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      The California community caught between a powerful megachurch and far-right extremists

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      This is the third in a series of three stories on the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election in Shasta county, a region of 180,000 people in northern California that has emerged as a center of the election denial movement and hotbed for far-right politics. Read the first and second story.For years, an extremist far-right movement has worked to transform one of California’s most conservative regions. Since gaining a majority on Shasta county’s governing body, they have managed to spark an exodus of government workers, attempted to do away with the voting system and fought the state over policies pertaining to Covid-19 and the second amendment.Earlier this year, voters in the community of 180,000 – perhaps tired of Shasta’s national notoriety as a hotbed for extremist politics and election denialism – declared they had had enough. In a stunning rebuke, they voted out a far-right leader by an enormous margin, handing his seat to a political newcomer.Matt Plummer, a Yale-educated former college football player who owns a corporate training business, pledged to provide an alternative to the “hostility and division” tearing Shasta apart. Supporters view Plummer, with his focus on issues such as crime, roads and homelessness, as someone who can help the community chart a path out of the upheaval.But others are concerned about Plummer’s connection to another powerful and ultra-conservative force that has reshaped the region: Bethel church. The megachurch has more than 11,000 members, including Plummer, and a school of “supernatural ministry” that serves 2,000 students a year.View image in fullscreenBethel leaders once said that God wanted Donald Trump to have a second term and have claimed that Joe Biden won the 2020 election by “fraud”. Church members have become major players in local government – three of the five members on the city council in Redding, the county seat, attend Bethel. The city’s vice-mayor is a church elder.The church is involved in nearly every part of Shasta county, and is a cornerstone of the local economy, said Doni Chamberlain, a longtime local journalist and chronicler of the area.Shasta’s extreme political landscape has forced residents to choose between a toxic rightwing movement and a church that also has deeply conservative and extreme beliefs, she said.“This is the bind we’re in,” she said. “Shasta county is in this weird extremist sandwich where we have the rightwing pushing for guns and splitting the state. And there is the other extreme side of the sandwich that is Bethel church. Then the middle where people are trying to figure out how to survive in this place.”Before Shasta county garnered national attention for its fierce opposition to Covid-19 restrictions and efforts to institute a hand-count voting system favored by those who believe lies about election fraud, it was Bethel church that raised the region’s profile.There are churches – of which Shasta county has plenty – and then there is Bethel, a behemoth institution without parallel in the area. First established in a private home in 1952, it now has more than 11,000 members – more than 10% of the population in the city of Redding – where the church is based.Bethel’s transformation came under the direction of Bill Johnson, the son of a long-serving pastor who began leading the church with Beni, his wife, in 1996. The church has grown significantly, opening a school, a youth outreach program and Bethel Music, a record label that produces popular worship music and reported $18m in revenue in 2023. Justin Bieber is a fan and has filmed himself covering a song from a Bethel artist. Today several of Johnson’s children work as senior leaders in the church.But it’s Bethel’s school of supernatural ministry, which has been called a “Christian Hogwarts”, that is often credited with its growth. The program was founded by Kris and Kathy Vallotton, the senior leaders of the church, and teaches students that they can perform miracles and heal through prayer. “Students will learn how to read, understand, and ‘do’ the Bible, how to practice His presence, to witness, heal the sick, prophesy, preach, pray, cast out demons and much more,” the school website states.People travel to Redding from around the world, more than 100 countries, to attend the vocational program. Students have been known to approach people in the city, particularly those in casts or with walkers, to offer prayers for healing. The focus on “supernatural power” is fundamental to the church, which in 2019 asked members to pray for the resurrection of a two-year-old girl.Bethel has long believed in the power of healing people through prayer. Chamberlain joined the church as a child after her mother died and her siblings were adopted by a local couple who were members. When they learned that Chamberlain and her twin sister had a neurological disorder that caused involuntary movements, church elders came to treat their “demons” and the children were made to throw away their medications, Chamberlain recalled.“When you have a bunch of adults circling around you and putting their hands on your heads and shaking you, it was pretty intimidating,” she said, adding that they coached her on how to speak in tongues.“It’s like being waterboarded, you just give up and give in so they leave you alone. Then you’re in the club.”Since its founding in 1998, Bethel’s supernatural school has brought thousands of people to Redding. They are a visible presence around the city, in its grocery stores and the hip cafes and bakeries operated by Bethel members. And as the church’s footprint has grown, so too has criticism of its role.Supporters say the church has been a positive force in Redding and that it’s natural for a large institution to attract scrutiny but that members want to be a part of the community in which they live. They often point to local volunteer work or when the church donated money to fund police positions in Redding and began leasing the local auditorium when it appeared the city would have to close it down.Bethel did not respond to multiple requests for comment.View image in fullscreenBut other Shasta county residents argue the church has changed the fabric of the community and worsened an existing housing shortage by drawing thousands of students to the area while driving up costs.“If you look from the outside in, there seems to be positives. They’ve done good things, but I don’t feel like on balance what they’ve done is for the good of the community in general,” said Robert Sid, a Shasta county resident who supported Plummer. “Their Hogwarts supernatural ministry has really played into flooding the market and artificially pricing things that the regular Redding person can’t afford.”Critics have expressed discomfort with church members who hold key positions in local government voting on proposals from Bethel to expand. Some residents have joined a Facebook group to identify businesses connected to the church.“[The owners] tithe to the church. If you patronize a Bethel-affiliated business then now some of those profits are being tithed to the church. You’re kind of indirectly supporting the church by doing that,” said Rachel Strickland, who started the group. “People don’t want to do that.”And for some in this deeply conservative region, where Republicans outnumber Democrats two to one, the church’s political ties have been cause for concern as well. Religious experts have described it as closely related to the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement built around the idea of modern-day prophets and apostles that aims to have Christians transform society and rule over key political and cultural institutions, referred to as the “Seven Mountain Mandate”.Johnson co-authored a book, Invading Babylon: the 7 Mountain Mandate, which advises Christians to exert influence in seven core areas: church, family, education, government, media, arts and commerce.Matthew D Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish studies who has studied Bethel, argued that the church appears to be trying to implement the Seven Mountain Mandate in its community.“I think they very much intend to enact this bigger vision of Christian supremacy and Christian dominance in the Redding area. It doesn’t mean they are always overt about that,” said Taylor, the author of a book on the New Apostolic Reformation for which he interviewed Johnson.Bethel leaders endorsed Donald Trump, and in 2021 one apologized for incorrectly prophesying that he would win a second term. The church has come out against efforts to restrict conversion therapy. In 2019, several figures associated with the church attended an Oval Office event with Trump to pray over the president. Bethel has sought to distance itself from January 6, however, Taylor said.“They are trying to tone down public rhetoric and make themselves [seem] less extreme than they are but as far as I can tell they haven’t moderated their extremism. They are just trying to package it in a better way,” he argued.The church has long emphasized that the beliefs of individual church members are not necessarily reflective of the church’s positions. Chamberlain, who left the church as a young adult, argues it is important to distinguish between the church leadership and its members.“You have to separate the leaders of the church, the people who are millionaires and drive expensive cars, cars that cost as much as somebody might pay for a house. They have vacation homes and eat at The French Laundry,” Chamberlain said.They live a life of the rich and famous, she added, while some Bethel members, and students, leave their homes abroad and live in extreme poverty to be close to the church.Members point out that they are not a monolith.Matt Plummer’s journey to Redding began the same way thousands of others have – with Bethel. He moved to the city in 2016 with his wife and daughters to attend the church, and remains a member, he said in an interview with the Guardian.Plummer, who grew up in rural New Jersey where his first job was on a horse farm, was drawn to the region’s access to nature from hiking to swimming holes, he said, and the family has developed deep ties to the area.He decided to run for the board of supervisors after working in several political campaigns and seeing the intense polarization and problems that have plagued Shasta county.“We have tied basically for the highest suicide rate in the state. You have one of the highest rates of childhood trauma and one of the highest rates of kids being born with drug withdrawal effects,” he said. “This is a pretty cool community that has a lot to offer but at the same time if you look at all these dimensions of what makes a community thrive, we’re trailing.”View image in fullscreenHe had a tough race ahead of him seeking to unseat Patrick Jones, who previously served on the Redding city council and had been a supervisor for three years as well as a leader of the anti-establishment movement that has come to define local politics.Jones, a gun store manager, led some of the county’s most controversial efforts, including attempting to upend the voting system and moving to allow people to carry firearms in public buildings in violation of state law. He also spread conspiracy theories, telling a conservative national news outlet: “Elections have been manipulated at the county level for decades.”He once responded to a reporter’s query by telling them to “drop dead”.While polarizing, Jones was well-known and had been in politics for years, Plummer said, and had the backing of a Connecticut magnate who has poured millions of dollars into local elections.Plummer made up for that by making personal contact, and personally knocked on about 9,000 doors, he said (there are about 23,000 registered voters in his district).“People care if you show up and meet them,” he said.He sought to stay out of ideological debates and focus on what residents were worried about, primarily public safety, roads and homelessness. The number of unhoused residents has grown significantly in recent years from 793 in 2022 to 1,013 people in 2023.“My opponent had been on the board almost four years and he had been on city council for eight years, which had some jurisdiction over the same things. And they had all gotten worse,” he said.His affiliation with Bethel was a concern, he acknowledged, one he tried to address and alleviate. “I’m not speaking on stage and not this type of celebrity at Bethel. I just go there on a Sunday morning.”View image in fullscreen“One of the things I said is: ‘I’m not running to represent Bethel and so my job is not to defend Bethel’ and so when people would attack Bethel for things, I’d say OK, that’s fine. That’s actually not my priority here,” he said.Strickland, who has described Bethel as a cult, said the choice put the community in a tough position, but that even in her Facebook group people seemed to be leaning toward Plummer. “For me Patrick Jones is much more dangerous.”Plummer received the endorsement of Chamberlain’s publication, A News Cafe, drawing backlash from some readers who started referring to the outlet as Bethel Cafe.“It was a tough call. I have a problem with Bethel on a lot of levels, but just kind of putting on your thinking cap sometimes the Bethel candidates were the best choice for the positions,” she said.“Do we vote for Patrick Jones who is pushing guns and open carry? Or do we vote for Matt Plummer who is a Bethel member? He’s also articulate, educated and smart.”And in the current political climate in the county, Chamberlain mused, few people would want to subject themselves to running for office. “The Bethel people are kind of impervious to it. It’s scriptural.” More

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      Thousands rally at Christian nationalist event in DC to ‘turn hearts back to God’

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      Tens of thousands of Christians poured onto the National Mall on Saturday to atone, pray and take a stand for America – which, in their view, has been poisoned by secularism and must be ruled instead by a Christian god.Summoned to Washington DC by the multilevel marketing professional-turned-Christian “apostle” Jenny Donnelly and the anti-LGBTQ+ celebrity pastor Lou Engle, they streamed onto the lawn holding blue and pink banners emblazoned with the hashtag #DontMessWithOurKids – a nod to the myth that children are being indoctrinated into adopting gay and transgender identities.It was no coincidence that the event was held on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, or that many attendees carried shofars and Israeli flags: evangelicals and charismatic Christians find spiritual meaning in Old Testament scripture, Jewish rituals and support for Israel – where they believe the end times prophecy will take place.Although most of the day was spent in prayer and worship, November’s presidential election hung heavy over the crowd. A promotional newsletter for the event called on “the Lord’s authority over the election process and our nation’s leadership”, and organizers handed out flyers promoting a pre-election prayer event hosted by the Donald Trump-aligned organization Turning Point USA Faith.Lance Wallnau, a Maga evangelist who rose to prominence after prophesying Trump’s first term in office, delivered remarks at the gathering.“We have 31 million Christians, I just found out, they’ve just been so bombarded by woke preachers and apathetic Christians that they don’t think they’re gonna vote this year,” said Wallnau. “Folks, this meeting, on Yom Kippur, is our governmental moment to shift something in the spirit.” Wallnau called on pastors to urge their congregants to vote.“I was here at January 6,” said Tami Barthen, an attendee who traveled from Pennsylvania to attend the rally, and who described her experience of the Capitol riot as profoundly spiritual. “It’s not Democrat versus Republican,” she said. “It’s good versus evil.”It’s the first of a series of Christian nationalist gatherings in DC to rally believers to the Capitol ahead of the 2024 election.Donnelly billed the event as a rallying call for mothers concerned about changing gender norms in the modern US and casting the gathering at the Capitol as an opportunity for women to stand their ground and play a pivotal role in changing the country’s cultural and political trajectory.The rally is a collaboration organized by multiple far-right Christian leaders affiliated with the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement on the political far right that seeks to establish long-term Christian dominion over government and society as well as get Trump a second presidency in November.Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies, said the effort was aimed at “creating a network – a mass of people – who see it as their spiritual mission to take over Washington DC”Most prominent in the push to turn out women to the National Mall is Engle, a rightwing pastor and staunch opponent of LGBTQ+ rights and abortion, whose tutelage of anti-gay Ugandan pastors and coordination of mass prayer mobilizations has earned him international notoriety and celebrity.The Southern Poverty Law Center, which characterizes Engle as an anti-LGBTQ+ extremist, notes that Engle has in the past compared the anti-LGBTQ+ push to the secessionist south during the American civil war, calling on opponents of gay rights to emulate the Confederate general Robert E Lee, who “was able to restrain Washington”.Donnelly’s vision – of a crowd of moms descending on the Capitol in pink and blue – is her own. Engle, whose mass prayer rallies have drawn hundreds of thousands to DC in the past, offers a platform to turn people out.View image in fullscreen“We are seeing a million women and their families coming together to see this great country turn their hearts back to God,” said Donnelly, on a 21 June podcast promoting the march. Donnelly, who lives in Portland, Oregon, with her family, described how during the Covid-19 lockdowns and Black Lives Matter protests – twin forces she says shut down her church – she was called by God to go deeper into the political realm.“I said: ‘Lord, I’m just a mom of five, I have a great church – it’s not huge. I’ve done women’s retreats, I think I’ve been doing my part in the kingdom and I love Jesus so much, but I don’t even know where to begin, but would you put me in the fight?’” she said.Donnelly has sought to pass along that message to other Christian women through an organization called Her Voice Movement Action, which organizes women into decentralized, independently-run “prayer hubs” – a source of spiritual community for women that also functions as a political mobilization tool.“We’ve been praying for our nation for a couple years in small prayer hubs,” said Louette Madison, who traveled from Washington state to DC for the rally. Madison has teenagers in the public school system and described hoping for a day when prayer is embraced in schools, saying: “I think that the schools are kind of getting rid of the values, and also getting rid of the discipline, [and] when there’s no consequences, that can cause a lot more chaos in school.”The decentralized organizing model carries echoes of Donnelly’s previous life: before reinventing herself as a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation, Donnelly earned millions through the multilevel marketing company AdvoCare, which collapsed after settling with the Federal Trade Commission for $150m in a lawsuit alleging the company was an illegal pyramid scheme.From Peru to PortlandYears before Donnelly flew the #DontMessWithOurKids flag, a movement under the same name took hold in Peru, promoted by Christian Rosas, a conservative Christian political strategist and consultant in the mining industry. The evangelical “No te metas con mis hijos” – “don’t mess with my kids” – coalition, which opposed LGBTQ+ inclusion and abortion, earned followers in 2016 during a wave of conservative backlash against governmental efforts to introduce themes of gender equality and LGBTQ+ inclusion in the school system.When the government issued lockdown orders to slow the spread of Covid-19, it issued travel restrictions by gender, allowing women and men to leave the house on different days of the week and affirming that trans people’s gender identities would be respected in enforcing the rule. Rosas took issue with the trans-inclusive policy, claiming that police officers were obligated to enforce the rule based on travelers’ identification cards, not their gender identities.During the lockdown orders, the Peruvian investigative reporting outlet OjoPúblico reported on 18 incidents of humiliating and abusive arrests of trans women by the police.What started as street protests has turned into an electoral strategy to elect ultra-conservative allies of the Christian right into office in Peru. These lawmakers have passed a slew of socially conservative laws, including one this year that classifies transgender identities as mental illnesses.Donnelly has taken up the mantle of this movement among Christian moms in the US, drawing directly from Rosas’s vision in Peru and consulting him on strategy.“We challenged the law, why? Because the law was unjust. We challenged the curriculum. Why? Because the curriculum was unjust,” said Rosas on a podcast interview with Donnelly on 6 November 2023. “TV, news [outlets], they mocked us every day, they mocked us, they ridiculed us, saying: ‘Look at them, they’re radical, religious, whatever,’ but they saw that we are not retreating.”Rosas spoke at the Capitol rally on Saturday, too, where he preached against LGBTQ+ acceptance and promised that his movement could be replicated in the US.“Obedience to the Lord also requires us to stand up strong against weakened structures,” Rosas said. “Against evil, against unjust laws.”Don’t Mess With Our Kids and No te metas con mis hijos have both attempted to cast their organizations as grassroots mobilizations. In a 2017 interview with Vice News, a spokesperson for the group spoke on the condition of anonymity, claiming to speak for “the collective”.Donnelly’s Her Voice Movement adopts a similar approach. In a recording of a Zoom call in August – which journalist Dominick Bonny obtained and shared with the Guardian – Her Voice Movement spokesperson Naomi Van Wyk said the group had teamed up with Moms for Liberty to launch a multi-state campaign called March for Kids, but cautioned members to keep the association private.“The parent company is Moms for Liberty, but they don’t wanna be recognized. They really want this movement to be grassroots, and to make a public statement that there are hundreds and thousands of people across the country that are coming together under one umbrella,” said Van Wyk.Elizabeth Salazar Vega, a reporter covering gender and politics in Peru, said she was not surprised that the push had taken hold in the US – or that it had found expression just weeks before a presidential election.“This is the ideal scenario to bind these voices together, that could normally appear siloed in civil society,” Salazar Vega told the Guardian in Spanish. “I don’t think it would be impossible for this to escalate rapidly in the United States.”Sean Feucht, a Christian nationalist pastor who has organized “Kingdom to the Capitol” protests in swing states, is planning a similar march in DC later this month. More

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      Pope criticizes Harris and Trump and tells US Catholics to choose ‘lesser evil’

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      Pope Francis on Friday criticized Donald Trump over his plan to deport millions of immigrants and Kamala Harris over her stance supporting abortion rights.Asked about the US presidential election on his flight back to Rome from Singapore, the pope said not welcoming migrants is a “grave” sin, and likened having an abortion to an “assassination“.He said US Catholics would have to “choose the lesser evil” when they vote in November, without elaborating.Francis was speaking in a press conference with journalists after a 12-day tour across south-east Asia and Oceania. Although the pope did not use Trump and Harris’s names, he referred specifically to their policies and their genders. Despite criticizing both candidates, he said Catholics should vote.“Not voting is ugly,” the 87-year-old pontiff said. “It is not good. You must vote.“You must choose the lesser evil,” he continued. “Who is the lesser evil? That lady, or that gentleman? I don’t know. Everyone, in conscience, [has to] think and do this.”American Catholics, numbering roughly 52 million nationwide, are often seen as crucial swing voters. In some battleground states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, more than 20% of adults are Catholic.Francis, leader of about 1.4 billion Catholics globally, is usually careful about weighing in on national political elections. But he frequently criticizes abortion, which is forbidden by Catholic teaching, in sharp terms. He has also previously criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. During the 2016 election, he said Trump was “not Christian” in his views. On Friday, Francis said both candidates’ policies were “against life”.“Whether it is the one who is chasing away migrants, or the one that kills children,” said the pope. “Both are against life.”Trump has promised to crack down on illegal immigration and deport millions of immigrants already in the US if elected to a second term as president. He has also refused to rule out building detention camps for undocumented immigrants.Harris has promised to sign any legislation passed by Congress to restore national protections for abortion access, which were struck down by the US supreme court in its 2022 Dobbs decision.The two candidates sparred over both issues on Wednesday in their first debate together. Most polls show a tight race, with Harris leading slightly.The pope called immigration “a right”, citing Bible passages that call orphans, widows and foreigners three kinds of people that society must care for. “Not giving welcome to migrants is a sin,” said the pope. “It is grave.”Francis said abortion “is killing a human being”. He said there could be no excuses for an abortion. “It is an assassination,” he said. “On these things we must speak clearly. No ‘but’ or ‘however’.” More

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      ‘We have to be voting biblically’: the Courage Tour rallies Christians to get Trump in office

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      By 9am on Monday, hundreds of worshipers who had gathered under a tent in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, were already on their feet. Praiseful music bumped from enormous speakers. The temperature was pushing 90F (32C).The congregants had gathered in north-western Wisconsin for the Courage Tour, a travelling tent revival featuring a lineup of charismatic preachers and self-styled prophets promising healing, and delivering a political message: register to vote. Watch, or work, the polls. And help deliver the 2024 election to Donald Trump.Serving as a voter registration drive and hub for recruiting poll workers, it was no mistake that the Courage Tour came to Wisconsin just three months ahead of the presidential election in November. The tour had already visited three other swing states: Georgia, Michigan and Arizona.Heavy-hitting Maga organizations – including America First Policy Institute, TPUSA Faith and America First Works – had a presence outside the tent. Inside, headlining the event was Lance Wallnau, a prominent figure in the New Apostolic Reformation – a movement on the right that embraces modern-day apostles, aims to establish Christian dominion over society and politics and has grown in influence since Trump was elected president in 2016.“‘Pray for your rulers,’ that’s about as far as we got in the Bible,” said Wallnau, setting the tone for the day, which would feature a series of sermons focused on the ideal role of Christians in government and society. “I think what’s happened is over time, we began to realize you cannot trust that government like you thought you could trust, and you can’t trust the media to tell you what’s really happening,” he exclaimed.What followed in Wallnau’s morning sermon were a series of greatest hits of the Maga right: January 6 (not an insurrection), the 2020 election (marred by fraud) and Covid-19 (a Chinese bioweapon).Many of the attendees had learned of the event from Eau Claire’s Oasis church – a Pentecostal church whose congregants were already familiar with the movement’s goal to turn believers into activists with a religious mission.“This is wonderful,” said Cyndi Lund, an Oasis churchgoer who attended the four-day event. “I teach a class on biblical citizenship – the Lord put in my heart that we have to be voting biblically, and if nothing else, we have a duty in America to vote.”According to the preachers who sermonized on Monday, the correct biblical worldview is a deeply conservative one. The speakers repeatedly stated their opposition to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights and inclusion, ideas that were elaborated on in pamphlets passed around the crowd and on three large screens facing the audience. (“Tolerance IS NOT A commandment,” read one poster, propped up in front of the pro-Trump Turning Point USA stall outside the tent.)After Wallnau spoke, Bill Federer, an evangelist who has written more than thirty books weighing in on US history from an anti-communist and rightwing perspective, offered a brief and often intensely inaccurate, intellectual history of the US and Europe. During his talk, Federer dropped references to the villains of his historiography – among them Karl Marx, Fidel Castro, the German philosopher Hegel and, “a little closer to home”, the political theorist of the New Left, Saul Alinsky. The crowd, apparently already versed in Federer’s intellectual universe, groaned and booed when Federer mentioned Alinsky.Federer also railed on “globalists”, tapping into the longstanding antisemitic idea of a shadowy cabal led by wealthy Jewish people who dictate world events.“Globalists,” Federer said, “are giving money to LGBTQ activists to get involved with politics.”It would be up to God-fearing Christians with a biblical worldview to push back against “wokeism”, by influencing what New Apostolic Reformers refer to as the “seven mountains” of society: religion, family, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and, most important at the Courage Tour, government.The stakes, emphasized many of the speakers, couldn’t be overstated.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“What we’re up against aren’t people,” said Mercedes Sparks, speaking on the topic of the secularization of US life. “These are spirits.” Sparks made clear her explicit goal – shared by the other speakers on the tour – of bringing Christianity into politics and government. But despite invoking an intense form of Christian nationalism, the speakers at the Courage Tour repeatedly decried the label as a smear.“This whole idea of Christian nationalism, it’s kind of interesting, right?” said Sparks, who claimed the term amounts to a form of persecution against Christian Americans. “This term that’s being thrown around, that I really think is designed to shame Christians into not voting and not being engaged like any other group that makes up America.”By the end of the day, the speakers had warmed up the crowd for the afternoon’s natural conclusion: a call to get involved.Joshua Caleb, a speaker at the event who described himself as a former Republican opposition researcher, called on attendees to join his organization, The Lion of Judah – a group which, according to its website, aims to unleash “the ROAR of Christian Voters across America” and urges members to “fight the fraud” by becoming election workers. Event organizers handed out flyers provided by the Trump-aligned America First Works and the evangelical group Faith and Freedom, urging pastors to help their congregants get registered to vote before the November election.Not all attendees were prepared for the speakers’ political, and often dire, message.“It’s too intense for me,” said Kahmara Kelly, who is 20 years old and recently joined the Oasis church. “My body just doesn’t like the tension that could come with it, and the conflict, so I just try avoiding politics.” At times, Kelly left the tent for a breath of air.“Not gonna lie, I was ready to just walk away,” Kelly added. More

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      Making US public schools display the Ten Commandments isn’t harmless or neutral | Judith Levine

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      I was 10 in 1962, when the supreme court ruled, in Engel v Vitale, that the officially sanctioned recitation of prayer in public schools violated the constitution’s first amendment, which prohibits the establishment of a state religion.Before that, my school day started with the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by an appeal to God. We rose and pushed our chairs under our desks. Then we stood erect, gazed at the flag sticking out at an angle above the blackboard, and placed our right hands over our hearts. After the pledge, we bowed our heads and said a prayer composed by the New York state board of regents, which held authority over the schools: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country.”As far as I could tell, none of this presented a problem for my classmates, almost every one of them Italian, Greek, or Irish Catholic. Many kids clasped their hands during the prayer.But as the only Jew in the class and the daughter of militantly atheist socialists to boot, saying these words every day was no simple exercise.To my parents, both the pledge and the prayer constituted authoritarian brainwashing. They had reason to suspect oaths of allegiance. Under the anticommunist regime of Senator Joe McCarthy, my father, a high school teacher, was required to sign a loyalty oath disavowing membership in the Communist party. He refused, and, like other government employees on the left, resigned rather than be fired.Although the Pledge of Allegiance contained no such explicit ideology, in 1954 Congress added the words “under God” to the pledge, a rebuke to godless communism. My parents weren’t thrilled by this conflation of patriotism and theism. But even if the US deserved fealty – and my mom and dad were not convinced it did – they objected to children being trained to give it by rote.It was the prayer that really riled them, though. Its authors called it “non-denominational”, but that did not distract the supreme court, or my parents, from the law’s intent: “to further religious beliefs”, said the justices – a clear breach of the separation of church and state. “In this country, it is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite as a part of a religious program carried on by government,” they wrote.I’d been attending civil rights and Ban the Bomb demonstrations since infancy. I was an unswerving non-believer as far back as I could remember. I was proud to be different, because nonconformity meant rejecting lies and standing up for what was right.Still, a kid wants to fit in. It was hard enough being Jewish. Hurtful to endure casual antisemitism (“I hate Jews,” an erstwhile friend announced one day, out of the blue). Uncomfortable to be left alone with the teacher and the one Protestant girl on Wednesday afternoons, when the Catholic kids were excused for “catechism”.It was dicey being an atheist. In third grade, I was consumed by terror after my three best friends convinced me that if I didn’t start believing in God I would end up in hell, which they described in ghastly detail. Anti-communism also threatened my family’s security – I kept that part of me a secret.Mom and Dad assured me that the law allowed me to remain silent or leave the room during the prayer, and they’d support my doing so even if it were illegal. I wanted to. But didn’t they understand that either act would only call attention to my apostasy?I was destined to betray something or someone – America, God, the truth, my family. Or myself. But what elementary school child knows who that is? What child should be compelled to figure it out?Jeff Landry, the Republican governor of Louisiana, recently signed a law requiring that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every classroom. “If you want to respect the rule of law,” he said, “you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.”It was a nod to the “Judeo” in the “Judeo-Christian values” the Christian right is forever invoking – never mind that some people are neither Jews nor Christians, but Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, or none of the above. The Republican state representative Dodie Horton insisted that the law “doesn’t preach a certain religion”, but merely “shows what a moral code we all should live by is”.These statements recall New York’s statement on moral and spiritual training in the schools, in which the “non-denominational” prayer was published three-quarters of a century ago. “We believe that this statement will be subscribed to by all men and women of good will,” the officials wrote, “and we call upon all of them to aid in giving life to our program.”Civil libertarians are challenging the Louisiana law. Its supporters are keen for the challenge, betting that the justices who have begun removing bricks from the constitutional wall of church-state separation will demolish the whole thing this time. Republican politicians in Texas have already indicated they plan to follow Louisiana’s lead.Government-mandated religion is patently unconstitutional. It reproduces the religious coercion that Europeans came to this continent to escape. It is no boon to children’s spiritual or civic education. Rather, it is harmful to children – or some children, as it was to me. And legally and morally, even one is too many.
      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books More

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

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

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

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

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

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