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      In Trump we trust: religious right on crusade to make their man president

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      God’s army is on the march. And many of its foot soldiers are wearing “Make America great again” regalia, sensing that their unlikely standard-bearer, former US president Donald Trump, is once again close to the promised land.“I do not believe that America can survive another four years of Joe Biden,” Ralph Reed, founder and chair of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, told a gathering of the religious right in Washington on Friday. “I haven’t felt this way since Jimmy Carter was president.” The audience burst into knowing laughter.Reed promised they would knock on 10m doors of Christian and conservative voters in every battleground state, make 10m phone calls, send 25m text messages and put 30m voter guides in 113,000 churches, producing “the biggest turnout of Christian voters in American history”.The election result will be clear, he added. “This time there aren’t gonna need to be any lawsuits. We’re not going to have to go to court and we’re not going to have to wait until 2.30 in the morning for Donald Trump to declare victory. He’s going to do it at 9 o’clock at night!”With Trump running ahead of Biden in many swing state polls, religious right voters scent a historic opportunity to impose a radical agenda that could ban abortion nationwide, curb LGBTQ+ rights and blur the separation of church and state. At Friday’s conference, speaker after speaker framed it as righteous crusade and the only way to resist a tide of liberal secularism sweeping America.Ben Carson, a former housing secretary in Trump’s first term, praised Republican-dominated Louisiana for becoming the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every government school classroom.“Aren’t you glad that yesterday the governor of Louisiana signed into law – put the Ten Commandments back in the schools?” he said to cheers and applause before warning of a 60-year communist project to change America by taking over schools, churches and Hollywood and removing God from the public square.Josh Hawley, a Republican senator for Missouri, warned of a “radical anti-faith agenda” gripping the country. He said: “Who’s dividing America is the radical left and that’s why I say to you we don’t need less Christian influence in our society, we don’t need less Christian witness in our society; we need more in every part of government, in every part of society.”To approving roars from the audience, Hawley added: “We ought to take the Pride flag out of schools and put the Bible back in. You know what? We ought to take the trans flag down from all of our federal buildings and over every federal building in America write the words: ‘In God we trust.’ In God we trust. Amen.”The couching of an Armageddon election, in which religious truth itself is at stake, with victory representing divine providence and defeat spelling total catastrophe, was crystallised by Monica Crowley, a rightwing political commentator and former assistant secretary of the treasury.She described the election as a “hinge moment” comparable to the American revolution, American civil war, second world war and September 11 terrorist attacks. She spoke of a “war” against “the enemy within” that has spent nearly half a century “infiltrating, undermining and destroying” America with “godless philosophies”.Crowley lamented that Hollywood no longer produces “patriotic films” like those of John Wayne and, extraordinarily, defended the communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. “Senator Joe McCarthy was right, and he was trying to ring the bell in the 1950s about communist infiltration in our government and the same deep state that is now going after Donald Trump,” he said.“The same deep state that removed Richard Nixon, the same deep state that went after Ronald Reagan and anybody else who stood up to them. That deep state became very insidious and in the 1950s smeared and attacked Joe McCarthy for speaking the truth about godless communism in very halls of our government.”Notably, little was said by the dozen main stage speakers about abortion, a live political grenade for which Republicans have struggled find a coherent message since the supreme court overturned the landmark Roe v Wade precedent two years ago.Religious conservatives’ pact with Trump appears to be holding. Some were sceptical about the thrice-married reality TV star when he first ran for president in 2016 but the concerns were assuaged by his running mate, born-again evangelical Christian Mike Pence, and by a first term that saw him shift the judiciary to the right.Not even Trump’s conviction in New York last month on 34 felony counts in a trial involving hush-money payments to an adult film star has shaken his grip on this constituency. Many who complain that their faith is under siege regard him as a blunt instrument with which to fight back against the radical left.They often rationalise their vote by saying they are choosing a president, not a pastor. Some evangelicals have likened him to Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who, according to the Bible, enabled Jews to return to Israel from their exile in Babylon.View image in fullscreenRobert P Jones, the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute thinktank in Washington, wrote on Substack recently: “The transformation of Trump from a person to a symbol is the key to understanding the power of the Maga movement and the internal logic of the upside-down world where a unanimous guilty verdict in a fair trial results in solidified support, record fundraising, and desperate Christian defenses of a convicted felon.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe presumptive Republican nominee has exploited this totemic status. Earlier this year, he launched his own brand of Bible, selling for $59.99 each. During the trial, he shared social media posts comparing himself to Jesus Christ.At Friday’s Road to Majority policy conference, it was not uncommon to hear of the Almighty and Trump spoken in the same breath. Crowley said: “We do have a fearless leader in Donald Trump, where they have thrown the kitchen sink at this man over nine years and they cannot believe that he is still standing. Hand of God!”Kari Lake, a senate candidate in Arizona, said: “We gotta bring Him back into our culture, into our lives, into our hearts and souls – and then also let’s work to bring Donald J Trump back on November 5.”Inside the upmarket Washington hotel hosting the conference, there were vendors selling Maga merchandise, lifesize cardboard cutouts of Trump and an area where attendees could pose with head shots of their choice for his running mate.Stephen Sandrelli, 60, posed with a picture of the US representative Elise Stefanik against an Oval Office backdrop. “First of all, we’ve got to deport millions – at least 15 million people,” he said of a second Trump term. “The Democrats are terrorists. They hate our nation. They hate humankind.“They’re trying to replace us – replacement theory, whatever you want to call it – and Trump cares about us. I believe he’s a man that God has touched and he’s doing the right thing. He’s only blessed our country. He’s only helped people.”Sandrelli, a former Democrat and federal government officer from Fitchburg, Massachusetts, added: “Anybody who supports abortion is supporting murder.”But sensing political danger, Trump has refused to endorse a national abortion ban. Some here felt let down. Wearing a red Maga cap, Thomas Dinkel, 16, who goes to a school in Morgantown, West Virginia, said: “I’m going to be honest with you: as a pro-life Christian, it hurts. I see why he and a lot of other national Republicans are doing it. They’re slowly backing away from the issue. It’s ruffled some feathers.“I do back an abortion ban. For right now, it’s at the state level, and I respect that, but if it ever went as a federal ban, I would back that. I understand why Trump is having a stance on that, just like some other stances he’s been taking lately. I pray that when he gets in, the least he can do for the pro-life communities is continue to back and appoint pro-life justices.”But Dinkel is supporting Trump and is willing to overlook his moral shortcomings, saying: “Listen, I’m a Christian. I mess up, you mess up. Everyone in this room messes up. We sin, we fall short, we turn away from God, and Trump has admitted to that. He’s not the best person. He’s not a perfect person. None of us are. He says that he’s repented of his sins, and I’m called to forgive Trump.”Dorothy Harpe, an African American woman who is retired from a church in Atlanta, Georgia, was wearing a Maga cap and badge that said: “Trump was right!” The 74-year-old said: “He tells the truth. People don’t want to believe him, they think he always doing something wrong, but he’s not. He’s innocent of all the bogus charges they brought against him. God knows every man’s heart, and I believe he is a Christian.” More

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      ‘Demolishing democracy’: how much danger does Christian nationalism pose?

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      Bad Faith, a new documentary on the rise of Christian nationalism in the United States, opens with an obvious, ominous scene – the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021 – though trained on details drowned out by the deluge of horror and easily recognizable images of chaos. That Paula White, Donald Trump’s faith adviser, led the Save America rally in a prayer to overturn the results for “a free and fair election”. That mixed among Trump flags, American flags and militia symbols were numerous banners with Christian crosses; on the steps of the Capitol, a “JESUS SAVES” sign blares mere feet from “Lock Them UP!”The movement to overturn the 2020 election for Donald Trump was, as the documentary underscores, inextricable from a certain strain of belief in America as a fundamentally Christian nation, separation of church and state be damned. In fact, as Bad Faith argues, Christian nationalism – a political movement to shape the United States according a certain interpretation of evangelical Christianity, by vote or, more recently, by coercion – was the “galvanizing force” behind the attempted hijacking of the democratic process three years ago.Bad Faith traces the origins of the movement as a savvy, disproportionately powerful political force, from churches to Republican political operatives to donors, either from conviction or convenience. “I think a lot of Americans have a very difficult time accepting and understanding the fact that such treason, such anti-democratic activity, could be carried out by people who basically look like Sunday school teachers,” Stephen Ujlaki, the film’s director, told the Guardian. By looking back on the half-century of Christian nationalist belief, organizing and action, the events of January 6 no longer seemed shocking, but the logical endpoint of anti-democratic ideals. “It was unmistakable, once you looked in the right place and you listened to what people were saying, and you understood how to decode what they were saying,” said Ujlaki. “Little would you know that when they talk about recreating the kingdom of God on earth, they weren’t talking about something spiritual. They were talking about demolishing democracy so that God, ie themselves, could rule. And for that reason, I call it a conspiracy carried out in broad daylight.”Though Christian nationalists are quick to invoke the founding fathers, whom they claim were directed by a Christian God, the conspiracy has its modern origins in the 1970s, when the Republican political organizer Paul Weyrich began uniting evangelical parishioners and televangelist preachers like Jerry Falwell with Republican party politics opposing desegregation, via a political action group called the Moral Majority. It’s not that evangelical Christians weren’t political – as the film, narrated by Peter Coyote, points out, the idea of America as a white Christian nation undergirded the Ku Klux Klan, which at its peak in 1924 claimed 8 million members, the vast majority of whom were white evangelicals, including 40,000 ministers.Accordingly, the crucial tie between white evangelicals and the Republican party came not from the 1972 ruling in Roe v Wade, as is often misattributed, but from opposition to a different ruling preventing racially segregated institutions – including schools and churches – from claiming charitable, tax-exempt status. The ruling brought segregated church leaders such as Falwell in alignment with Republican operatives like Weyrich, who cannily realized that emotional arguments against abortion would drive more grassroots support than openly racist talk against desegregation.Bad Faith highlights Christian nationalism’s “origins in the racism, and the segregation mentality, and you can draw a straight line from that to gerrymandering and voter suppression,” said Anne Nelson, a film participant and author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. Christian nationalist supporters, she added, were “very skillful at … framing and branding and messaging, that makes something like voter suppression look like electoral integrity. And they do this time after time, on every front”.The film juxtaposes the decades-long roots of the movement with its evolving principles: that America was founded as a Christian nation, for and by Christians; that maintaining such a state is a divinely sanctioned, righteous fight; that anti-democratic or violent tactics should be employed in the name of God. And in recent years, that Donald Trump – a thrice-married, profligate cheater with too many character scandals to name – is, if not a true “Christian”, a divinely sanctioned “King Cyrus” figure sent to disrupt the secular order. “The divisiveness and the distrust of institutions that we’re seeing today was part of a plan,” said Ujlaki. “It was a result of an actual plan, successfully executed to get to this point. And once the institutions are weakened and people have lost faith in elections, there’s room for the strongman to come in.”View image in fullscreenIn addition to political experts contextualizing the growth and funding of Christian nationalism, Ujlaki also enlisted several prominent, faithful Christians to dispute another of the movement’s prominent myths: that it’s a true distillation of Christian teachings. “It is absolutely not Christian. It is anti-Christian,” said Ujlaki. He quoted the theologian Russell Moore, who calls the movement “heresy” in the film, as well as the Rev William Barber II, whose faith leads him to advocate for wealth redistribution, racial equality and social justice: “They may have their Trump, but they don’t have their Jesus.”“They don’t care about the actual Jesus,” said Ujlaki. That’s underscored by the money trail, followed by Nelson and others, which leads to several non-evangelical donors – the Koch brothers and more – who nevertheless benefit from the movement’s weakening of institutions and drive to the far right, as with the Tea Party movement in 2010. “They’re in bed together, based on economic principles, not theology,” said Nelson.And yet theology continues to drive an anti-democratic movement, for which January 6 was not a disaster but a starting point. Bad Faith ends with a note about Project 2025, announced in December 2023 by the Heritage Foundation. The 900-page document builds on Weyrich’s Conservative Manifesto and recommends, among other things: placing all independent government agencies, including the FBI and Department of Justice, under direct presidential control; purging government employees considered “disloyal” to the president; and deploying the military against American citizens under the Insurrection Act.Some of the recommendations sound far-fetched and extreme, but if Bad Faith has one point, it is to take Christian nationalism as a serious threat to democracy. “These people are not stupid,” said Nelson. “They’re incredibly strategic. They’re extremely good at organization, and they have a very, very long attention span. If they set out an objective, they will give it 40 years to play out, they will build organizations, they will go into electoral districts not a month before the election, but two years before the election, organizing voters.”In Nelson’s view, major media organizations misunderstood this in the run-up to January 6. “They look at these events as independent grassroots eruptions, like the Tea Party,” she said. “And they’re actually fully integrated as a strategy with massive coordinated funding and implementation. If you don’t see that, you miss the story.”
      Bad Faith is now available to rent digitally in the US with a UK date to be announced More

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      Christian nationalists embrace Trump as their savior – will they be his?

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      A thrice-married man who refers to the Eucharist as a “little cracker”, was apparently unable to name a single Bible verse and says he has never asked God for forgiveness was always an unlikely hero for the most conservative Christians in the US.But in both 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump resoundingly won the vote of white evangelicals. Now, with Trump having almost certainly secured the Republican nomination for 2024 and eyeing a return to the White House, his campaign is doubling down on religious imagery, securing the evangelical base and signaling sympathies with Christian nationalism.Indeed, the former US president’s relationship with the religious right has deepened so much that Trump is now comfortable with comparing himself to their messiah.“And on June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise, and said: ‘I need a caretaker,’” booms a video that Trump shared on his Truth Social account, and that has been played at some of his rallies.“So God gave us Trump.”The video, made by Dilley Meme Team, a group of Trump supporters, continues:“God said: ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay up past midnight at a meeting of the heads of state.’ So God made Trump.”To some, it is a baffling pairing. Evangelicals, who typically adhere to a literal reading of the Bible and, theoretically, follow a strict code that opposes infidelity, immorality and abortion and is critical of same-sex relationships, seem an odd match-up with a man like Trump.But the pairing has had benefits for both parties: Trump got elected in 2016, and evangelicals got a conservative supreme court that has already overturned the Roe v Wade ruling, which enshrined a constitutional right to abortion.Now, Trump is believing the hype he’s received from some on the religious right: that he has been chosen, or anointed, by God himself.He has increasingly begun to lean into the rightwing social conservatism that white evangelicals – who make up 14% of Americans – favor. That was clear in February, when Trump spoke at the National Religious Broadcasters convention (NRBC), a gathering of the kind of conservative Christians who lead mega-churches, host televangelist shows and claim to receive prophecies from God.Trump said in that address that there was an “anti-Christian bias” in the US, and promised that he would create a taskforce to investigate “discrimination, harassment and persecution against Christians in America”.While Trump easily won the white evangelical vote in his previous two presidential elections, Kristin Du Mez, a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University whose research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion and politics, said this election cycle sees him leaning even further into this appeal.Du Mez said his speech at the NRBC was “a new level we haven’t often seen”.“He was promising [the evangelical audience] power, but in much more explicit terms,” she said. “And he was really leaning into this language of culture wars, of religious wars: that he was going to protect their interests and protect their power against the enemies – against fellow Americans, against liberals, against the enemies who were trying to persecute Christians, who were persecuting Christians.”The “God made Trump” video is not the only example of Trump seeing himself as a deity. On 25 March, Trump said on his Truth Social account that he had received the following message from a supporter:“It’s ironic that Christ walked through His greatest persecution the very week they are trying to steal your property from you.”It follows Trump sharing a fake court sketch in late 2023, published during Trump’s fraud trial in New York, which shows him seated beside Jesus Christ.About 85% of white evangelical Protestant voters who frequently attend religious services voted for Trump in 2020, Pew Research found, as did 81% of those who attend less frequently.Securing, and adding to, that vote could be key to a Trump victory. Du Mez pointed to research by the Public Religion Research Institute that shows how crucial the evangelical vote is in swing states. Evangelicals make up about a quarter of residents in Georgia and North Carolina, 16% of the population in Pennsylvania and about 12% of voters in Wisconsin.Biden beat Trump in all but North Carolina in 2020. Given the lack of enthusiasm for both candidates, both men are desperate to win every possible vote in what is expected to be a tight election.It helps Trump that evangelicals feel under attack. Since 2015, he has told his supporters that they are looked down on by liberal elites, and that their rights are threatened. That same message resonates with some religious voters, Du Mez said, who could also resent the mockery of Trump’s imagining himself as Jesus Christ.“It only reinforces the scripts that they’ve been handed, which is that the left is out to get you and they are mocking and they have no respect for your faith,” Du Mez said.While Trump has long enjoyed popularity among evangelicals, and has been courted by leaders including televangelists and pastors at mega-churches, this is the first election cycle in which he has been confident enough to compare himself to Jesus Christ. So, what’s changed?Trump “has been getting this message from these folks for years now”, said Matthew D Taylor, author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, recalling the sight of evangelical leaders praying over Trump during his time in office.The thirst for Trump as a biblical figure can be traced to the unique way he ascended to become an evangelical favorite, Taylor said: when he launched his campaign in June 2015, few in “respectable evangelical circles” wanted anything to do with the brash, twice-divorced, self-proclaimed billionaire.It made sense. This was a man who, during his first presidential campaign, memorably misnamed the body of Christ, and while at church put cash in a plate that is meant to hold the communion. During his early forays into religious outreach, Trump was asked to name his favorite verse in the Bible, and couldn’t name one – asked again three weeks later, he named one that doesn’t exist.He enlisted Paula White as his spiritual adviser, and charged her with bringing the evangelical elites onboard. The problem was that White, herself a thrice-married multimillionaire who preaches the idea that God will bestow wealth on his followers, didn’t move in those circles.Taylor noted that White’s allies were among fellow prosperity gospel preachers and “new apostolic reformation leaders” – a movement that seeks to inject Christianity into politics, the judiciary, the media and business.“These folks were really on the margins not only of American Christianity, but of American evangelicals. They were seen as kind of lowbrow and prosperity gospel types and televangelists. They were seen as kind of a laughable sector of evangelicalism in respectable evangelical circles,” Taylor said.As Trump won primary elections in state after state, the respectable evangelicals were able to overcome their moral objections to him being the Republican candidate.But by this point, Trump’s main advisers were cemented as the type of religious leaders once scoffed at by the religious elites. Trump continued to rely on the Paula Whites of this world, and the more far-out religious leaders won influence – and are set to have even more if he wins in 2024.“Those are the type of people I think Trump would be bringing in to help shape policy, help shape identity,” Taylor said.“These aren’t the kind of people who are policy wonks, but there are Christian nationalists who have very clear agenda items, especially on topics like abortion, on topics like support for Israel, on topics like religious freedom, on topics such as LGBTQ +rights.“Trump has surrounded himself and has brought into his White House advisers echelons some very, very extreme Christian voices. And he seems to be at the very least playing footsie with them, if not overtly endorsing some of their ideas.”This bodes poorly for a Trump second term, when abortion rights, the rights of LGBTQ+ people and even the right to access IVF treatment could come under attack.There are also warning signs, Taylor said, should Trump again refuse to concede the election – and if his supporters once more interpret his rhetoric as a call to attack the home of US democracy.Trump’s religious supporters were among those at the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection. Taylor said he was seeing “more and more of this cross-pollination between far-right and even overtly racist elements and these spiritual warriors”.“When you are mixing white nationalism and neo-Nazi ideas with very heavy religious fervor and processes, that is a very, very dangerous mix,” Taylor said.“Because it’s encouraging more and more people to do extraordinary things, if they feel like their country is slipping away from them.” More

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      Senator Raphael Warnock: ‘The Bible doesn’t need Trump’s endorsement’

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      Donald Trump’s decision to sell Bibles branded under his name is “risky business”, the Democratic US senator Raphael Warnock said on Sunday, as the former president stands accused of having few moral scruples in four separate criminal indictments pending against him.“The Bible does not need Donald Trump’s endorsement,” Warnock, the pastor of Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist church, said to CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. Speaking on Easter, one of Christianity’s holiest celebrations, Warnock added: “It’s a risky bet because the folks who buy those Bibles might actually open them up, where it says things like thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not bear false witness, where it warns about wolves dressed up in sheep’s clothing.“I think you ought to be careful. This is risky business for somebody like Donald Trump.”Warnock’s comments to CNN came days after the Republican who is running against Joe Biden for a second presidency in November presented an offer for the public to buy Trump-endorsed Bibles for $59.99. “Let’s Make America Pray Again”, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, a clear reference to the “Make America Great Again” slogan that he rode to the White House in 2016.But indeed more than 80 criminal charges filed against Trump over the previous 12 months – including in Warnock’s home state of Georgia – charge the former president with behaving in ways that many true Bible devotees would frown upon.Trump has pleaded not guilty to allegations that he tried to unduly overturn the outcome of the 2020 election that he lost to his Democratic rival Biden, improperly retained classified government materials after his presidency, and illicitly covered up hush-money payments to an adult film actor who has claimed to have engaged in extramarital sex with him.He is also facing multimillion-dollar civil penalties for business practices deemed fraudulent and an allegation that he raped a woman – a claim that a judge has determined to be substantially true.Warnock on Sunday said he wasn’t surprised Trump had turned to selling Bibles to help raise funds for his soaring legal bills as well as his presidential campaign. The senator alluded to Trump’s history of hawking – among other things – Trump-branded steaks, non-accredited business school degrees and, more recently, $399 gold sneakers.“Now he’s trying to sell the scriptures,” said Warnock, who was first elected to the US Senate in 2020. “At the end of the day, I think he’s trying to sell the American people a bill of goods.”Warnock went out of his way to mention that Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016, but recognized that his tact allowed him to triumph in the electoral college. But Warnock remarked: “It did not work in 2020,” when Trump lost both the popular and electoral college votes.“And,” the senator said,” I don’t think it’s going to work in 2024.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDuring his interview on CNN, Warnock also addressed criticism from Trump and his Republican allies that Biden recognized Transgender Day of Visibility – which falls annually on 31 March – as scheduled on Sunday, even though this year it coincided with Easter.The Republican US House speaker, Mike Johnson, notably asserted that Biden had “betrayed the central tenet of Easter”, something that he called “outrageous and abhorrent”.Warnock, who is part of a succession of Ebenezer Baptist church pastors that includes the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, said the fabricated controversy was another instance of people “who do not know how to lead us trying to divide us”.“Apparently, the speaker finds trans people abhorrent, and I think he ought to think about that,” Warnock said. “The fact of the matter is … March 31 has been a day to lift up transgender people who endure violence and bigotry.“But this is just one more instance of folks … who do not know how to lead us trying to divide us. And this is the opposite of the Christian faith. Jesus centered the marginalized. He centered the poor. And in a moment like this, we need voices, particularly voices of faith, who would use our faith not as a weapon to beat other people down, but as a bridge to bring all of us together.” More

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      Al Sharpton: Trump’s $60 Bibles ‘a spit in the face of people that really believe’

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      The spectacle of Donald Trump selling $60 Bibles is “a spit in the face of people that really believe”, the Rev Al Sharpton said, amid widespread backlash over the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s latest moneymaking scheme.“Blasphemy certainly comes to mind,” Sharpton told MSNBC.“I think that people ought to realise how offensive this is to those of us that really believe in the Bible. He’s doing this during Holy Week. Tomorrow is Good Friday, Sunday is Easter. Of all of the times you want to hustle using the Bible, why would you do it during Holy Week, which is really a spit in the face of people that really believe in the Bible from a Christian point of view?”Trump announced the Bible project on Tuesday, in a video posted to his Truth Social platform and in concert with Lee Greenwood, the country and western singer whose signature song, God Bless the USA, is played at Trump rallies and gives its name to the new Bible-hawking project.A website selling the Bibles featured Trump but claimed the project was “not political and has nothing to do with any political campaign”.A statement added: “GodBlessTheUSABible.com is not owned, managed or controlled by Donald J Trump, the Trump Organization, CIC Ventures LLC or any of their respective principals or affiliates.“GodBlessTheUSABible.com uses Donald J Trump’s name, likeness and image under paid license from CIC Ventures LLC, which license may be terminated or revoked according to its terms.”Set up by people close to Trump, CIC Ventures is registered at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, and has worked on other money-making ventures including digital trading cards and $400 gold sneakers.Citing a source “familiar with the details of the business arrangement”, the New York Times reported that Trump is “getting royalties” from purchases of the branded Bible, which includes copies of the US constitution and other founding documents.In his video announcement, Trump vowed to “defend God in the public square and not allow the media or the leftwing groups to silence, censor or discriminate against us”.But as he is campaigning for president while facing multimillion-dollar civil penalties and 88 criminal charges in four cases, so Trump has diverted significant funds to paying legal costs.The multiplying ironies of Trump selling Bibles have been widely remarked since the plan emerged.Trump continues to rely on conservative evangelical Christian support despite being married three times, accused of sexual misconduct by more than 25 women, legally adjudicated a rapist, facing 34 criminal charges for paying off an adult film star who claimed an affair and often struggling to articulate his own supposed religious beliefs.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSharpton is a long-term civil rights leader, political activist and MSNBC contributor. On Thursday, Willie Geist, a Morning Joe co-host, said: “I mean, $60. First of all, [Trump] wants you to pay for what he calls his Bible. There’s no your Bible or my Bible or Rev’s Bible or anybody else’s. It’s ‘my Bible’. Sixty bucks.“We all know where the money’s going. They say it’s not going to the campaign, but there are awful lot of legal bills that need to be paid here … who knows what he’s going to sell, but I think we should defer to the Rev Al Sharpton on questions of the Bible.”Sharpton said: “I wonder how many ministers or conservative evangelicals will go to their pulpit tomorrow or on Sunday, Easter, using the Trump Bible. They ought to be defrocked if they would even try and act like this.“This is nothing but … a hustle. You know, when I was growing up, I was licensed in the largest Black pentecostal church at the time, Washington Temple, very respected. But every once in a while a huckster evangelist would come through and they would sell blessed oils, blessed cloth.“Let’s remember this man [Trump] has sold the pieces of his garments that he went to court with [for $4,699]. He has sold sneakers, gold sneakers with red bottoms. Now Bibles. I mean, if he’s not like the old hustlers that used to [profit] off old ladies that believed that this was the way to God, then I don’t know what it is.“And for those in the evangelical community not to come out and say, ‘Wait a minute, during the Holy Week, that’s a step too far,’ makes us wonder where they’re committed.” More

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      The Exvangelicals review: fine study of faith under fire in the age of Trump

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      Sarah McCammon’s new book about “exvangelicals” like herself is a powerful memoir of her complicated journey away from Christian fundamentalism. Because she experienced it from the inside, she is also able to give the rest of us one of the best explanations I have ever read of how so many Americans became part of the non-reality-based cult that remains so stubbornly addicted to the insanities of Donald Trump.Brought up by rigorous evangelicals equally opposed to abortion and in favor of corporal punishment of their children, McCammon grew up inside a religious bubble supposedly designed to protect everyone within it from the evils of a secular world.Now 43 and national political correspondent for NPR, she was born at the dawn of the Reagan administration, which also marked the beginning of the alliance between religious extremism and the Republican party.The number of Americans who identified as evangelical or born again peaked in 2004, when it reached 30%. McCammon’s parents, though, came of age at the height of the Vietnam war and the sexual revolution. Like millions of others who felt unhinged by the chaos, they cast aside the “love ethos” of their youth, replacing “drug culture and anti-war protests” with “praise choruses” and the teachings of religious reactionaries such as James Dobson.The McCammons took Dobson’s teachings very seriously, especially his book Dare to Discipline, which taught them to spank babies as young as 15 months and to use “a small switch or belt” which should be seen by the child as an “object of love rather than an instrument of punishment”.As the historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez has explained, McCammon’s generation grew up during the creation of “a massive industry of self-reinforcing Christian media and organizations” and a media network that functioned “less as a traditional soul-saving enterprise and more as a means by which evangelicals … maintained their own identity.” Or as DL Mayfield, another writer born into an evangelical family, put it: “Being born into white evangelicalism as marketers were figuring out how to package and sell Christian nationalism … was really bad timing.”The literal interpretation of the Bible McCammon grew up with of course required the rejection of evolution. Everything, including “our understanding of basic scientific facts” had to be “subordinated to this vision of scripture”. By pulling their children out of public schools, parents could guarantee that “they could graduate from high school without ever taking a course on evolution or sex ed” and then move “seamlessly to a four-year Christian college with the same philosophy”.View image in fullscreenEvolution had been invented by scientists so they could reject God’s authority and construct “a world … where they were free to pursue their sinful lusts and selfish desires. What other motive could the there be” for dismissing the story of Adam and Eve?The real-world consequences of this indoctrination include a Republican party blithely unconcerned with the effects of global warming. As Jocelyn Howard, an exvangelical interviewed by McCammon, observes: “When you’re taught that science is basically a fairytale … then why would you care if the world is burning around us … The world around us doesn’t matter, because this is all going to burn like in Revelations anyway.”By distancing so many evangelicals from mainstream thought, their leaders created “a fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories that can be nearly impossible to eradicate”. As Ed Stetzer, an evangelical pastor and executive director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center told FiveThirtyEight: “People of faith believe there is a divine plan – that there are forces of good and forces of evil … QAnon is a train that runs on the tracks that religion has already put in place.”Part of the time, McCammon manages to remember her youth with humor, particularly in a passage describing a discussion of the meaning of “oral sex” with her mother, inspired by the release of Ken Starr’s report about Bill Clinton’s interactions with Monica Lewinsky, an intern at the White House.“I think,” said the author’s mother, “if you have Jesus, you don’t need oral sex.”McCammon can’t remember how she responded but she has been “telling that story for decades when people ask me to describe my childhood”.The first cracks in her evangelical faith began when she spent a semester as a Senate page and befriended a fellow page who was a Muslim.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Do you believe that because I’m Muslim I’m going to hell?” he asked.“Suddenly,” McCammon writes, “everything that felt wrong about the belief system I had been told to promote crystalized in my mind. All she could muster in response to his question was, ‘I don’t know. I think it’s between you and god.’”By the time she graduated from college, McCammon “was exhausted from trying to get my brain to conform to the contours of the supposed truth I‘d been taught. Why did certain types of knowledge seem forbidden, and why were only our experts to be trusted?”Her solution was to choose a career in journalism: “I craved a space to ask questions about the way the world really was, and the freedom to take in new sources of information. Journalism required that: it honored the process of seeking truth and demanded the consideration of multiple points of view.”This book is an elegant testament to how well McCammon has learned her craft. The hopeful message she leaves us with is that her own journey is being replicated by millions of others in her generation, many finally convinced to abandon their faith because of the racism and xenophobia embraced by evangelicals’ newest and most unlikely savior: Trump.Since 2006, evangelical Protestants have experienced “the most precipitous drop in affiliation” among Americans, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, shrinking from 23% in 2006 to 14% in 2020. In November, we will learn if that is enough to keep democracy alive.
      The Exvangelicals is published in the US by St Martin’s Press More

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      What Alabama’s IVF ruling reveals about the ascendant Christian nationalist movement

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      In the Alabama state supreme court case that dubbed embryos “extrauterine children” and imperiled the future of in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the state, the first reference to the Bible arrives on page 33.“The principle itself – that human life is fundamentally distinct from other forms of life and cannot be taken intentionally without justification – has deep roots that reach back to the creation of man ‘in the image of God’,” the Alabama supreme court justice Tom Parker wrote in an opinion that concurred with the majority. Attributing the idea to the Book of Genesis, Parker’s opinion continued to cite the Bible as well as such venerable Christian theologians as John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas.For experts, Parker’s words were a stunningly open embrace of Christian nationalism, or the idea that the United States should be an explicitly Christian country and its laws should reflect that.“He framed it entirely assuming that the state of Alabama is a theocracy, and that that is a legitimate way of evaluating laws and policies,” said Julie Ingersoll, a University of North Florida professor who studies religion and culture. “It looks like he decided to just dismiss the history of first amendment religious freedom jurisprudence at the federal level, and assume that it just doesn’t apply to Alabama.”View image in fullscreenDebates over the centrality of Christianity in US life have raged since the founding of the country. But now that Roe v Wade has been overturned and Donald Trump is once again running for president, observers say Christian nationalism has gained a stronger foothold within US politics – and its supporters have grown bolder.“They’re sort of saying the quiet parts out loud,” said Paul Djupe, who studies Christian nationalism as the chair of data for political research at Denison University in Ohio, of Parker’s decision.Today, 30% of Americans support tenets of Christian nationalism, according to a study released earlier this week from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). Researchers asked more than 22,000 Americans how much they agreed with statements such as: “The US government should declare America a Christian nation”; “Being Christian is an important part of being truly American”’; and “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.” Ultimately, about 10% of Americans qualify as “adherents” to Christian nationalism, and another 20% are “sympathizers”.White evangelicals are particularly likely to support Christian nationalism: 66% hold Christian nationalist views.View image in fullscreenPRRI did not ask whether people self-identify as Christian nationalists, because many people who may hold those beliefs shy away from the divisive label. Yet over the last several years, conservatives at the local, state and federal level have notched major legal and political victories that have cleared the way for Christian nationalist priorities such as the overturning of Roe v Wade and the proliferation of efforts targeting sex education, LGBTQ+ rights and the separation of church and state in schools. Now, supporters are seeing further opportunity in a potential second Trump term. Whether someone openly claims the label of “Christian nationalist” is almost beside the point, Ingersoll said.“There are all kinds of people who are influenced by it in ways that they’re not even aware of,” Ingersoll said. “Most people couldn’t tell you who Thomas Aquinas was, but that doesn’t matter. They don’t have to know who that is to have been shaped by a form of Christianity that arose from his work. And I think that happens with Christian nationalism all over the place. It’s a way of shaping the public discourse.”Parker has ties to proponents of the “Seven Mountain Mandate”, a theological approach that once seemed fringe within evangelicalism but is now gaining traction. Backed by a network of nondenominational, charismatic Christians known as the New Apostolic Reformation, this mandate calls on its adherents to establish what they believe to be God’s kingdom over the seven core areas of society, including the government. On 16 February, the day the Alabama supreme court issued its ruling, a prominent proponent of the Seven Mountain Mandate released an interview with Parker.View image in fullscreen“God created government and the fact that we have let it go into the possession of others is heartbreaking,” Parker said in the interview, whose existence was first reported by the liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America. The interview took place in front of a framed copy of the Bill of Rights.A spokesperson for the Alabama state supreme court did not immediately return a request for comment from Parker.“It is clear that in the US, there have been two competing visions of the country,” said Robert P Jones, PRRI’s president and the author of The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future. “They’re mutually incompatible visions of the country, but they really have been: are we a pluralistic democracy, where everybody stands on equal footing before the law, or are we a promised land for European Christians?”‘I’m going to be your defender’Support for Christian nationalism is deeply linked to partisan politics. Residents of red states are far more likely to espouse Christian nationalist beliefs; in Alabama, 47% of people are adherents of or at least sympathetic to Christian nationalism, according to the PRRI survey. More than half of Republicans also hold Christian nationalist beliefs, compared with a quarter of independents and just 16% of Democrats.According to Jones and the PRRI survey, Christian nationalists’ top litmus tests for politicians are support for access to guns and opposition to immigration, although they are also very likely to say that they would only vote for a candidate who shares their opposition to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.The 2015 US supreme court decision Obergefell v Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, sparked a huge backlash among many conservative Christians. Galvanized by the ruling, they threw their considerable electoral power behind Trump, who had announced his presidential candidacy just days before Obergefell was decided.View image in fullscreen“Conservative Christians have long had this kind of worldview that they’re embattled by the broader culture,” Djupe said. The Obergefell decision “was a huge spur and Trump played with it. He came on the scene to run for president about the exact same time saying: ‘You’re about to be persecuted. I’m going to be your defender.’”Trump went to great lengths to reward rightwing Christians for their support. According to one analysis, Trump’s judicial appointees were more than 97% Christian and a majority had some kind of affiliation with a religious group such as churches, the Christian law firm the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Catholic fraternal order the Knights of Columbus – far higher rates than judges who were appointed by Democrats or other Republicans. (The judges were no less well-credentialed.) Trump-appointed judges were also much likelier to vote in favor of Christian and Jewish plaintiffs embroiled in cases over the free exercise of religion.Trump also appointed three of the six US supreme court justices who voted to overturn Roe. The supreme court’s new conservative majority has steadily eroded the separation of church and state embedded in the US constitution.View image in fullscreenThe post-Roe skirmish over abortion rights illustrates another key element of a Christian nationalist worldview: the tendency to not only cast issues in binary terms, but to believe that the opposing side is a force of literal evil.“If you believe that babies are being murdered – which is the rhetoric that you often find in these ‘pro-life’, anti-abortion circles – if you believe that, then that is a very troubling and even diabolical activity,” said Matthew Taylor, Protestant scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies and author of an upcoming book about Christian extremism, The Violent Take It by Force. “There’s no dialogue with the other side … in their mind, you never compromise with demons. You exorcise demons.”Christian nationalists are roughly twice as likely as other Americans to believe that political violence is justified, according to the PRRI survey.‘They’re seeing the energy’In 2022, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Republican congresswoman from Georgia, openly embraced Christian nationalism. “We need to be the party of nationalism,” she said. “I am a Christian and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists.”But Greene is something of an outlier. Powerful organizations within the Christian legal movement, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, are not yoked to the charismatic strain of evangelical Christianity that is today more closely linked to Christian nationalism, according to Djupe – even if they often work toward similar aims.View image in fullscreenStill, Djupe believes that the energized charismatic movement is pulling other Christian groups further to the right. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, has ties to the New Apostolic Reformation, which has also been linked to Trump’s rise. Johnson once suggested that no-fault divorces were responsible for school shootings.“They’re seeing the energy, they’re seeing the growth among charismatics, and saying, ‘Hey, you know, there’s clearly something to that formula that’s influential,” Djupe said. I think they’re starting to adopt it.”View image in fullscreenPolitico reported last week that the Center for Renewing America, a rightwing thinktank close to the former president, is drawing up plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas throughout a second Trump administration. The Center’s president, Russell Vought, has also advised another powerful conservative thinktank, the Heritage Foundation, on its Project 2025, a playbook of proposals for a Trump administration 2.0, according to Politico.If Trump does win in November, experts fear what may happen next.“This is a worldview that does cast political struggles into an a kind of apocalyptic struggle between good and evil,” Jones said. “We stop thinking about our fellow citizens as political opponents and we start seeing them as existential enemies. And that really, at the end of the day, is poison to the blood of democracy.” More

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      The Republican party wants to turn America into a theocracy | Robert Reich

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      In a case centering on wrongful-death claims for frozen embryos that were accidentally destroyed at a fertility clinic, the Alabama supreme court ruled last Friday that frozen embryos are “children” under state law.As a result, several Alabama in-vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics are ceasing services, afraid to store or destroy any embryos.The underlying issue is whether government can interfere in the most intimate aspects of people’s lives – not only barring people from obtaining IVF services but also forbidding them from entering into gay marriage, utilizing contraception, having out-of-wedlock births, ending their pregnancies, changing their genders, checking out whatever books they want from the library, and worshipping God in whatever way they wish (or not worshipping at all).All these private freedoms are under increasing assault from Republican legislators and judges who want to impose their own morality on everyone else. Republicans are increasingly at war with America’s basic separation of church and state.According to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution, more than half of Republicans believe the country should be a strictly Christian nation – either adhering to the ideals of Christian nationalism (21%) or sympathizing with those views (33%).Christian nationalism is also closely linked with authoritarianism. According to the same survey, half of Christian nationalism adherents and nearly four in 10 sympathizers said they support the idea of an authoritarian leader powerful enough to keep these Christian values in society.During an interview at a Turning Point USA event last August, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (a Republican from Georgia) said party leaders need to be more responsive to the base of the party, which she claimed is made up of Christian nationalists.“We need to be the party of nationalism,” she said. “I am a Christian and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists.”A growing number of evangelical voters view Trump as the second coming of Jesus Christ and see the 2024 election as a battle not only for America’s soul but for the salvation of all mankind. Many of the Trump followers who stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021 carried Christian symbols and signs invoking God and Jesus.An influential thinktank close to Trump is developing plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas into his administration if he returns to power, according to documents obtained by Politico.Spearheading the effort is Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget during his presidential term and remains close to him.Vought, frequently cited as a potential chief of staff in a second Trump White House, has embraced the idea that Christians are under assault and has spoken of policies he might pursue in response.Those policies include banning immigration of non-Christians into the United States, overturning same-sex marriage and barring access to contraception.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a concurring opinion in last week’s Alabama supreme court decision, Alabama’s chief justice, Tom Parker, invoked the prophet Jeremiah, Genesis and the writings of 16th- and 17th-century theologians.“Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God,” he wrote. “Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”Before joining the court, Parker was a close aide and ally of Roy Moore, the former chief justice of the Alabama supreme court who was twice removed from the job – first for dismissing a federal court order to remove an enormous granite monument of the Ten Commandments he had installed in the state judicial building, and then for ordering state judges to defy the US supreme court’s decision affirming gay marriage.So far, the US supreme court has not explicitly based its decisions on scripture, but several of its recent rulings – the Dobbs decision that overruled Roe v Wade, its decision in Kennedy v Bremerton School District on behalf of a public school football coach who led students in Christian prayer, and its decision in Carson v Makin, requiring states to fund private religious schools if they fund any other private schools, even if those religious schools would use public funds for religious instruction and worship – are consistent with Christian nationalism.But Christian nationalism is inconsistent with personal freedom, including the first amendment’s guarantee that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”.We can be truly free only if we’re confident we can go about our private lives without being monitored or intruded upon by the government and can practice whatever faith (or lack of faith) we wish regardless of the religious beliefs of others.A society where one set of religious views is imposed on those who disagree with them is not a democracy. It’s a theocracy.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More