted even more frequently about Todd Rokita, the current occupant of the Attorney General’s office. Rokita has taken every possible opportunity to pander to the far Right of the Republican Party, most (in)famously in his vendetta against the doctor who performed an abortion on a ten-year-old rape victim, charging her with improprieties he knew to be false. He has subordinated his duties as AG to participation in national litigation brought by Rightwing AGs from other Red states, been chastised by the state’s Supreme Court (members of which were selected by Republican governors), and routinely acted in ways to embarrass not just Indiana, but the entire legal profession.

This slate of candidates makes outgoing conservative Republican Governor Holcomb look leftwing by comparison.

So–here we are. As I have previously noted, in November, Indiana voters will choose between a statewide slate of three talented and accomplished women whose credentials are appropriate for the jobs they seek, and whose positions on the issues are mainstream and sensible, and a collection of out-and-proud MAGA misogynists and theocrats. This won’t be an election in which differences are minor. Unlike so many elections in Indiana, it also won’t be an election affected by gerrymandering–even Hoosier Republicans can’t gerrymander a statewide race.

If you agree that most Indiana citizens reject the Neanderthal positions of these misogynist theocrats, you should send McCormick, McCrae and the eventual Democratic AG candidate a few dollars each–giving them the wherewithal to inform Indiana’s voters that Braun, Beckwith, Banks and Rokita are nothing like Indiana’s traditional Republicans.

As my students might have put it– these are scary dudes, and Indiana’s voting public needs to understand just how scary they are.

These four men all reject America’s constitutional values, and I  refuse to believe they reflect the values of Hoosier voters. Despite my son’s contrary views, I am convinced that these “Christian warriors” will only win if the Democrats lack the resources to expose them for what they are: the Christian Taliban.

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Religious War, Modern Version…

As weird as it seems–this is, after all, the twenty-first century– America seems to be in the throes of a religious war. Whatever the actual motives of the self-identified “righteous religious,” today’s culture warriors increasingly hide behind assumed doctrinal pieties.

And they’re suddenly everywhere.

The media is filled with stories about fissures in state-level Republican parties, fights between the GOP’s extreme Rightwingers and its flat-out nutcase “Christian warriors.” Here in Indiana, that schism is illustrated by the GOP’s internal fight over the Lieutenant Governor nomination. Mike Braun, who won the nasty race for the gubernatorial nomination, has picked a no-name, relatively inoffensive Rightwing female, but his choice is being challenged by religious warrior Micah Beckwith.

Noblesville pastor Micah Beckwith’s unconventional campaign for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor appears to be surging. Several GOP insiders I spoke with believe he will upset Mike Braun’s hand-picked candidate Julie McGuire at the state convention this Saturday.

Braun evidently recognizes that a Beckwith victory will make his already far-Right campaign more difficult, since Beckwith is a proud member of the Christian Taliban. The linked article reported his remarks at gatherings of GOP insiders.

Beckwith told the delegates in both Fort Wayne and Nappanee that it was his belief that America was straying from its Christian principles that motivated him to get into politics.

“I started recognizing something very concerning to me, that the church in America was dropping the ball on stewarding our nation,” he said in Nappanee. “When [the church] started shutting our mouths, the silent majority did a huge disservice to this nation. We became quiet. No wonder we’ve gone off the rails.”

Beckwith blamed America’s problems on a list of issues for which, according to him, the Bible has already provided guidance.

“Isn’t it interesting that all of the political things that are destroying our nation right now are things like marriage, things like abortion, things like parental rights, things like the sovereignty of our borders, things like taxes. But wouldn’t you know, God has said something about all of those issues.”

Evidently, God also told Beckwith to attack Governor Holcomb’s attempt to protect Hoosiers from COVID.

“It was March 15, 2020. I called out COVID exactly what it turned out to be,” he told the delegates in Nappanee. On that day, he said he broadcast a Facebook live video telling people “don’t shut down, don’t lock down, don’t mask up. And I called it out.”

As the linked article notes, 22,450 Hoosiers died from COVID after Beckwith made that video, including 616 residents in his home of Hamilton County. But evidently, that was God’s plan–after all, Beckwith is certain he knows what his God wants…

Unfortunately, the growth of Christian Nationalism isn’t a phenomenon limited to state-level politics. Not only does a rabid (and distinctly unChristian) cohort consistently prevent Congress from functioning, it has infected the nation’s highest court. That infection is most apparent in the person of Justice Alito, who–as Robert Hubbell recently reported–has now “said the quiet part out loud—i.e., that the reactionary majority on the Supreme Court is engaged in a religious battle to return the country to a place of godliness.”

It seems that an enterprising reporter has obtained evidence of what most observers have long surmised.

Lauren Windsor, a progressive filmmaker and political activist, bought a ticket in her own name to the Supreme Court Historical Society dinner that was held on June 3 and carried her cell phone so she could record conversations she held with Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts.  She’s done it before, posing as a fellow conservative as she recorded conversations with right-wing politicians at public events.  This time, Windsor appears to have been posing as a Christian Nationalist Catholic when she got close enough to Alito at the dinner to ask him a few questions.

While condemning the tactic employed, the New York Times reported the taped conversation,  and Alito’s view that that the nation should return to a “place of godliness.” Several other reports included anti-gay remarks made by his wife. (The taped conversations have since been uploaded to YouTube.)

The utter lack of humility that characterizes these smug “warriors for God” always reminds me of that FaceBook meme–something to the effect that “it’s interesting that God hates the same people they do.”

Historians and legal scholars can rebut these efforts to rewrite American history and undermine the First and Fourteenth Amendments, and theologians can contest the simplistic, dishonest and oh-so convenient approach to belief, but it will be up to voters to reject Christian Nationalists’ drive to deliver social and legal control to White Christian fundamentalists.

Vote Blue. Religious liberty depends on it.

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Appalling

A few days ago, I posted my belief that Indiana’s dismal education policies were the result of Hoosier legislators simply not understanding the difference between education and job training. A couple of commenters disagreed; rather than ignorance and inadvertence, they saw the GOP’s attack on education as intentional. Keep the peons ignorant, and they’re easier to exploit.

Evidently, those commenters were onto something.

Florida–led by “Florida Man” Ron DeSantis–has been one of the Red states leading the way back to the 1950s. That path back to a “Christian” paternalism has been paved by persistent attacks on educational institutions. DeSantis began by appointing far Right ideologues as university trustees, and working with his compliant legislature to threaten librarians and forbid teachers from “saying gay.”

But those measures–unAmerican as they were–were apparently just an introduction. Now, Florida’s schoolteachers are being instructed in how to teach Christian Nationalism.

Training materials produced by the Florida Department of Education direct middle and high school teachers to indoctrinate students in the tenets of Christian nationalism, a right-wing effort to merge Christian and American identities. Thousands of Florida teachers, lured by cash stipends, have attended trainings featuring these materials.

A three-day training course on civic education, conducted throughout Florida in the summer of 2023, included a presentation on the “Influences of the Judeo-Christian Tradition” on the founding of the United States. According to speaker notes accompanying one slide, teachers were told that “Christianity challenged the notion that religion should be subservient to the goals of the state,” and the same hierarchy is reflected in America’s founding documents. That slide quotes the Bible to assert that “[c]ivil government must be respected, but the state is not God.” Teachers were told the same principle is embedded in the Declaration of Independence.

The site Popular Information obtained the slides from the Florida Freedom to Read Project, which received them from the Florida Department of Education after filing a public records request.

The next slide in the deck quotes an article by Peter Lillback, the president of Westminster Theological Seminary and the founder of The Providence Forum, an organization that promotes and defends Christian nationalism. The group’s executive director, Jerry Newcombe, writes a weekly column for World Net Daily — a far-right site known for publishing hundreds of stories falsely suggesting Obama was a Muslim born in Africa.

Popular Information asked Amanda Tyler to review the presentation. Tyler is the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, and an expert on Christian nationalism.

Tyler said that the “focus on the mythological founding of the country as a Christian nation, this use of cherry-picked history… is very much a marker of Christian nationalism.” According to Tyler, the aim of the presentation is “to solidify this ideology that equates being American to being Christian.” Tyler noted that the presentation does not address why, if religion was so essential to the structure of the government, the Constitution does not mention God at all.

Robert P. Jones, the president of the Public Religion Research Institute and the author of a newsletter on American Christianity, agreed, saying that the language in the slide deck is similar to what one would hear at “Christian nationalist rallies.” The term “Judeo-Christian,” Jones said, is frequently deployed in Christian nationalist circles as code for a white European Christian worldview.

One Florida middle school teacher who attended the civics training in 2022 and 2023 told Popular Information that, in one session, presenters used the King James Bibles to illustrate their points. Another said there was a heavy emphasis in the training on “dispelling the separation of church and state.” Teachers attending the training were told “that there was no such thing because the founders were Congregationalists,” (an assertion that is factually untrue and– had it been true– would hardly have supported a rebuttal of the constitutional separation of church and state.)

The training ignores John Locke and other Enlightenment figures. Instead, the slides claim that the basis of U.S. law is the Ten Commandments and that the phrase “all men are created equal” is derived from the biblical concept that “man is made in the image of God.”

Instructors were drawn from places like Hillsdale College, a Right-wing Christian institution seeking an overhaul of K-12 education that aligns with its conservative ideology. Hillsdale’s ideology downplays the role of slavery in American history and compares progressivism to fascism and the school is intimately connected to the Christian Nationalist movement.

Here in Indiana, clones of “Florida Man” include Republican culture warriors like Mike Braun, Jim Banks and Todd Rokita. If Hoosiers elect any or all of them, it will be an endorsement of the appalling “education” being pursued in Florida.

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HCR Connects The Dots

One of Heather Cox Richardson’s recent Letters clarified–in a way I’d not seen elsewhere–the stakes of our upcoming election. She began by reporting on a recent interview in which Bill Barr, who headed the Department of Justice under Trump, acknowledged Trump’s volatility and unstable behavior, but then indicated his intent to vote for him.

When the interviewer asked him why he planned to vote for someone he knew had tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power–someone incapable of achieving his own policies, who lies repeatedly, and faces multiple criminal charges–Barr responded, “I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration.”

Just wow.

Later, Richardson shared a speech Barr had delivered that illuminates that otherwise incomprehensible response. The speech was a defense of the so-called “unitary executive” theory (a “president as king” theory, the origin of which has been attributed to Samuel Alito.)

In 2019, Barr explained to an audience at the University of Notre Dame the ideology behind the strong executive and weakened representation. Rejecting the clear words of the Constitution’s framers, Barr said that the U.S. was never meant to be a secular democracy. When the nation’s founders had spoken so extensively about self-government, he said, they had not meant the right to elect representatives of their own choosing. Instead, he said, the founders meant the ability of individuals to “restrain and govern themselves.” And, because people are willful, the only way to achieve self-government is through religion.

Those who believe the United States is a secular country, he said, are destroying the nation. It was imperative, he said, to reject those values and embrace religion as the basis for American government.

The idea that the United States must become a Christian nation has apparently led Barr to accept the idea that a man who has called for the execution of those he sees as enemies should be president, apparently because he is expected to usher in an authoritarian Christian state, in preference to a man who is using the power of the government to help ordinary Americans.

That is the unbridgeable gulf we face. The over-riding question Americans will face in November is whether the United States will continue to be the secular democratic republic bequeathed to us by the nation’s founders, or a Christian Nationalist theocracy.

As Richardson noted, a number of pundits have shared a recent, blistering diatribe by George Stephanopolis, focusing on the numerous other differences between the upcoming election and previous contests.

“Until now,” he said in the show’s opener on Sunday, “[n]o American president had ever faced a criminal trial. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment for retaining and concealing classified documents. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment or a state indictment for trying to overturn an election, or been named an unindicted co-conspirator in two other states for the same crime. No American president ever faced hundreds of millions of dollars in judgments for business fraud, defamation, and sexual abuse….

“The scale of the abnormality is so staggering, that it can actually become numbing. It’s all too easy to fall into reflexive habits, to treat this as a normal campaign, where both sides embrace the rule of law, where both sides are dedicated to a debate based on facts and the peaceful transfer of power. But, that is not what’s happening this election year. Those bedrock tenets of our democracy are being tested in a way we haven’t seen since the Civil War. It’s a test for the candidates, for those of us in the media, and for all of us as citizens.”

Stephanopolis’ passionate summation was absolutely correct–but it was also incomplete. What he neglected to add was that those who are prepared to ignore all of it–prepared to cast a ballot for this wretched joke of a man– are motivated by an underlying philosophy utterly incompatible with the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Christian Nationalism–not to be confused with genuine Christianity–often cloaked in legal jargon about a “unitary executive” and MAGA slogans about putting America First–is at the root of Trump support. MAGA Republicans are all about remaking America into their version of a “Christian Nation,” and we are just now beginning to see that movement for the racist, misogynist, utterly regressive effort it is.

This is no time to debate the merits of this or that policy. We can argue policy later. In November, we need to prevent MAGA Christian Nationalists from turning America into the country of Bob Barr’s wet dreams.

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Not Even A Festivus For The Rest Of Us…

Unlike most Americans, I was never a big “Seinfeld” fan, but many of the sitcom’s jokes became widespread–none more than its promotion of “Festivus for the rest of us,” a “celebration” for those who don’t celebrate Christmas.

What brought that mythical holiday to mind was a very unfunny report from Talking Points Memo about America’s growing Christian Nationalist movement, a movement that–if successful–will leave no room for alternate (i.e. nonChristian) holidays. The sub-head really says it all: “From traditional Christian-right figures to secret societies envisioning a ‘national divorce,’ a growing contingent of radical activists is planning for Christian supremacy.”

The report was written by Sarah Posner, a journalist who has covered the Christian Right for two decades.

Over the past three years, I began to more frequently use the term “Christian nationalism” to describe the movement I cover. But I did not start using a new term to suggest its proponents’ ideology had changed. Instead, the term had come into more common usage in the Trump era, now regularly used by academics, journalists, and pro-democracy activists to describe a movement that insists America is a “Christian nation” — that is, an illiberal, nominally democratic theocracy, rather than a pluralistic secular democracy.

To me, the phrase was highly descriptive of the movement I’ve dedicated my career to covering, and neatly encapsulates the core threat the Christian right poses to freedom and equality. From its top leaders and influencers down to the grassroots — politically mobilized white evangelicals, the foot soldiers of the Christian right — its proponents believe that God divinely ordained America to be a Christian nation; that this Christian nation has come under attack by liberals and secularists; and that patriotic Christians must engage in spiritual warfare to rid America of demonic forces, and in political action to restore its Christian heritage. That includes taking political steps — as a voter, as an elected official, as a lawyer, as a judge — to ensure that America is governed according to a “biblical worldview.”

Those of us who occupy a far more secular America have been laboring under the misapprehension that religious wars are things of the past. Those of us who are comfortable in a society formed in large part by changes introduced during the Enlightenment–respect for science and empiricism, belief that governments derive their powers from the people, not from deity–have a hard time recognizing, let alone understanding, a worldview that remains rooted in the 16th Century. But that is the worldview that has spawned today’s politically active megachurches, and what the article calls “culture-shaping organizations like Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council.

These “Christian soldiers” want governance according to their vision of a biblical worldview. They oppose church-state separation, want expanded rights for conservative Christians, are dead-set against abortion and LGBTQ rights, and are extremely hostile to trans people and trans rights. (Here in Indiana, Jim Banks–currently the unopposed Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, often called “Focus on the Family’s man in Washington, is a perfect example of a Christian Nationalist “warrior.”)

Posner and several others have noted the prominence of Christian iconography at the January 6 insurrection, and the growing willingness of MAGA Christians to tolerate, even welcome, virulent racists, anti-Semites and other extremists in their midst. As she writes, “Their entire alliance with Trump is one of sharing political and ideological space with the overtly antisemitic, racist, Islamophobic, nativist extremists he elevated to mainstream status in the GOP.”

Posner describes the various strands within Christian Nationalism, but notes commonalities as well: they “believe they are restoring, and will run, the Christian nation God intended America to be — from the inside.”

They will do that, in their view, through faith (evangelizing others and bringing them to salvation through Jesus Christ); through spiritual warfare (using prayer to battle satanic enemies of Christian America); and through politics and the law (governing and lawmaking from a “biblical worldview” after eviscerating church-state separation). Changes in the evangelical world, particularly the emphasis in the growing charismatic movement on prophecy, signs and wonders, spiritual warfare, the prosperity gospel, and Trumpism, has intensified the prominence of the supernatural in their politics, giving their Christian nationalism its own unmistakable brand.

Every single MAGA politician elected in November will be a foot-soldier for Christian Nationalism. A Trump victory would give them free reign to remake America in accordance with a “Godly” vision–a vision that was expressly rejected by the nation’s Founders.

The world that these Christian Nationalist politicians inhabit (and want to impose upon all of America) is pre-modern, intolerant, anti-science, anti-democracy. It has no room for “the rest of us.”

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