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      Christian Nationalism ‘Is No Longer Operating Beneath the Surface’

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      Mike Johnson is the first person to become speaker of the House who can be fairly described as a Christian nationalist, a major development in American history in and of itself. Equally important, however, his ascension reflects the strength of white evangelical voters’ influence in the House Republican caucus, voters who are determined to use the power of government to roll back the civil rights, women’s rights and sexual revolutions.“Johnson is a clear rebuttal to the overall liberal societal drift that’s happening in the United States,” Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University, wrote by email in response to my query. “His views are far out of step with the average American and even with a significant number of Republicans.”“Yet, he was chosen as speaker,” continued Burge, who is also a pastor in the American Baptist Church. “If anything, it shows us that white evangelicals still have a very strong hold on the modern Republican Party. They are losing overall market share in the larger culture, but they are certainly taking on an outsized role in Republican politics.”Burge provided The Times with data on the changing religious composition of the Republican electorate. In the 1970s, mainline Protestants dominated at 46 percent, compared with evangelical Protestants at 24 percent and Catholics at 19 percent. By the decade of the 2010s, evangelical Protestants were a commanding 38 percent of Republicans, mainline Protestants had fallen to 17 percent, and Catholics had grown to 25 percent.Robert Jones, the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, described Johnson in an email as “the embodiment of white Christian nationalism in a tailored suit.”What is Christian nationalism? Christianity Today described it as the “belief that the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way. Popularly, Christian nationalists assert that America is and must remain a ‘Christian nation’ — not merely as an observation about American history, but as a prescriptive program for what America must continue to be in the future.”Johnson’s election as speaker, Jones went on to say, “is one more confirmation that the Republican Party — a party that is 68 percent white and Christian in a country that is 42 percent white and Christian — has embraced its role as the party of white Christian nationalism.”Jones argued that “while Johnson is more polished than other right-wing leaders of the G.O.P. who support this worldview, his record and previous public statements indicate that he’s a near textbook example of white Christian nationalism — the belief that God intended America to be a new promised land for European Christians.”In a long and data-filled analysis posted on Substack on Oct. 29, “Hiding in Plain Sight: The Sources of MAGA Madness,” Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., argued that the election of Johnson reflects the success of the Christian right in a long-term struggle to wrest control from traditional Republican elites, in battles fought out in Republican primary elections.Over the past two decades, Podhorzer wrote, “the political might of organized right-wing Christianity was successfully redeployed against establishment Republicans.”The decimation of moderate and centrist members of the House was most striking over the election cycles from 2010 to the present, according to Podhorzer: “From 2010 through 2022, a historically high number of House Republicans were defeated in primaries, with the vast majority of successful challenges happening in the most evangelical districts.”The result: When House districts are ranked by the percentage of voters who are white evangelicals, the top quintile is represented by 81 Republicans and 6 Democrats and the second quintile by 68 Republicans and 19 Democrats. The bottom three quintiles are represented by 188 Democrats and 73 Republicans.Not only do Republicans overwhelmingly represent the districts with the most white evangelicals, but those Republicans are deeply entrenched, with little or no danger of losing the general election to a Democrat:“Republicans represent 98 percent of the most evangelical safe districts and 82 percent of the remaining above-median evangelical safe districts,” Podhorzer wrote. “These two categories elected just shy of three-quarters of the Republican Caucus in safe districts.”The MAGA movement, in Podhorzer’s view, was unleashed with the Tea Party movement in 2010, well before Donald Trump emerged as a dominant political figure, and the elevation of Johnson marks the most recent high point in the movement’s acquisition of power: “Mike Johnson becoming speaker is better understood in terms of the ongoing white Christian nationalist takeover of the American government through MAGA,” he writes.White Christian nationalists, Podhorzer contended, “were once reliable votes and loyal foot soldiers for almost any Republican candidate since the 1970s,” but they “rebelled when John McCain and other establishment Republicans treated Obama’s win as legitimate.”From 2010 forward, Podhorzer wrote, “the political muscle provided by white Christian nationalism’s extensive church-based infrastructure in congressional districts, and its national reach through Christian broadcasting and national organizations, has turned MAGA into a ruthlessly successful RINO-hunting machine.”It should not be surprising, Podhorzer said, “to see an election-denying evangelical Christian who favors a national abortion ban, Bible courses in public schools, and ‘covenant marriage,’ and who believes that L.G.B.T.Q. people are living an ‘inherently unnatural’ and ‘dangerous lifestyle’ elevated to the speakership.”There is a strong correlation between election from a district with a high share of white evangelical voters, Podhorzer found, and election denial: “More than three-quarters of those representing the most evangelical districts are election deniers, compared to just half of those in the remaining districts. Fully three-quarters of the deniers in the caucus hail from evangelical districts.”The most recent P.R.R.I. American Values Survey, conducted in late August, “Threats to American Democracy Ahead of an Unprecedented Presidential Election,” further illuminated the priorities of the contemporary Republican electorate.The survey asked respondents whether they would “prefer a presidential candidate who can best manage the economy” or a candidate who will “protect and preserve American culture and the American way of life.”Democrats chose a candidate who can manage the economy 57 to 40, a view shared by independents by a smaller margin, 53 to 45. Republican voters, in contrast, preferred a candidate who will preserve American culture, by 58 to 40 percent.A different P.R.R.I. survey, released on Feb. 8, “A Christian Nation? Understanding the Threat of Christian Nationalism to American Democracy and Culture,” measured support for Christian nationalism based on responses to five statements:The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.On the basis of the responses, P.R.R.I. created four categories:Christian nationalism adherents: the 10 percent of Americans who overwhelmingly either agree or completely agree with the five statements above.Christian nationalism sympathizers: the 19 percent of Americans who agree with these statements but are less likely to say they “completely agree.”Christian nationalism skeptics: the 39 percent of Americans who disagree with the statements but are less likely to completely disagree.Christian nationalism rejecters: the 29 percent of Americans who completely disagree with all five statements in the scale.Among Democrats, the survey found that 15 percent were either adherents (5 percent) or sympathizers (10 percent). Among independents, 23 percent were adherents (6 percent) or sympathizers (17 percent).Among Republican voters, 54 percent were either adherents (21 percent) or sympathizers (33 percent).In a series of questions on racial issues and immigration, Christian nationalist adherents were well to the right of Americans as a whole.Asked whether “discrimination against white Americans has become as big a problem as discrimination against Black Americans and other minorities,” 85 percent of Christian nationalist adherents agreed, compared with 41 percent of all those surveyed.Asked whether they agree or disagree with the statement “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background,” 81 percent of Christian nationalist adherents agreed.Philip Gorski, a sociologist at Yale who has written extensively about Christian nationalism, replied by email to my inquiry about Johnson’s election:He says out loud what most others just feel: that America was founded as a Christian nation, that the founders were “evangelical” Christians, that the founding documents were based on “biblical principles,” that God has entrusted America with a divine mission, that he has blessed America with unique power and prosperity and that those blessings will be withdrawn if America strays off the straight and narrow path of Christian morality. And that it is every good Christian’s duty to make America Christian again.Christian nationalism, in Gorski’s view,is no longer operating beneath the surface or in the background. It’s now front and center at commanding heights of power. It will now be much harder for right-wing Christian activists to claim that Christian nationalism is a fringe phenomenon or a left-wing smear job. In 2021, it was still hard to find an avowed Christian nationalist in the top ranks of the G.O.P. Not anymore.Gorski wrote that Johnsonlikes to say that the United States is a “republic” and not a “democracy.” By this, he means that the majority does not and should not get its way. That would be democracy. A republic means rule by the virtuous, not the majority. And the virtuous are of course conservative Christians like him.Eric Schickler, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, stressed in an email his view that Johnson’s election as speaker demonstrated once again the weakness of the centrist wing of the House Republican caucus, writing that the elevation of the Louisiana Republicanreinforces the message that the most conservative voices in the Republican Party have decisive influence on the party in the House of Representatives. Less conservative members from swing districts have repeatedly made noises, suggesting that they were willing to wield power to ensure that leaders would reflect their needs — but once again, when push came to shove, they gave in despite having the numbers to hold the balance of power in the House.In addition, the “entire episode” — from the ousting of Kevin McCarthy on Oct. 3 to the election of Johnson on Oct. 25 — reflects the collapse of the unwritten rule that “majority party members would stick together on the floor in speakership contests.” There is no way, Schickler added, that “the Freedom Caucus would have voted for a member seen as distant from them on key issues.”Does Johnson’s election as speaker improve Democrats’ chances to retake the House in 2024? I asked.Schickler: “It is hard to know. Johnson starts with such a low profile, it is not clear whether Democrats will be able to make him a target.”Johnson’s relative anonymity in the House served him well in his bid for the speakership, insulating him from acrimony. More recently, however, some of Johnson’s out-of-the-mainstream views and alliances have begun to surface.In a July 20, 2005, opinion essay for The Shreveport Times, Johnson argued:All of us should acknowledge the real emotion and strife of the homosexual lifestyle and should certainly treat all people with dignity, love and respect. But our government can never provide its stamp of approval or special legal sanction for behavior patterns that are proven to be destructive to individuals, to families and to society at large. Your race, creed and sex are what you are, while homosexuality and cross-dressing are things you do.“We must always remember,” Johnson concluded, “that it is not bigotry to make moral distinctions.”A year earlier, Johnson wrote, in another opinion essay:The state and its citizens have a compelling interest in preserving the integrity of the marital union by making opposite sex marriage the exclusive form of family relationship endorsed by government. Loss of this status will de-emphasize the importance of traditional marriage to society, weaken it, and place our entire democratic system in jeopardy by eroding its foundation.It would be difficult to overestimate the dangers Johnson foresaw. “Society,” he wrote,cannot give its stamp of approval to such a dangerous lifestyle. If we change marriage for this tiny, modern minority, we will have to do it for every deviant group. Polygamists, polyamorists, pedophiles and others will be next in line to claim equal protection. They already are. There will be no legal basis to deny a bisexual the right to marry a partner of each sex, or a person to marry his pet. If everyone does what is right in his own eyes, chaos and sexual anarchy will result. And make no mistake, the extremists who seek to redefine marriage also want to deny you the right to object to immoral behavior. Our precious religious freedom hangs in the balance.In an Oct. 26 interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News after he was elected to the leadership post, Johnson described his faith in the Bible as his exclusive guide in life:What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun? Go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview. That’s what I believe.On Oct. 27, my Times colleagues Annie Karni, Ruth Graham and Steve Eder reported on a 2006 essay that Johnson posted on Townhall, a right-wing website.In it, they wrote, “Johnson railed against ‘the earnest advocates of atheism and sexual perversion’. He also decried ‘This sprawling alliance of anti-God enthusiasts’ that ‘has proven frighteningly efficient at remaking America in their own brutal, dehumanizing image.’”“In the space of a few decades,” Johnson added, “they have managed to entrench abortion and homosexual behavior, objectify children into sexual objects, criminalize Christianity in the popular culture, and promote guilt and self-doubt as the foremost qualities of our national character.”In lectures, Karni, Graham and Eder wrote, “Johnson has lamented that ‘There’s no transcendent principles anymore. There’s no eternal judge. There’s no absolute standards of right and wrong. All this is exactly the opposite of the way we were founded as a country.’”David Corn, the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, reported in an Oct. 28 article that in a series of seminars Johnson and his wife, Kelly, a Christian counselor, conducted — “Answers for Our Times” — the couple addressed such questions as:What is happening in America and how do we fix it? Can our heritage as a Christian Nation be preserved? How should Christians respond to the changing culture? What does the Bible say about today’s problems and issues?In May 2019, Johnson described the goal of the seminars to the Louisiana Baptist Message: “Our nation is entering one of the most challenging seasons in its history, and there is an urgent need for God’s people to be armed and ready with the truth.”For Johnson, the obligation “to be armed and ready with the truth” led him to become a leader of the election denial movement. In December 2020 he recruited 125 fellow House Republicans to sign on to his lawsuit seeking to persuade the Supreme Court to overturn the election results.He told his colleagues that “the initiative had been personally blessed by Mr. Trump, and that the former president was ‘anxiously awaiting’ to see who in Congress would defend him,” The Times reported.In the Supreme Court brief that Johnson filed on Dec. 10, 2020, he argued that the election hadbeen riddled with an unprecedented number of serious allegations of fraud and irregularities. National polls indicate a large percentage of Americans now have serious doubts about not just the outcome of the presidential contest, but also the future reliability of our election system itself. Amici respectfully aver it is the solemn duty of this Court to provide an objective review of these anomalies and to determine for the people if indeed the Constitution has been followed and the rule of law maintained.On Dec. 11, in a brief unsigned order, the Supreme Court dismissed the suit, but Johnson won recognition from his fellow Republicans in the House for his fealty to Trump.Asked shortly after he was elected speaker whether he continued to believe that the 2020 election was stolen, Johnson told a Washington Post reporter: “We’re not talking about any issues today,” adding only, “My position is very well known.”In theory, at least, it is difficult to understand how Johnson can justify his support for Trump, whom Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum and a contributing writer for Times Opinion, described this way in The Atlantic in 2020:A man whose lifestyle is more closely aligned with hedonism than with Christianity, Trump clearly sees white evangelicals as a means to an end, people to be used, suckers to be played. He had absolutely no interest in evangelicals before his entry into politics and he will have absolutely no interest in them after his exit. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a person who has less affinity for authentic Christianity — for the teachings of Jesus, from the Sermon on the Mount to the parable of the good Samaritan — than Donald Trump.Johnson’s ascent to the top job in the House also raises a larger, more encompassing question: Will voters care in 2024 (and beyond) that one of America’s two major political parties has been taken over by an alliance of MAGA forces and their white evangelical allies, who have clearly indicated their willingness to abandon democratic norms — that is, democracy itself — in the pursuit of power?Polling suggests that this is a far from settled question.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Where Mike Johnson Stands on Key Issues: Ukraine, LGBTQ Rights and More

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      The new House speaker, an evangelical Christian, has a staunchly conservative record on gay rights, abortion, gun safety and more.Speaker Mike Johnson, the little-known congressman from Louisiana who won the gavel on Wednesday, is deeply conservative on both fiscal and social issues, reflecting the G.O.P.’s sharp lurch to the right.Mr. Johnson, a lawyer, also played a leading role in former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, helping to push a lawsuit to throw out the results in four battleground states he lost and then offering members of Congress a legal argument upon which to justify their votes to invalidate the results.He has a career rating of 92 percent from the American Conservative Union and 90 percent from Heritage Action for America.Here’s where he stands on six key issues.Government fundingMr. Johnson is a fiscal conservative who believes Congress has a “moral and constitutional duty” to balance the budget, lower spending and “pursue continued pro-growth tax reforms and permanent tax reductions,” according to his website.He voted in favor of the deal in May to suspend the debt ceiling negotiated between former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the Biden administration. But alongside 89 other Republicans, Mr. Johnson voted against the stopgap funding bill Mr. McCarthy put forth last month to stave off a government shutdown just hours before it was to commence. That bill ultimately passed with more Democratic than Republican support and cost Mr. McCarthy the gavel.In a letter this week, before he was elected speaker, Mr. Johnson proposed a short-term funding bill to avoid a shutdown and an aggressive calendar for passing yearlong spending bills in the interim. But he did not specify what spending levels he would support in the temporary bill, and many Republicans have refused to back such measures without substantial cuts that cannot pass the Democratic-controlled Senate or be signed by President Biden.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

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      Urgency Grows for DeSantis in Iowa as Trump Looks to Finish Him Off

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      Despite spending far more time campaigning across the must-win state, Ron DeSantis still trails Donald Trump by double digits. And now Mr. Trump is stepping up his visits.On paper, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is doing everything that a Republican presidential candidate should do to win Iowa.He is doggedly crisscrossing the state, visiting 58 of its 99 counties so far and vowing to make it to the rest. He is meeting voters at small-town churches, meeting halls, county fairgrounds and ice-cream parlors, heavily courting evangelicals and racking up endorsements from influential faith leaders and local politicians. His super PAC is building a formidable get-out-the-vote operation and says it has reserved $13 million in television ads in Iowa through Thanksgiving.For Mr. DeSantis, who is trailing former President Donald J. Trump in Iowa by double digits, the state has become a must-win. Mr. Trump, who has campaigned sparingly here, appears to know it. The Trump campaign recently announced that he would visit Iowa five times in the next six weeks, including stops on Wednesday, in a clear attempt to scupper Mr. DeSantis’s bid for the presidency with a resounding victory in the Jan. 15 caucuses, the first votes of the race for the nomination.Mr. Trump’s enduring popularity with the Republican base — so strong that the former president has recently felt comfortable veering away from the party’s orthodoxy on abortion — is only one of Mr. DeSantis’s major hurdles in Iowa. The other is his lack of light-up-the-room charisma and folksy authenticity, qualities that seem required, at a minimum, to beat an established star like Mr. Trump.“He’s very cerebral, very smart,” said John Butler, 75, an accountant from Pella, Iowa, who heard Mr. DeSantis speak on Saturday at a gathering of Christian conservatives in Des Moines. “But it feels like it can be hard to get to know him.”For now, Mr. DeSantis’s top advisers say they are planning a steady diet of the grind-it-out approach that worked for the Republican victors in the 2008, 2012 and 2016 Iowa caucuses — none of whom, notably, went on to capture the party’s nomination.“Winning an Iowa caucus is very difficult,” David Polyansky, Mr. DeSantis’s deputy campaign manager, said in an interview this month. “It takes a tremendous amount of discipline. It takes an incredible amount of hard work and organization, traditionally. So much so that even in his heyday, Donald Trump couldn’t win it in 2016.”A campaign stand for former President Donald J. Trump was set up at a tailgate event this month in Nevada, Iowa.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMuch of the DeSantis strategy mirrors the approach taken by the last three Republicans to win contested caucuses in Iowa: former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, all social conservatives who trekked to practically every corner of the state. Mr. Cruz — not exactly a ball of white-hot magnetism himself — beat Mr. Trump here in 2016, an effort in which Mr. Polyansky played a key role.“Governor DeSantis is doing the 99-county tour,” said Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who appeared with Mr. DeSantis on Saturday at a meet-and-greet at a county historical society in her hometown, Red Oak. “He’s meeting with those Iowa voters. That makes a difference.”And Mr. Trump may be giving Mr. DeSantis openings to press his case in the state.In an interview broadcast on Sunday, Mr. Trump called a six-week abortion ban that Mr. DeSantis signed in Florida a “terrible thing.” Iowa passed a similar law that is widely popular with social conservatives. Mr. DeSantis struck back on Monday in an interview with Radio Iowa, saying, “I don’t know how you can even make the claim that you’re somehow pro-life if you’re criticizing states for enacting protections for babies that have heartbeats.”The former president has also spent few days campaigning in Iowa so far, and he was booed when he appeared this month at the Iowa-Iowa State football game.“They’re jittery, they’re nervous, and they absolutely should be,” Mr. Polyansky said of the Trump campaign. “At the end of the day, it’s going to be a very tight race in Iowa. And the former president losing there seriously damages the sheen of invincibility that they are trying to project.”Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said Mr. Trump would “put the pedal to the metal” in Iowa, even though he has a commanding lead.“We don’t play prevent defense,” Mr. Cheung said in a statement. “President Trump’s aggressive upcoming schedule in Iowa reflects his continued commitment to earning support in the state one voter at a time.”One of Mr. DeSantis’s biggest challenges may be showing voters that he is not as painfully awkward as his critics suggest.Rachel Paine Caufield, a professor of political science at Drake University in Des Moines, has seen Mr. DeSantis appear at roughly 10 events so far this cycle. She said that his small-town approach made sense in Iowa but that he himself might not be the right candidate to execute it. She has been particularly struck, she said, by how he interacts with voters.“He always looks miserable until he’s directly in front of a camera about to take a selfie,” said Dr. Paine Caufield, who has written a book about the Iowa caucuses.On Twitter, a cottage industry has sprung up turning Mr. DeSantis’s most awkward moments into viral memes. There was the time he told a young girl at a county fair in Iowa that her Icee probably had a lot of sugar. The painful way his face contorted when he was reminded that Mr. Trump led him in the polls. And, of course, the bizarre, almost body-racking laughs — his head thrown violently back, eyes screwed shut, mouth agape — he uses to herald jokes from voters.New York magazine and Vanity Fair have packaged those interactions into clickbait listicles. They have become fodder for late-night comedians. The Onion, a satirical news site, has turned Mr. DeSantis into a regular punching bag (“DeSantis Has Surprisingly Smooth Verbal Exchange With Iowa State Fair Corn Dog,” one headline read).Even his super PAC, Never Back Down, reminded Mr. DeSantis that he should be “showing emotion” when discussing his wife and children, in an unexpectedly public memo about last month’s debate.Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC, Never Back Down, has been integral to his campaign in Iowa, and it has reserved $13 million in television ads there through Thanksgiving.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesBut on the campaign trail, where he is often accompanied by his wife, Casey, a former local television anchor, and their three small children, Mr. DeSantis has seemed plenty likable, voters say. Even some Trump supporters don’t find him to be a stiff. They just like Mr. Trump better and wish the Florida governor had waited to run until 2028.“I saw a very confident spokesman for what he believes in,” said Madeline Meyer, 85, a retiree who heard Mr. DeSantis speak at a fund-raiser in Iowa last month but said she planned to stick with the former president. “He’s got a good voice and a nice, young family.”In a Fox News interview last weekend, Mr. DeSantis called criticisms of his demeanor a “bogus narrative.”Kristin Davison, Never Back Down’s chief operating officer, said the group’s messaging in Iowa would zero in on Mr. DeSantis’s plans for immigration and the economy, which polling shows are top issues for Republicans.“We’re focusing on amplifying what the governor has said he will do for voters,” Ms. Davison said in an interview.Mr. DeSantis has also tried to tailor his appeal more specifically to Iowa voters in recent trips, after heavily focusing his initial pitch on his record in Florida. He has noticeably adjusted his stump speech to talk less about Florida and more about what his priorities would be as president.But the governor clearly finds it hard to leave his home state behind.As he walked through an Iowa cattle ranch over the weekend, a gust of wind blew his blazer open, revealing that its lining had been stitched with images of Florida’s state flag.Maggie Haberman More

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      Republicans Agree on Foreign Policy — When It Comes to China

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      At first glance, last week’s Republican presidential debate revealed a party fractured over America’s role in the world. Ron DeSantis said he wouldn’t support additional aid to Ukraine unless Europe does more. Vivek Ramaswamy said he wouldn’t arm Ukraine no matter what. Chris Christie, Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, all staunch defenders of Kyiv, pounced. Within minutes, the altercations were so intense that the moderators struggled to regain control.But amid the discord, one note of agreement kept rising to the surface: that the true threat to America comes from Beijing. In justifying his reluctance to send more aid to Ukraine, Mr. DeSantis said he’d ensure that the United States does “what we need to do with China.” Mr. Ramaswamy denounced aiding Ukraine because the “real threat we face is communist China.” Ms. Haley defended such aid because “a win for Russia is a win for China.” Mr. Pence said Mr. Ramaswamy’s weakness on Ukraine would tempt Beijing to attack Taiwan.Regardless of their views on Ukraine, Republicans are united in focusing on China. They are returning to the principle that many championed at the beginning of the last Cold War. It’s neither internationalism nor isolationism. It’s Asia First.When Americans remember the early Cold War years, they often think of Europe: NATO, the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, which justified aiding Greece and Turkey. But for many leading Republicans at the time, those commitments were a distraction: The real menace lay on the other side of the globe.Senator Robert Taft, nicknamed “Mr. Republican” because of his stature in the party, opposed America’s entrance into NATO and declared in 1948 that “the Far East is ultimately even more important to our future peace and safety than is Europe.” The following year, Senator H. Alexander Smith, a Republican on the Foreign Policy and Armed Services Committee, warned that while the Truman administration was “preoccupied with Europe the real threat of World War III may be approaching us from the Asiatic side.” William Knowland, the Senate Republican leader from 1953 to 1958, was so devoted to supporting the Nationalist exiles who left the mainland after losing China’s civil war that he was called the “senator from Formosa,” as Taiwan was known at the time.Understanding why Republicans prioritized China then helps explain why they’re prioritizing it now. In her book “Asia First: China and the Making of Modern American Conservatism,” the historian Joyce Mao argues that Cold War era Republicans’ focus on China stemmed in part from a “spiritual paternalism that arguably carried over from the previous century.” In the late 19th century, when the United States was carving out a sphere of influence in the Pacific, China, with its vast population, held special allure for Americans interested in winning souls for Christ. The nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, who were Christians themselves, used this religious connection to drum up American support — first for their war against Communist rivals on the Chinese mainland and then, after they fled to the island of Taiwan, for their regime there.Many of America’s most influential Asia Firsters — like the Time magazine publisher Henry Luce — were either the children of American missionaries in China or had served as missionaries there themselves. The John Birch Society, whose fervent and conspiratorial brand of anti-Communism foreshadowed the right-wing populism of today, took its name from an Army captain and former missionary killed by Chinese communists at the end of World War II.Today, of course, Americans don’t need religious reasons to put Asia first. It boasts much of the world’s economic, political and military power, which is why the Biden administration focuses on the region, too. In Washington, getting tough on China is now a bipartisan affair. Still, the conservative tradition that Ms. Mao describes — which views China as a civilizational pupil turned civilizational threat — is critical to grasping why rank-and-file Republicans, far more than Democrats, fixate on the danger from Beijing.In March, a Gallup poll found that while Democrats were 23 points more likely to consider Russia a greater enemy than China, Republicans were a whopping 64 points more likely to say the reverse. There is evidence that this discrepancy stems in part from the fact that while President Vladimir Putin of Russia casts himself as a defender of conservative Christian values, President Xi Jinping leads a nonwhite superpower whose regime has spurned the Christian destiny many Americans once envisioned for it.In a 2021 study, the University of Delaware political scientists David Ebner and Vladimir Medenica found that white Americans who expressed higher degrees of racial resentment were more likely to perceive China as a military threat. And it is white evangelicals today — like the conservative Christians who anchored support for Chiang in the late 1940s and 1950s — who express the greatest animosity toward China’s government. At my request, the Pew Research Center crunched data gathered this spring comparing American views of China by religion and race. It found that white non-Hispanic evangelicals were 25 points more likely to hold a “very unfavorable” view of China than Americans who were religiously unaffiliated, 26 points more likely than Black Protestants and 33 points more likely than Hispanic Catholics.This is the Republican base. And its antipathy to China helps explain why many of the right-wing pundits and politicians often described as isolationists aren’t isolationists at all. They’re Asia Firsters. Tucker Carlson, who said last week that American policymakers hate Russia because it’s a “Christian country,” insisted in 2019 that America’s “main enemy, of course, is China, and the United States ought to be in a relationship with Russia aligned against China.” Mr. Ramaswamy, who is challenging Mr. DeSantis for second place in national polls, wants the United States to team up with Moscow against Beijing, too.And of course, the Republican front-runner for 2024, former President Donald Trump — deeply in tune with conservative voters — has obsessed over China since he exploded onto the national political stage eight years ago. Mr. Trump is often derided as an isolationist because of his hostility to NATO and his disdain for international treaties. But on China his rhetoric has been fierce. In 2016, he even said Beijing had been allowed to “rape our country.”Republicans may disagree on the best way forward in Ukraine. But overwhelmingly, they agree that China is the ultimate danger. And whether it’s Mr. Trump’s reference earlier this year to his former secretary of transportation as “Coco Chow” or House Republicans implying that Asian Americans in the Biden administration and Congress aren’t loyal to the United States, there’s mounting evidence that prominent figures on the American right see that danger in racial terms.That’s the problem with Republicans’ return to Asia First. Many in the party don’t only see China’s rise as a threat to American power. They see it as a threat to white Christian power, too.Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) is a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is also an editor at large of Jewish Currents and writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Pence Leans Into Civility Politics at Iowa State Fair

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      Looking to contrast himself with former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — leading rivals in the race for the Republican nomination who converged on Iowa on Saturday — former Vice President Mike Pence made a play for civility politics during a round table with about two dozen Christian college and university presidents.When Mr. Pence arrived at the event in Ankeny, Iowa, Mary Jo Brown, 67, told the former vice president that he was “a man of integrity.”A former teacher at Faith Baptist Bible College and Theological Seminary, a private Christian school, Ms. Brown said in an interview that Mr. Pence’s faith had guided his decision-making on Jan. 6 and that she would support him “if he can get through.”Mr. Pence is polling at a distant sixth place in Iowa, according to a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, far behind contenders like Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis, who are commanding attention in Iowa this weekend with their brasher style of politicking.Since the latest indictment against Mr. Trump came down, which revealed that Mr. Pence had provided prosecutors with “contemporaneous notes” regarding the former president’s efforts to reverse his 2020 loss, Mr. Pence has been emphasizing his loyalty to the Constitution — and invoking his faith as he tries to win the support of the evangelical voters he is counting on to propel him in the 2024 primary.But polling shows that Mr. Pence has the same 3 percent support among white evangelicals in Iowa that he has among the larger field of Republican caucusgoers.On Saturday, Mr. Pence cast himself as a key figure in the appointment of three conservatives to the Supreme Court by Mr. Trump, telling the Christian education leaders that he had interviewed each justice — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — as vice president.“You can have confidence that we have a pro-religious majority on the Supreme Court,” he said.Mr. Pence also shared an anecdote at the event about being invited in 2010 to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., by his then-House colleague John Lewis to commemorate Bloody Sunday.Noting their political differences, he called the civil rights leader, who died in July 2020, a “great man” and said that they had a mutual respect for each other as men of faith. That’s a stark contrast from how Mr. Trump played down Mr. Lewis’s accomplishments after his death.“He didn’t come to my inauguration,” Mr. Trump said at the time. More

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      The State of Evangelical America

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      Matija MedvedThere are few evangelical Christians who have gotten as much media coverage or criticism in the last decade as Russell Moore. He previously served as the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the policy wing of the Southern Baptist Convention, and became a prominent evangelical voice opposing a Trump presidency. Moore is currently the editor in chief of Christianity Today, which The Times’s Jane Coaston called “arguably the most influential Christian publication” in the United States. I asked Moore if he would speak to me about the evangelical movement and his new book, “Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America.” This interview has been edited and condensed.Tish Harrison Warren: The subtitle of your newest book is “An Altar Call for Evangelical America.” What do you mean by evangelical America?Russell Moore: What I mean by “evangelical” is people who believe in the personal aspect of what it means to be a follower of Christ. That includes the way that we understand the Bible, the way that we understand the need to be born again.In your book, you discuss how increasing secularization isn’t going to end the culture wars. In fact, you say it may heighten them. Why do you think that?I was in a session several years ago in which a researcher had done a survey about religious people’s reactions to immigrants and refugees. And she was stunned to find that the more active evangelistic work a church did, the more welcoming they were to refugees in their communities. I was not surprised at all, because evangelism presupposes the possibility of conversation and persuasion. And not the coercion of raw power.When churches have given up on evangelism, this means they’ve given up on actually engaging with and loving their neighbors. That’s bad news for everybody. You end up in a situation where these warring groups in American life are seeking some kind of total victory, where somebody is the final, ultimate winner and somebody is the final, ultimate loser. That ratchets up the stakes of culture wars dramatically.Your book delves into Christian nationalism as a component of the evangelical movement. How would you define Christian nationalism? And how has it affected evangelicalism in the United States?Christian nationalism is the use of Christian symbols or teachings in order to prop up a nation-state or an ethnic identity. It’s dangerous for the nation because it’s fundamentally anti-democratic. Christian nationalism takes a political claim and seeks to make it ultimate. It says: If a person disagrees with me, that person is disagreeing with God. No democratic nation can survive that, which is why the founders of this country built in all kinds of protections from it.Christian nationalism is also dangerous for the witness of the church, because Christian nationalism is fundamentally, at its core, anti-evangelical. If what the Gospel means is for people to come before God, person by person, not nation by nation or village by village or tribe by tribe, then Christian nationalism is heretical.Christian nationalism assumes outward conformity enforced by social or political power. It transforms the way that we see reality with the assumption that the really important things are political and cultural, as opposed to personal and spiritual and theological.It’s been hard for me to evaluate how widespread this is. Anecdotally, I know a lot of Christians, including a lot of evangelicals, and they would not be considered Christian nationalists. So I often wonder: Is this fringe?It is affecting almost every sector of American Christianity in varying ways. It’s similar to the Prosperity Gospel of the last generation. Most American Christians wouldn’t identify themselves as Prosperity Gospel adherents. Yet many of them were adopting key pieces of that understanding of the world.Studies have shown the way that Christian language is being used in Europe and in other places to prop up populist authoritarian movements. You can see this in the way that survey data show how white evangelicals in America are becoming much friendlier to outright authoritarianism — as seen in the Jan. 6 insurrection. I don’t think that it is merely fringe at all.We can’t talk about the rise of Christian nationalism without bringing up Donald Trump. You said that he was morally unfit to be president and received intense backlash — even from Trump himself. Were you surprised by the severe criticism from certain Christians for your denunciation of Trump?It didn’t surprise me that there would be overwhelming buy-in once Trump became the Republican nominee. One of the things I was worried about is that people would say: I’m not supporting him, I’m just voting for him because I think the alternative is worse. I feared, at the time, that the way that American politics works right now is inherently totalizing, so there would not be people after Trump was elected who would, for instance, support him on some judicial appointments and oppose him on a Muslim ban or whatever the issue is. And I think that has proved to be the case. Trump has transformed evangelicalism far more than evangelism has influenced Trump.I was surprised by the aftermath of the “Access Hollywood” tape. When the “Access Hollywood” tape was released, I was saying to people around me: “Don’t say ‘I told you so.’ We need to have empathy for Trump-supporting evangelicals who are really hurting at this revelation.” But what ended up happening is that white evangelicals made peace with “Access Hollywood,” if anything, quicker than the rest of America did.I received a castigating email from a sweet Christian lady who had taught me Sunday school when I was a kid. And none of it argued: “You’re wrong about Trump’s moral character.” The argument was: “Get real. This is what we have to have in order to fight the enemy.” That was surprising to me. And disorienting.In your book, you tell a story about how an evangelical person said to their pastor: “We’ve tried to turn the other cheek. It doesn’t work. We have to fight now.” Why do certain evangelicals feel so embattled now?Some of it is a response to legitimate fears. There are many people in American life who assume that religion itself is oppressive and should be done away with. And there is a general sense of crisis and decline in American life, and it’s translated into religious terms. In many cases, I would not disagree with the diagnosis about some of the things that are wrong. What I would disagree with is the sense of futility and giving up on what it means to live in a pluralistic democracy.I would also point to the decline in personal evangelism. When you have people who are trained to share the Gospel with their neighbors, they have an understanding from the very beginning that people in my community aren’t my enemies, they’re my mission field. This changes the way that you see people.When that starts to diminish, there’s a lack of confidence and a frantic looking about for whatever tool is at hand. Ideological zealotry becomes the tool at hand.I mentioned in the book about how many pastors talk about referencing Jesus’ call to “turn the other cheek,” only to have blowback from people in their congregation because they say that that doesn’t work in times like these. The assumption is that we’re in a hostile culture as opposed to a neutral culture — as though the Sermon on the Mount is delivered in Mayberry, not ancient Rome. And the assumption also shows a lack of confidence in the means that God has given us to advance the church through proclamation and demonstration.A moving part of your book is when you write about your father, who had a complicated relationship with the church.He never lost his faith. But he was always very suspicious of church structures and found it hard to go to church for long periods at a time. When I was younger, I judged him for it. I thought that this was a spiritual defect. Now that I have more perspective and can see his life, I understand it.You write about how his experience has given you compassion for folks who have left the church. And you often say that people don’t always leave the church because of what Christians believe, but instead because they don’t think Christians actually believe what they claim to believe. What do you mean by that?When I first started in ministry, if someone came and said, “I’m losing my faith, I’m walking away from the church,” the cause was almost always one of two things. Either the person started to find the supernatural incredible. Or the person thought that the morality of the church was too strict in some way, usually having to do with sex. I almost never hear that anymore. Instead, the people that I talk to often have a sense that for the church, the Gospel is a means to an end — whether that end is politics or cultural control or cultural influence or something else. And in many cases they’re starting to question not whether the church is too strict, but whether the church actually holds to a morality at all. What is alarming to me is that some of the people I find who are despairing are actually those who are the most committed to the teachings of Christianity.So with all this dysfunction that you are speaking about in evangelicalism, why are you still an evangelical Christian?I think the fragmentation that’s happening to the evangelical movement right now is actually a necessary precondition for renewal.I won’t give up on the word “evangelical.” There was a time when I did. I wrote an op-ed in 2016 in The Washington Post called “Why This Election Makes Me Hate the Word ‘Evangelical’” — but I’ve come around. I can’t find a good alternative shorthand to describe the kind of Christian that I am. But also because Tim Keller came with me to a class I was teaching at the University of Chicago, and one of the students asked why we would use the word “evangelical” when it’s become so politicized and toxic. And Tim responded, “Well, it’s because most of us evangelicals are in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the North Americans don’t get to just choose what we’re called because we’ve wrecked the brand.” The student said, “Fair enough.”What do you think a healthy political engagement from evangelicals would look like?It would mean a reordering of priorities. The church could see ultimate things as ultimate and other things as falling in line behind those ultimate things. That’s the fundamental shift.I do think that we need to have the right ordering of our priorities and our loves, and also the right understanding of what it means to follow Christ. The figure of Jesus in the New Testament Gospels is not a frantic, angry culture warrior. He is remarkably tranquil about the situation around him. I think we need more of that. If our neighbors saw us loving one another and forgiving one another, even if they find our theological beliefs to be strange or even dangerous, that would be a good start.An AnnouncementI have some news. The past two years of writing this newsletter for The Times have been a profound joy and privilege, so it is bittersweet to announce that I will be leaving this post in early August, first for a brief sabbatical, and then to work on longer-form book projects. I am very grateful for my editors and colleagues at The Times. And for you, my readers, who have generously shared your lives, thoughts and prayers with me through thousands of weekly notes and emails. You have stuck with me through controversial pieces and lighthearted ones. You’ve walked with me as I’ve written my way through grief, doubt and joy. I cannot thank you enough. For fans of my work, I intend to keep writing. And I hope you will see my work in The Times, too, in the future.Tish Harrison Warren (@Tish_H_Warren) is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America and the author of “Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      DeSantis, Haley and Pence Attack Democrats in Speeches Supporting Israel

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      President Biden and progressive congresswomen were the focus of Republican presidential hopefuls’ criticism at the Christians United for Israel Summit.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Monday sharply criticized the Biden administration’s policies on Israel, calling them “disgraceful,” seeking to highlight his pro-Israel credentials as he goes head-to-head with former President Donald J. Trump for evangelical voters.In Washington at the Christians United for Israel Summit, an annual gathering of conservatives with ties to the Israeli right wing, Mr. DeSantis also vowed to never waver on Israel’s claim to Jerusalem and to forcefully oppose the boycott-Israel movement that he said promoted prejudice against Jewish people.Three Republican presidential candidates, including Mr. DeSantis, appeared at the event, which unfolded as President Biden on Monday invited Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to the White House and was set to meet in Washington later this week with Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president. The Netanyahu government has long cultivated its ties with evangelical Christians, whose beliefs that Israel is special to God has led many to hold hawkish views in support of the Jewish state.“You’re free as a person to have whatever views you want,” Mr. DeSantis told the crowd. “But when you concoct a movement that focuses all of your ire at the only Jewish state in this world, at the exclusion of all these other things,” he added, “that is antisemitism.”Mr. DeSantis never once mentioned the progressive Democrats who have said they will boycott a speech by Mr. Herzog to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday. But he used his speech to emphasize his strong support for Israel and attack White House policies, as many conservatives have sought to portray Democrats who criticize Israel as anti-Zionist or even antisemitic.His Republican presidential rivals who also spoke at the event — Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and a United Nations ambassador in the Trump administration, and former Vice President Mike Pence — took direct aim at the progressive Democratic congresswomen who have pushed for a shift in thinking about the Mideast conflict, focusing the debate on human rights.Ms. Haley attacked Mr. Biden over how long it took to extend a White House invitation to Mr. Netanyahu after he re-entered office in December. In callbacks to the public fights between Mr. Trump and the “Squad,” she singled out Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who is planning to skip the Herzog speech, and said “the Democratic Party is the definition of extreme.” She added, “It’s time to censure the Squad and get antisemitism out of America for good.”Antisemitism has been on the rise in recent years. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a long-shot Democratic presidential candidate who has been invited by House Republicans to testify on Capitol Hill on censorship, falsely claimed recently that the Covid-19 virus was engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, prompting accusations of antisemitism and racism.And top House Democrats have been rushing to reject comments from Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Washington Democrat who described Israel as “a racist state” at a progressive conference over the weekend.In a statement on Sunday, Ms. Jayapal, who heads the Congressional Progressive Caucus, sought to clarify her remarks. “I do not believe the idea of Israel as a nation is racist,” she said. “I do, however, believe that Netanyahu’s extreme right-wing government has engaged in discriminatory and outright racist policies and that there are extreme racists driving that policy within the leadership of the current government.”On Monday at the summit in Washington, Mr. Pence criticized Ms. Jayapal, Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota for using what he described as “antisemitic tropes” and “antisemitic remarks.”“The words by these congresswomen are a disgrace,” Mr. Pence said, adding that “they are beneath the dignity of the relationship” between the United States and Israel. “President Biden and every Democrat member of Congress should denounce them and denounce them today.”Ms. Omar in 2019 apologized for implying that American support for Israel was fueled by money from a pro-Israel lobbying group, remarks that drew swift condemnation from fellow Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Ms. Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman elected to Congress, has also faced criticism from Republicans and pro-Israel Democrats for calling Israel an “apartheid regime.”Coming out in support of Ms. Jayapal on Monday, Ms. Tlaib said, “The Israeli government is committing the crime of apartheid.”“Apartheid is a racist system of oppression,” she added.On Monday, Mr. DeSantis, who received loud applause and a standing ovation, rejected a two-state solution establishing an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel that has been at the basis of peace talks for decades but has proved difficult to achieve. And he denounced efforts that he argued used “the economy and business to impose a radical left-wing agenda” on Israeli policy.“The way they treat a strong ally like Prime Minister Netanyahu,” he said of the Biden administration, “what they’re trying to do to shoehorn Israel into bad policies has been disgraceful.” More

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      Tucker Carlson Turns a Christian Presidential Forum into a Putin Showcase

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      The Iowa evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats gathered Republican White House hopefuls in Des Moines, then gave Tucker Carlson the microphone.Bob Vander Plaats, the conservative evangelical kingmaker in Iowa politics, now knows what happens when you turn over your Republican presidential showcase to Tucker Carlson.Jesus is out. Vladimir V. Putin is in.Mr. Carlson was given the task of interviewing six Republican presidential hopefuls at the Family Leadership conference in Des Moines on Friday. Consequently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine became the dominant issue of debate, on a day when Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa used the event to sign a near-total abortion ban into law.In the hands of Mr. Carlson, the former Fox News host who was recently fired, Ukraine became the bad actor in the conflict, not Russia.The most heated exchange came when Mr. Carlson interviewed former Vice President Mike Pence before a packed auditorium in Des Moines’ convention center. Mr. Pence was berating the Biden administration for being too slow to provide advanced weaponry to Ukraine.“We promised them 33 Abrams tanks in January. I heard again two weeks ago in Ukraine, they still don’t have them,” Mr. Pence said. “We’ve been telling them we’ll train their F-16 pilots, but now they’re saying maybe January.”Mr. Carlson interjected, to the delight of much of the audience. “Wait, I know you’re running for president, but you are distressed that Ukrainians don’t have enough American tanks?” he asked, in his trademark confrontational style.For good measure, Mr. Carlson called Ukraine an American “client state,” accused Ukraine’s Jewish leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, of persecuting Christians and strongly indicated Mr. Pence had been conned, despite evidence to the contrary.Mr. Pence was not alone. Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, argued that by degrading Russia’s military, American aid to Ukraine was making the United States stronger and more secure.Mr. Carlson responded with a signature dismissive response.“The total body count from Russia in the United States is right around zero; I don’t know anyone who’s been killed by Russia,” Mr. Carlson said. “I know people personally who have been killed by Mexico,” he said, adding, “Why is Mexico less of a threat than Russia?”It didn’t go any better for his first target, Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, who led border security under former President George W. Bush, who found himself making the case to Mr. Carlson that bombing Mexican drug cartels might be problematic since it would be an act of war against a friendly neighboring state.The divide in the Republican Party between traditional conservatives who favor the projection of American military might and a new, more isolationist wing that leans toward Russia is nothing new. But the Family Leadership Summit was supposed to be a showcase of Christian values, where social issues like abortion and transgender rights were expected to be center stage.But by making Mr. Carlson something of a master of ceremonies, Mr. Vander Plaats, the president of The Family Leader, which hosted the summit, dealt the crowd a wild card. By the time the spotlight turned to Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, Eric Teetsel, vice president of government relations at the Heritage Foundation, praised her as “still willing to come up onstage” after the preceding appearances.Mr. Pence had his laments after his appearance. “I regret that we didn’t have very much time during my time onstage to talk about the progress for life or issues impacting the family,” he said, before adding, “I’m really never surprised by Tucker Carlson.” More