As predicted the "Christian nationalists" have indeed taken over the Trump administration
The evidence is evident in the fact that there is virtually no evidence
Where have all the “Christian nationalists” gone?
Or at least all those supposed “Christian nationalists” who were predicted to dominate the Trump administration and usher in a brutal anti-woman and anti-democratic theocracy of the type fantasized in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale?
“White Christian nationalists are poised to remake America in their image during Trump’s second term,” blared a CNN headline in January.
“Trump has put Christian nationalists in key roles”, warned The Guardian just last month.
As many of my readers know, I’ve had a relatively jaundiced eye in recent years toward all “the-Christian-nationalists-are-coming” hype and hysteria that has been fomented by certain advocacy journalists and armchair academics seeking to make a media splash since the Congressional election cycle of 2022.
I’ve written both seriously and sardonically about this somewhat farcical phenomenon here, here, and here.
Not to say there aren’t real “Christian nationalists” of the ill-boding ilk, the controversial kind that has historically been known as “Christian Reconstructionism”, “theonomy”, or “dominionism” and apes the writings and teachings of the late neo-Calvinist theologian Rousas John Rushdoony (1916 – 2001).
It’s simply a question of how many and how influential they really are.
The Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry (CARM) characterizes Christian Reconstructionism as follows:
Christian Reconstructionism advocates the restoration of Old Testament civil and moral laws in order to reconstruct present American society into an Old Testament-type Mosaic form and that the three main areas of society – family, church, government – should all be biblically modeled, the Bible being the sole standard. This would include severe punishments for lawbreakers. Some Christian reconstructionists would advocate death for adulterers, abortionists, idolaters, murderers, homosexuals, rapists, etc.
That wouldn’t win over many swing state voters.
But what I object to is the latter day burgeoning of an vertically integrated “the-Christian-nationalists-are-gonna-getcha” industry, which almost overnight has perfected the art of rhetorical hocus-pocus and word wizardry to brand just about any Christian, populist, or just plain old-school American conservative as “Christian nationalist”.
But what do I know?
We can find this trend in the recent efforts of media-anointed “experts” on “Christian nationalism” to explain how it has seized control of the American Democratic experiment with the election of Trump.
Take, for example, the predictions of Kristin Du Mez, professor at Calvin College in Michigan and author of the book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
In the January piece from CNN Du Mez ruminates about Trump’s 2024 election and the ideological accelerant it will pour on the flames by which all those “[white] Christian nationalists” are poised to torch American civil society and institutions of government.
She forecasts:
It will embolden and empower the White Christian nationalist movement. In all likelihood, it will institutionalize White Christian nationalism. It will transform our government, with the goal of transforming our society. It will likely place White Christian nationalists in positions of enormous political power. It could be transformative.
No one doubts Trump’s accession to power has been “transformative”, even if the word implies nothing more so far than category five polemical shitstorms blasting as daily routine from a pathologically high-strung media as well as the mealy mouths of sensation-seeking politicos.
Or whether it simply connotes a blessed rage for chaos.
But if it’s because of all those slippery and shifty “Christian nationalists” – white, black, brown or whatever – which the Trump administrations has secretly and strategically inserted into his cabinet since Inauguration Day, I need serious help in detecting the game plan.
In performing my own private due diligence of monitoring the recent mud tide of Christian nationalism’s hostile takeover of Washington, I ran a religious background check of Trump’s cabinet officers and found myself a bit perplexed.
I will concede that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth probably, as they say, walks and quacks like a “Christian nationalist”.
According to Democracy Now, Hegseth is a member of Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, a church affiliated with the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), founded by Doug Wilson, a self-characterized “Christian nationalist” who adheres to Rushdoony’s brand of Calvinist “reconstructionism”.
He also reputedly bristles with classic Crusader tattoos.
But that’s the kind of guy you’d expect Trump to appoint to head the Pentagon anyway. We need tough guys with principled conviction in charge of our warrior class.
However, beyond Hegseth, finding a cabinet members with Christian Nationalist bona fides, especially the “white Christian nationalist” kind, becomes a whole lot dicier.
Other than the DOD, the obvious place to sniff out and decisively root out a Christian nationalist fifth column would be the Director of National Intelligence and the head of the FBI.
No luck there unfortunately.
Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, happens to be Hindu. Ditto Kash Patel, the supposedly hyperzealous and controversial Trump appointee to head the national police force.
Not only are neither of them “Christian”, but neither are they white.
But let not your heart be troubled. If one consults Sojourners magazine, a Christian left pub, we have “convincing” evidence that Christian nationalism has slithered its way into FBI leadership in dark skin and Hindu Vaishnavite clothing.
If you chant “Hare Krishna”, that’s really code for “vanquish the infidels”.
Sojourners interviewed Stanford University scholar Lerone A. Martin, an expert on J. Edgar Hoover’s persecution of Martin Luther King, Jr., and found that Patel may not have the obvious earmarks of a Christian nationalist sleeper agent.
No offensive tattoos. Yet, according to Marin in Sojourners,
If we look through the lens of Christian nationalism, it makes sense when Kash Patel says he wants to take the FBI back to its original purpose. It’s a commitment to a Christian nationalism that has race involved, that has gender involved, and even sexuality. Now, it’s interesting to say that because Kash Patel is not white. But we also have to remember that Hoover fought vigorously against queerness in American life — and there’s questions about Hoover’s own sexuality. Psychologists would tell us that people who feel as if their status is precarious, or people who feel that their status in an in-group is precarious or at risk, they often police the boundaries of the in-group. We could possibly see that with Patel and Hoover.
I’m not sure if there’s not some slick apples and oranges fallacy covertly at work in these remarks – maybe apples, oranges, and bananas, as it turns out – but I think what Martin is saying is that Kash Patel might be a deep cover CNer simply because his predecessor J. Edgar himself was rumored to be gay, and since the latter “fought vigorously against queerness in American life”, the former just might be precisely the opposite of what he obviously appears to be.
There’s academic expertise for you.
Okay, so let’s examine some of Trump’s other “authoritarian” appointees such as Attorney General Pam Bondi, Vice President J.D. Vance, “border czar” Tom Homan, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Bondi, it seems, is a Sphinxy sort of riddle wrapped in a Sunshine-stately enigma. She keeps her personal religious beliefs very private, which frustrated web sleuths doing oppo research on her background during confirmation hearings.
One news outlet, which surveys the faith background of all Trump’s nominees, offers the following observation.
Bondi has not spoken about her religious background in interviews or on social media. Faith-related headlines about her work have instead focused on her political stances, including her views on the relationship between the U.S. and Israel.
Back in 2010 she was accused of having some questionable, way-too-cozy connections with Scientologists, but those canards have now been largely debunked.
And, hey, I don’t think any self-respecting Christian Nationalist would mask as one of L. Ron Hubbard’s minions anyway?
So strike 2.
Vance, Homan, and Rubio are all well-known and well-proven to be standard, average, garden variety, cut-and-dried, old-time Catholics, so it’s still rather hard to get whipped into a frenzy about the possibility of our national security establishment quietly installing high-tech blasphemy detectors in all the nation’s office cubicles, public eateries, and women’s locker rooms.
Strike 3?
Nah.
Enter everyone’s favorite Christian nationalist sniffer-out – Anthea Butler, Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania and frequent commentator on Religion News Service (RNS).
Butler is the author of White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America.
She is an expert on “Christian nationalism” because, according to her own testimony, she is an expert on “whiteness”, which is all the same as evangelicalism, which is what Christian nationalism is all about anyway
Butler writes in the introduction to her book:
I have taught and written about American evangelicalism for the past twenty years, and questions about the movement have always haunted me: Does being evangelical really mean being white? Does it mean that anyone who embraces evangelical beliefs has to give up parts of their culture? Does it mean that evangelicals always have to vote Republican? To be honest, I have always known the answers. Evangelicalism is synonymous with whiteness. It is not only a cultural whiteness but also a political whiteness. The presupposition of the whiteness of evangelicalism has come to define evangelicalism, and it is the definition that the media, the general public, and politicians agree on.
We can also all “agree” that the Catholic Church, even under the late Pope Francis’ headship, has been crawling with Christian nationalists.
In an article in Baptist News Global titled “Anthea Butler explains the Catholic version of Christian nationalism” she is cited as underscoring how church doctrine aligns in many instances with the usual CN obloquy.
“The way this comes together is through the spiritual realm”, Butler is quoted as saying. “Both of these people think about demons. Both of these groups think about the supernatural. Both of these groups think about what does God’s supernatural hand have to do in history”.
Yep, I can certainly see that believing in the bones of saints, the presumed Fatima miracles, Virgin sightings, and maybe even the mutterings of the Catholic mass make the Vatican into the mighty citadel of Christian nationalism down through the centuries – even before there were such things as nation-states.
To be fair, Butler clarifies that she is not talking about the whole of Catholicism but something termed “Catholic integralism”, which Stephen Kahn, executive editor of The Conversation International defines as follows:
…there are two areas of human life: the spiritual and the temporal, or worldly. Catholic Integralists argue that the spiritual and temporal should be integrated – with the spiritual being the dominant partner. This means that religious values, specifically Christian ones, should guide government policies.
Kahn suspects that Vance, in particular, might be one of them, but he isn’t entirely sure. Butler, who in the article says she was raised Catholics, is quite sure.
You cannot think about integralism just as this idea about a JD Vance intellectual sort of Catholicism. It is also about the people who are sitting in the pews every week in churches like I went to in Los Angeles and other places who are sitting in Spanish masses and hearing about why Trump is going to be good for them because Trump is going to make sure that their families are taken care of and that their daughters get married to somebody who’s not gay.
Cue in J. Edgar once more.
But it’s not only the Vance style of “intellectual” Catholic integralism that’s the problem in a global context. Ostensibly white racist Christian evangelicalism cum Christian nationalism has never had an exclusively monopoly on, well, Christian nationalist “authoritarianism”.
According to the Baptist reporter:
“And if we wanted to go back and dig into history, and this is where it gets dangerous, some of the things in Catholicism if we start to think about what happened in Spain and authoritarianism and everything else, really fit in with these movements. And that is where the danger, and that’s where I think we have to learn a different language about talking about Catholics and politics. ”Catholicism teaches a kind of authority structure that lends itself well to authoritarian political leaders, she said. “We usually listen to local priests, we listen to our bishops, we listen to our cardinals, we listen to the pope.”
Even though there tends to be scant evidence that Du Mez’ prophetic warning about a “transformational” takeover of the federal government by Christian nationalists is not false prophecy, I’m sympathetic to the logic that appearances can rudely deceive.
I’m reminded of an incident during the late 1980s wherne a student of mine, impressed by my knowledge and extensive public exposure regarding the then seething “cult” controversies of that era, asked if I worked for the CIA.
I replied matter-of-factly that I didn’t. But that only confirmed her suspicions.
“I knew it. You do work for the CIA,” she blurted out as if she had stumbled on the identity of a serial killer.
I asked her calmly how she came up with that ingenious deduction, and she replied effusively.
“Since you immediately denied working for the CIA, that proves you in fact do work for them,” she explained. “You know, ‘plausible deniability’.”
Touche, I thought. I smiled and said, “okay”, then left pondering the profundity of her logic.
Which leads me to conclude – conclusively – that the Christian nationalists have indeed beyond the shadow of a doubt taken over, and no one even noticed it.