White Christian Nationalists and the January 6th Insurrection

My first direct exposure to right wing evangelicals and what might aptly be called white Christian dominionists was nearly 30 years ago when I first became deeply involvedin politics and ran for public office.  Eventually, I became a member of the City Committee for the Republican Party of Virginia Beach and witnessed the efforts of members of the Christian Coalition and other Christian extremist to infiltrate the Republican Party.  The hallmark of these people was their desire to impose their extreme beliefs on all and marginalize anyone who differed with them and did not look like them.  There was and continues to be a strong racist undercurrent and gays, non-Christians and even liberal Christians were deemed the enemy.  Rather than practicing the true tenents of Christ's gospel message the goal of these faux Christians is power, especially political power that will enable them to impose their dogma on all citizens. Democracy in an increasingly diverse nation is an obstacle to this extremist agenda and it's little surprise that the January 6th coup attempt and sacking of the U.S. Capitol involved many white Christian nationalists only too eager to overthrow the government.  The recently revealed text messages involving Virginia Thomas - wife of Justice Thomas, the dullard in chief on the U.S. Supreme Court - underscore this anti-democracy movement.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this continued threat to constitutional government:

We haven’t paid enough attention to the role of right-wing Christian nationalism in driving Trump’s effort to destroy our political order, and in the abandonment of democracy among some on the right more broadly.

In invoking Jesus’ support for Trump’s effort to overturn the election, [Trump aid Mark] Meadows — who handled evangelical outreach in the White House — was not merely making an offhand comment. He was speaking in a vein that has held wide currency among the Christian nationalist right throughout the Trump years, right through the insurrection attempt.

Sarah Posner, a scholar of the Christian right, has extensively documented the role of that movement in supporting and lending grass-roots energy to the effort to overturn the election procedurally, and even in fomenting the insurrection itself.

The rhetoric from the Christian right about Trump has long sounded very much like that exchange between Meadows and [Ginni] Thomas. In a piece tracing that rhetoric, Posner concludes that for many on the Christian right, Trump was “anointed” by God as “the fulfillment of a long-sought goal of restoring the United States as a Christian nation.”

In this narrative, Trump — despite his glaring and repugnant personal imperfections — became the vessel to carry out the struggle to defeat various godless and secularist infestations of the idealized Christian nation, from the woke to globalists to communists to the “deep state.”

This culminated with the effort to overturn the election and the lead-up to the Jan. 6 rally that morphed into the mob assault. As Posner documents, Christian-right activists developed a “bellicose Christian narrative in defense of Trump’s coup attempt,” investing it with biblical significance and casting it as “holy war against an illegitimate state.”

That illegitimate state, of course, is our democracy. And so, when Thomas and Meadows text about the religious dimensions of the coup attempt, they’re echoing much of what we’ve long heard from the Christian right about it.

To be fair, some Christian voices roundly condemned the Jan. 6 violence. But on the day itself, there were many Christian symbols of various kinds visible throughout the “Stop the Steal” rally crowd, as Robert Jones, the founder and CEO of Public Religion Research Institute, has documented.

“The evidence for White Christian nationalism’s importance to the effort to overthrow the election was right before our eyes on Jan. 6,” Jones told me. “It was in the signs that were carried. It brought a veneer of divine blessing on the violence and the insurrection.”

Christian nationalism has at different times focused on varying enemies of its vision of a Christian nation. But the through line here is that multidenominational, multiracial democracy is producing a country that is unacceptable to the Christian nationalist vision, Jones notes.

Which is why reckoning with the role of this movement in the turn against democracy is important. “It is a violent reclamation movement,” Jones told me. “If we’re going to move into the promise of a multi-religious, multiethnic democracy, these forces are going to have to be confronted.”

In his diatribe about Meadows’s invocation of Jesus, [Joe] Scarborough said: “He’s right — it was a fight between good and evil. He’s just got the jerseys mixed up.” Scarborough repeated that this is a “sickness.”

But this movement runs a whole lot deeper than Meadows and Thomas. And it isn’t going anywhere.

These people are a clear and present danger.  People need to understand the viciousness of members of this movement and their mindset that the end goal justifies the means regardless of the harm done to others.  These are not you church bake sale ladies - they are armed and dangerous.