Column: The once-secretive right-wing ideology emerging as an overt threat to American democracy
Last week, Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley admitted something that might have once shocked his party.
“Some will say I’m calling America a Christian nation,” Hawley told an audience at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington. “And so I am. Some will say I’m advocating Christian nationalism. And so I do. My question is: Is there any other kind worth having?”
Conservative Christian supremacy is on the march.
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In Oklahoma, the state’s top education official has ordered the public schools to put a Bible in every classroom and incorporate its teachings into their lessons.
In Louisiana, officials have decreed that every public school classroom must display the Ten Commandments.
What is going on in our nation, which was founded on the principles of religious freedom and separation of church and state?
A toxic brew of politics, racism and conservative Supreme Court rulings fuels the effort to prevent people of color and college students from casting ballots.
“Josh Hawley would not have said that a year ago,” said Stephen Ujlaki, producer and director of the stunning new documentary “Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy.” But these days, he said, Christian nationalists “are feeling more empowered. Their goal is to act as though they have already won and cow everyone into going along with it.”
Six years ago, Ujlaki, who was ending his term as dean of the Loyola Marymount University School of Film and Television, decided to figure out how Donald Trump — adulterer, sexual abuser, compulsive liar — could become president with the rabid support of voters who claim to espouse Christian values.
What he came to understand is that Trump’s presidency and enduring popularity among the most extreme religious conservatives are the products of a 50-year-old political movement. Christian nationalism aims to turn back the clock on a century of American social progress by exploiting white conservatives’ anxiety over the demographic and political shifts that are changing the country.
Christian nationalists don’t exactly identify with Trump; rather, he is their vessel and their wrecking ball, and he’s been wildly successful in that sense. Who would have imagined years ago that a Supreme Court reshaped by the real estate mogul would obliterate half a century of reproductive rights?
Indeed, a Republican member of Congress said on the floor of the House Thursday that the country should “work our way back” to 1960 if Trump is elected, decrying the emasculation of men by an “angry feminist movement.”
Christian nationalism is a white supremacist political ideology masquerading as religion.
“They are pretend Christians,” said Christianity Today editor Russell Moore, who left the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission over its support for Trump in 2016.
The movement did not arise, as is widely believed, in response to the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 decision legalizing abortion. It formed years earlier in response to decisions ending the tax-exempt status of racially segregated schools such as Bob Jones University. Abortion simply became a more palatable cover than racism.
“The big idea of Christian nationalism is that God made America for a particular kind of white Christian with a particular ideology and worldview,” said Eboo Patel, the founder of Interfaith America, which promotes religious diversity. “That group is supreme and everyone else is subordinate, and they need to be kept subordinate with violence if necessary.” (See: Jan. 6.)
On the advice of his friend and fellow documentarian Ken Burns, Ujlaki takes a chronological approach in “Bad Faith,” going back to the 1981 founding of the secretive, extremely well-funded Council for National Policy by archconservative Christian activists. Among them was Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich, who once said, “I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
The Washington Post described the council in 2021 as “the most unusual, least understood conservative organization” in the capital. It bars the press from its events, and its members, including former Vice President Mike Pence and insurrection supporter Ginni Thomas, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife, “agree to remain silent about its activities.”
One of the council’s many interconnected allies is the Heritage Foundation, whose more than 900-page Project 2025 is considered a blueprint for a second Trump administration. The document espouses the goals of Christian nationalism: dismantling the administrative state by replacing civil servants with Trump worshipers, slashing regulations, gutting protections for gay and transgender people, abolishing the Department of Education, requiring all pregnancies to be carried to term, making it harder for some people (guess who?) to vote and shrinking the social safety net (because if you’re poor, that’s on you).
“This is not Jim Crow,” the Rev. William Barber II, who founded the Yale Divinity School’s Center for Public Theology & Public Policy, says in “Bad Faith.” “This is James Crow, Esq. He went to school, got a law degree and has come back to take out every progressive voice in this nation.” (Exhibit A: Hawley, Stanford ’02, Yale Law ’06.)
A February Pew Research Center poll found that less than half of U.S. adults said they had ever heard or read anything about Christian nationalism. “Most Republicans,” Pew reported, “say they have never heard of Christian nationalism.” It’s scary that Americans know very little about the movement that is trying to wrench them into the past.
No one has captured the warped ethos of the Christian nationalist movement better than the white supremacist homophobe Nick Fuentes, who appears briefly but memorably in “Bad Faith.”
“F— democracy,” Fuentes says. “I stand with Jesus Christ.”
Except, you know, he really doesn’t.
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