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      Trump warns of enemies ‘within our country’ to Christian media gathering

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      Donald Trump told a warmly receptive gathering of religious broadcasters on Thursday that “it’s the people from within our country that are more dangerous than the people outside”, in his latest effort to mobilize Christian fundamentalists who have swung dramatically behind him in recent years.Trump’s speech in Nashville, Tennessee, to the National Religious Broadcasters presidential forum gala offered him a chance to pitch himself to hundreds of Christian media figures whose approval – and willingness to carry his message on air – could drive huge turnout in November.“The greatest threat is not from the outside of our country – I really believe it is from within,” said Trump, whose fire-and-brimstone speech focused largely on his political enemies. “It’s the people from within our country that are more dangerous than the people outside.”The former president’s relationship with the religious right has shifted since his unlikely bid for the presidency in 2016, when his campaign was met with deep skepticism from conservative Christian leaders who had initially thrown their support behind Ted Cruz.Trump has since consolidated support among Christian fundamentalists. In 2016, in exchange for the support of prominent conservative pastors, he offered them a direct hand in policymaking through an evangelical advisory board, giving rightwing Christian religious leaders unprecedented access to the White House.“In my first term I fought for Christians harder than any president has ever done before,” said Trump. “And I will fight even harder for Christians with four more years in the White House.”In his speech, Trump promised to create a new taskforce to counter “anti-Christian bias” by investigating “discrimination, harassment and persecution against Christians in America”. He vowed to appoint more conservative judges, reminded the audience of his decision to break with decades of international consensus and move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and assured them a future Trump administration would take particular aim at transgender people – for example, by endorsing policies to restrict access to gender-affirming healthcare.The event brought together key figures in the former president’s coalition, from the president of the Heritage Foundation to the hard-right former head of the Alliance Defending Freedom, Michael Harris.A non-profit and tax-exempt organization, National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) is prohibited from campaigning directly for any candidate for public office, a fact that its president, Troy Miller, mentioned during his opening remarks. Trump was nevertheless the star of the show, with speakers lavishing him with praise in an atmosphere similar to one of his campaign rallies.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Appearing on a stage before Donald Trump is like opening for the king himself, George Strait,” said the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, to laughter and applause. “If you do well, everyone will be very nice. If you do poorly, no one will remember anyway.”The event spotlighted the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a “presidential transition project” that envisions reshaping the executive branch to maximize the president’s power. Many fear Trump’s first acts should he win office would be to enact revenge on his political enemies, deport immigrants en masse and roll back legal protections for LGBTQ+ people.It also highlighted the central role that Christian fundamentalism would play in Trump’s second term in office, with Miller declaring: “One of the most dangerous falsehoods spread today is the separation of church and state.” More

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      New role for Amy Coney Barrett’s father inside Christian sect sparks controversy

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      Survivors of alleged childhood abuse inside the People of Praise, a secretive Christian sect that counts Amy Coney Barrett as a member, are voicing concerns that the supreme court justice’s father, who was recently promoted to a new role, may seek to block information about the group’s historic handling of sexual abuse becoming public.Barrett, a conservative justice who was appointed by former US president Donald Trump, has never publicly disclosed her participation in the covenant Christian community, which some former members have compared to a cult.Her father, Michael Coney, a Louisiana-based lawyer who worked for Shell and has been a longtime member of the PoP, was this month appointed to serve as the group’s new legal counsel. Coney is also taking the helm of a “consultation team” that, internal correspondence seen by the Guardian shows, has been dealing with “issues of concern” to the group’s 1,100 members, including “misuse of authority” inside the PoP, “lack of accountable leadership”, and “mistrust of the board”.Coney’s appointment is part of a broader shake-up inside the PoP, whose leadership has been consumed by a contentious debate over the legitimacy of the 2021 election of its current leader, Charlie Fraga. Known as the “overall coordinator”, Fraga has said the bitter fight has emerged as an “urgent threat to the unity of the community”.For survivors of alleged childhood sexual and physical abuse inside the PoP, Coney’s elevation is deeply troubling. PoP Survivors – as the group is known – has for years called for the PoP to be investigated and held accountable for its handling of historic claims of abuse. The Guardian reported last year that the FBI had interviewed several individuals who have alleged they were abused by members of the PoP, but it is not clear whether the FBI opened a formal investigation.In 2020, as allegations of abuse and emotional trauma began to emerge in press reports in the Guardian and other media outlets, the PoP hired the law firm of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan to conduct an “independent investigation” into sexual abuse claims on behalf of the PoP. The results of the investigation were never made public.PoP Survivors say the lack of transparency is unusual given how many organizations and institutions have – however reluctantly – released the results of such investigations in the past, including some Catholic Church dioceses. They worry that Coney could now have an outsized role in determining what may be released in the future.“Elevating Amy Coney Barrett’s father to a position where he can influence what goes public is a huge conflict of interest. It gives him the power to block information that might be embarrassing to her. Yet public scrutiny is exactly what’s needed in order to protect children in the group,” said a spokesperson for PoP Survivors, which has 55 members and is comprised of adults who grew up in the sect and are no longer affiliated with the group.Barrett has not been accused of wrongdoing. But at the time of her nomination to the supreme court, it was reported by the AP that the PoP had sought to erase all mentions and photos of her from its website before her meetings with lawmakers. It may have been an effort to shield Barrett from questions about the PoP’s extreme beliefs.The Guardian asked Fraga, the PoP overall coordinator, for a comment on the leadership controversy and survivors’ concerns over Coney’s promotion, but he did not respond to the request for comment.Barrett’s supreme court chambers did not respond to a request for comment.It is not only the survivor group that has challenged Michael Coney’s appointment.Nano Farabaugh, an active member of the PoP, sent a letter to the all-male board of governors on 9 January in which she called on the board to reject Coney’s appointment to replace PoP co-founder Paul DeCelles as the leader of the consultation team.In her letter, which was obtained by the Guardian, Farabaugh said the team had recently submitted its suggestions to the board about PoP’s “future direction”. It is not clear what the consultation group has proposed or whether those suggests are now being scrapped.Farabaugh said Fraga’s decision illustrated many of the concerns that were being aired by PoP members, including: “Misuse of authority, mistrust of the board, not being consulted on matters that directly affect women, not listening to men and especially the voice of women, lack of transparency, [and] lack of accountable leadership.”The PoP was founded in the 1970s as part of a Christian charismatic movement. In meetings, members are encouraged to share prophecies and speak in tongues. One former member said adherents believe God can speak through members to deliver messages, sometimes about their future.A PoP handbook states that members are expected to be obedient to male authorities, or group heads, and are expected to give 5% of their earnings to the group. Heads are influential decision-makers in members’ lives, weighing in on issues ranging from dating to marriage and determining where members should live.After a waiting period, members agree to a covenant – a lifelong vow – to support each other “financially and materially and spiritually”.The group has been criticized for endorsing discriminatory practices. Members who engage in gay sex are expelled, and private schools closely affiliated with the group – the Trinity Schools – have admission policies that in effect ban the children of gay parents from attending. Barrett has previously served on Trinity’s board of trustees.Single members are encouraged to live with other members of the community, including families with children, a practice that former members and adults who grew up in the sect say created opportunities for sexual abuse.Justice Barrett’s membership in PoP was first widely publicized in a 2017 New York Times report, which noted that Barrett’s membership in the “tightly knit Christian group” never came up in a Senate hearing to confirm her as an appeals court judge.
      For tips on this story please contact: Stephanie.Kirchgaessner@theguardian.com
      This article was amended on 29 January 2024 to correct a mistyped word. The word “coveted” was meant to be “covenant”. More

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      House speaker’s Christian nationalist ties spark first amendment fears

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      Links between the new Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, and key Christian nationalist leaders have sparked fears the devout Louisiana congressman might seek to erode elements of the first amendment, which protects key US civil liberties including freedom of religion and the separation of church and state.Long before th eevangelical conservative Johnson became speaker, he had forged close ties with Christian nationalists like David Barton, whose writings claiming the country’s founders intended to create a Christian nation have been widely debunked by religion scholars.Although Barton, a self-styled historian, has been heavily criticized for distorting the first amendment by promoting the flawed idea there should be no separation between church and state, Johnson has hailed him as an important mentor and Barton has returned the praise.Johnson lauded Barton effusively in 2021 at an event sponsored by the Texas-based Christian nationalist group WallBuilders which Barton founded 35 years ago to promote a conservative family values agenda, citing his “profound influence on me, and my work, and my life in everything I do”.Little wonder that a day after Johnson became speaker in October Barton, who has worked closely with the rightwing GOP senator Ted Cruz and conservative legislators, boasted in a podcast that he had already talked with Johnson, about helping find staff for his office.“We have some tools at our disposal now [that] we haven’t had in a long time,” allowed Barton who has dubbed Johnson a “God guy”.A Johnson spokesman said neither “the speaker, nor his office, have had any subsequent conversations with Mr Barton about staff”.Still, the ties and mutual admiration between Johnson and Barton suggest they are now poised to bolster one another politically and in Christian nationalist circles, spurring some scholars to stress they hold dangerous views about America’s founding principles and the first amendment.“Johnson has bought into the malignant cancer about America being a Christian nation which Barton has propagated, ” said Randall Balmer, a Dartmouth historian of religion.“For Barton and Johnson to subvert the first amendment is both dishonest and myopic. Dishonest because the founders were abundantly clear that they intended church and state to be separate entities. Myopic because the lack of a religious establishment – the separation of church and state – has been the best friend that religion ever had.”Other scholars voice alarms at the deep ties between Johnson and Barton, one of whose books was withdrawn by its publisher due to errors.“It is dangerous to the country that the speaker of the House is relying for his understanding of American history on a writer who has zero credibility in the history profession,” said David A Hollinger, an historian of religion at Berkeley and a former president of the Organization of American Historians.Despite such stinging criticism, since Barton founded WallBuilders in 1988 he has helped build a strong Christian nationalist and political network with rightwing state legislators which seems poised to expand its influence with the rise of Johnson to speaker.The wide-ranging missions of WallBuilders are palpable on its website.“American liberty is being eroded, and our Biblical foundation is under attack. Here at WallBuilders, we provide education, training, and resources to equip people to know and defend the truth to protect our freedom.”The group’s mission includes “providing information to federal, state, and local officials as they develop public policies which reflect Biblical values”.WallBuilders expanded its ties with conservative state legislators by launching the “ProFamily Legislative Network” in 1998 to help push bills on abortion, LGBTQ+ rights and other hot button issues for the religious right, and host a yearly conference with legislators.When Cruz sought the GOP nomination for president in 2016, Barton did a stint leading a Cruz Super Pac. Barton has also served as vice-chairman of the Texas Republican party, and been a consultant to the Republican National Committee.To spur its growth, WallBuilders has lured some big checks from mega-donors including $3.2m from the Thirteen Foundation helmed by fracking billionaire and pastor Farris Wilks who has railed against homosexuality and equated the climate crisis with God’s will. Wilks, his brother Dan and their wives also donated $15m to a Cruz Super Pac during his run for president.WallBuilders, which now boasts Barton’s son Tim as president, has been on a fundraising roll with its annual revenues reaching $5.9m in 2021 versus $1.9m in 2017.Despite his powerful rightwing network, Barton’s career has been dogged by big headaches due to multiple inaccuracies in his book The Jefferson Lies.The nation’s largest religious book publisher, Thomas Nelson, in 2012 pulled back Barton’s book due to mounting criticism of its errors.Nonetheless, WallBuilders sells sizable quantities of Barton’s books and writings espousing his views. Barton’s messages have also been boosted in recent years via the rightwing Patriot Academy led by the evangelist and ex-Texas legislator Rick Green.Barton has also been a star attraction on the American Restoration tour, a far-right project that espouses the Christian nationalist view there should be no separation between church and state, according to a book on American evangelicals by the journalist Tim Alberta entitled The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHowever, Barton’s influence and brand of Christian nationalism has drawn fire from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has tracked his attacks on some minorities. The center has noted that “Barton has also demonized LGBTQ persons and communities, arguing that HIV and Aids are god-given consequences for living out one’s LGBTQ life”.Balmer, an Episcopal priest, added: “Johnson’s and Barton’s brand of Christian nationalism tends to go hand in hand with calls for draconian Old Testament punishment for what he regards as deviant behavior.”Barton did not respond to calls seeking an interview.Barton is hardly alone among Christian nationalist leaders in banking on Johnson’s new clout in Washington and the ties he forged with the religious right before he was elected to Congress in 2016 and since then.Before Congress, Johnson worked for about two decades as a lawyer for the Christian-right Alliance Defending Freedom, and Johnson also built close ties to the far-right Family Research Council and its leader, Tony Perkins.Johnson has developed good ties too with other influential Christian bigshots including the Christian-right Pastor Jim Garlow, who hosts regular World Prayer Network live streams where Johnson has been a guest.On an 9 August broadcast, Garlow said Johnson has “worked with us very closely”.Johnson, in turn, praised Garlow. “I’m so grateful for the ministry and your faithfulness. It’s a great encouragement to me and others who are serving in these sometimes rocky corners of the Lord’s vineyard.”Significantly, Johnson’s far-right Christian credentials are also proving helpful to Donald Trump. Soon after becoming speaker, Johnson endorsed Trump’s bid to be the Republican nominee for the presidency.Johnson’s fast Trump endorsement fits with his role in 2020 when he helped enable Trump’s false claims that fraud cost him the election. Johnson took the lead in writing a brief for a lawsuit that sought to overturn Joe Biden’s win, and he rounded up fellow members to sign it too.“I see Speaker Johnson and many others in the vanguard of the GOP aiding and abetting Trump, including his more increasingly authoritarian rhetoric and plans,” said Adam Russell Taylor, president of the Christian social justice group Sojourners.Taylor stressed: “Many white Christian nationalists see the need to elect someone like Trump as president because he is willing to bend the rules or even break the rules in order to keep themselves in power and further their ideologies.”Scholars say Johnson’s rise to House speaker is result of a decades-long drive for political clout by the religious right in which WallBuilders and other key Christian nationalist groups played important parts.“Johnson’s ascent is a capstone victory for a culture-warring religious conservatism that has leveraged legal strategies meant to bolster white Christian hegemony,” said the Notre Dame university historian Darren Dochuk.“With monies generated by Christian allies, fiercely ‘libertarian’ ones in business sectors ranging from oil and gas to the service industry, and an increasingly theocratic ambition to take over the Capitol for God, they built their alternative infrastructure.”In Dochuk’s eyes, “Johnson is the product and culmination of a decades-long quest by rightwing religionists to assert themselves politically through backchannels not always visible to the uninitiated. Ronald Reagan’s evangelical allies could not have imagined such a swift, no-holds-barred rise to power.” More

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      ‘The venom of our age’: James Carville on the danger of Mike Johnson’s Christian nationalism

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      As hard-right movements rattle or control European governments, the words of George Steiner animate James Carville.“Nationalism is the venom of our age,” Steiner wrote in his 1965 essay on the Holocaust, A Kind of Survivor. “It has brought Europe to the edge of ruin.”Those words prompted Carville, the centrist Democratic political consultant who guided Bill Clinton to the presidency, to say: “The greatest distinction in the world is between patriotism, which is positive – a piece of ground as an idea – and nationalism, which is tribal, exclusionary and, yeah, poisonous.”Carville zeroed in on the US variant: white Christian nationalism, particularly as embodied by Mike Johnson, his fellow Louisianan and the US House speaker.“Johnson has no skill, no background, no majority to speak of,” the so-called Ragin’ Cajun declaimed on Saturday, hours before he watched the Louisiana State Univeristy quarterback Jayden Daniels win the coveted Heisman award.Football is as dear to Carville as politics and his Roman Catholic faith. A graduate of LSU and its law school, he wears the Tigers’ gold and purple shirts in many of his TV appearances, accentuating his flamboyant presence.“What Johnson does represent is a level of breathtaking hypocrisy,” Carville said. “His anti-homosexuality and young earthism are hypocrisy on steroids.”In a 2004 Shreveport Times op-ed on gay marriage, Johnson wrote: “If we change marriage for this tiny minority, we will have to do it for every deviant group. Polygamists, polyamorists and pedophiles will be next in line to claim equal protection.”“Young earthism” signals Johnson’s belief that the planet is 6,000 years old, a literal interpretation of Genesis. In a 2021 interview celebrating the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which lies 40 miles from Ark Encounter, Johnson said: “The Ark Encounter is one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events.”Johnson, his role as lawyer, helped the gigantic ark attraction secure significant funding from the state tourism budget, Reuters reports.Itching for a fight, Carville is challenging the speaker to a debate at Louisiana Christian University, a small Southern Baptist campus in the town of Pineville.Carville calls LCU “the epicenter of Christian nationalism”.“The debate I want begins: ‘Resolved, Christian nationalism is a greater threat to America than al-Qaida,’” Carville said. “I want students to see real debate and make up their own minds about what kind of America we want.”Before his election to Congress, Johnson was founding dean of a campus law school to be named for Paul Pressler, 93, a retired Texas judge, legislator and Southern Baptist potentate. In 2018, the Houston Chronicle reported Pressler paid $450,000 to settle a lawsuit by a man who alleged that Pressler sexually assaulted him as a high school student in Bible study. The law school never materialized.Carville, 79, and Johnson, 51, stand a generation apart, their lives mirroring the state’s divided history. Once a Democratic party stronghold of the Gulf south, Louisiana has gone deep red: Republicans hold the major state offices and a heavy legislative majority. The attorney general and governor-elect, Jeff Landry, boasted of the former president Donald Trump’s endorsement as Landry coasted to an outright, multiparty primary victory.Carville lives in New Orleans with the Republican political operative Mary Matalin, his wife. But he grew up 16 miles south of Baton Rouge along the Mississippi River in the town of St Gabriel, in the Carville neighborhood, named for his grandfather.The oldest of eight children, he attended mass in a church built in the late 18th century, taking comfort in the gospels as he does today. The 1960 election of John F Kennedy, a Catholic, was like a magnet pulling Carville into politics.Johnson is a firefighter’s son from Shreveport – far upstate, an area more culturally akin to Alabama or Mississippi. He came of age as Pentecostal Christianity became a political force. He won election to the House in 2016, telling the Louisiana Baptist Message newspaper: “I am a Christian, a husband, a father, a lifelong conservative, constitutional law attorney and a small business owner in that order.”He claimed the speaker’s gavel after it was wrested from the retiring congressman Kevin McCarthy, emerging from the subsequent Republican infighting.For all of his spitfire attacks on Johnson and “the blood and soil” Make America great again (Maga) agenda pushed by Trump, Carville draws on a wellspring of faith. He says he has “a Catholic construct of the world” – and that attending mass daily at 8am calms and comforts him.“I like the predictability of the gospel readings,” Carville said. “So much of my life is unpredictable.”The church’s ongoing clergy sex abuse crisis eats at him, in part because one of his cousins is an ordained priest who holds the elevated title of monsignor. “I can’t tell you how much I’ve thought about that,” Carville said. “Like most people, I struggle.”Although Pope Francis is a widely admired global figure, the American church is as deeply torn as the US’s red v blue political split. Carville draws a careful distinction between the power structure of bishops and the people in churches with priests they like.“I’ve seen how [bishops] try to repress people while they were allowing predators, covering up, lying to people and hiding behind their lawyers,” Carville said. “I hold the Roman Catholic church to a higher standard than I would Ford Motor Company.”The hard-right network of Catholic organizations such as the Napa Institute, Church Militant and Eternal Word Television Network offend Carville for similar reasons that send him into attack mode against Trumpism and Johnson.“The essence of Trumpism is that politics has run over you,” Carville said. “I understand why people feel that – the idea of loss, what people once had. In the church, we’re seeing a real defense of power in reaction to the hypocrisy and rottenness that’s been exposed. So the right wing doubles down.”Carville was delighted when Francis sacked the American cardinal Raymond Burke from his Vatican apartment and salary. Burke, a former archbishop of St Louis, is known for his lavish, regal attire and attacks on the pope’s agenda of “radical mercy” – reaching out to migrants and people on the margins, seeking to make the church more welcoming to LGBTQ+ believers, divorced Catholics and women.“The Cardinal Burkes of the world are telling you that you have to protect power at all costs,” Carville said. “That branch of the church has never really liked democracy, an open society or anything approaching bodily autonomy.”Like most liberal Catholics, Carville finds a bulwark in faith in the form of the big tent, the messy, sprawling people of God packed into sacred spaces that unite them on Sunday to hear the gospel, take the host and go back to their different lives.That sensibility, quaint though it may seem to myriad of others aghast at the church scandals, nevertheless holds a ray of hope for the likes of Carville. Down in the mud pit of politics, he is worried about more than just Christian nationalism.“I have all kinds of people tell me: ‘James, this is not the country we grew up in,’” Carville said.And they’re right, he says – but probably not in the way they mean.Carville said: “I actually hear [white people] say: ‘People knew their place.’ Well, I graduated from LSU law school with one Black and three females in the class. You go to any law school today and half the class are women. That’s a profound change in my lifetime. You can’t show someone a Norman Rockwell painting, say this used to be America, and expect the world to change.”Carville’s greatest concern about the 2024 election is Joe Biden. He points to a recent Wall Street Journal poll that had the president at 31%.“I don’t think he should run,” Carville said. “I like President Biden. I like people who get scarred politically and come back and survive – he’s that kind of guy.“But he’s too old. It’s that simple. The Democratic party has breathtaking talent, but no energy. We’re keeping it bottled up. If you ask the average person in Terre Haute, Indiana, what do you think of the Democratic party, they’d say two things: ‘They’re for the cities and they’re too old.’ We need to change that image.” More

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      The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory review: Trump and his evangelical believers

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      With The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, Tim Alberta of the Atlantic, author of a previous blockbuster on Republican politics and, this year, the profile that helped bring down Chris Licht at CNN, delivers another essential read. It is substantive, news-filled and personal.“I have endeavored to honor God with this book,” he writes. The son of an evangelical Presbyterian minister who came to religion from finance, Alberta lays bare his hurt over how the cross has grown ever more synonymous with those who most fervently wave the Stars and Stripes, on the right of the political spectrum.“All nations before him are as nothing; and they are counted to him less than nothing, and vanity.” Isaiah’s teaching stands nearly forgotten.In his prologue, Alberta takes us back to summer 2019, and his father’s funeral. The Rev Richard Alberta died suddenly, of a heart attack. Regardless, a church elder delivered to Alberta a one-page screed expressing his disapproval of the author for not embracing Donald Trump as God’s anointed. Yes, the same guy who made “Two Corinthians” a punchline. Time, place and decorum were discarded. Alberta’s sins demanded rebuke.“I was part of an evil plot, the man wrote, to undermine God’s ordained leader of the United States. My criticisms of President Trump were tantamount to treason – against both God and country – and I should be ashamed of myself.”Alberta passed the letter to his wife.“What the hell is wrong with these people?” she cried.As many congregants would see it, probably nothing. The unidentified elder simply repeated sentiments that had taken root in evangelical America since Trump’s election in 2016. The letter embodied a shift that was decades in the making. Demographics were in flux. Barack Obama had occupied the White House. The spirit of Protestant dissent, which once fueled rebellion against the crown, had given way to declaring Trump a divine emissary, a modern-day Cyrus. Or Caesar.Funny how Obama never held such a place of honor. Then again, he was Black and liberal and his personal beliefs could be discounted. American evangelism had evolved into caffeinated American nationalism, white identity close to the surface.Franklin Graham, the late Billy Graham’s son, threatened Americans with God’s wrath if they had the temerity to criticize Trump. “The Bible says it is appointed unto man once to die and then the judgment,” he said, on Facebook.Another famous scion, the now disgraced Jerry Falwell Jr, admonished his flock to stop electing “nice guys”. Instead, he tweeted, “the US needs street fighters like Donald Trump at every level of government”. Resentment and grievance supplanted the message of scripture and “What would Jesus do?”Alberta remembers a preacher in Colorado who conflated a Republican midterms victory with the triumph of Christ. “May this state be turned red with the blood of Jesus, and politically,” Steve Holt prayed, at a revival in spring last year.“Lauren Boebert looked right at home,” Alberta recalls, of the far-right controversialist and congresswoman from the same great state. “Boebert wasn’t bothered by this pastor praying for Jesus’s blood – His precious, sacrificial blood, shed for the salvation of sinners – to win an election, because, well, she wasn’t bothered by much after all.”Months later, Boebert won re-election in a squeaker. Her recent behaviour at a performance of the musical Beetlejuice in Denver – singing, dancing, vaping, groping – simply confirmed what everyone had thought since she arrived on the national scene. She is profoundly unsuitable for power.Alberta grapples with the decline in evangelical affiliation and the growth of evangelical unpopularity. He is mindful of religion’s lack of purchase among younger Americans. Scandal, and the embrace of conservatism and Trump, has extracted a heavy price. “Religious nones” grow stronger at the polls. In 2020, more than one in five voters identified that way. White evangelicals made up 28%.Alberta also delivers a deep dive into events at Liberty University, the Virginia machine built by Jerry Falwell Sr and Jr.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Jerry Jr told me … the school was building a new $35m facility,” Alberta writes. “There would even be a hologram of Falwell Sr preaching.”So much for the biblical injunction against worship of idols and images.“I actually own my father’s name and it happens to be my name too,” Falwell Jr is quoted as saying. By that logic, the sordid circumstances surrounding Falwell Jr’s marriage would be stains on his father’s legacy. “I like to watch”? It doesn’t scream piety or faith.These days, Falwell Jr litigates against the school his father built. Fallen from grace, he wants back in. Among his gripes is that present management is “choosing piety over competence”, Alberta quotes him as saying. “It’s exactly what my dad didn’t want to see happen.”Alberta also captures Trump’s true feelings for the evangelical community, or at least those who sided with Ted Cruz in the 2016 primary. “So-called Christians.” “Real pieces of shit.” Seven years on, it does not seem much has changed.According to recent reports, Trump has privately derided anti-abortion leaders as lacking “leverage” to force his hand while tweaking them for having nowhere else to go after the supreme court struck down Roe v Wade. He has reportedly mocked as “disloyal” and “out of touch” those evangelicals who cast their lot with Ron DeSantis. In Iowa, Trump holds a 30-point lead. DeSantis falls, Nikki Haley nipping at his (lifted?) heels. As November 2024 draws closer, a Trump sell-out of his evangelical supporters looms large.Alberta closes his book with a verse from II Corinthians, the Epistle of Paul Trump couldn’t get right: “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
      The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism is published in the US by Harper More

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      Trump called Iowa evangelicals ‘so-called Christians’ and ‘pieces of shit’, book says

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      In the heat of the Republican primary of 2016, Donald Trump called evangelical supporters of his rival Ted Cruz “so-called Christians” and “real pieces of shit”, a new book says.The news lands as the 2024 Republican primary heats up, two months out from the Iowa caucus and a day after Trump’s closest rival this time, the hard-right Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, was endorsed by Bob Vander Plaats, an influential evangelical leader in Iowa.The new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, by Tim Alberta, an influential reporter and staff writer for the Atlantic, will be published on 5 December. The Guardian obtained a copy.Early in the book, Alberta describes fallout from an event at Liberty University, the evangelical college in Virginia, shortly before the Iowa vote in January 2016.As candidates jockeyed for support from evangelicals, a powerful bloc in any Republican election, Trump was asked to name his favourite Bible verse.Attempting to follow the advice of Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, the thrice-married, not noticeably church-going New York billionaire and reality TV star introduced it as “Two Corinthians”, rather than “Second Corinthians”, as would have been correct.“The laughter and ridicule were embarrassing enough for Trump,” Alberta writes. “But the news of Perkins endorsing Ted Cruz, just a few days later, sent him into a spiral. He began to speculate that there was a conspiracy among powerful evangelicals to deny him the GOP nomination.“When Cruz’s allies began using the ‘Two Corinthians’ line to attack him in the final days before the Iowa caucuses, Trump told one Iowa Republican official, ‘You know, these so-called Christians hanging around with Ted are some real pieces of shit.’”Alberta adds that “in private over the coming years”, Trump “would use even more colourful language to describe the evangelical community”.Cruz won Iowa but Trump took the second primary contest, in New Hampshire, and won the nomination with ease. After beating Hillary Clinton and spending four chaotic years in the White House, he was beaten by Joe Biden in 2020.Pursuing the lie that his defeat was the result of electoral fraud, Trump refused to concede defeat. He has continued to dominate Republican politics, now as the clear frontrunner to be the nominee again.Trump has maintained that status despite having been impeached twice (the second for inciting the deadly January 6 attack on Congress) and despite facing 91 criminal charges (34 for hush-money payments to a porn star) and civil threats including a case arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.Evangelicals remain the dominant bloc in Iowa, 55% of respondents to an NBC News/Des Moines Register poll in August identifying as “devoutly religious”. But despite his lengthy rap sheet, Trump’s hold on such voters appears to remain strong.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn October, the Register put him at 43% support overall in Iowa, with DeSantis and the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley 27 points behind. The same poll said 44% of evangelicals planned to make Trump their first choice, with DeSantis at 22% and Haley seven points back.Evangelicals have also stayed with Trump nationwide. According to exit polls, in the 2020 presidential election he was supported by 76% of white evangelical voters.DeSantis and Haley must attempt to catch Trump in Iowa. Vander Plaats’ endorsement was thus a sought-after prize, if one Trump did not pursue, declining to attend a Thanksgiving Family Forum Vander Plaats hosted in Des Moines last week.On Monday, announcing his decision to endorse DeSantis, the president of the Family Leader, which seeks to “inspire the church to engage government for the advance of God’s kingdom and the strengthening of family”, pointed to the conclusion he hoped his followers would reach.Speaking to Fox News, Vander Plaats said: “I don’t think America is going to elect [Trump] president again. I think America would be well served to have a choice, and I really believe Ron DeSantis should be that guy. And I think Iowa is tailor-made for him to win this.”Trump’s rivals may yet take encouragement from Register polling, should evangelicals begin to doubt Trump. In the October poll, 76% of Iowa evangelicals said they had a positive view of DeSantis, while 62% said they liked Haley. More

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      Mike Johnson, theocrat: the House speaker and a plot against America

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      The new House speaker, Mike Johnson, knows how he will rule: according to his Bible. When asked on Fox News how he would make public policy, he replied: “Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.” But it’s taking time for the full significance of that statement to sink in. Johnson is in fact a believer in scriptural originalism, the view that the Bible is the truth and the sole legitimate source for public policy.He was most candid about this in 2016, when he declared: “You know, we don’t live in a democracy” but a “biblical” republic. Chalk up his elevation to the speakership as the greatest victory so far within Congress for the religious right in its holy war to turn the US government into a theocracy.Since his fellow Republicans made him their leader, numerous articles have reported Johnson’s religiously motivated, far-right views on abortion, same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights. But that barely scratches the surface. Johnson was a senior lawyer for the extremist Alliance Defending Fund (later the Alliance Defending Freedom) from 2002 to 2010. This is the organization responsible for orchestrating the 303 Creative v Elenis legal arguments to obtain a ruling from the supreme court permitting a wedding website designer to refuse to do business with gay couples. It also played a significant role in annulling Roe v Wade.The ADF has always been opposed to privacy rights, abortion and birth control. Now Roe is gone, the group is laying the groundwork to end protection for birth control. Those who thought Roe would never be overruled should understand that the reasoning in Dobbs v Jackson is not tailored to abortion. Dobbs was explicitly written to be the legal fortress from which the right will launch their attacks against other fundamental rights their extremist Christian beliefs reject. They are passionate about rolling back the right to contraception, the right to same-sex marriage and the right to sexual privacy between consenting adults.Johnson’s inerrant biblical truth leads him to reject science. Johnson was a “young earth creationist”, holding that a literal reading of Genesis means that the earth is only a few thousand years old and humans walked alongside dinosaurs. He has been the attorney for and partner in Kentucky’s Creation Museum and Ark amusement park, which present these beliefs as scientific fact, a familiar sleight of hand where the end (garnering more believers) justifies the means (lying about science). For them, the end always justifies the means. That’s why they don’t even blink when non-believers suffer for their dogma.Setting aside all of these wildly extreme, religiously motivated policy preferences, there is a more insidious threat to America in Johnson’s embrace of scriptural originalism: his belief that subjective interpretation of the Bible provides the master plan for governance. Religious truth is neither rational nor susceptible to reasoned debate. For Johnson, who sees a Manichean world divided between the saved who are going to heaven and the unsaved going to hell, there is no middle ground. Constitutional politics withers and is replaced with a battle of the faithful against the infidels. Sound familiar? Maybe in Tehran or Kabul or Riyadh. But in America?When rulers insist the law should be driven by a particular religious viewpoint, they are systematizing their beliefs and imposing a theocracy. We have thousands of religious sects in the US and there is no religious majority, but we now have a politically fervent conservative religious movement of Christian nationalists intent on shaping policy to match their understanding of God and theirs alone. The Republicans who elected Johnson speaker, by a unanimous vote, have aligned themselves with total political rule by an intolerant religious sect.The philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard eloquently explained that religion is a “leap of faith”, not susceptible to reasoned discourse. The framers of the constitution and Bill of Rights thought the same. Under the first amendment, Americans have an absolute right to believe anything we choose and courts may not second-guess whether a believer’s truth is supported in reason or fact. For a believer, their belief is their “truth”, but for the republic, it is simply one of millions of beliefs across a country where all are free to believe. Thus, a scriptural originalist is by definition incapable of public policy discussions with those who do not share their faith.The grand irony is that being a “scriptural originalist” is oxymoronic. The colonies were first populated by those fleeing the theocracies of Europe – a fact the founders knew and respected. Millions were killed during the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and the Spanish and Roman inquisitions, because only one faith could rule. Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, as well as many other kings and queens, ordered apostates killed, imprisoned or exiled. Current theocracies underscore this historical reality. The Pilgrims fled England because they were at risk of punishment and even death for observing the wrong faith. So did the Quakers, Baptists and Presbyterians. Despite the ahistorical attempts of rightwing ideologues to claim we are or were a monolithic “Christian country”, this was always a religiously diverse country, and they did not all get along at first. Jews arrived in 1654. Early establishments faded away in the early 19th century as they could not be sustained in the face of our diversity.The primary drafter of the first amendment, James Madison, was keenly aware of these realities as he reflected on the dangerous history of theocracies in his famous Memorial and Remonstrance, opposing Virginia taxes for Christian education, asking: “Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects?”Madison further invoked the Inquisition, stating that a bill funding religious education through taxes “degrades from the equal rank of citizens all those whose opinions in religion do not bend to those of the legislative authority. Distant as it may be in its present form from the Inquisition, it differs from it only in degree. The one is the first step, the other the last in the career of intolerance.” US history is proving him correct.Johnson isn’t just talking about a tax to support his brand of Christian nationalism, though the right’s religious movement, with the approval of the supreme court, has gone all out to ensure that as many tax dollars flow to their mission as possible. Johnson has asserted the hackneyed conservative theory of original intent – that the constitution must be interpreted precisely according to what the founders said – but with a twist. According to Johnson, George Washington and John Adams and all the others “told us that if we didn’t maintain those 18th-century values, that the republic would not stand, and this is the condition we find ourselves in today”. The founders, according to Johnson, were scriptural originalists and he’s here to take us back to their “true” Christian beliefs. In fact, the founders’ 18th-century enlightenment values directly repudiate Johnson’s 21st-century theocratic dogma.The Constitutional Convention itself shows how little support there is for the view that America started from a dogma-soaked worldview. During debates, Benjamin Franklin proposed bringing in a member of the clergy to guide them with prayer. Only three or four out of 55 framers agreed. The matter was dropped.Less than a decade ago, it looked like the religious right had lost the culture wars. The turning point seemed to be the decision in Obergefell v Hodges in 2015, which established same-sex marriage as a constitutional right. “It’s about everything,” Focus on the Family’s James Dobson mourned, “We lost the entire culture war with that one decision.”But instead of surrendering, the truest believers vowed to supplant democracy. They doubled down on furiously grabbing political power, to force everyone else to live their religious lives. Led by the likes of Leonard Leo, a reactionary Catholic theocrat who is chair of the Federalist Society’s board of directors, Dobson and many other Republicans, including the then little-known Mike Johnson, remade the supreme court and instituted stringent religious litmus tests for Republican candidates. Unable to control the culture, they have mounted a legal-political crusade against all who refuse to embrace their religious worldview.In little over a year, since Dobbs, the theocrats have converted their belief in the divinity of the fetus and disdain for the life of the pregnant into law, in one Republican-dominated state after another. But that is just a preview. Johnson and his crusaders would like to insert their scriptural originalism into every nook and cranny of federal law and public policy, to create a blanket of religious hegemony. Conservative governors and legislators have shamelessly invoked their God as the legislative purpose behind such draconian limitations.In the US, the peaceful coexistence of thousands of faiths was made possible in great part by the separation of church and state, which was demanded by Baptists in Massachusetts, Virginia and other places where they were being ostracized, taxed, flogged, imprisoned and even killed for their beliefs. That separation, which is the wall that protects religious liberty and prevents religious hegemony, was engraved in the constitution. How cruel an irony that some of the spiritual descendants of those persecuted Baptists should, like Mike Johnson, pervert American history and the constitution to impose a theocracy that would mean the end of democracy.
      Marci A Hamilton is a professor of practice and the Fox Family Pavilion non-resident senior fellow in the Program for Research on Religion at the University of Pennsylvania More

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      ‘This war is prophetically significant’: why US evangelical Christians support Israel

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      It didn’t take long for many evangelical Christian groups in America to show their support for Israel.Hours after Hamas attacked the country on 7 October, killing more than 1,400 people, Christians United for Israel, an evangelical lobbying group which claims to have more than 10 million members, posted a message to on X, formerly known as Twitter.“To the terrorists who have chosen this fight, hear this, what you do to Israel, god will do to you. Despite today’s weeping, joy will come because he [god] who watches over Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps,” CUFI, whose founder believes the presence of Jews in Israel is a precursor to Jesus Christ returning to Earth, wrote.Soon an “Evangelical statement in support of Israel” was issued by the ethics and religion liberty commission – an arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination which has 45,000 churches in the US.In the statement, 2,000 evangelical leaders – not all were named – said they “fully support Israel’s right and duty to defend itself against further attack”. Little credence was given to the Palestinians who would soon find themselves under attack: more than 8,000 people in Gaza have now been killed by Israeli bombardments, according to Gaza’s health ministry .“While our theological perspectives on Israel and the Church may vary, we are unified in calling attacks against Jewish people especially troubling as they have been often targeted by their neighbors since God called them as His people in the days of Abraham (Gen. 12:1-3),” the evangelical statement said.“In keeping with Christian Just War tradition, we also affirm the legitimacy of Israel’s right to respond against those who have initiated these attacks as Romans 13 grants governments the power to bear the sword against those who commit such evil acts against innocent life.”The more than 90 named signatories – four were women, the rest men – included the current president, and eight former presidents, of the Southern Baptist Convention, among other influential evangelicals.For people not immersed in evangelicalism – a conservative strand of Christianity which emphasises adherence to the Bible – the overt biblical references may have seemed unusual to hear in a geopolitical context.Romans 13 – the 13th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans in the New Testament – is essentially a lengthy treatise on the importance of submitting to bureaucracy, which states:“Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason.”For those more familiar with the evangelical world, the vehemence of the support has not been a surprise, given the importance to evangelicals of an Israel inhabited by Jewish people. One main strand of evangelical theology holds that the return of Jews to the region starts the clock ticking on a seven-year armageddon, after which Jesus Christ will return.To that end, the issue of Israel and Palestine has dominated sermons at evangelical churches over the past two Sundays, said Daniel Hummel, a historian of American religion, and the author of Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and US-Israeli Relations.“The overwhelming theme has been: this war is prophetically significant, but no one is willing to really claim exactly how,” Hummel said.“And that’s been a long tradition of sort of hedging your bets and getting whatever you can in terms of sort of interest and eyeballs, by declaring that there’s something significant here, but once you start saying specific things and you’re sort of on the hook, it doesn’t turn out that way.”The rush to respond, and the statements in support of Israel, were not surprising to those aware of the deep feeling evangelicals have for Israel.Broadly speaking, some evangelicals believe that Jewish people returning to Israel following the 1917 ​​Balfour Declaration, a British statement which called for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”, was key to end times, when God will purge sinners and Jesus Christ will return.John Hagee, an evangelical pastor and influential founder of Christians United for Israel, explained the prophecy to TBN Networks in December 2022.“God is getting ready to defend Israel in such a supernatural way it’s going to take the breath out of the lungs of the dictators on planet Earth but we are living on the cusp of the greatest most supernatural series of events the world has ever seen ready or not.”Hagee said when Jewish people are present in Israel “the clock starts ticking” on the rapture.“What will come soon [is] the antichrist and his seven year empire that will be destroyed in the battle of armageddon. Then Jesus Christ will set up his throne in the city of Jerusalem. He will establish a kingdom that will never end,” Hagee said.Hagee, despite having a long history of antisemitism – he has suggested Jews brought persecution upon themselves by upsetting God and called Hitler a “half-breed Jew” – founded Christians United for Israel in 2006.Among other things, the group lobbied for the US embassy in Israel to be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which Donald Trump did in 2018, and is “committed to Israel’s strength, security and sovereignty”.The support of evangelical Christians – in 2015 the Pew Research Center estimated there were about 62 million in the US – for Israel can be split into different groups, Hummel said.While there are plenty of evangelicals who, like Hagee, adhere to the Israel-is-key-to-Jesus’-return theology, there are also those who believe in “blessings theology”, a less outlandish, more transactional approach to support for Israel.The blessings theology is based on a literal reading of the book of Genesis, where God told Abraham – who Hummel described as “the patriarch of the Jewish people” – that he would “bless those who bless you” and “curse those who curse you”.“For the last couple of centuries this has been interpreted on individual terms. So you can accrue personal blessings by being good to the Jewish people, or by giving money, or touring Israel or things like that,” Hummel said.That also works on a national level, he said.“And so the crude way of doing this is a pastor will say something like: ‘Look at the Roman Empire and how they persecuted the Jews and Rome fell. Look at the British Empire and how the British didn’t treat the Jews well, and how they fell. Look at the Nazis and how they persecuted the Jews, and they fell.“And we, the Americans, don’t want to be the next Empire or the next great power to fall because we didn’t sufficiently bless the Jewish people.’”There are also those whose support is “more broadly American”, Hummel said: “There’s a deep cultural affinity that’s been built over decades and decades between the US and Israel all across the board.”Evangelicals make up an influential part of the Republican party base, and have a strong number in Congress. More than 100 members of the current Congress can be broadly identified as evangelical, and that was on display in recent days.Lee Fang, a journalist, recently asked congressmen and women whether their religion was important to their support for Israel, for the documentary “Praying for Armageddon”.“This entire matter is based upon the faith of our maker, our creator, but it’s also faith of a chosen people,” Pete Sessions, a Republican congressman from Texas and a Methodist, said.Fang asked Tim Burchett, a Republican congressman from Tennessee, about evangelical support.“They’re following the scripture, and what the scripture says about Israel: ‘Those who bless Israel will be blessed,’ they take it literal, and I’m one of those people,” Burchett said.In terms of the influence evangelicals might wield as the Israel-Hamas conflict continues, Hummel said there had been a “mixed record” on evangelicals’ political sway.Still, Trump has specifically said he moved the US embassy to Jerusalem “for the evangelicals”, while Hagee served as an adviser to the twice-impeached president.In the 2020 election, evangelical or born-again Christians made up 28% of the overall electorate, CNN reported, and three-quarters voted for Trump. Given that support for the Republican party, under GOP leadership evangelicals would have plenty of influence.“When there’s a Republican president they have a seat at the table it doesn’t mean the president’s going to do exactly what they want, but they’re the ones that the president’s listening to more than other interested parties on Israel,” Hummel said.With a presidential election looming, and with few signs that the Israeli conflict will ebb away any time soon, evangelicals could find themselves in a position of significant power in the near future. More