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    UK populists mix faith and politics with parroting of ‘Judeo-Christian values’

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    The splendours of the Parthenon, Colosseum and Great Pyramid of Giza were in stark contrast to the utilitarian conference centre in London’s Docklands, but they were there to make a point.As 4,000 people from dozens of countries filed in for a three-day jamboree of rightwing discourse this week, the images were a reminder that great civilisations of the past had risen, declined and fallen. A commentary warned that western civilisation was at a tipping point, in crisis because it had lost touch with its “Judeo-Christian foundations”.The message greeted those attending a sold-out conference for politicians, policymakers, businesspeople and “culture formers” organised by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (Arc) at the ExCeL centre in east London, where non-discounted tickets cost £1,500.The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, and the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, addressed the gathering in person. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, and the billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel joined via video link from the US.It was not explicitly a faith-based event, but a distinctly religious flavour ran through the proceedings. The Arc’s co-founders and principal faces are Philippa Stroud, a Tory peer and devout Christian, and Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist whose lectures draw heavily on the Bible.Among the group’s known funders is the GB News investor Paul Marshall, a hedge fund boss and media tycoon whose worldview is shaped by his evangelical Christian faith. According to one well-connected former Conservative MP, Marshall’s influence on UK rightwing discourse is growing, not just through GB News but also his ownership of the Spectator magazine and the Unherd website.Marshall is not a member of any political party and said in a pre-conference interview last week that faith and politics were a “dangerous combination”. But some rightwingers – energised by Donald Trump’s victory and beguiled by the rhetoric of his Catholic vice-president, JD Vance – see populist potential in advocating for “Judeo-Christian values”.View image in fullscreenThe meaning of this phrase, much repeated at the Arc conference, is the “moral foundation of western civilisation” based on the shared values of Christianity and Judaism, according to Dennis Prager, an American conservative talkshow host. He added: “The ultimate embodiment of Judeo-Christian values has been the United States of America.”The term, drawing on both faiths’ biblical roots, was first used in the early 19th century to refer to Jewish converts from Christianity. Much later, it was adopted by conservative Christians in the US. The former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has fought court battles in an attempt to set up an academy for the Judeo-Christian west – a “gladiator school for culture warriors” – in an Italian monastery.Some believe the phrase has become code for Islamophobia. During Trump’s first term as US president, Meredith Warren of the University of Sheffield said it was a dog-whistle myth peddled by the far right “to draw a line between imagined Christian values and a perceived (but false) threat of Muslim immigration”.Farage, whose populist brand of politics has rarely made reference to the Christian faith, told this week’s conference that Britons should have more children to restore traditional Judeo-Christian culture. “We’ve kind of forgotten that what underpins everything is our Judeo-Christian culture and that’s where we need to start. And if we recognise that, and if we value that, then I think everything comes from that,” he said.Badenoch did not use the phrase in her speech to the conference but has often described herself as a “cultural Christian”. She understands the “importance of Christian values as the foundation of family and community life”, David Burrowes, a former Tory MP and co-founder of the Conservative Christian Fellowship, said last year.View image in fullscreenThe influence of evangelical Christianity in the Conservative party remains relatively marginal, but it has grown in recent years via two prominent voices: Danny Kruger, an MP since 2019 who has become a leading opponent to legalising assisted dying; and Miriam Cates, who was elected to parliament in 2019 but lost her seat last year, who is a vocal proponent of traditional family values. Kruger and Cates are on the Arc’s advisory board.Georgina Waylen, a professor of politics at the University of Manchester who has been researching the influence of evangelical Christianity on British politics, said it had “grown in recent years, and most notably in the Conservative party, following the election of a small number of rightwing socially conservative evangelical MPs who were well organised, knew what they wanted to achieve and oppose, and have been aided by the increasing influence of evangelical Christians in the rightwing ecosphere.”She added: “The evangelicals work effectively with others, including some rightwing populists, and have taken advantage of the chaos in the Conservative party. They have been active around gender identity issues and oppose assisted dying.”Evangelical conservative Christian groups have been active in lobbying MPs on issues such as abortion and assisted dying, although their involvement has not always been explicit. In November, an Observer investigation found that Christian pressure groups were secretly coordinating and funding anti-assisted dying campaigns ostensibly led by grassroots healthcare workers and disabled people.Organisations on the US Christian right have been accused of “infiltrating” the UK, lobbying MPs to restrict women’s reproductive rights. Last year, the UK branch of the US-based Alliance Defending Freedom provided “briefing material and legal analysis” to MPs before a vote on introducing buffer zones to prevent anti-abortion activity outside abortion clinics.One reason for the sometimes covert involvement of such groups is the resistance of many people in a largely secular society to religious individuals or organisations seeking to impose their worldview on others. Evangelical Christians have fared poorly in UK politics whenever their views have come into conflict with principles fundamental to British liberal democracy.“Religion is much less of a factor in politics here than in the US,” said Nick Spencer of Theos, a Christian thinktank. “But the Christian right is gaining momentum. I don’t think the Arc conference would have got off the ground 10 years ago.”Those speaking at the conference appeared to be a mixture of conservative Christians, social conservatives, libertarians and “Maga-types”, he said. “It is clear what they’re against – internationalism, net zero, the denigration of national history – but these aren’t necessarily theological positions.”Rob Ford, a professor of politics at the University of Manchester, said there was “no comparison whatsoever between the US and UK. Britain is one of the most secular societies in the world. Very few people go to church. The largest group are the people who say they have no religion at all. The kind of highly polarised debate that the Americans have had over abortion is inconceivable in the same way.”But he added: “At the level of political elites, that’s where you get the most interesting similarity that is also a difference. In the US, evangelical Christians are a huge part of politics because they are a huge part of US life. Here you have quite a remarkably high density of evangelical Christians in elite politics.”Some evangelical Christian organisations have sought to nurture potential high-flyers in order to ensure a Christian presence in the upper reaches of public life. Half a century ago, the Iwerne Trust’s Christian holiday camps, mainly for boys attending elite public schools, had precisely this goal. Holy Trinity Brompton, London’s foremost evangelical church, has counted many high-flyers among its congregation – including Marshall.Not all evangelical Christians share the same political views. Tim Farron, the former Liberal Democrat leader who resigned in 2017 saying the role was incompatible with his Christian faith, said the use of the term “Christian values” was sometimes “a proxy for things that aren’t very Christian at all”.He said: “People who talk about the loss of Christian values often have actually lost touch with Christian values themselves. It’s really dangerous when political parties seek to appropriate Christianity for their own ends.” More

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      Evangelical education nearly ruined me. Now the Christian right is coming for public schools

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      When I got the chance to attend a conservative, evangelical high school in rural Iowa, I was ecstatic. My early education had been in a similar school – where creationism was the one true science, and evolution was satanic propaganda – and I’d spent the interim as a frightened pilgrim in the unholy land of public school. I was a teenage zealot and longed to be among my people.Throughout those years, my church leaders urged me to proselytize to the public school students, to debate teachers about the age of Earth or the founding of our Christian nation, to be a spiritual exhibitionist, praying loudly at my locker or the flagpole. The apocalypse was at hand, so who had time for algebra?I viewed my enrollment at Forest City Christian school in my junior year as being honorably discharged from my duty of “reclaiming our schools for Christ”. But what I envisioned as a sanctuary of faith, community and “true” education not only left me more disillusioned and bullied but also robbed me of a high school diploma and set me on a path of crushing financial insecurity that would haunt me for years.View image in fullscreenTwenty-five years later, Donald Trump and the Christian nationalist movement that put him in the White House (twice) are seeking to transform public education into something similar to what I was reared on, where science, history and even economics are taught through an evangelical conservative lens, while prayer and Bible reading are foundations of the curriculum.These efforts test the boundaries of the constitution’s establishment clause, reversing a century of civil rights victories in public schools, and have the potential to fundamentally alter the way American children learn – and what they learn about.The push comes in two forms: injecting more Christian rhetoric and rituals into public school curriculum and for the first time in history, using tax dollars to subsidize private religious schools, generally via vouchers that cover student tuition. Each has the potential to bolster the education of America’s most privileged students, while downgrading services for children of low-income families.In Oklahoma, the state superintendent ordered his public schools to teach from the Christian holy book; he later sought to mandate all schools to air a video in which he prays for Trump. On his desk sat a black mug with the Latin phrase si vis pacem para bellum: “If you want peace, prepare for war.”In June, Louisiana passed a law ordering all classrooms to display the Ten Commandments. And in Florida, Pam Bondi, now Trump’s attorney general, supported a constitutional amendment to allow state funding for religious schools before voters rejected it.In 2022, a supreme court ruling allowed private religious schools to receive government funding. In response to this, LGBTQ+ advocates helped pass the Maine Human Rights Act in their state, protecting students and faculty from discrimination. Two Christian schools are suing the state for the ability to violate the new law while still receiving government funding. Separately, the supreme court has taken up a case addressing whether to allow taxpayer funds for religious charter schools, potentially leading to the first Christian public school in the US.View image in fullscreenIn Texas, the state representative James Talarico has been fighting against a new elementary school curriculum that infuses Bible stories into language arts programs, as well as a bill that could allow students to use public funds to attend private schools, including Christian schools, a move he says will harm low-income students while bolstering the most privileged.“Attempting to indoctrinate public school students into Christianity is not only unconstitutional and un-American, it’s deeply un-Christian,” says the former public school teacher, who is also studying to be a preacher.And this wave of Christianizing is not limited to the south.In 2023, my home state of Iowa passed legislation granting taxpayer-funded scholarships to families who enroll their children in private schools, including Christian ones. And last fall, a wildly successful Christian lobbying group, the Idaho Family Policy Center (IFPC), announced the drafting of a new bill that would require Bible reading in all Idaho public schools.“By bringing back school-sponsored Bible reading, we are bringing God back into public education,” says Morgan MaGill, communications director for IFPC, which has drafted successful state measures restricting rights to abortion and transgender healthcare in Idaho.Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has characterized the growth of US Christian schools as an “educational insurgency” collecting “recruits” to build an underground army “with the opportunity later on of taking offensive operations in an overt way”, Hegseth said in a podcast appearance. Such militaristic language is reminiscent of the evangelical rallies, camps, youth services and Christian rock concerts I attended as a boy, where we were indoctrinated to be “soldiers in God’s army”, fighting to “take back our schools for Christ”.That, said Hegseth, is “what the crop of these classical Christian schools are gonna do in a generation”.View image in fullscreenTalarico views Texas’s efforts to create a voucher program for private Christian schools as not only bad for Jewish, Muslim and LGBTQ+ students, but also as stealing from the poor to serve the rich.“If you gave my students on the west side of San Antonio an $8,000 or $10,000 voucher, there’s still no way they can afford a $20,000 a year private school,” Talarico says. “But because the voucher program is universal, the wealthy family that is sending their kid to that private school will now get an $8,000 or $10,000 discount on their tuition, at the expense of the working-class kids on the west side.”Talarico adds that the voucher program includes funding for home-school students, up to 90% of whom are Christian and whose curriculum is often poorly regulated. “So we taxpayers will be funding homeschool programs that teach students the earth is flat,” he says.The battle for schoolsTrump’s promise to “bring back prayer to our schools”, shut down the Department of Education and embrace “school choice” fulfills an evangelical wishlist I’d heard about throughout my childhood. The belief that our government seeks to brainwash children into liberal atheists, close churches and outlaw prayer – threats that Trump promised to eradicate throughout the last election – were at the heart of the formation of the Christian right in the late 70s. But the clash over Christian education in America began long before.Protestant education was the norm in the US for nearly two centuries. MaGill points out that Benjamin Rush – a founding father who helped build the US public school system – was a strong advocate for Bible reading in US schools.And while opponents emphasize the idea of “separation of church and state”, those pushing to re-Christianize US public schools are correct when arguing that the phrase is not in the constitution. But it is misleading to claim that this was ever a settled – or simple – issue.In 1797, John Adams signed the treaty of Tripoli, which stated: “The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”View image in fullscreenThe first amendment says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Thomas Jefferson later said the amendment created “a wall of separation between church and state”.When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, it was often explained to me that this phrase was intended to keep the government out of religion and not the other way around. The issue of religion in public education muddies this divide.Throughout the 19th century Catholics fought for their unique prayers and scripture to be taught in public schools. When Tennessee passed a law in 1925 banning the teaching of evolution in public schools, the trial of a jailed science teacher captivated the nation, leading to a media circus that portrayed biblical literalists as “yokels”, accelerating the fundamentalist movement in America, as well as a deep distrust of both the media and intellectuals among evangelicals.In 1962, the supreme court ruled that teacher-led prayer in school violated the first amendment’s establishment clause, essentially banning the practice. Many evangelicals – particularly in the south – felt that their religious rights had been violated years earlier when the court mandated that all US schools be racially integrated, as many white, southern Christians at the time interpreted scripture as mandating segregation.In response, there was an explosion of what would come to be known as “segregationist academies”, private Christian K-12 schools and universities that believed they could continue to racially discriminate – while enjoying tax-free status – due to protections to their “religious liberties”. In time, they would create their own textbooks and accreditation systems, a whole bubble of education independent from public schools or conventional higher education.View image in fullscreenIn the late 1970s, the heavily segregated Bob Jones University had its tax-exempt status revoked by the IRS, a move that was interpreted by many evangelical pastors as the government shutting down a church. The ruling was blamed on Jimmy Carter’s new Department of Education (which would become a whipping boy for evangelicals in the years to come) despite the IRS acting on a court ruling from several years earlier.The perceived attack on segregated Christian schools by the US government helped galvanize evangelicals into voting Republican.Meanwhile, the Christian right doubled down on the creation of its own, independent education system, one that rejected evolution in favor of creationism, made students pledge allegiance to a Christian flag, and preached against environmental issues, LGBTQ+ rights and progressive policies.Escaping the bubbleI was born in 1982, and my education began in this isolated world of alternative facts. In my Christian kindergarten, I learned to read using the Bible and did math equations from scriptures on tithing. We were taught a great deal about the dangers of communism, while our working-class parents fell victim to predatory capitalism, manipulated into paying a tuition they couldn’t afford, convinced public schools were unsafe.View image in fullscreenThe collapse of my parents’ small business, a farm crisis tanking the Iowa economy, and years of tithing and additional “seed faith” donations to our church had left them broke.When I was in first grade, my mom and I performed janitorial work after hours for a reduction on my tuition. My dad borrowed money from family members to keep us enrolled and away from the dangers of public school. But following a divorce and bankruptcy, they, like many other working families, could no longer afford tuition.I was terrified of public school, which I imagined to be a cesspool of adolescent sin.I developed a hypervigilant paranoia when it came to the lessons of my public school teachers, particularly when it came to science and history. I was not only tasked with rescuing my classmates from hell; I had to avoid it myself, mainly through maintaining my belief in (a very specific definition of) God, which the “secular humanist” curriculum was a threat to. This required me to keep a heavy filter on the information I allowed into my mind and censor the thoughts that information inspired.Consequently, I flunked half of my classes.At the Christian school I attended my junior year of high school, things were different. We were taught from the lectures of creationists such as Ken Ham and Kent Hovind that our planet is only 6,000 years old, along with a detailed meteorological explanation for Noah’s flood. Hovind often blended conspiracy theories, such as evolution being a communist plot, into his lectures. Ham and Jessica DeFord’s book Climate Change for Kids explains to homeschooled and Christian school students: “Man cannot destroy the earth. God promised that.”In “Logic” class, we learned about gay rights rallies in San Francisco that were attempting, according to my teacher, to “indoctrinate children into that lifestyle”. It was not uncommon to hear leaders in the Christian school movement, like the “Christian economics” textbook author Gary North, argue for capital punishment for all homosexuals. North believed this should occur through the biblical practice of “stoning”. As a thin, effeminate young man with little interest in sports or hunting (yet perked up if the conversation turned to musicals or Alloy magazine), I was a relentless target for the rural boys at the Christian school, who saw it as their religious duty to shout “fag” in my ear as they tussled my hair and knocked books from my hands.The longer I stayed at the school, the deeper I fell into a malaise of depression and self-harm. In addition to the stress of bullies, I had trouble getting my mind around the logic of these classes, and knew that if I didn’t understand it, and believe it, eternal torture awaited me. Meanwhile, costs remained difficult. I was working part-time at Subway and Bennigan’s to pay for my Christian education, but it still wasn’t enough.I headed back to public school for my senior year. I’d been there a semester before it was explained to me that my credits from Forest City Christian school didn’t transfer, because they weren’t “accredited” by the government. (The school has since closed.)Instead, I was directed toward the GED testing center, where my education came to an unceremonious end with a generic certificate. Colleges and universities, I was told, were even worse than public schools in their liberal indoctrination, so I drifted through a decade of low-wage jobs in factories, restaurants and construction sites, as my fellow students who’d graduated from public school, then college, ascended the socioeconomic ladder.In time, I developed my own education at libraries and bookstores. But first, I had to, in the words of Yoda, “unlearn what you have learned”. In fundamentalist education, all knowledge and thought must bend itself to unarguable truth that the Bible is 100% factual in all matters. The itchy curiosity of philosophy, the relentless questions of the scientific method, the skeptic probing of journalism, have no place in that world.It was only through breaking out of the Christian education bubble – defecting from my duty to “reclaim America for Christ” – that I was able to cultivate strong learning faculties, eventually clawing my way into a career in journalism.Perhaps my financial prospects would have been much brighter if I had stayed in my Christian high school, attended a Christian college like Liberty University (which accepts students from non-accredited Christian schools) and gone on to work at a megachurch like Joel Osteen’s Lakewood church or in a Maga political organization like Turning Point USA. But my inability to get my head around the 2+2=5 logic of creationist science, or the claim that our founding fathers intended to create a Christian theocracy, prevented me from being an effective soldier in the fight for Christian nationalism, despite how eager I was to join the fight.Instead, I eventually traveled in the opposite direction, reporting extensively on the modern machinations of the Christian right. In the course of that work, I have often felt a deep sorrow for students enduring the bubble of private Christian education – particularly the poor and queer ones. Now it seems that compassion must extend to those in public schools as well.

      This story was co-published and supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project’s James Ledbetter Fund. More

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      Trump’s taskforce order is latest in efforts to boost Christian nationalism

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      Donald Trump is reigniting his alliance with the Christian right, unveiling a flurry of actions that include an aggressive executive order establishing a dedicated taskforce to combat what he claims is “anti-Christian bias” across federal agencies.Addressing supporters at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Trump announced a far-reaching directive that empowers Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, to lead an effort to “fully prosecute anti-Christian violence and vandalism” in government institutions.“You’ve never had that before,” Trump said. “If we don’t have religious liberty, then we don’t have a free country.”The move represents a direct appeal to energize his Christian conservative base, and follows efforts including pardoning anti-abortion activists such as Paulette Harlow, who was convicted of blocking access to an abortion clinic – which his administration framed as persecution of Christian believers. Trump also signed orders to ban the legal recognition of transgender people by the US government.The president’s push for a religious conservative alliance also bridged domestic and international spheres this week, with his new taskforce announcement paralleling the visit of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to Washington.At Blair House on Monday, Netanyahu met with key evangelical leaders, including the Christians United for Israel founder and pastor John Hagee and former governor Mike Huckabee – Trump’s ambassador-designate to Israel – drawing together Christian Zionists who form a critical geopolitical support network.These evangelical powerbrokers, who champion hardline annexation policies such as Trump’s surprise announcement to empty out and take ownership of Gaza, and reject traditional diplomatic language around the occupied Palestinian territories, represent a formidable political bloc through groups such as Christians United for Israel, which claims more than 10 million members.The recent executive order announcement takes direct aim at federal agencies including the FBI and IRS, which Trump accused of systematically targeting Christian believers. It includes the creation of a new White House faith office led by Trump’s longtime spiritual adviser, the televangelist Paula White.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSome critics were quick to condemn the initiative as a thinly veiled attempt to privilege evangelical Christianity over other religious minorities.“If Trump really cared about religious freedom and ending religious persecution, he’d be addressing antisemitism in his inner circle, anti-Muslim bigotry, hate crimes against people of color and other religious minorities,” the president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Rachel Laser, said in a statement. “This taskforce is not a response to Christian persecution; it’s an attempt to make America into an ultra-conservative Christian Nationalist nation.” More

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      ‘We create gods because the world is chaos’: Ralph Fiennes, John Lithgow and Stanley Tucci on celebrity, sin and papal thriller Conclave

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      Faith, death and vengeful vaping: of all the Oscar contenders this year, Conclave is the one that best combines chewy religious inquiry and lavish side-eye. Adapted by Wolf Hall screenwriter Peter Straughan from the Robert Harris novel, Conclave has been directed by All Quiet on the Western Front’s Edward Berger as a heavy-breathing battle for hearts, minds and power.Ralph Fiennes stars as Cardinal Lawrence, who, after the sudden death of the pope, must park his own religious doubts to wrangle the 113 cardinals who have descended on the Vatican. These men will be sequestered until they can elect one of their number as the new pontiff. Among them are the gentle progressive Bellini (Stanley Tucci) and smooth traditionalist Tremblay (John Lithgow). Both have secrets. But are they as lethal as those of their friends – and rivals?The film was shot in Rome 20 months ago; triangulating the actors’ schedules for a reunion seemed to take almost as long. Fiennes is completing work on a new Alan Bennett adaptation and zombie follow-up 28 Years Later; Tucci shooting the Russo brothers’ latest and promoting his new memoir; Lithgow stars at the Royal Court in new play Giant, as Roald Dahl, railing against accusations of antisemitism.In the end, they all dialled in early one morning from different parts of London. Fiennes was in a tasteful kitchen and vast cardie, Tucci his home office, teetering with books and sketches, while Lithgow beamed from a creamy Chelsea rental.View image in fullscreenCatherine Shoard: Did any of you find or renounce God while making the film?John Lithgow: No. But we were in Rome, so taking a warm bath in Renaissance Italian art, which is as Christian as you can get. And we were working on something that really felt worthy. So it was a spiritual experience.Stanley Tucci: I was raised Catholic but broke with the church. It just never made sense to me. It was a myth I had great difficulty believing. But as John said, being in Rome is always incredibly moving. I remember as a kid living in Italy and being profoundly moved by the experience of going into a church, simply because of the art and the amount of time and energy that was devoted to creating it – and sustaining the myth. But it didn’t sway me one way or the other.Ralph Fiennes: I feel a bit differently. My mother was a committed Catholic, but quite enlightened. She had brothers and a great uncle who had been priests. My great uncle, Sebastian Moore, is quite a well-known theologian. So God was not unfamiliar to me. Questions about faith were something I grew up with.I rebelled against my upbringing when I was 13. I said to my mother: “I’m not going to mass.” I didn’t like the heaviness. There was a very claustrophobic, dominant feeling from the church in Ireland, where we then were living, in the early 70s. I hated the sense of compulsion and constriction.I don’t think of myself as a practising anything, but I’ve never stopped having a curiosity about what it is to have faith. I’m also very moved by what we can encounter with the art the church has produced. Not just the Catholic church. I was in Thessaloniki recently and went to a museum of icons there, which was profoundly moving. What is it that makes us want to build these churches and shrines? Faith is a huge, potent thing that mankind seems to want to have, even if the forces of logic and science and reason go against it. I’m curious about that energy.CS: Why are people drawn to faith?RF: It’s about looking for answers. Life is messy. Life is shitty. Life is unpredictable. I think human beings want a sense of coherence in their inner selves. And often faith does contain helpful guidances or moral rulings. Of course, the Catholic church has done terrible things. It’s full of twisted and dark corners, but all power structures will go that way. I think the precept of a faith brings people together and gives communities a sense of coherence.Christ was teaching at a time when tiny communities were held together by messengers on horseback or on ships, taking letters or preaching vocally. They didn’t have mass communication. So in a small community, how you cohered was really important. I have some experience with visiting Inuit peoples in northern Canada, where they worship animals and have a real respect for the elements. Their communities have been totally shattered and wounded by encounters with the Christian churches. But they have their stories which help them survive and cohere.ST: I think that this sense of camaraderie and community is something we all long for and there’s no question that the church does that. But we create these ideas of God, or gods, because the world is chaos. It’s to dispel our fears. We have no control over our lives and that causes anxiety. Fear of death is the most potent; we’ve created all these constructs to make ourselves feel better about when we or a loved one dies.View image in fullscreenEach society has their own construct to dampen those fears, to make it OK. If we think about religion as making order out of chaos, it’s exactly the same thing that art does. And yet so much art has been created by the church. Of course all of these incredible artists could only paint religious subjects. I have faith, I have faith in art. That’s where my faith lies.JL: What they said! It’s such a deeply thought-out film. What’s fascinating about telling a story like this is the context of a political event – the election of a new pope – and examining the electorate. The college of cardinals are all men who’ve been drawn to religion by a longing to commit their lives to faith. And so wholeheartedly that they are at the top of the food chain of a great big religious construct.But when it comes right down to it, they all have to vote and compete. There are rivalries and betrayals and deceptions and jealousies and ambitions and aspirations, all of which go counter to the entire reason they’re there: a devotion to Christ and the idea of the Catholic church. Any story with that tension between virtue and sin is automatically great. I think that’s why people are responding so fervently to this film. They see these tensions: men who went into something for deep personal reasons that have gradually been eroded by ambition.CS: Do you think there’s anything unhelpful about the drama of elections? Are we addicted to horserace narratives?JL: It’s inevitable when a leader is chosen that it’s going to get political. But it’s just an incredibly interesting moment for this film to arrive. While we were shooting the film, there was the great fight in the US House of Representatives for the House speaker. There were 15 ballots before Kevin McCarthy finally survived the process – it was just like what we were acting out.View image in fullscreenThat was uncanny event No 1 – the second is what happened two weeks ago. Had the only voters in that been the cast and crew of Conclave, there would’ve been the opposite result. There’s a great liberal tradition in film – and the great example is Mr Smith Goes to Washington. The forces of corruption and money in politics fail at the end and the simple man prevails. That’s very much the movie paradigm. And Conclave basically follows those rules. It’s just amazing the tide has turned so much in the last few weeks. It makes our movie into a kind of wish-fulfilment story – which I think is another reason people have been attracted to it.ST: The film does follow a certain trope, in a way, as the book did. But it’s a fascinating one – and not an easy one. So often movies are made just to make us feel better. That’s why there are so many happy endings in movies, because there are so many unhappy endings in life.CS: In the film someone pointedly says that the papacy is a heavy burden for an older man. Should there be an upper age limit on positions of power? Or even voting for them? In real life, cardinals can’t vote once they’re over 80.RF: It would be a great guideline in the current US government: 80 as a signoff. We’d have two years of Trump but not four.JL: I don’t think it would pass Congress at the moment.RF: But maybe that’s a good idea, to have an age limit on any electoral governmental ruling system. I’m sure that’s smart, but who decides whether it’s 75, 80, 70? There are plenty of people with alert minds working vigorously into their early 80s. But the patriarchal element seems to me one of the looming themes, that begs all kinds of questions. Stanley’s character, Cardinal Bellini, articulates the very, very vital issues of how the church should go forward in relation to gender and sexual identity and diversity. Mostly the film has been well-reviewed. Some people seem to think it’s a bit simplistic, but I think it puts on the table quite coherently and intelligently big themes that could be discussed without it being an attack on the church.View image in fullscreenThe Catholic church is riven with it. That’s why it’s very frustrating to read Saint Paul: he preaches love, but his strictures on women are just horrendous. It’s so conflicted. It needs a good clean out. And yet these patterns of behaviour do seem to appeal to all the world. People love the ritual. They love the tradition. It’s kind of a conundrum, isn’t it? The church is so potent. Clearly it does good. It does lots for suffering peoples and the poor, but it’s also got this other side where it’s so backwards in its conventions and thinking. Its traditions are holding it back.CS: What can the church do to change?ST: Priests should be able to get married. That changes everything. And nuns. Why can’t you be devoted to God and love someone at the same time? I don’t understand that. Priests used to be married many years ago but the Catholic church stopped that. The excuse was that priests needed to devote themselves to God. But really it was because when they died, everything went to their wives. It wasn’t about devotion but money. And I think that’s a problem. Priests being able to be married would ground them in reality and only enhance their spirituality. Let’s just start with that.CS: Yet in the US the democratic process recently embraced a return to patriarchy. Why are people drawn to institutions and leaders who seek to roll things back?View image in fullscreenRF: I think it comes back to a story and how it’s put out. Trump told a story. The way he described the problem with America and what he could do, was a story. He has a remarkable gift for talking and accessing people’s deeper gut feelings. And the story in its simplicity appealed. Whatever you think of the horror of the language and the racism and sexism that we all identify on the liberal side, it speaks to people. He’s the man in the bar who says: “I’ll get rid of this shit. We’ll make your lives better.” His win was a visceral response to a man saying: “I’m going to sort it for you.” Basically, his story won. It’s not my country, but it seems to me that the Democrats were increasingly perceived as a sort of removed elite. Theirs wasn’t a story that I think was put across very strongly. Trump told the best story, whether you like it or not.JL: He also told the story of the Democrats. He dominated the narrative with a much bolder, louder voice, and with the support of a huge amount of the media. Story is a very potent word in in this conversation. The Democrats couldn’t get their story out, or whatever was persuasive and compelling about their story couldn’t rise above all the noise.ST: By simplifying everything, he distilled it down to ideas that were very easy for people to grasp.JL: And that’s how tyranny operates.ST: He just played on everyone’s fears and he did what so many fascistic-minded people do, which is find a scapegoat: immigrants. It’s always the other. So people go: that’s why I have no money, because of that guy. It’s not true, at all. But it works. It’s worked before and it worked again.RF: It seems the rate of inflation in America has wrong-footed a lot of people; the price level people are used to dealing with suddenly went up.JL: Well, there was a simple story to tell there that never got articulated: inflation was substantially a result of the huge crisis of Covid and it had been coming down steadily for months. The Biden administration was doing a very good job at handling an inflation crisis, but that story never got told. And it doesn’t matter how many graphs you see in a newspaper, it still feels like prices are too high. But prices are too high because the country suffered a traumatic economic episode. It was being handled. God knows what’s gonna happen now, with tariffs being the new go-to solution. They’re gonna create inflation.ST: How are tariffs gonna help? I don’t know.CS: Conclave is a very theatrical film. Does all the smoke and bling and the costumes attract certain people to the pulpit? Someone like Trump – embraced by the religious right – is used to being immediately judged on his performance.View image in fullscreenRF: The spoken word in the space to a body of people is the business we’re all in. There’s John every night embodying Roald Dahl with extremely toxic views. In a way that’s a pulpitian provocation. That’s what the theatre does – and Giant is a fascinating, compelling play. As actors, when we speak on a stage and we have our audience, that’s a potent thing that’s created. I don’t know that people are drawn to the church so that they can always be speaking, but clearly if you are a priest, there is that moment when you get up and you deliver your homily for the week. You have to put across a view or a lesson or a teaching or an idea that is meant to send your community out with, hopefully, questions to improve their moral wellbeing or the way they engage with life.My memory of listening to homilies is that they are sort of provocations based in the religious text that say: think about this or think about that. How we listen as a congregation is fascinating. That’s why I love what the theatre is.JL: There’s something in all of us three – actors, not men of the cloth – that is mainly interested in impact. We just wanna reach people, and we’re playing roles and we’re telling stories that are not our personal stories. But the three of us have had hundreds of experiences of reaching people, throttling them with theatrics, making them laugh or cry or scream out in horror.RF: Or go to sleep.JL: Our great ambition is to wake them up and to startle them and get huge rounds of applause. There are two major, beautifully written speeches in our film that have an extraordinary impact on the college of cardinals. That’s why we are in the game. We understand the thrill of succeeding at making an impact.RF: And we understand that crushing disappointment when you realise you haven’t made the impact you’d hoped.JL: Oh, it’s awful!CS: The characters you play are trying to emulate God and falling short. As actors who are public figures, are you more conscious of being treated like quasi-gods – and of your own failings coming under more scrutiny?JL: Different types of actors are treated very differently. I’m a strange actor who’s gone off and done extremely peculiar roles. I’m the go-to psychopath or hypocrite or villain from time to time. I guess all three of us are character actors in a sense. My whole game is surprising people. I have a sort of perverse enthusiasm for upending people’s expectations of me. People don’t go to me for political wisdom. I come off very pretentious if I get anywhere near that kind of talk. But my acting is completely surprising and sometimes revolting. I just go for it.View image in fullscreenST: These people are trying to emulate God and yet they created God. So that’s weird. But without question, people in the public eye are always under more scrutiny. You’re larger than life. But I think that’s changed over the years. You used to see actors on stage, from a distance, in a proscenium. Then you saw them in movies, but still in this big rectangle. Everybody was big and what they did was big. Over the years things got smaller and smaller and now you can put me in your pocket.That changes the way we look at people. It used to be only posthumously that you’d find out somebody in Hollywood was a sexual deviant or a terrible drinker or whatever. In life, it was like: let’s just leave them alone. And everybody did. Television altered how much access to people you were allowed. But now, you can watch me on like your wristwatch and that changes the way you look at me. So people realise that yes, actors are just people. But they still want them not to have these faults. Yet they can’t wait to find out about them.JL: It’s interesting to hear you talk about this, Stanley, because of the three of us people have come to know you the best.ST: Because I made that food show.JL: But that food show is very much the Stanley show and the world has got to know you so well and like you so much. In Rome you were virtually worshipped in that wine shop.View image in fullscreenST: That was really funny. I remember when we went to a grocery store. You were always able to hide behind a persona or a character. So it’s odd because it’s the first time I’ve ever just been myself. And I was very uncomfortable with it at first, even though it was my idea. I don’t know what I was thinking, and now I’m more comfortable with it. I know the idea of connecting through food makes people so happy, so that makes me happy. I just think it’s a nice thing. But I’m never eating Italian food again …RF: I don’t know if priests are emulating God. I think they’re meant to be conduits or shepherds for the message. We’re all sinners – even priests. I think priests or nuns are mostly just answering a calling to preach the message. But of course, if you are preaching the message and you’re in the pulpit, naturally people will expect that you are going to be an example. Cinema is very potent in how it puts an actor’s face on screen. We are conduits for a playwright or a character, we’re not there necessarily preaching a religion or political idea or any kind of philosophy. We’re just drawn to roles. We’re drawn to the drama. The workings of cinema are so keyed into key myths that we want to keep telling ourselves. So audiences will project on to actors huge things, and the media massages the sense of projection. So you suddenly can feel very exposed. People in all forms of entertainment can suddenly realise that there’s an expectation of them as a private person. I think that’s troubling.CS: There are two lines in the film I want to ask your opinion on. The first is: “Things fall apart. The abyss calls out.” Which is a warning from one cardinal about what will happen if the church embraces liberalism. Where do you see the church in 50 years’ time? The second is Stanley’s character’s line that to not know yourself at his age is shameful. Is it, and do you?ST: I’m still learning about myself and trying to make myself better. I don’t always succeed. Sometimes we know ourselves and sometimes we just don’t. I don’t fully know myself. I worry that I’m going to have an epiphany about myself on my deathbed. Then I’ll just die sad.CS: What might it be?ST: Suddenly it’ll occur to me that I really just don’t like myself at all. And then it’ll be over. I’d have no time to rectify it.View image in fullscreenJL: You’d have time for a phone call, Stanley.ST: But I’d wanna go back and change things and make things better and I’ll just be dead.JL: By now, I have settled into a strong sense of myself as a good actor. I wouldn’t work all the time if I weren’t good at it. What I love about the profession is also what makes me feel a little guilty: it seems the most irresponsible thing you can do. Your lines are written for you. Everyone takes good care of you lest you miss a performance or lose a shooting day. You’re treated like a much bigger deal than you actually are. But I think the more you are content with that self-image, the better off you are.RF: I would like to think the church will evolve by dialogue within itself. That it can be a force for good. But I think the evolution of the church is going to be difficult and hard. Our journey through life is a constant evolution with relation to ourselves and in relation to others with whom we connect. There are always traps for us as individuals with our egos and our sense of anxiety. The best of the church or any faith, or any structure, or just your therapist, is in helping each other deal with the world.View image in fullscreenThe acting community at its best is wonderful at supporting each other. The experience where I thought this, at its best, is a fantastic profession to be in, was a production of King John, directed by Deborah Warner at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1988. The sense of ensemble and community was so fantastic in that production. Everyone flowered in their parts and within themselves as a group. The best the church can be is as a fantastic group. And the energy and the positivity of the group reaches out, and groups everywhere are wonderfully self-supportive of each other.ST: That’s the ideal, but I worry that this right-leaning ideology that’s taking over so much of the world will once again make the church retreat. And that’s really scary.RF: But at the end of our film, the group celebrates the person who seems to me to carry the spiritual depth and coherence and integrity that is needed. Going forward in the world now, we’re very frightened of what might come at us because of what’s happened. But we mustn’t lose sight of the power of what we can have. We must keep intact our aspiration to an ideal. More

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      ‘Partisan politics’: how efforts to overturn the Johnson amendment could upend campaign finance

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      Donald Trump has long promised his evangelical base he will undo the Johnson amendment, allowing churches and other nonprofits to weigh in on and donate to political campaigns – and his path to doing so is now clearer than ever.A provision of the tax code since 1954, the Johnson amendment prohibits certain tax-exempt nonprofit organizations from making political endorsements in – or offering monetary support to – political campaigns. If the president-elect succeeds in overturning it through any of a few available methods, experts say it could have the profound effect of opening up a flow of dark money into politics.“I think it’ll have as big, or a bigger impact than Citizens United,” said Andrew Seidel, a constitutional attorney and expert on Christian nationalism. “I don’t think people are fully prepared for a country in which churches can accept tax deductible donations in the billions of dollars and then turn around and use that money for partisan politics.”With a likely narrow majority in the US House of Representatives and the Senate, Trump has multiple avenues to challenge the provision. He could try to push Congress to take legislative action. He could attempt to unwind parts of the provision through executive action, an approach that would likely be subject to litigation. Or, he could involve the Department of Justice – which he has vowed to mobilize politically – in a key, ongoing Texas lawsuit threatening the law.During Trump’s first term, he failed to deliver on his promise to destroy the amendment. Congress failed to roll back the regulatory measure and in an executive order gesturing at the issue, Trump only advised the treasury to take a lenient posture on the political speech of clergy – “to the extent permitted by law”.Now, with a lawsuit filed in Texas making its way slowly through the courts, Trump has yet another avenue to chip away at legal limits on churches’ political activity. The complaint, filed against the IRS by National Religious Broadcasters, two Texas churches and the group Intercessors for America – whose mission includes a “call for godly government” – seeks to find the Johnson amendment unconstitutional.It claims that churches are subject to “unique and discriminatory status” under the tax code and that the IRS “operates in a manner that disfavors conservative organizations and conservative, religious organizations” in enforcing the law.Named after its author Lyndon B Johnson, the Johnson amendment is inserted into section 501(c)(3) of the tax code to prevent certain nonprofits from “participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office”. The law also notes that “contributions to political campaign funds” would “clearly violate” the provision.Some churches already flaunt the law’s requirement to refrain from endorsing political candidates – a trend that the Texas Tribune has documented. Repealing the Johnson amendment would allow churches to go further, including potentially donating to partisan causes. Because churches, unlike other nonprofit organizations, are not required to file 990 forms disclosing key financial information to the IRS, such an arrangement would allow for little public oversight.Representing National Religious Broadcasters on the complaint is Michael Farris, the former CEO of the powerful rightwing legal outfit Alliance Defending Freedom and a driving force behind the “parental rights” movement, which seeks to limit schools’ ability to teach about race, gender and sexuality in the classroom. Like the conservative “parental rights” movement, the push to do away with the Johnson amendment could chip away legal barriers separating church and state.In the short run, overhauling the provision could, Seidel said, allow churches to function effectively as Super Pacs, accepting tax-deductible donations from politically-motivated donors and channeling them into political causes. Such a scenario could, Seidel cautions, force churches to subject themselves to the same financial disclosures that Super Pacs face.“The church could be the subject of litigation, but then again, who’s going to be running the IRS? Who’s going to be enforcing that?” said Seidel. “It’ll be the Trump administration.” More

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      How the Christian right is twisting the legacy of an anti-Nazi hero

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      This article is co-published with DocumentedLeading figures on the Christian right have seized on an unlikely hero in their campaign against secular government: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an antifascist theologian and pastor who resisted the Nazi regime before he was executed in 1945.Driving the trend is Eric Metaxas, a prolific author, speaker and celebrity on the Christian right, whose writings on Bonhoeffer and American politics provide the intellectual fodder for a movement that seeks to turn evangelicals against liberal policies on women’s rights, LGBTQ+ inclusion and racial justice.In the short term, this push has taken the form of a well-funded voter mobilization campaign ahead of the 5 November presidential election, with conservative organizations coordinating to screen Metaxas’s 2024 film – which lays out an argument equating liberal policies with Nazism, and urges believers to emulate Bonhoeffer – in churches across the country.In the long run, experts worry that the push to liken American liberal democracy to Nazi Germany could spur political violence, citing past examples of Christian extremists who invoked Bonhoeffer to justify bombing and shooting up abortion clinics.“We’re worried about post-election political violence, and this is a way of inspiring that,” said Victoria Barnett, a theologian and eminent scholar of Bonhoeffer and the Holocaust who has advocated for a nuanced understanding of Bonhoeffer and has cautioned against depicting Bonhoeffer as a kind of evangelical “Lone Ranger”.According to documents obtained by the Guardian and Documented, the production and distribution of the movie, called Letter to the American Church, was coordinated by the rightwing group Turning Point USA and American Letter Productions – the film division of Metaxas Media, an entertainment business founded by Eric Metaxas.Through the Letter to the American Church tour, an initiative launched in mid-2024, these groups and others have screened the film at churches, community organizations, and small groups for donations of any amount; churches willing to screen the film received an “extensive marketing kit” to promote it.Funding for this film and tour was pledged, in part, by the secretive Christian donor network Ziklag, a non-profit that embraces the aims of a growing movement of Christian nationalists who strive to rule over US government and society. As a piece of Ziklag’s larger, coordinated effort to get out the vote, the group committed to funding movie screenings in churches across the country “with a focus on oversaturation in the battleground states” to galvanize congregations and increase evangelical voter turnout.Since its launch, the film has been screened at least 170 times across the country, including more than 40 times in key swing states. Local GOP chapters and numerous outside organizations on the right have also held screenings, some in conjunction with poll worker sign-up initiatives and alongside Turning Point Action, a group the Trump campaign has relied on for its voter registration and turnout efforts.Internal videos produced by Ziklag, obtained by the Guardian and Documented, detail Ziklag’s 2024 election strategy, pledging $800,000 to “focus on rallying the church behind biblically based voting using Eric Metaxas’ new documentary, Letter to the American Church”. Organizations that partnered with Metaxas, including Turning Point Action and TPUSA Faith, were promised donations from Ziklag in this effort to engage evangelical voters.Ziklag and Turning Point USA did not return requests for comment.View image in fullscreenIn an email, Metaxas denied having “anything to do with the making of the LETTER film” – although he stars in the movie and founded one of the companies that produced it. Metaxas rejected the term “Christian nationalism”, saying it is used to “demonize people who believe that we Christians are obliged to live our faith in every sphere, including the political.”And he suggested that Bonhoeffer scholars and his critics were in fact the ones inciting political violence, not him.‘Co-opted by extremists’Born in 1906 and raised in a family of intellectuals and academics, Bonhoeffer dedicated himself as a young man to theology and ministry. At 21 years old, he wrote a dissertation exploring the idea of Christians’ ethical and moral obligations to one another and society.But Bonhoeffer’s prodigious academic career was cut short by the rise of Hitler’s Nazi party.An early dissident, Bonhoeffer wrote in 1933 that the Hitler government’s increasingly discriminatory and violent oppression of Jews was a “problem for the church”, which he viewed as responsible for opposing such policies, even if they were not directed at Christians.His work in the following decade, with other dissenting clergy and networks of resisters, would eventually lead the regime to accuse him of aiding in a plot to assassinate Hitler. He was arrested in 1943 and hanged in 1945 in the Flossenbürg concentration camp, leaving behind his letters from prison and numerous writings on ethics, morality and the role of Christians in a secular, modern society.Before he was executed, Bonhoeffer warned of the dangers of zealotry and groupthink – perils he believed societies face during times of political upheaval.“[The] upsurge of power is so terrific that it deprives men of an independent judgement,” wrote Bonhoeffer, “and they give up trying – more or less unconsciously – to assess the new state of affairs for themselves.”Scholars of Bonhoeffer, and Bonhoeffer’s living relatives, have argued that Bonhoeffer teaches Christians to reject nationalisms of all kinds.To their dismay, Christian nationalists have embraced Bonhoeffer, frequently invoking his participation in the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler as an example of moral courage. In this interpretation, Bonhoeffer is cast not as the contemplative theologian who agonized over his role in the antifascist resistance, but as a Christian warrior with the political leanings of a 21st-century American evangelical.Tobias Korenke, Bonhoeffer’s great-nephew, has expressed frustration about the use of Bonhoeffer by the religious right, saying in a recent interview with Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper that Bonhoeffer’s name had been “co-opted by extremists”.At its worst, this interpretation of Bonhoeffer has led to violence. Michael Bray, a pastor who was convicted for his role in bombing numerous abortion clinics in 1984 and 1985, cited Bonhoeffer as an inspiration. Paul Jennings Hill, an anti-abortion zealot who shot and killed a physician at an abortion clinic in 1994, too, invoked Bonhoeffer.Metaxas’s political evolutionOne evangelical celebrity who has consistently and effectively worked to popularize Bonhoeffer on the right is Eric Metaxas, a Yale-educated talkshow host whose popular biography of Bonhoeffer helped introduce the historical figure to a broader audience in the US.Metaxas’ 2009 book, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, was marketed to Christians but achieved popular acclaim – serving as a biography and an inspirational history for readers familiar and unfamiliar with Bonhoeffer.To explain Bonhoeffer’s participation in the resistance, Metaxas writes that God had called him to “get his hands dirty”.In turn the New York-based Metaxas, already an unusual east coast ambassador for conservative evangelicalism, achieved a new level of fame.“He was the rare figure in the evangelical world who was mixing it up with the culture shapers and the intellectuals in New York City,” said John Fea, a historian who has documented the rise of contemporary Christian nationalism. “And then the Bonhoeffer book came out, and that skyrocketed him.”At the 2012 National Prayer Breakfast, an annual gala in Washington convening lawmakers and Christian faith leaders, Metaxas spoke about the genesis of his Bonhoeffer biography in a speech delivered with the cadence and occasional vulnerability of a stand-up routine.View image in fullscreenFifteen minutes into the 30-minute talk, Metaxas reflected on the book’s widespread popularity, joking that “it was read even by president George W Bush, who is intellectually incurious, as we’ve all read. He read the book.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMetaxas paused, turning to Barack and Michelle Obama, who were seated to his right. “No pressure,” he added, and thrust a copy of the book into the hands of the president, who played along, smiling for a photo with the book.During the remainder of his speech, Metaxas became sharply political, railing in particular against abortion.“This is a Bonhoeffer moment,” Metaxas declared, implicitly comparing abortion to the Holocaust and calling on Christians to intervene in the manner that many Germans did not.In the decade that followed, Metaxas’s political evolution has turned even more dramatically to the right. In a 2016 column in the Wall Street Journal, he endorsed Donald Trump, acknowledging his reservations about the real estate mogul but writing that if Christians voted for Hillary Clinton, “God will not hold us guiltless,” citing abortion as a top issue.Metaxas eventually embraced Maga politics fully, vowing to support Trump as the former president falsely claimed the 2020 presidential election had been stolen and attempted to overturn the results.“This is the most horrible thing that has happened in the history of our nation,” Metaxas told Trump on 30 November, in a since deleted recording of a phone call between Metaxas and the former president that ran on Metaxas’s show. “I’d be happy to die in this fight,” he told Trump later in the call.Experts question the underpinnings of Metaxas’ work on Bonhoeffer. A recent petition circulated by eight Bonhoeffer scholars, and signed by dozens of clergy and scholars of religion, argues that Metaxas “has manipulated the Bonhoeffer story to support Christian Nationalism”.It warns that in his social media posts and public appearances, Metaxas “glorifies violence and draws inappropriate analogies between our political system and that of Nazi Germany”.Barnett argues that Metaxas’s book overstated Bonhoeffer’s role in the plot to assassinate Hitler and that Metaxas “tapped right into” a “mythology that Bonhoeffer was like the Lone Ranger, the Christian hero who fought the Nazis”.In fact, the full extent of Bonhoeffer’s role in the conspiracy has been disputed – and however closely involved he might have been in the plot, Bonhoeffer did not legitimize political violence in religious terms.“He did not justify his knowledge of the conspiracy on his being Christian – he just refused to do that, because he understood the dangers of that,” said Barnett.Blurred lines between religion and politicsIn Letter to the American Church, Metaxas, who narrates much of the documentary-style film, and a roster of rightwing pastors and activists take the Bonhoeffer narrative a step further, casting liberals and Democrats as being as destructive as Nazis and calling on evangelicals to take action and oppose evil.They insist liberal teachings are destroying the family and religion in an effort to strip away freedoms from the American people. The speakers warn that if evangelicals do not rise up against ideas that they portray as evil, such as LGBTQ+ rights and women’s rights, the country is headed for destruction.At the heart of their argument is Bonhoeffer.“Bonhoeffer effectively told the church that if we’re going to see any effective change for the better, they needed to start taking action and getting political,” Metaxas tells his audience in the film. “He said those who call themselves Christians have an obligation to God to get political if necessary, and to take a bold and likely dangerous stance against their own government.”Letter to the American Church has partnered with influential rightwing organizations, including the pro-Trump Moms for America, the anti-LGBTQ+ Her Voice Movement, and Patriot Academy – a Christian nationalist group that seeks to rewrite the constitution – to promote the film and spread its message. The organization also partnered with Million Voices, an evangelical get-out-the-vote initiative, to launch a “Pledge to Vote” campaign, aiming to see “250,000 pledge to vote” after seeing the movie.View image in fullscreenThe effort highlights how some tax-exempt religious organizations push the boundaries of legal restrictions on electioneering.Churches are banned from issuing endorsements or campaigning on behalf of a candidate, but they may be able to participate in the screenings without fear of incurring legal penalties, said Andrew Seidel, a constitutional attorney who specializes in first amendment and religious freedoms cases.“One of the ways that this Christian nationalist movement has started operating in the political space, is to create these kinds of movies and then push them out through churches,” he said.Despite the timing of the screenings – which end on election day – and the film’s ultra-political content, “the churches would all have, probably, some pretty credible deniability, if they said: ‘Hey, we were just [given] a chance to run a movie we thought our folks would be interested in.’”The Letter to the American Church tour officially ends on 5 November – but don’t expect Bonhoeffer to go away anytime soon.A splashy feature film, Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin, is to debut in theaters across the US on 22 November. Bonhoeffer, the movie, features a star-studded cast of German actors and promises to be a captivating second world war drama. (Americans might recognize August Diehl, who plays the resistance theologian Martin Niemöller, from his role in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, or the 2010 thriller Salt).Posters for the movie show Bonhoeffer carrying a gun. “With world-shattering stakes,” the Christian streaming company Angel Studios writes in its promotional materials for the film, Bonhoeffer “begs the question, how far will you go to stand up for what’s right?”Bonhoeffer scholars reject this gun-toting version of the theologian – and the film’s “how-far-would-you-go” framing. “[In] the current, highly-polarized climate in the United States, these are dangerous words,” wrote the leaders of the English and German-language International Bonhoeffer Society last month in Die Zeit.In their petition, the scholars warn more broadly of a possible uptick in violence after the election linked to the Christian far right.“Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words and witness will be used to pit one side against the other, to fight ‘evil’, to put ‘America First’, and to justify violence,” they write. “The misalignment between these views and actions and Bonhoeffer’s own cannot be overstated. When you hear these grievous misuses, and you will, do not be fooled.” More

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      Mormons were once reliably Republican – but they could tip Arizona Harris’s way

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      A valuable Republican voting bloc in Arizona is seeing a shift from members towards Kamala Harris in numbers that Democrats believe could make the difference for them in an election where the latest polls have Donald Trump slightly ahead in the swing state.With nearly 450,000 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as LDS or Mormons, living in Arizona, they make up about 6% of the state’s population and both the Harris and Trump campaigns have been going all out to woo them.While the church’s home base of Utah is one of the deepest red states, in neighboring Arizona there is a growing partisan rift.Mormons in Arizona are now “poised to support Kamala Harris more than any other presidential Democratic ticket in 60 years”, Jacob Rugh, an associate professor in the department of sociology at the LDS church-run Brigham Young University, said in a Harris-Walz campaign call in August.In the 2020 election, Joe Biden delivered the first Democratic win in Arizona in a presidential election in 24 years. He garnered an estimated 18,000 votes from the LDS community, double Hillary Clinton’s share of LDS voters there – and won the state by just 10,457 votes.“The 18,000 votes was more than the margin of victory, and it showed the significance of the LDS vote,” said Robert Taber, the national director of LDS for Harris-Walz.“Where Biden got 18% of the LDS vote in 2020, I think Harris could hit 25-30% of the LDS vote,” Taber added, citing the increased Democratic campaign efforts there this cycle, as well as the “post-January 6” environment.“I think there’s a decent chance that Harris does a little bit better than Biden,” he said, which, if it happens, could help the Democrats to “hold on to Nevada and Arizona”, he added.In the United States, members of the LDS church make up a relatively small, predominantly white voting bloc – about 2% of the population – and have traditionally been among the most loyal voting blocs for the Republicans over the last several decades, historically aligning on traditional conservative values such as religious freedoms, pro-life stances and small government.But in 2016, when Trump was nominated as the Republican presidential candidate, some in the community felt conflicted. That year, after the Hollywood Access tape was published, Deseret News website, which is owned by the LDS church, called on Trump to resign, stating that he did not align with the community’s ideals and values.A small but increasing number of LDS voters continue to shift away from him.Julie Spilsbury, a Republican council member in Mesa, Arizona, and an LDS church member, recently endorsed Harris .“I think the character of our leaders matter,” Spilsbury, 47, said. “And when I hear him talk about – women, immigrants, refugees, people who disagree with him – I cannot, in good conscience, vote for someone like that.”Spilsbury voted for Trump in 2016 but later abandoned him due to his character, divisiveness and rhetoric, she said. She voted for Biden four years later – but quietly. Now she’s publicly supporting Harris.In 2020, about half of LDS voters under the age of 40 voted for Biden, and in Utah, he performed the best of any Democratic presidential candidate since 1964.While most LDS voters nationwide are expected to vote for Trump, if Harris can better the Biden numbers among the group, it could make a crucial difference in Arizona – and Nevada, where Mormon numbers are also strong, although there is less data available about their voting history in that state from 2020.View image in fullscreenThe Harris campaign launched an LDS advisory committee in Arizona in September and in Nevada in early October to canvas Mormon voters and hold events.The Republicans launched a Latter-day Saints for Trump coalition in early October, and Trump called in to an LDS for Trump video call as the campaign tried to shore up the vote.But in Arizona, John Giles, a lifelong Republican, LDS member and the mayor of Mesa – once dubbed the most conservative city in America – publicly backed Harris just eight days after Biden dropped out of his re-election campaign.He wrote an op-ed in the Arizona Republican saying Harris “is fighting to make sure Americans can get ahead and be safe from gun violence and to restore and protect the rights of women”, while Trump stood for the far right, “crudeness and vulgarity”.And at a recent Harris-Walz rally in Arizona, Giles said the GOP had been “taken over by extremists”, and described Trump as “morally and ethically bankrupt”.In recent years, Trump has also clashed with prominent LDS members, including Mitt Romney, Utah’s retiring US senator and past presidential nominee, who voted to impeach Trump after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol; Rusty Bowers, the former speaker of the Arizona house who resisted Trump’s demands to undermine the 2020 election in Arizona; and former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, who recently endorsed Harris.“I saw a lot of people really upset about the way that he attacked very well-respected Arizona politicians like Rusty Bowers,” said Lacy Chaffee, a member of the LDS church and a candidate for school board in Mesa.“Rusty campaigned for Trump, but he wasn’t willing to lie,” she added. “So I think that that’s something that speaks very deeply to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We hold very deeply the sense of integrity and truth, and I think that, for a lot of people, was the breaking point.”The Mormon church itself maintains political neutrality, but it encourages civic participation and for members to elect politicians who are “honest, wise and good”.Rugh, the sociology expert, said his analysis showed that candidates who denied that Biden won the 2020 election lost substantial LDS votes.Meanwhile, the church teaches members that the principles in the US constitution are divinely inspired, said Taber, the director of LDS for Harris-Walz. . But Trump has said the constitution should be “terminated”.The LDS youth vote is also shifting significantly. Brittany Romanello, an anthropologist and faculty associate at Arizona State University, said that Harris and the Democrats “have a very big opening” with young LDS voters because of greater diversity both of people and opinions in their ranks, and agreater willingness to disagree with the church majority.“Gen Z is the most politically, ethnically, sexually and romantically diverse generation, and they’re a huge part of the voting bloc, and this includes Mormons,” Romanello said.Rugh’s analysis also found that more than 50% of gen Z LDS members voted for Biden in 2020.View image in fullscreenIn terms of more LDS voters being willing to buck the norm, and be open about it, Spilsbury said:“If me speaking out helps some others, specifically LDS women, know that there’s another choice and that we don’t have to vote Republican just because it’s the thing we think we’re supposed to do, then that’s really important to me.”She said a lot of the reaction from her community to her choice had been “rough” but that she received some positive messages, too.Meanwhile, Mormonism is a conservative, pro-life religion but known as less fiercely anti-abortion than some, generally supporting exceptions for rape, incest and the health of the mother or child. Harris has zeroed in on reproductive rights since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, after Trump’s three appointees tipped the bench to the right.LDS Arizona resident Monica Chabot, 28, had a miscarriage last year and elected to have the fetus removed rather than wait for it to pass naturally. Her experience changed her perspective on the Republican party and its anti-choice stance, she said. She believes theprocedure would probably not have been allowed under an extreme ban dating from 1864 that briefly took effect in Arizona after Roe was overturned, before some Republicans crossed the aisle to repeal it, which the state’s Democratic governor signed off on, leaving a less harsh ban.“It made me realize how little Trump and other Republicans seem to care about me and my experiences and my body,” she said. “And hearing Kamala talk about it and fighting for that is a big reason why I’ve been involved in the Harris campaign.”Arizona voters have a ballot measure this November that would enshrine in the state constitution the right to abortion until viability, or around 24 weeks. It remains to be seen whether it will encourage split tickets as conservatives who want reproductive choice vote for the measure but also for Trump, or whether it boosts women’s turnout in a huge windfall for Harris.Chabot said that while she would never choose to get an abortion, or encourage others to get an abortion, she doesn’t believe in the government making that decision for a woman.She said: “We talk a lot about agency in the church, and how it’s one of our greatest gifts from God – the ability to choose.” More

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      Harris and Trump lean into their faith in appeals to Christian voters in Georgia

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      Two Georgia megachurches hosted presidential candidates last week, highlighting the stark differences between how Kamala Harris and Donald Trump speak about faith and what Georgia’s Christian religious congregations expect of them.Though Trump and Harris communicate differently to the public about their faith, religious leaders on the left and the right are casting this election in apocalyptic terms. And both candidates know religious voters will be essential to winning swing states like Georgia.“It is so good to be here with everyone today and to worship with you,” Harris said from the pulpit to thousands gathered at New Birth Missionary Baptist church in south DeKalb county last Sunday. “On this day, then, I am reminded, with everything that we reflect on, on the parable from the Gospel of Luke.”Four thousand people packed the pews of the predominantly-Black megachurch outside of Atlanta, one of the most prominent and powerful Black churches in America – a point of which pastor Jamal Bryant regularly reminds his congregation. New Birth owns more land than any Black church in America. It gave away $83m in college scholarships last year, he said.It wields its political clout deftly. New Birth’s congregants include many of Atlanta’s most powerful political figures – mayors, sheriffs, members of Congress. Bryant said it has hosted appearances by five presidents.But people who attend New Birth aren’t there for a stump speech. And Harris didn’t give one.“You don’t want to give political speeches in a sanctuary, because you’re there to worship God,” said state senator Emanuel Jones, a DeKalb Democrat who attended church at New Birth last week. “To me, it is not a good use of a sanctuary to try and politicize – particularly on a Sunday, by the way – to try and mix politics with religion. I think she does a really good job of keeping them separate. She did that today, and we all should.”View image in fullscreenHarris campaigned in Georgia with her pastor Rev Dr Amos Brown, pastor at Third Baptist Church of San Francisco and a contemporary of Martin Luther King Jr and other luminaries in Atlanta’s civil rights history. She told a CNN townhall a few days later that her first call after learning that Biden would be withdrawing was to Brown.“I do pray every day,” she told Anderson Cooper. “Sometimes twice a day.”Harris will discuss her faith when it comes up, but doesn’t go out of her way to portray her campaign as religiously motivated. Conversely, she never mentioned her campaign directly while speaking at New Birth. She shied away from the political themes common to her political rhetoric – abortion rights, the cost of living and the general unfitness of her opponent. She used the word “faith” 16 times in her 14-minute address.“Faith is a verb,” she said. “We show it in action, in our deeds and in our service.”Though she had not come to deliver a political speech, in a church with the flags of dozens of countries lining the balconies, the subtext was clear enough – a repudiation of conservative xenophobia about immigrants.Elaine Montgomery heard it.“Like she said, when you don’t help people like my neighbors and we all in this world,” Montgomery said. “Everything belongs to God.”Montgomery, 69, from Stone Mountain, Georgia, was wearing a pink hat big enough to see from space that Sunday. She was on her way to vote. Her disdain for Trump’s expression of faith was plain.“He’s a man speaking on a level that’s below God, I will say that,” Montgomery said. Her voice lowered. “I don’t really think Donald Trump had faith. I really don’t. I’m serious, you know, because if he had faith and he believed in Jesus Christ, he wouldn’t be doing the things he does.”Faith matters in Georgia. White Christian evangelical beliefs correlate with the strongest support for Donald Trump, and about 38% of Georgians fall into that category, according to the Pew Research Center. Black voters in Georgia are also much more likely to be religious than the baseline, and Black voters represent about 30% of the electorate.Georgia, in the heart of the Bible Belt, has one of the highest rates of regular church attendance in America at 42%.View image in fullscreenLast Sunday, 42,694 voters cast a ballot in Georgia, many going in a “souls to the polls” push regularly organized by churches, particularly in metro Atlanta. In the flurry of conservative election legislation that followed the 2020 election in Georgia, a plan to eliminate Sunday early voting floated through the legislature. Outcry from pastors across the state ended that gambit. Mobilizing religiously-motivated voters is a necessary, if insufficient, requirement for any candidate to win a Georgia election.Trump found himself in Zebulon, Georgia, last week, doing just that.He was 45-minutes late to the faith townhall held at Christ Chapel church. Thousands of people packed its hall and sprawled into a parking lot ringed by semi-truck trailers with snipers on the roofs.“You know, without religion, it’s like the – it’s like the glue that holds it all together. This would be a different country,” he said, noting a declining trend in religious participation, suggesting that “people started thinking a little bit differently and they got used to a different way of life” after the pandemic. He spoke about how Christians – particularly Catholics – faced unspecified “persecution” today in America.But most of Trump’s comments at the “Believers and Ballots” townhall were campaign fodder about illegal immigration, how great his rallies have been and attacks on Harris and the Biden administration.About 1,100 people live in Zebulon, about an hour-and-a-half south of Atlanta. Christ Chapel has about 1,600 members, with more at satellite campuses in middle Georgia.Brian Hood, a congregant at Christ Chapel, said he expected Trump to speak about the border and inflation, but also freedom of religion.“Donald J Trump professes to be a born-again Christian. Does that mean that he’s perfect? Of course not. None of us are. Anybody who says they are is a liar. He appeals to, not just Christians, but all the American people. He loves God and loves people, all walks of life.”Georgia’s lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, a Republican and ally of the former president, asked Trump about coping with the assassination attempts and the pressure of the campaign. “How do you lean into your faith and your family to deal with this?”“I say this. Faith – when you have faith, when you believe in God, it’s a big advantage over people that don’t have that. It’s a big advantage,” Trump replied.It was the only substantial reference Trump made to his own faith in the abbreviated 40-minute forum for faith voters.View image in fullscreenRalph Reed, chairman of the Faith & Freedom Coalition and a longtime activist on the Christian right, succinctly laid out the stakes for antiabortion conservatives as he warmed up the crowd before Trump’s arrival.Harris is “going to pass a federal law to impose abortion on demand on all 50 states,” Reed said. “And when she’s done doing that, she’s going to repeal the filibuster and then she’s going to pass a federal law imposing term limits on the supreme court which will instantly remove justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and John Roberts from the court and she’s going to replace them with the most leftwing radical extremist justices ever nominated. That’s her agenda.”The first accomplishment listed on the campaign’s “Believers for Trump” website is how Trump appointed three supreme court justices, “which led to the end of Roe v Wade and broader protections for religious liberties.” Ending legal abortion is central to the religious conservatism of many of his supporters.“I believe that life begins in conception. I cannot follow the dictates of being able to abort at any time,” said Carol Whitcomb of Stockbridge, a conservative who attended the Trump forum.But it also may be a losing political position, even in Georgia. In every state where abortion rights have been a ballot referendum since the end of federal protections, voters have taken the more pro-choice position. Trump has generally avoided talking about abortion on the campaign trail, with no mention of it at all in a later appearance in Georgia last week.Sandra Stargel of McDonough, Georgia, who attended the forum, has registered a change in Trump’s posture toward abortion, she said. “But, you know, I believe God has been talking to him, too. God has him here for a reason. I understand that women want to be in charge of their bodies. I get that. But in that case, they make birth control. Use it. Don’t just keep killing babies.”Reed highlighted the stakes of the election: “We gather in this sanctuary 13 days before not only the most important election of our lifetimes but one of the most important elections in American history,” he said.While Harris was at New Birth a few days earlier, the church’s pastor Bryant used similar rhetoric, likening this political moment to the biblical story of Esther and her obligation to save Jews from death. “If you are silent in this moment, your family will not survive,” Bryant said. “This is not the time for y’all to be bougie and stuck up. Generations of your unborn family are waiting to see what you do next.” More

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      ‘I’m a Christian for trans rights’: pro-LGBTQ+ Missouri pastor runs for office

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      When Phoenix Lemke was in his final year of high school, he had nowhere to go.The family of the teenager from O’Fallon, Missouri, had long disapproved of him being queer, and in December 2021, at age 17, he left home without a clear plan. He spent several days couchsurfing with friends until he found refuge with an unlikely figure: a local pastor.The Rev Susan Shumway, a minister at a nearby church, had known Lemke for years through his friends and offered him a room as soon as she learned of his predicament.“She has a history of letting people stay here when they are struggling,” Lemke, now 20, said on a recent evening, seated with Shumway in their living room. “She was adamant in letting me know she supported me, and at some point I just started calling her mom.”Shumway is something of an anomaly in this deep red state: a clergy member advocating for LGBTQ+ equality.Missouri in recent years has been at the center of a national push to limit the rights of trans and queer people. State officials have pushed to outlaw healthcare for trans youth, block trans kids from sports, restrict trans people’s bathroom access and censor LGBTQ+ content.As in other parts of the country, those efforts have found the support of Christian nationalist groups, and Missouri officials have explicitly pointed at their faith while enacting trans restrictive policies. Mike Moon, the state’s senator and author of its trans youth healthcare ban, has referenced God and the Bible to support his bill (and defend child marriage). The Missouri attorney general, Andrew Bailey, as well as the Missouri US senator Josh Hawley, who embraces the idea of America as a “Christian nation”, have promoted the anti-trans talking point that God “doesn’t make mistakes”, falsely suggesting children cannot be trans.Shumway has a very different view. “I’m a Christian who believes in trans rights. And I’m going to be loud and make sure legislators hear from Christians who are not spewing hate,” she said.Shumway’s now campaigning to become a state representative, hoping to be a strong opposition voice in a legislature that has become one of the most hostile in the nation toward queer and trans people.“The Christian right has not had a challenge from the Christian left, and we need to join together and make some noise,” she said.Shumway traces her LGBTQ+ rights advocacy to 1999, when she was in seminary, leading a youth group. As she prepared to move away, one of the young members confided he was gay, telling her last-minute and worried she would disapprove. “I said, ‘So what? I love you,’” she recalls.The interaction taught her about how coming out feels risky to many kids, she said. “And I knew that wouldn’t be the last youth to come out [to me].”Shumway is a member of the United Church of Christ, a Protestant denomination with 770,000 members, which promotes inclusivity.Over the years, she has helped lead numerous churches through the process of becoming “open and affirming” congregations that support LGBTQ+ members. She acknowledges non-queer congregants’ discomfort and tries to help them grasp what it might be like to struggle with dysphoria. She emphasizes the importance of treating people like Lemke with respect, even if they don’t understand them. “I affirm God’s love for this person,” she said. “I believe God created Phoenix to be a wonderful person of God just as he is.“I believe it’s my job to kick open the doors that have been closed and allow Phoenix and others the opportunity to walk through if they want to,” Shumway added.Moving in with Shumway was transformative for Lemke, he said. He came out as trans after he started living with Shumway, and began transitioning soon after. “Here, I could do what I want, be who I want and kiss who I want without being called a slur.”View image in fullscreenLast year, he posted a joyous photo holding his court paperwork confirming his legal name change: “I just felt so much better and happier.”Lemke said he’s estranged from most of his relatives, who have resisted acknowledging his transition. “By insisting they had a daughter, they lost the opportunity to have a son,” he said. “I wish I could get them to understand that – as much as you think you know me, you don’t live in my body. You didn’t live the first 17 years of your life looking at it and knowing something is wrong but not being allowed to say it, because you know you wouldn’t be safe.”Lemke said he still feels unsafe using public bathrooms in Missouri. While he was grateful to turn 18 so he could access gender-affirming healthcare, he has also had distressing conversations with his doctor about how hard it has become to support trans patients in the state.Lemke scoffs at the idea that Republicans are “protecting children” with bills restricting trans existence – laws that have been linked to sharp increases in suicide attempts among trans youth. “They want to die because they aren’t allowed to be themselves,” Lemke said of some of his peers. “I genuinely feel I am alive because I was able to put my foot in the door.”Shumway said watching Lemke blossom had inspired her to keep fighting for LGBTQ+ rights. “It’s such a privilege seeing these shackles that were holding him down fall off, and seeing him become such a confident young man.”Lemke isn’t religious, but sometimes makes food for Shumway’s congregation. When friends learn he lives with a pastor, “they say, ‘Are you okay? Blink twice,’” he said, noting how many of them have come to associate religion with intolerance.Shumway added: “The corporate church has done such harm, and there needs to be healing.”Shumway’s statehouse race is an uphill battle in a district dominated by Republicans. Whether she’s elected, she said she’ll advocate for the passage of a nondiscrimination law in Missouri, where state law does not prohibit employers from firing people for being LGBTQ+.Other Missouri faith leaders have organized against anti-trans bills, some motivated by their own trans children.Daniel Bogard, a St Louis rabbi, has pleaded with lawmakers to preserve the rights of his 11-year-old trans son. He cited sacred Jewish texts that scholars interpret as referencing nonbinary identity. “Legislators pretend like being queer is new, and it’s not,” he said. “There have always been queer people. It’s just another incredible way of being human.“I used to believe, if I could show them that, they would leave my family alone. I don’t believe that anymore,” he continued, saying legislators now won’t acknowledge his family. “They stopped looking us in the eye, because it just hurt them too much to see us as humans … It works for these Christian nationalist politicians to get people to be fearful of and disgusted by my child.”While disillusioned by the political process, Bogard said he will continue to encourage faith leaders to “stand up for the dignity and sacredness of trans kids.“These kids need to know there are people who love them and are fighting for them.” More