Tag: christian nationalists
Christian Nationalist Group's Secret Documents Promise Apocalyptic Violence

Christian Nationalist Group's Secret Documents Promise Apocalyptic Violence

In a recent article, The Guardian's Jason Wilson detailed the links between the Claremont Institute — a right-wing think tank — and a "shadowy" Christian nationalist group called the Society for American Civil Renewal (SACR).

Claremont, founded in 1979, was once a traditional conservative outfit that championed the ideas of Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) and President Ronald Reagan. But in recent years, Claremont has taken a decidedly MAGA turn that critics have described as extreme and authoritarian. And Wilson's March 11 article illustrated Claremont's willingness to embrace the far-right fringe.

Now Wilson follows up his earlier report with another Guardian article — this time, describing newly revealed documents that "shed light on" the "secretive" SACR's "origins and inner workings."

The documents, Wilson reports in an article published on March 19, address "methods for judging the beliefs of potential members on topics such as Christian nationalism, and indications that its founders sought inspiration in an apartheid-era South African white men-only group, the Afrikaner-Broederbond."

Wilson explains, "(The documents) also show that Boise State University Professor and Claremont think tank scholar Scott Yenor tried to coordinate SACR's activities with other initiatives, including an open letter on 'Christian marriage.' One expert says that one of the new documents — some previously reported in Talking Points Memo — use biblical references that suggest a preparedness for violent struggle against the current 'regime.'"

According to Wilson, the "origins" of SACR "appear to date to the latter half of 2020" — and there are "indications that the inner circle of the group sought inspiration from earlier iterations of Christian nationalism in authoritarian states."

"In the early part of 2021," Wilson explains, "Yenor drafted documents that firmed up SACR's purpose and character. To a 27 April 2021 e-mail sent to himself and his wife at her employment address, Yenor attached a document entitled 'Working Membership and Recruiting Guide for Chapter Leadership.' In spelling out SACR’s rules, the document reveals the high value the organization places on secrecy."

Wilson notes that the SACR material has a "patriarchal edge," calling for "taking ownership as head of the household in terms of leading regular prayer and spiritual reading and reflection."

The Guardian discussed the SACR documents with Bradley Onishi, author of the 2023 book Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism — and What Comes Next.

According to Onishi, the prayers described in SACR documents may include "coded" biblical references to violence.

Onishi told The Guardian, "What happens when the walls fall down? Joshua's men go in and kill everyone: men, children, women, animals. It's an attempted genocide, right? In that prayer, they're saying we're Joshua's men. We're the type of men who trust God. And when God, when God gives us the signal, we're going to go kill everybody. That's what we do.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

New Poll: Most Republicans Identify As 'Christian Nationalists'

New Poll: Most Republicans Identify As 'Christian Nationalists'

A new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute reveals that more than half of Republicans don’t understand America and would like either Jesus Christ or Donald Trump to lead us to a God-ordained promised land flowing with milk, honey, unchecked grift, and bottomless cheese fries.

According to PRRI, 55 percent of Republicans qualify as Christian nationalists, per the survey’s criteria, as opposed to just 25 percent of independents and 16 percent of Democrats. At the same time, 83 percent of Democrats can be considered “skeptics” or “rejecters” of Christian nationalism, compared with just 43 percent of Republicans who feel the same way.

Meanwhile, those Christian nationalist views are, as you might have guessed, strongly predictive of support for Donald Trump.

According to PRRI, “Among those who hold favorable views of Trump, 55 percent qualify as Christian nationalists (21 percent Adherents and 34 percent Sympathizers). Only 15 percent of those who hold favorable views of President Joe Biden qualify as Christian nationalists (four percent Adherents and 11 percent Sympathizers).”

In other words, there’s a good reason the current House Speaker Mike Johnson thinks he’s Moses and the Alabama Supreme Court thinks eight-celled frozen embryos are human beings. Republicans are all hunkered down in a hermetically sealed room sniffing the same glue.

PRRI based its survey results on a five-point definition of Christian nationalism. Respondents were asked if they agreed or disagreed—either “mostly” or “completely”—with the following statements:

  • The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.
  • U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.
  • If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.
  • Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.
  • God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.

The fact that so many Americans agree with even one of these statements means Thomas Jefferson must be rolling over in whatever golf course shed Trump stashed him in after stealing his corpse and wrapping it in top secret nuclear documents like a day-old order of fish and chips.

The fact that a majority of the U.S. population still identifies as Christian does not make America a Christian nation, and it never has—any more than, say, the overwhelming prevalence of white hockey players makes the NHL the KKK.

Nope! We are a religiously diverse country with a Constitution that—in theory, at least—protects the rights of all citizens regardless of creed, and explicitly prohibits religious tests for public office.

But even though U.S. Christian nationalists have a completely (M)ass-backward view of religion’s proper place in a pluralistic liberal democracy, they nevertheless wield outsized influence. And consider the current makeup of the Supreme Court, and the ascent of Speaker Mike Johnson—who’s called the principle of church-state separation a “misnomer”: That influence only continues to grow.

Ja'han Jones, writing for MSNBC’s The ReidOut Blog, noted this out-of-whack power dynamic:

PRRI found “three in ten Americans qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents (10%) or Sympathizers (20%), compared with two-thirds who qualify as Skeptics (37%) or Rejecters (30%).”

So adherents and sympathizers of Christian nationalism make up about 30% of the American population — and evidently about 66% of the Supreme Court bench, if the Dobbs ruling is any indicator.

In other words, because two presidents who were originally elected by a minority of voters have appointed five of our current SCOTUS justices, the majority of Americans—who would prefer to keep the country as Jefferson and James Madison envisioned—are already living under a quasi-theocracy. And Christian nationalism’s enduring popularity only promises to make this tyranny of the minority worse.

That a movement so antithetical to clearly defined and long-held American values has overtaken one of our two major parties is truly disturbing. But as this same survey makes clear, we are still the majority. Which means there’s still plenty we can do to push back, even if the game is rigged against us, thanks to the same Constitution that’s supposed to confer inalienable religious freedoms.

It starts with this November’s elections—but hopefully doesn’t end with them. After all, our own little MAGA Moses remains determined to lead us into a promised land that very few of us ever signed up for.

Needless to say, we can’t let him.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Mike Johnson

Does Johnson Really Believe All That 'Biblical' Shuck And Jive? Nah

Everybody in the South has known somebody like House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA): an amiable, polite, well-dressed religious crackpot who’s either completely out of his mind or pretends to be for career purposes. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

If you’re an ambitious politician someplace like his hometown of Shreveport, there’s no penalty for professing belief in all manner of absurdities calculated to reassure God-intoxicated true believers in backwoods churches that you’re one of them. Everybody understands, especially the people who put up the money.

There’s nothing in the Bible, for example, that compels Johnson to profess disbelief in climate change—although he could probably manufacture something, if challenged. There are, however, plenty of oil and gas wells around the Ark-La-Tex, as the area around Shreveport and Texarkana is called, and the people who own them mean to extract every cubic centimeter from the ground and turn it into cash. The bulk of Johnson’s campaign funds come from the petrochemical industry.

Never mind that finding oil requires hiring geologists that understand the actual age of the earth, some 13.8 billion years, rather than the 6600 decreed by Answers in Genesis, the Kentucky theme-park Johnson once represented, with its life-sized Noah’s Ark exhibit and sea-faring brontosauruses. The congressman has insisted that the Bible story represents historical truth.

It’s the same with evolution. As a creationist, does he take his children to physicians who reject biological science as a Satanic lie? Even in Shreveport, those can be hard to find. So, it’s all a shuck and a jive. Almost everybody who’s been to college—Johnson has two degrees from Lousiana State University—understands the rules of the game, and everybody plays along.

In media interviews, Johnson is anything but shy about advertising his piety, recently describing himself to Fox News propagandist Sean Hannity as “a Bible-believing Christian.” To understand his views, he said “pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.”

A skeptic might observe that Scripture has been interpreted in rather a lot of different ways over the centuries. To Johnson, however, it’s only in Southern Baptist churches in North Louisiana that perfect fealty to God’s word has been achieved. All others are heretics or worse.

Also during his interview with Hannity, however, Johnson displayed a newfound willingness to accept political reality. He told his host that gay marriage is a settled issue and that there’s no national consensus on abortion. In the past, he has blamed legal abortion for mass shootings: also, feminism, no-fault divorce laws, and the “sexual revolution.”

"When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it’s expendable,” he told a New York magazine interviewer in 2015, “then you do wind up with school shooters.”

Because to the fundamentalist mind, only two possibilities exist. Either you agree with them on every issue, or you’re “of the devil” and an enemy of God. Indeed, Johnson has compared same-sex marriage to the right of "a person to marry his pet."

Which come to think of it…

Who starts purring madly when I climb into the marital bad at night? My wife or Martin the cat? Who gets up early to read the newspaper, and who stays wedged by my side? Have I chosen the wrong gender and species?

But I digress. Rep. Johnson claims firmer views. See, when the U.S. Constitution says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” it really means that Protestant fundamentalism rules.

Similarly, when Thomas Jefferson wrote that “It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are 20 gods or no God,” he really meant to establish a Biblical republic based upon a literalist reading of scripture. That this is absurdly ahistorical matters hardly at all. It’s called “Christian Nationalism,” and millions in the so-called Red States have chosen to believe it.

Theirs is an embattled faith. According to Johnson, “it is only and always the Christian viewpoint that is getting censored. The fact is the left is always trying to shut down the voices of the Christians.”

And yet God has elevated a champion. “I believe God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment,” he said during his first speech upon being elected Speaker.

And that champion’s main purpose, he has made clear, will be elevating, Donald J. Trump, that thrice-married, career adulterer, pussy-grabber and adjudicated rapist to the presidency. Johnson was one of the prime movers among GOP congressmen trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election, crafting absurd legal arguments even the Republican-majority Supreme Court rejected out of hand.

Think about it: Trump re-installed in the White House.

Wouldn’t that be a glorious day for the Lord?

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

Danziger Draws

Danziger Draws

eff Danziger lives in New York City and Vermont. He is a long time cartoonist for The Rutland Herald and is represented by Counterpoint Syndicate. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons, a novel and a memoir. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.