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      Oklahoma voters kick out local official tied to white nationalist groups

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      Voters in Enid, Oklahoma, have decisively kicked out a city council member with a history of ties to white nationalist groups from the elected body almost a year after he was admitted.Judd Blevins lost his position as Enid’s ward 1 council member, according to Oklahoma’s state election board. The move comes months after Blevin was shown to have attended a deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and was later shown to have led an Oklahoma chapter of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa.Blevins denied he was or ever had been a white supremacist, and said he was motivated by “the same issues that got Donald Trump elected in 2016”.A small group of 36 Blevins supporters had won him election last year, but he lost Tuesday’s vote to fellow Republican candidate Cheryl Patterson who had campaigned on a platform of returning Enid to “normalcy” and appears to have defeated Blevins by a 20-point margin, or 268 votes.In his campaign to maintain his seat on the council after a recall election was approved earlier this year, Blevins noted his achievements, including voting for a movie theater in his ward, storm water drainage improvements and the opening of a branch of the Texas Roadhouse steak restaurant chain.He had said voters had elected him “because they believed I was the best candidate who shared their values, their concerns and their hopes for the future of Enid”.An earlier effort to censure Blevins for failing to explain or apologize for aligning himself with white nationalists collapsed after a fellow commissioner, Derwin Norwood, the only Black member of the city governing body, said he accepted Blevins’s statement that he was opposed “to all forms of racial hatred, racial discrimination and any form of government that would suppress the rights that are enshrined in our constitution”.But as the election drew close, some claimed that Blevins’s extremist ties had not been severed.At a public forum last week, his opponent said she believed in “second chances, but my opponent has not been forthcoming in his continued association with members of the white nationalist movement”.After Tuesday’s results rolled in, Connie Vickers, a Democrat who campaigned against Blevins, told NBC News: “We won. Blevins lost. Hate lost.” Even on voting day, Blevins said he had a good chance of retaining his seat. “I’m pretty confident I’ll come out on top,” he told the outlet. “And if not, I fought the good fight.”He said that if he was defeated, he planned to “just go back to private life. Life goes on.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut the race between Blevins and Patterson at times grew heated. He disparaged her as a tool of radical social justice campaigners and compared himself to Donald Trump encircled on all sides by a faction of far-left “perverts”. Someone had tried to kill him by cutting a brake line on his pickup, he claimed.Blevins’s opponent, meanwhile, campaigned on a platform to restore Enid’s sullied reputation. “It was time to step forward,” Patterson said of her candidacy. “It’s time to restore our reputation.”“Enid is not a town that promotes white nationalism or white supremacy in any way,” Patterson was quoted by NBC. “And the people are good.”The Enid election results have yet to be certified, which could happen on Friday. More

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      Politician who attended Charlottesville white-supremacist rally faces recall

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      Voters in the north-west Oklahoma city of Enid are being asked to decide whether a councilmember who attended the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 should be removed from his post.Iraq war veteran Judd Blevins, 42, was elected to Enid’s city council to be the commissioner of its first ward last year. He soon faced an effort by the Enid social justice committee, which claimed Blevins “embraces the same Nazi ideology [the US] defeated almost 80 years ago” during the second world war.Accusations against Blevins levelled by the group are not limited to his attendance in Charlottesville, where neo-Nazi groups protested the removal of a Confederate monument in a demonstration that led to the murder of a counterprotester.He also has been linked to chatroom posts planning the march, and posted hate group propaganda and recruited members to Identity Evropa, a white-supremacist group that has been disbanded.In addition to the murder of counterprotester Heather Heyer, the Charlottesville rally was marked by a state police helicopter crash that killed two.Blevins’ election to office came after a local newspaper, the Enid News & Eagle, ran a story about his ties to white nationalism.“Our initial desire was for either Judd Blevins to address these questions and denounce any sense of neo-Nazism or white supremacy or for Enid’s leadership to step up and get those answers and demand those answers,” the committee’s James Neal said in a petition to remove Blevins.He added: “Neither of those things have occurred, and we are left to take it to the voters, to the people, to address the issue.”In his response, Blevins said: “Regrettably, this fringe group has chosen to continue a smear campaign against me.” He maintained that the effort to remove him would be an added cost to taxpayers.He invoked the wishes of his predecessor, Jerry Allen, who had said: “Mr Blevins deserves the respect of the office, and I hope you give him the opportunity that I was given many years ago.”Blevins noted his achievements, including voting for a movie theater in his ward, storm water drainage improvements and the opening of a branch of the Texas Roadhouse steak restaurant chain. Blevins added that voters had elected him “because they believed I was the best candidate who shared their values, their concerns and their hopes for the future of Enid”.In November, a resolution to censure Blevins for his failure to explain or apologize for aligning himself with white nationalists was brought before the city council. The measure was then dropped after a fellow commissioner, Derwin Norwood, the only Black member of the city governing body, said he accepted Blevins’ statement that he was opposed “to all forms of racial hatred, racial discrimination and any form of government that would suppress the rights that are enshrined in our constitution”.Blevins acknowledged in recent days that he participated in the Charlottesville rally, where white nationalists held a tiki torch-light parade across the University of Virginia campus chanting “Jews will not replace us” and said he had been connected to Identity Evropa.But he repeated that he is “opposed to all forms of racial hate and racial discrimination”.He told a community forum that his involvement in the rally and ties to Identity Evropa were to bring “attention to the same issues” that won Donald Trump the presidency in 2016.Those included, he said, “securing America’s borders, reforming our legal immigration system and, quite frankly, pushing back on … anti-white hatred”.When voters go to the polls on 2 April to decide whether Blevins should continue in office, they could opt to replace him with his opponent, Cheryl Patterson, a grandmother and longtime youth leader at an area church, who is also a Republican.One of the organizers of Blevins’ recall push, Democrat Nancy Presnall, told the Associated Press: “There are people on the opposite side of the political spectrum who are totally together with us on this. This isn’t a Republican-Democrat thing. It’s a Nazi and not-Nazi thing.”However the vote falls, some of the city’s 50,000 residents are concerned about lasting damage to Enid’s reputation. Some residents blamed a decline in newspaper readership and voter apathy, particularly in municipal elections, for allowing a small group of hard-core Blevins supporters to help him with the seat by a margin of 36 votes out of 808 cast.Neal, who is pastor of the Holy Cross Orthodox-Catholic church in Enid, agreed with that assessment, saying: “I think a lot of people in the community, myself included, thought that he had no chance of winning,” Neal said. “The people who support that ideology are very passionate and very dedicated, and up until this point we haven’t been.”The pastor added: “This has been galvanizing and helped us get off our asses, quite frankly, and fight back.” More

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

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

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      North Carolina schools candidate who called for Obama’s death put on the spot

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      The far-right Republican candidate running to oversee public schools in North Carolina decried “extreme agendas that threaten our children’s future”, after being confronted by reporters over tweets in which she called for the executions of Barack Obama and Joe Biden.“Don’t let extreme agendas threaten our children’s future,” Michele Morrow said on social media on Thursday, posting an address in which she said she was “facing the most radical extremist Democrats [that] have ever run for superintendent in the history of North Carolina”.But Morrow, who is running for superintendent of public instruction, also had to respond to a CNN crew who confronted her about posts, unearthed by the same network, in which she advocated violence against leading Democrats.Comments made by Morrow between 2019 and 2021 and reported by CNN included a May 2020 tweet in which Morrow said Obama should be the subject of “a Pay Per View of him in front of a firing squad”, adding: “I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death.”In December 2020, when Biden, as president-elect, said he would ask Americans to wear masks against Covid-19 for 100 days, Morrow – a nurse – wrote: “Never. We need to follow the constitution’s advice and KILL all TRAITORS!!!”Other Democrats that Morrow said should be executed, CNN said, included the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar; the North Carolina governor, Roy Cooper; former New York governor Andrew Cuomo; the former first lady, senator, secretary of state and presidential nominee Hillary Clinton; and the New York senator Chuck Schumer.Morrow also called for the executions of Anthony Fauci, a senior public health adviser to Donald Trump during the Covid pandemic, and Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and vaccination campaigner.She also promoted slogans and claims associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory.Morrow first responded to the report by saying: “According to [CNN], Obama’s drone attacks on hundreds of innocent Muslims in Yemen are not treasonous. The insanity of the media demonstrates the need to teach K-12 students real history and critical thinking skills.”Then, on Thursday, CNN played footage of a parking-lot confrontation between Morrow and its correspondent Shimon Prokupecz.Prokupecz said: “Do you still stand by your comments about former president Barack Obama and that he should be executed, calling for the death of other presidents, do you stand by that?”Morrow repeatedly said: “No comment.” She also said she was “focused on helping the families of North Carolina, for their children to get quality education, for them to be safe, and for us to be sure that our money is going into the classroom rather than bureaucracies”.Pressed about her tweets advocating executions of prominent Democrats, Morrow said: “How do you know those are my words?”Prokupecz said: “Because you tweeted. Are those not your tweets?”Morrow said she only wanted to “discuss education”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn Thursday, in video posted to social media, Morrow complained: “Three CNN reporters from New York City have been on my street for the last 48 hours, watching my every move. They’ve been stalking me and my family.”The North Carolina public school system is responsible for the education of 1.3 million students. Amid proliferating attempts by the Republican right to gain control of public schooling, the North Carolina superintendent race promises to attract national attention.The Democratic candidate is Mo Green, a former county superintendent and executive director of a foundation focusing on public education.Morrow, a “lifelong Christian conservative” who homeschools her children, is endorsed by Moms for Liberty, a rightwing pressure group with a national profile. In the Republican primary, she pulled off an upset by defeating the incumbent superintendent.As reported by local media, Morrow was at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, when Trump supporters attacked Congress in an attempt to keep Trump in power.Speaking to the Raleigh News & Observer, she described seeing rioters attempting to break a window and asking them to stop.“I was frustrated and disgusted when I found people had broken in,” she said. “I felt it was so immature and was not going to solve anything.”Asked about the January 6 Capitol attack, Morrow recently told Axios: “I won this campaign because of my focus on scholastics … We want to focus on math, reading and science. And I think that’s what North Carolina businesses expect for us to do.”In her comments on Thursday, Morrow said the CNN crew who confronted her were “trying to interfere in the 2024 election, just like they did in the 2020 election”. More

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      ‘A campaign for vengeance’: critics warn of a radical second Trump term

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      The US election primary season is effectively over. Conventional wisdom holds that the two major candidates will now pivot towards the centre ground in search of moderate voters. But Donald Trump has never been one for conventional wisdom.Detention camps, mass deportations, capital punishment for drug smugglers, tariffs on imported goods, a purge of the justice department and potential withdrawal from Nato – the Trump policy agenda is radical by any standard including his own, pushing the boundaries set during his first presidential run eight years ago.“In 2016 he was still, in his own mind at least, positioning himself to be beloved by everybody,” said Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist. “That’s why ‘Drain the swamp’ was a more populist, appealing message to all sides of the aisle because everyone on some level felt like Washington’s broken, Washington’s left us behind.“Now you flash-forward to 2024 and we’re getting a much darker version of Donald Trump, one who seems to be driven by imaginary grievances from the 2020 election. There’s nothing unifying about that message in any way; it’s incredibly self-centred. This is a campaign for vengeance. In a lot of ways he is Ahab and Moby Dick is the United States of America.”Eight years ago Trump, seeking to become the first US president with no prior political or military experience, was running with a clean slate. If anything, there was a suspicion that his background as a thrice-married New York celebrity implied some ideological fluidity and latent liberal instincts.But he announced his candidacy in June 2015 by promising to build a wall on the southern border, using xenophobic language to portray Mexicans as “criminals” and “rapists” and promising to “make America great again”.During the campaign he described international trade deals as “a disaster” and called for increased tariffs on imports. He promised sweeping tax cuts and vowed to repeal Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and environmental regulations, describing climate change as “a total hoax”.Trump pledged to nominate supreme court justices opposed to abortion and, in one TV interview, suggested that women who have abortions should be punished. With backing from the National Rifle Association, he opposed gun safety reforms.Overseas, the Republican candidate deployed the slogan “America first”, questioning the Nato alliance while calling for improved relations with Russia. He vowed to destroy the Islamic State and called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”.Trump did implement his first attempt at a Muslim ban almost immediately after taking the Oval Office in January 2017, prompting protests, airport chaos and a long legal battle in the courts. The supreme court ruled in June 2018 that the third iteration of the law could go into full effect, meaning considerable restrictions on Muslim travellers entering the country.Trump failed to overturn the Affordable Care Act, but his presidency was hugely consequential in other ways. His $1.5tn tax cut added to the national debt and, research has shown, helped billionaires more than the working class. The US pulled out of the Paris climate agreement. Trump reshaped the federal judiciary and appointed three supreme court justices who would be instrumental in ending the constitutional right to abortion.He botched the response to a coronavirus pandemic that has now left more than a million Americans dead, initially underplaying the threat and later suggesting that patients might inject bleach as a cure. In the summer of 2020, Trump is said to have wanted the US military to shoot peaceful protesters in Washington during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations.In the aftermath of his 2020 election defeat, and dozens of criminal charges against him, Trump’s extremism has broadened and deepened as he heads into an electoral rematch with Joe Biden. He won the Republican primaries with ease, prompting commentators to warn of “collective amnesia” and “the banality of chaos” as many voters seemingly become numb to his demagoguery.However, an AP VoteCast poll found six in 10 moderate Republicans in New Hampshire and South Carolina were concerned that Trump was too extreme to win a general election.View image in fullscreenFor example, he now argues that presidents should have total immunity and openly threatens the guardrails of American democracy. “I only want to be a dictator for one day,” he told supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire, earlier this year.He has said he would try to strip tens of thousands of career employees of their civil service protections as he seeks to “totally obliterate the deep state”. Given his rage at the FBI and federal prosecutors pursuing criminal cases against him, Trump may target people linked to those prosecutions for retribution.His signature issue, border security, is once again taking centre stage with record levels of migrants caught crossing into the US. In response, he has pledged to launch the biggest deportation effort in American history. This would involve far-reaching roundups and detention camps to hold people while they await removal, the New York Times reported. He has also refused to rule out reinstating a Muslim travel ban and a hugely controversial family separation policy.Trump further wants to build more of the border wall – his first administration built 450 miles (724km) of barriers across the 1,954-mile (3,144km) border, but much of that replaced existing structures. He also wants to end automatic citizenship for children born in the US to immigrants living in the country illegally, an idea he flirted with as president.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFormer Republican congressman Joe Walsh said: “He’s even uglier in his language now. He’s even more cruel in his approach. He’s gotten much more extreme, which you would think means, oh my God, how stupid politically, because he needs people in the middle. But it is big issue and Democrats have never understood how important immigration and the border are and so Trump feels as if he can demagogue it in even more of an extreme fashion.”Trump has called for the death penalty for drug smugglers and those who traffic women and children. In a broader anti-crime push, he says he will require local law enforcement agencies to use divisive policing measures including stop-and-frisk. Last year, he told a rally in Anaheim, California: “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”Under the mantra “Drill, baby, drill”, Trump says that he would increase oil drilling on public lands and offer tax breaks to oil, gas and coal producers. He would again exit the Paris climate accords, end wind subsidies and eliminate environmental regulations.Trump has suggested that he is open to making cuts to the social security and Medicare welfare programmes. But one area in which he has hinted at moderation is abortion, publicly acknowledging that the national ban favoured by some Republicans would be electoral kryptonite, although it was reported last month that he privately expressed support for a 16-week limit with exceptions.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “His campaign has been smart to float the 16-week ban because I think most Americans fall somewhere between 16 and 20 weeks as something they can live with. If he basically says the federal government will not try to do a six-week ban, we’re not going to come after a foetal heartbeat bill – so if you live in a swing state like Michigan that has codified abortion, I’m not coming after you – that is strategically a smart position. But it would be considered a modification to the centre on abortion by Trump.”On foreign policy, Trump claims that even before he is inaugurated, he will have settled the war between Russia and Ukraine. Last week, after visiting the former president at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said Trump promised him that he will end Russia’s war with Ukraine by not giving “a single penny” in aid.The Republican nominee also says he will continue to “fundamentally re-evaluate” Nato’s purpose and mission. At one recent rally, he said he would “encourage” Vladimir Putin’s Russia to attack Nato allies who do not pay their bills. And he says he will institute a system of tariffs of perhaps 10% on most foreign goods.Sometimes it can all seem like campaign bluster unlikely to survive the scrutiny of advisers, Congress or the courts. But whereas Trump’s 2016 win took everyone by surprise, perhaps including him, resulting in a first term marred by infighting and hastily written executive orders, this time there are allies who consider a second term is possible, or even probable, and are ready to hit the ground running.Trump’s campaign and groups such as the Heritage Foundation and America First Policy Institute thinktanks are assembling Project 2025 policy books with detailed plans. Groups of conservative lawyers are sizing up what orders Trump might issue on a second presidency’s first day. With lessons learned, his administration could be even more ruthless and efficient.Lanhee Chen, a fellow in American public policy studies at the Hoover Institution thinktank in Stanford, California, said: “Some of the general framing and themes around what it is he wants to do are relatively consistent. What is different this time around is that there’s more of an architecture and infrastructure supporting a lot of these policy proposals.“If you look at the ecosystem of organisations that’s involved in helping him think through what a second term agenda would look like, it’s much more robust in 2024 than it was in 2016. So I don’t necessarily subscribe to the view that the substance is all that different or somehow more extreme. It’s just there’s a lot more people who are thinking about it. Some of them are authorised; some of them are probably not authorised.”Critics of Trump warn that, while Trump himself has few core beliefs, he would effectively become a vehicle for extremists to push a far-right agenda wildly out of step with the majority of Americans. Reed Galen, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said: “He is an empty vessel for these other people around him who do have very specific policy ideas, most of them rooted in straight authoritarianism or some noxious mix of authoritarianism and Christian dominionism.“He doesn’t care. For all of it, it’s a means to an end. If I win do these people help me or do they hurt me? Do they give me more control? Do they give me less control? Do they give me more access to making sure I’m never going to go to jail, that I can persecute and prosecute my political enemies, that I can make life harder for the media?”Galen added: “In many ways, he is the leader of the torchlight parade but he’s being taken arm in arm and pushed from behind by a bunch of very noxious individuals with what I would call fundamentally anti-democratic and un-American ideology.” More

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      Among the exvangelicals: Sarah McCammon on faith, Trump and leaving the churches behind

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      For Sarah McCammon, “it was really January 6, watching people go into the Capitol with signs that said ‘Jesus saves’ and crosses and Christian symbols” that made her finally decide to write about her evangelical upbringing and her decision to leave it behind.“I wanted to tell my story,” she says.As a national political correspondent for NPR, McCammon tells many stories. Her first book, The Exvangelicals, is not just a work of autobiography. It is also a deeply reported study of an accelerating movement – of younger Americans leaving white evangelical churches.McCammon grew up in the 1980s and 90s in Kansas City, Missouri, then went to Trinity College, an evangelical university in Deerfield, Illinois. Now, she chronicles the development of her own doubts about her religion, its social strictures and political positions, while reporting similar processes experienced by others.For many such “exvangelicals”, things began to come to a head in 2016, when Donald Trump seized the Republican presidential nomination with a harsh message of hatred and division – and evangelical support.McCammon says: “When I was hired by NPR to cover the presidential campaign, I found myself pretty quickly at the intersection of my professional life and my personal background, because I was assigned to the Republican primary. I was happy about that, because I kind of knew that world.It made sense. I figured I’d be covering Jeb Bush, his waltz to the nomination. But it didn’t turn out that way.“So much of the story of the Republican primary became about Donald Trump and white evangelicals. What were they going to do? How were they going to square evangelical teachings with his history and his character?”As McCammon watched, those evangelicals embraced a three-times married icon of greed, a man who boasted of sexually assaulting women while demonising migrants, Muslims and more.For McCammon, evangelical support for Trump was then and is now a matter of simple power politics – about how he offers a way to maintain a position under fire in a changing world – buttressed by the appeal of Trumpian “alternative facts” familiar to churches that have long denied the science of evolution, ignored the role of racism in American history and taken myriad other positions at odds with mainstream thought.View image in fullscreenMcCammon had “this whole connection to this world”, having grown up “in a very evangelical, very conservative family, very politically active”. But “in a lot of ways, I think I got into journalism to get away from some of that. I didn’t want to work in an ideological space, theological or political. I didn’t want to be an advocate, I felt very uncomfortable with the pressure to make everybody believe what I believed. And I did not even feel sure.”Nonetheless, as Trump tightened his grip, McCammon was drawn back in, becoming “fascinated because I was in my mid-30s, I had some distance from my childhood and I felt I knew what questions to ask and anticipated some debates that would come up.“So after 2016, I spent a few years reflecting on where the country was and what had happened: on the evangelical embrace of Trump. And as I thought more about it, I thought maybe there’s something I want to say about this. I wanted to tell my story.”As it turned out, a lot of former evangelicals of McCammon’s generation were telling their stories too.Like other modern social and political labels – Black Lives Matter and MeToo, for example – the term “exvangelicals” first came to prominence as a hashtag around 2016, the year the writer Blake Chastain launched a podcast under the name. Much of McCammon’s research for her book duly took place on social media, tracking down exvangelicals using Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to share and connect.But McCammon’s own story forms the spine of her book. Her parents remain in the church. She and her first husband married in the church. It wasn’t easy to sit down and write.“When I was finishing the draft, I sent [my parents] several key sections,” she says. “Frankly, the sections I thought would be hardest for them. I wanted to do that both as their daughter and as a journalist, because in journalism, we usually give people a chance to respond. And so, they didn’t want to be quoted.”In the finished book, McCammon’s parents are quoted, one striking example a frank exchange of messages with her mother about LGBTQ+ rights.“They’re not thrilled,” she says. “But I did take their feedback into account. They didn’t fundamentally dispute anything, factually …skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I hope it comes through in the book that this is not an attack on my parents. I talk about my childhood because I want to illustrate what it was like to grow up inside the evangelical milieu of that time. And based on my conversations with lots of other people, I don’t think my experiences are unique.”McCammon’s grandfather was surely close to unique: a military veteran and a neurosurgeon who had three children before coming out as gay. At first largely excluded from McCammon’s life, later a central influence, he died as McCammon was writing.She says: “I make him such a central character because he was a central part of my experience of realising that there was a bigger world out there – when he was one of the only non-evangelical or non-Christian people I had any regular contact with, growing up. For my family he was always a source of concern and consternation and worry and prayer but also he was an incredibly accomplished individual, and he was somebody I think my whole family admired and was just proud of – at the same time that we prayed for his soul.“And so that was a crack for me in everything that I was being told.”View image in fullscreenMcCammon still believes, though she does not “use a lot of labels”. Her husband is Jewish. Shaped by her Christian upbringing, she has “slowly opened up my mind, as I’ve gotten older”, through talking to her husband and to people in “the progressive Christian space”. She can “read the Bible when I want to”, and does.Asked how she thinks The Exvangelicals will be received, she says “there are kind of three audiences for this book.“For exvangelicals, or people who have wrestled with their religious background, whatever it may be, I hope that they will feel seen and validated, and feel like there’s some resonance with their story, because I think there is kind of a common experience, even though the details are different.“For those like my husband, who when I met him had very little connection to the evangelical world, and are maybe a little confused by it, or maddened or frustrated by it, I hope the book will provide some insight and maybe even empathy, [helping] to understand how people think, why they think the way they think, and also the fact that evangelicalism is a massive movement and within it there are lots of different people with lots of different experiences.“The most difficult one is evangelicals. I hope those who are still firmly entrenched in the movement will read it with an open mind, and maybe some empathy. I think there are a lot of boomer parents out there, not just mine, who are trying to figure out why their kids have gone astray.“And I don’t think being an exvangelical is ‘going astray’. I think it’s about really trying to live with integrity. In some ways, it’s like: ‘You taught us to seek the truth. And so it’s what a lot of us are doing.’”
      The Exvangelicals is published in the US by St Martin’s Press More

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      in US Politics

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

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

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      A far-right US youth group is ramping up its movement to back election deniers

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      Turning Point USA, a far-right youth group known for its fundraising prowess and for promoting election-conspiracy theories, is mounting a multimillion-dollar mobilization drive via its advocacy arm in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin.Arizona-based TPUSA, a non-profit co-founded in 2012 by then 18-year-old Charlie Kirk that’s become a key ally in Donald Trump’s Maga ecosystem, has launched the drive through Turning Point Action, which has raised tens of millions of dollars and is hiring hundreds of full-time employees in the three states, according to its spokesperson, Andrew Kolvet.While its current fundraising drive is to support the voter-outreach efforts, TP Action is likely to help finance other political advocacy initiatives, including ousting some key Arizona election officials who disputed claims of election fraud in 2020.Dubbed “chase the vote”, the drive is being supplemented by another get-out-the-vote campaign that TP Action is starting with the Christian nationalist and televangelist Lance Wallnau.Together with Wallnau and some other Maga allies like Moms for America, TP Action is planning a “courage tour” in the same three swing states to enlist pastors and their churches in the voter-mobilization drive, which will include booths in churches to register voters.TP Action’s fledgling campaign is aimed at identifying and registering “patriotic” voters, encouraging early voting and getting voters to the polls in November, according to its website. Billed as the “first and most robust conservative ballot-chasing operation”, TP Action’s drive could benefit Trump and Maga-allied candidates in the three states.The new political advocacy drives come after TPUSA and TP Action sparked strong criticism from veteran Republicans, watchdog groups and analysts for backing several hard-right candidates in Arizona who were defeated in 2022, and pushing conspiracies about election fraud, Covid-19 and other issues.“TPUSA has a radicalized worldview that they use as a litmus test” in backing candidates, said Kathy Petsas, a GOP district leader in Phoenix. “When it comes to the general elections that matter, their ROI is lousy.”Notably, four top Arizona candidates in 2022 who were backed by TP Action lost to Democrats, including ex-Fox News anchor Kari Lake in her race for governor, and Mark Finchem in his bid to become secretary of state.“Virtually every major race they touched they lost in the general election in Arizona,” the former Arizona congressman Matt Salmon said. “Everyone Trump endorses they get behind. It’s not clear if it’s the tail wagging the dog, or vice versa.”Kolvet pushed back on criticism of the group’s 2022 results, noting that TP Action only spent $500,000 in total in several states in 2022, but that this year it intends to mount a much better-financed and robust effort, hiring hundreds of full-time employees for its “chase the vote” drive and seeking to raise an eye-popping $108m dollars.View image in fullscreenTP Action’s aggressive fundraising could prove useful in other election-related projects this year that the group is likely to get involved with.Austin Smith, a state legislator and TP Action’s enterprise director, in a tweet this week signaled an effort to oust several key election officials in the state’s largest county, Maricopa, in primaries this July.Smith said “[we] need to clean house in Maricopa county” and cited, among other officers, the county recorder, the Republican lawyer Stephen Richer, who rejected unsubstantiated claims of voting fraud in 2020 and 2022.Kolvet said TP Action to date hasn’t joined the effort, but added that “it’s more likely than not we’ll get involved in some of these races. We’re going to get behind conservative candidates.”One key example: TP Action in February endorsed Trump loyalist Kari Lake’s 2024 Arizona senate campaign.Kirk and TPUSA’s strong fundraising talents could prove helpful to TP Action’s current drive. TPUSA’s annual revenues have soared in recent years with help from leading rightwing donors including the Bradley Impact Fund, which chipped in $7.8m in 2022, the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation and dark-money behemoth Donors Trust.TPUSA has also benefited mightily from hosting several gaudy gatherings at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club and in tony Arizona venues that have drawn some big donors and conservative stars like the representatives Marjorie Taylor Green and Matt Gaetz, and Don Trump Jr.These events and mega-donor checks have helped make TPUSA a fundraising goliath: the group’s revenues soared from $39.8m dollars in 2020 to $55.8m in 2021 and $80.6m in 2022, according to public records.TPUSA now employs 450 people and has broadened its focus from fighting left and “woke” influence on campuses to other culture war fronts by setting up a Turning Point Faith unit that’s hosted large gatherings at churches featuring Wallnau and other Christian nationalist figures.Notwithstanding TPUSA’s fundraising successes, the organization and Kirk have been buffeted by criticism on multiple fronts. Late last year, Kirk ignited a political firestorm in mainstream GOP circles by using his eponymous radio show and an Arizona bash to make incendiary attacks on the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, which recycled old and unverified slurs about King, and disparaged Black airline pilots.During a major TPUSA event in Arizona in December, Kirk opined that “MLK was awful. He’s not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn’t believe.”“Kirk’s cheapening of Martin Luther King’s legacy and disparaging remarks about Black pilots hurt our cause, and don’t help it,” Salmon of Arizona said, adding that Kirk is “one of the strongest voices for factionalism in the party”.Other GOP veterans also voiced harsh critiques.“Kirk chases conspiracies that animate his followers and generate funds,” the long-time GOP consultant Tyler Montague said. “Kirk has used this method to push conspiracies about election fraud, Christian nationalism, anti-immigrant xenophobia, and now he’s opened a new front in racism with his Martin Luther King attacks.”Montague’s comments are in keeping with earlier criticism of Kirk for promoting Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of election fraud in 2020.Kirk and TP Action collaborated with about a dozen other groups to bring busloads of Trump allies to DC to attend Trump’s 6 January March to Save America rally that preceded the mob attack on the Capitol.View image in fullscreenPrior to the rally, Kirk predicted in a tweet it “would likely be one of the largest and most consequential in American history”, but he quickly deleted the tweet after the day’s violence.Independent analysts who study misinformation criticize Kirk’s penchant for pushing conspiracies and false narratives on the Charlie Kirk Show, which runs daily on the evangelical Salem Radio Network.“The Charlie Kirk Show consistently ranks high in the top 100 shows on Apple podcasts, and has been a leader in spreading false and unverified claims,” said Valerie Wirtschafter, a Brookings Institution fellow in AI and emerging technologies.Kirk’s dubious claims range “from the idea that the Covid-19 vaccine was poison, to the belief that the election was stolen in 2020 with fraudulent ballots, to claims that purported Ukrainian bioweapons facilities are somehow linked to Anthony Fauci,” she added.Kirk had company in backing Trump’s election fraud claims, which could pose legal risks to a top TP Action official: Tyler Bowyer, the COO, who also had that title with TPUSA, and who was one of Arizona’s 11 fake electors for Trump in 2020. He and the other fake electors are facing a state attorney general probe.The 11 fake electors filmed themselves signing documents stating they were legitimate electors, even though the then GOP governor, Doug Ducey, had certified Biden’s win by more than 10,000 votes.Bowyer, an Arizona GOP national committeeman who signed paperwork falsely claiming that Trump had won, introduced a resolution at a Republican National Committee meeting that began in late January seeking to get the RNC to indemnify RNC members in multiple states who had been fake electors and who face legal bills due to state probes.Bowyer justified his resolution by writing on X that “we need to send a clear signal that the RNC will defend those who serve as electors against Democratic radicals trying to criminalize civic engagement and process”.The resolution didn’t pass, but to appease Trump backers the RNC pledged to “vocally” back individuals who “lawfully” served as Trump electors in states that Biden actually won.Prosecutors in three states have brought charges against fake electors for sending certificates to Congress falsely stating Trump had won their states, and the justice department has probed fake elector schemes in multiple states in its wide-ranging inquiry into efforts by Trump and his allies to thwart Biden’s election.Serendipitously, right before the RNC meeting, TP Action hosted a two-day summit dubbed Restoring National Confidence, which drew several big-name election deniers including My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, ex-Trump senior White House strategist Steve Bannon and Don Jr.In a tweet, Don Jr wrote: “It was great speaking to all my friends at the Turning Point Restoring National Confidence Summit earlier this week.”The tight ties between TPUSA and Don Jr were underscored in 2020 when TPUSA paid a company owned by Don Jr $333,000 to buy copies of one of his books, which TPUSA gave away as part of a fundraising drive, according to the Associated Press.But watchdog groups are alarmed by TPUSA and TP Action’s record of promoting the ex-president’s bogus claims of election fraud, and candidates in Arizona in 2022 who espoused similar election falsehoods. They’re bracing for more in another heated election year.“They’ve backed conspiracy theorists for high office, mobilized activists around the ‘big lie’ and hired one of Arizona’s fake electors to help run their campaign arm,” said Heather Sawyer, the president of the watchdog group American Oversight.“Since January 6, TPUSA has become an animating force behind the election-denial movement.” More