When Christians Attack!

The Timeless Classic Gets a 21st Century Reboot

“You are not here to be blessed. You are here to do war.”

I have been writing this essay for over a year and every time I’m about to publish it some new story breaks, or essay is published, and I think, “Ack! I’ve got to include that too!” or I just get overwhelmed by the enormity of it all and throw up my hands. But the clock is ticking as the election approaches, so, I’m just going to go with what I’ve got.

Disclaimer 1: I’m not a theologian or historian, I’m not even a journalist, and this topic could take up several PhD theses. I’m just a cultural critic trying to wrap my head around a very disturbing and disorienting cultural moment.

Okay, so.

No matter who wins the election in November, “Christian Nationalism” isn’t going away any time soon. In fact, it appears that the Christian Right is trying to take over America, by any means necessary, and those of us who think that would be a bad thing need to be prepared. (See the new book by Talia Lavin, “Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America”, also Andra Watkins’ Substack about Project 2025)

Disclaimer 2: I want to take care to distinguish between the personal faith of millions of peaceful, loving, generous, kindly people who find meaning and succor in Christianity, for whom their faith is the bedrock of a life of compassion, generosity and service, and the politicized, institutional Far-Right Christianity exerting earthly power through hatred, repression and violence.

At this point, Trump is a chaos agent and strategic distraction, a master of misdirection. His word salad speeches are devoid of meaning, he is a coruscating signifier whose meaning is filled in by the audience. Even his supporters think he doesn’t mean what he says — about being a dictator, about deporting people, about letting police get really rough for one night — but he does. And when he waxes rhapsodic about “my beautiful Christians,” he means it.

I think the “nationalism” part of “Christian Nationalism” encourages secular society to see the election as primarily a political event, and it is tempting to see the current right-wing fervor for “restoring a Christian America” as the latest iteration of a long-running strand of Right Wing Christian political populism in American history.

But when we look at the rhetoric of contemporary Christian Nationalism, we can see the world as they see it, as a “spiritual war,” with 2024 as merely the latest arena in a perpetual conflict that started nearly 2000 years ago.

Looking out at the current landscape, I discern four distinct, if occasionally intersecting, strands of Far-Right Christianity — one might call it “Warrior Christianity” — at work:

• Far-Right Evangelical Christians
• Catholic Postliberalism
• Christian Identity Movement
• QAnon/Ecstatic/Gnostic/New Age Christianity

The Far-Right Evangelical strand operates on two fronts. They are conducting a “soft war” to drive cultural change through TV shows like The Chosen, films like Sound of Freedom and $100 million of Super Bowl ads for Jesus and Christianity. (See “What if Leonard Leo Became King of Hollywood”).

There is also a significant Evangelical movement towards an actual violent “hard war” that is being declared by radical Christian movements such as the New Apostolic Reformation. Some of these folks identify as “Dominionists”, others might fall into the Christian Identity Movement.

The Catholic Postliberal strand considers liberalism a failure and would like to see a shift in the dominant paradigm to a “postliberal” order where the government is run by adherents to their very conservative interpretation of Catholic doctrine. (Maybe go back to the Middle Ages?) They skew towards authoritarianism. JD Vance is influenced by, and keeps company with, prominent Catholic postliberal thinkers, among other obscure far-right intellectuals.

Financial and political operator Leonard Leo, who played a significant role in getting far-right conservative justices appointed to the Supreme Court, is associated with Catholic Postliberalism and Opus Dei, a shadowy Catholic organization committed to, among other things, the “re-Christianization” of society. Kevin Roberts, the architect of Project 2025, has ties to Opus Dei, and famously said that the United States is experiencing a “second American Revolution” that will be bloodless “if the Left allows it to be.”

The Christian Identity Movement is the KKK, neo-Nazis, Aryan Nations, and other affiliated groups. According to the SPLC there were 10 active Christian Identity groups in 2023. I can’t really tell how large this strand is, and it seems like there is some overlap with newer movements like Groypers and the Proud Boys. Kathleen Belew’s excellent Bring the War Home recounts the history of the White Power movement since the 1960’s which is intertwined with a distinct, fringe, racist Christian theology.

The QAnon/Ecstatic/Gnostic/New Age strand, as far as I can tell, is the most amorphous of these three movements. It is a kind of “Conspirituality” movement where New Age spirituality, Conspiracy Theories and Christianity merge.

Previously nascent, it seems to have coalesced out of the COVID anti-vaxx movement. It is exemplified by media personalities and self-styled gurus such as Russell Brand and Jordan Peterson but is really a big tent ranging from things like the Reawaken America Tour to RFK, Jr. events to January 6.

In this context, phrases like “Make America Healthy Again” take on a double meaning. On the one hand health is about “clean” food — no chemicals — and being physically healthy etc. But “clean” also implies a kind of spiritual sickness or “unclean-ness” due to spiritual — and physical — contamination by non-white, non-Christians. (See RFK Jr.’s conspiracy theory that COVID was “ethnically targeted”.)

The contemporary Far-Right Christian “spiritual war” seems to be animated by a handful of antique theological ideologies. To most non-religious folks these philosophies may seem arcane to the point of irrelevance, but I’m convinced that they are familiar to the intellectual framers of this resurgent re-Christianization movement. These ideologies include:

• The Great Commission
• Supersessionism, aka Replacement Theory
• The Doctrine of Discovery
• The Evangelistic Imperative

The Great Commission refers to a speech that Jesus gave to his apostles after he came back from the dead but before he went up to heaven. Jesus told his followers, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely, I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

This is kind of the original justification for everything that follows. Theoretically, this commission to “make disciples of all nations” is to be done by the power of persuasion, but historically this has often been accomplished through force. Take for example the Christianization of Europe which resulted in the erasure of the indigenous “pagan” religions, languages and cultures of Europe, considered complete in 1387, when Lithuania, the last pagan kingdom in Europe, was converted. Consider also the Crusades and the Inquisition, for starters.

Supersessionism is the idea that “God has elected Christians to displace the Jews in the covenant between God and His people. Christianity is taken to be Judaism’s necessarily total successor or “fulfillment” […] the only option for Jews is conversion to Christianity.” (read article here).

This is, of course, particularly problematic for Jews. In some way, this is the “ground zero” of Jew-hatred (later known as antisemitism), the primal unresolvable conflict from which the rest of antisemitism — the blood libels, conspiracy theories, etc., — originates.

Because, if you truly believe that “Sin is the problem, Christ is the cure”, then it is inconceivable that any decent, reasonable person, upon hearing this “good news”, wouldn’t believe and convert. Thus, the Jews’ obstinate refusal to accept Jesus as the Messiah is not only infuriating, but proof that they are “enemies of Christ” and therefore evil. (See Martin Luther’s “On the Jews and Their Lies” originally published in 1543. Now available as part of the Classics of Antisemitism™ Collection!)

In this framework, Jews, merely by existing, are an affront to Christianity. Pope Francis referenced supersessionism in 2021 and got some blowback, since officially the Catholic Church softened its position a little bit over the past few decades.

Supersessionism is really complicated and disputed, and there are a lot of different opinions among various Christian denominations, but this belief goes all the way back to pre-Nicene Christian philosophers like Tertullian and Justin Martyr. (NB: Certain Islamic traditions assert that the Quran is the ultimate interpretation and fulfillment of God’s Law, superseding both Christianity and Judaism.)

The Doctrine of Discovery comprises a group of papal bulls and edicts from the 15th century that formed the ideological and theological foundation for colonialism. (H/T to the Indigenous Values Initiative).

On June 18, 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas authorizing King Alfonso V of Portugal to:

invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens[Muslims] and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit.

In May, 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued the papal bull Inter Caetera, “with the express purpose of validating Spain’s ownership rights of lands in the Americas …” This is the religious document that sanctioned the violent subjugation of the Indigenous people of the Americas from 1493 to the Indian Boarding schools.

Shockingly, per the Indigenous Values Initiative, the “[Doctrine of Discovery] governs United States and international law today and has been cited as recently as 2005 in the decision City Of Sherrill V. Oneida Indian Nation Of N.Y.”!

And finally, I don’t really know if this is a widely read foundational document, but while doing my research I found an editorial published in Christianity Today in 1971 titled “The Evangelistic Imperative”.

This editorial basically reasserts the Great Commission and rails against any government that “seek[s] to stifle evangelical witness to Jesus Christ.” It asserts that in “seek[ing] the conversion of unregenerate men, even though they may be attached to some church or other religion, we are fulfilling our biblical mandate.”

This seems to be where the Far-Right Christian political rallying cries about “Freedom of Religion” come from — the freedom to proselytize and assert a muscular, confrontational Christianity in the public square, eventually dominating it to the exclusion of all others.

But, why does any of this ancient and/or obscure stuff matter? Because in their worldview, anyone who isn’t a Far-Right Christian Nationalist, and refuses to submit to their interpretation of Biblical Law, is by definition the enemy, and must be vanquished.

It’s not just the Louisiana Ten Commandments thing; or the Oklahoma Public Schools Bible teaching thing; or the Mike Johnson thing; or the Colson Center for Christian Worldview thing; or the Chris Rufo thing; or the fact that so many MAGAites make up a “rapidly growing, militant right-wing movement in American Christianity” who believe that Trump was chosen by God. It’s not just Franklin Graham saying, at the Republican National Convention, “One thing I do know is that God loves us and he wants us to be with him in heaven one day. And that’s through faith in his son, Jesus Christ.”

It’s not the fact that The Chosen — a TV series dramatizing the life of Jesus — is the biggest crowdfunded hit in history, part of a growing tidal wave of explicitly and aggressively Evangelical Christian content; or the $100 million of Super Bowl ads for Jesus and Christianity, or actor Zachary Levi endorsing Trump because “every one of us is a child of God.” It’s not JD Vance’s Catholic Postliberalism (read his conversion story here) and the Opus Dei agenda for “the complete ‘re-Christianization’ of society — of everything from education to politics, the courts and the private life of each and every citizen.”

It’s not just the Tree of Life shooting, or Charlottesville, or Kanye and Nick Fuentes, or Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Candace Owens; it’s not that Steve Bannon called the MAGA Movement a “spiritual war” in which “the future of American Jews, not just safety but their ability to thrive and prosper as they have in this country, is conditional upon one thing, and that’s a hard weld with Christian nationalism;” it’s not just the organizers of a Trump Boat Parade who disavow Nazi gatecrashers by saying, “Don’t fall for the fake news … Our movement the entire weekend was of wholesome values, Christianity, and patriotism!”

It is not just these things, it is all of these things. It’s the feeling that this is just the tip of the iceberg, that all of this is only what we are currently able to see, and there’s so much more yet to come.

In a previous essay I wrote about the “perils of ecstasy”:

There is this profound human urge towards ecstasy — in the original sense of the word — a desire to be outside of stasis, to experience a state of being beyond reason and self-control, to be caught up in something bigger and more profound, whether through artistic imagination, divine visions or revolution…

The radical social disruption of religion-induced ecstatic violence is cyclical. I’ve never lived through it before, but this moment feels disorienting; at once completely new and eerily familiar. A tale I’ve been told my entire life. And as reluctant as I am to quote Marianne Williamson, I think she was accurate when she said that Trump had unleashed a “dark psychic force” of “collectivized hatred” in the United States.

Never before have I so wanted to be wrong. I wish I was a comedian and could deflate this Far Right Christian posturing with humor. I wish I could make this all look silly and unreasonable; I wish I could trust that reason, civility and tolerance will prevail. I certainly hope they will. But I also fear that something dangerous has been set in motion that must needs play out.

And if it must play out, what can we do? How do we respond to this kind of hate? We can, of course, vote. We can be vigilant locally, regionally, nationally and globally to protect inclusive liberal democracy. I don’t know that the mechanisms of democracy will be enough. I hope that they will.

And maybe consider the words and wisdom of a different Martin Luther, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., from his 1958 essay “An Experiment in Love”:

At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love. The nonviolent resister would contend that in the struggle for human dignity, the oppressed people of the world must not succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter or indulging in hate campaigns. To retaliate in kind would do nothing but intensify the existence of hate in the universe. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives.

Sounds like good advice to me.

Oh, and don’t forget to vote.