Last week, Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley admitted something that could shake up his party.
“Some would say I call America a Christian nation,” Hawley told an audience at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington. “And so am I. Some will say I support Christian nationalism. And I do. My question: Is there another kind that deserves to be had?
Conservative Christian supremacy is on the march.
In Oklahoma, the state’s top education official ordered public schools to put Bibles in every classroom and incorporate its teachings into their lessons.
In Louisiana, officials have decided that every public school classroom must display the Ten Commandments.
What is happening to our nation, which was founded on the principles of religious freedom and separation of church and state?
“Josh Hawley wouldn’t have said that a year ago,” said Stephen Ujlaki, producer and director of the astonishing new documentary “Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy.” But today, he said, Christian nationalists “feel stronger. Their goal is to act as if they have won and try to get everyone involved.
Six years ago, Ujlaki, who ended his tenure as the dean of Loyola Marymount University’s School of Film and Television, decided to understand how Donald Trump – an adulterer, a sexual abuser, a compulsive liar – could become president with the support of the electorate. . claims to support Christian values.
What we do know is that Trump’s presidency and his continued popularity among the most extreme religious conservatives are the product of a 50-year-old political movement. Christian nationalism aims to turn back the clock on centuries of American social progress by exploiting the anxieties of white conservatives over demographic and political changes that are changing the country.
Christian nationalists don’t exactly identify with Trump; rather, it is a boat and a wrecking ball, and has been wildly successful in that sense. Who would have imagined last year that a Supreme Court reconstituted by real estate moguls would take away half a century of reproductive rights?
Indeed, Republican members of Congress said on the floor of the House Thursday that the country should “regress” to 1960 if Trump is elected, rejecting the emasculation of people by “angry feminist movements.”
Christian nationalism is a white supremacist political ideology masquerading as a religion.
“He’s pretending to be a Christian,” said Christianity Today editor Russell Moore, who left the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention over his support for Trump in 2016.
The movement did not arise, as is believed, in response to the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. It was formed years earlier in response to a decision that ended the tax-exempt status of racially segregated schools such as Bob Jones University. Abortion is just a tastier cover than racism.
“The big idea of ​​Christian nationalism is that God made America for a certain type of white Christian with a certain ideology and worldview,” he said. Eboo Patel, founder of Interfaith America, which promotes religious diversity. “The group is supreme and everyone is subordinate, and must remain subordinate by violence if necessary.” (Read: Jan. 6)
With the advice of friend and fellow documentarian Ken Burns, Ujlaki takes a chronological approach in “Bad Faith,” going back to the 1981 founding of the secretive and well-funded National Policy Council by archconservative Christian activists. Among them was one of the founders of the Heritage Foundation, Paul Weyrich, who once said, “I don’t want everyone to vote. In fact, our influence in the election is quite frankly because voter turnout is down.
The Washington Post described the council in 2021 as “the most unusual, least understood conservative organization” in the capital. It barred the press from the event, and its members, including former Vice President Mike Pence and rebel supporter Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, “agreed to remain silent about their activities.”
One of the council’s closest allies is the Heritage Foundation, whose more than 900-page Project 2025 is considered a blueprint for the second Trump administration. The document supports the goals of Christian nationalism: dismantling the administrative state by replacing civil servants with Trump worship, cutting regulations, protecting protections for gay and transgender people, abolishing the Department of Education, requiring all pregnancies to be carried out, making it more difficult. for some people (guess who?) to vote and shrink the social safety net (because if you’re poor, you have to).
“This is not Jim Crow,” Rev. William Barber II, who founded Yale Divinity School’s Center for Public Theology & Public Policy, said in “Bad Faith.” “This is James Crow, Esq. He went to school, got a law degree and has come back to pick up all the progressive voices in this country. (Exhibit A: Hawley, Stanford ’02, Yale Law ’06.)
A February Pew Research Center poll found that less than half of US adults said they had heard or read about Christian nationalism. “Most Republicans,” Pew reports, “say they’ve never heard of Christian nationalism.” It’s scary how ignorant Americans are of the movements that tried to destroy them in the past.
No one captures the ethos of the Christian nationalist movement better than white supremacist homophobe Nick Fuentes, who appears briefly but memorably in “Bad Faith.”
“F – democracy,” Fuentes said. “I stand with Jesus Christ.”
Except, you know, they really don’t.