The Power Worshippers Read online

  For my family

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1. Church and Party in Unionville

  2. Ministering to Power

  3. Inventing Abortion

  4. The Mind of a Warrior

  5. Up from Slavery: The Ideological Origins of Christian Nationalism

  6. The Uses and Abuses of History

  7. The Blitz: Turning the States into Laboratories of Theocracy

  8. Converting the Flock to Data

  9. Proselytizers and Privatizers

  10. Theocracy from the Bench, or How to Establish Religion in the Name of “Religious Liberty”

  11. Controlling Bodies: What “Religious Liberty” Looks Like from the Stretcher

  12. The Global Holy War Comes of Age

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  A Note on the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  This is not a book I could have imagined writing a dozen years ago. When an older couple from another town attempted to set up and lead a Bible club at my daughter’s public elementary school in Southern California in 2009, they might as well have been alien visitors showing up at a beach party. The purpose of the club was to convince children as young as five that they would burn for an eternity if they failed to conform to a strict interpretation of the Christian faith. The club’s organizers were offered free and better space in the evangelical church next door to our school, but they refused it; they insisted on holding the club in the public school because they knew the kids would think the message was coming from the school. They referred to our public school as their “mission field” and our children as “the harvest.” I thought their plan was outrageously inappropriate in our religiously diverse public school. I also thought it was a freak occurrence. They seemed completely out of place in the sunny land of stand-up paddle boarders and open-air wine tastings. In my eyes they came out of the American past, not the future. I was quite wrong about that.

  Sometimes it takes a while to realize what is happening in your own backyard. As I researched the group behind these kindergarten missionaries, I saw that they were part of a national network of clubs. I soon discovered that this network was itself just one of many initiatives to insert reactionary religion into public schools across the country. Then I realized that these initiatives were the fruit of a nationally coordinated effort not merely to convert other people’s children in the classroom but to undermine public education altogether. Belatedly, I understood that the conflict they provoked in our local community—I was hardly the only parent who found their presence in the public school alarming—was not an unintended consequence of their activity. It was of a piece with their plan to destroy confidence in our system of education and make way for a system of religious education more to their liking.

  In 2012, I published what I had learned about the topic in my book The Good News Club. As I was completing that project, I realized I had latched onto only one aspect of a much larger, more important phenomenon in American political culture. The drive to end public education as we know it is just part of a political movement that seeks to transform the defining institutions of democracy in America. This movement pretends to represent the past and stand for old traditions. But in reality it is a creature of present circumstances and is organized around a vision for the future that most Americans would find abhorrent.

  For the past ten years I have been attending conferences, gatherings, and strategy meetings of the activists powering this movement. I have sat down for coffee with “ex-gay” pastors determined to mobilize the “pro-family” vote. I have exchanged emails late into the night with men and women who have dedicated their lives to the goal of refounding the United States according to “biblical law.” I have walked alongside young women as they marched for “life” and followed them into seminar rooms where they receive training in political messaging and strategy. Along the way, I have made some friends and learned something like a new language. I no longer see members of this movement as alien visitors under the California sun. I know them to be very much a part of modern America. And that alarms me all the more.

  Now and then I wish I could go back to those happy afternoons on the California coast, where none of this would have seemed worthy of placing before the public. But I can’t so easily forget what I have learned. Anyone who cares about what is happening in American politics today needs to know about this movement and its people. Their issues—the overwhelming preoccupation with sexual order, the determination to unite the nation around a single religious identity, the conviction that they are fighting for salvation against forces of darkness—have come to define the effort that has transformed the political landscape and shaken the foundations upon which lay our democratic norms and institutions. This is the movement responsible for the election of the forty-fifth president of the United States, and it now determines the future of the Republican Party. It is the change that we have been watching—some with joy, others in disbelief, others in denial. And it isn’t going away anytime soon.

  I don’t doubt that many of the people I have met on my journey mean well. I have seen them showing kindness to friends and strangers with equal conviction, and I know that among them are many generous spirits. But I am convinced that they are dead wrong about the effect of their work on the future of the American republic. They may believe sincerely in the righteousness of their cause and want as much as anyone to build a secure and prosperous America. But that just makes their story—the subject of this book—an American tragedy.

  For too long now America’s Christian nationalist movement has been misunderstood and underestimated. Most Americans continue to see it as a cultural movement centered on a set of social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, preoccupied with symbolic conflicts over monuments and prayers. But the religious right has become more focused and powerful even as it is arguably less representative. It is not a social or cultural movement. It is a political movement, and its ultimate goal is power. It does not seek to add another voice to America’s pluralistic democracy but to replace our foundational democratic principles and institutions with a state grounded on a particular version of Christianity, answering to what some adherents call a “biblical worldview” that also happens to serve the interests of its plutocratic funders and allied political leaders. The movement is unlikely to realize its most extreme visions, but it has already succeeded in degrading our politics and dividing the nation with religious animus. This is not a “culture war.” It is a political war over the future of democracy.

  Political movements are by their nature complex creatures, and this one is more complex than most. It is not organized around any single, central institution. It consists rather of a dense ecosystem of nonprofit, for-profit, religious, and nonreligious media and legal advocacy groups, some relatively permanent, others fleeting. Its leadership cadre includes a number of personally interconnected activists and politicians who often jump from one organization to the next. It derives much of its power and direction from an informal club of funders, a number of them belonging to extended hyper-wealthy families. It took me some time to navigate the sea of acronyms, funding schemes, denominations, and policy and kinship networks, and I will lay out much of this ecosystem in this book. Yet the important thing to understand about the collective effort is not its evident variety but the profound source of its unity. This is a movement that has come together around what its leaders see as absolute truth—and what the rest of us may see as partisan agitation. My aim is to describe the common, often startli
ng political vision that has united this movement.

  Names matter, so I will take a moment here to lay out some of the terms of my investigation. Christian nationalism is not a religious creed but, in my view, a political ideology. It promotes the myth that the American republic was founded as a Christian nation. It asserts that legitimate government rests not on the consent of the governed but on adherence to the doctrines of a specific religious, ethnic, and cultural heritage. It demands that our laws be based not on the reasoned deliberation of our democratic institutions but on particular, idiosyncratic interpretations of the Bible. Its defining fear is that the nation has strayed from the truths that once made it great. Christian nationalism looks backward on a fictionalized history of America’s allegedly Christian founding. It looks forward to a future in which its versions of the Christian religion and its adherents, along with their political allies, enjoy positions of exceptional privilege and power in government and in law.

  Christian nationalism is also a device for mobilizing (and often manipulating) large segments of the population and concentrating power in the hands of a new elite. It does not merely reflect the religious identity it pretends to defend but actively works to construct and promote new varieties of religion for the sake of accumulating power. It actively generates or exploits cultural conflict in order to improve its grip on its target population.

  Other observers may reasonably use terms like “theocracy,” “dominionism,” “fundamentalism,” or “Christian right.” I use those terms where appropriate, but often prefer “Christian nationalism” in referring to the whole, because it both reflects the political character of the movement and because it makes clear its parallels between the American version and comparable political movements around the world and throughout history.

  This is not a book about “evangelicals.” The movement I am describing includes many people who identify as evangelical, but it excludes many evangelicals, too, and it includes conservative representatives of other varieties of Protestant and non-Protestant religion. This movement is a form of nationalism because it purports to derive its legitimacy from its claim to represent a specific identity unique to and representative of the American nation. And I join with others who study the field in calling it “Christian nationalism” in deference to the movement’s own understanding of this national identity, which it sees as inextricably bound up with a particular religion. However, I do not mean to suggest that Christian nationalism is representative of American Christianity as a whole. Indeed, a great many people who identify as Christians oppose the movement, and quite a few even question whether it is authentically Christian in the first place.

  I have been following this movement for over a decade as an investigative reporter and journalist. I remain as impressed with the organization and determination of its leaders as I am alarmed by the widespread lack of awareness of its influence among the general public. The aims of the movement’s leaders have been clear for some time, often openly stated in the forums that they share. Their recent achievements have exceeded reasonable expectations. Yet much of the public continues to believe that little has changed.

  Perhaps the most salient impediment to our understanding of the movement is the notion that Christian nationalism is a “conservative” ideology. The correct word is “radical.” A genuinely conservative movement would seek to preserve institutions of value that have been crafted over centuries of American history. It would prize the integrity of electoral politics, the legitimacy of the judiciary, the importance of public education, and the values of tolerance and mutual respect that have sustained our pluralistic society even as others have been torn apart by sectarian conflict. Christian nationalism pretends to work toward the revival of “traditional values” yet its values contradict the long-established principles and norms of our democracy. It has no interest in securing the legitimacy of the Supreme Court; it will happily steal seats and pack the Court as long as it gets the rulings it wants. It cheers along voter suppression and gerrymandering schemes that allow Republicans to maintain disproportionate legislative control. It collaborates with international leaders who seek to undermine the United States’ traditional alliances and the postwar world order built up over the past seven decades. And it claims to defend “the family,” but treats so many American families with contempt.

  The widespread misunderstanding of Christian nationalism stems in large part from the failure to distinguish between the leaders of the movement and its followers. The foot soldiers of the movement—the many millions of churchgoers who dutifully cast their votes for the movement’s favored politicians, who populate its marches and flood its coffers with small-dollar donations—are the root source of its political strength. But they are not the source of its ideas.

  The rank and file come to the movement with a variety of concerns, including questions about life’s deeper meaning, a love and appreciation of God and Scripture, ethnic and family solidarity, the hope of community and friendship, and a desire to mark life’s most significant passages or express feelings of joy and sorrow. They also come with a longing for certainty in an uncertain world. Against a backdrop of escalating economic inequality, deindustrialization, rapid technological change, and climate instability, many people, on all points of the economic spectrum, feel that the world has entered a state of disorder. The movement gives them confidence, an identity, and the feeling that their position in the world is safe.

  Yet the price of certainty is often the surrendering of one’s political will to those who claim to offer refuge from the tempest of modern life. The leaders of the movement have demonstrated real savvy in satisfying some of the emotional concerns of their followers, but they have little intention of giving them a voice in where the movement is going. I can still hear the words of one activist I met along the way. When I asked her if the anti-democratic aspects of the movement ever bothered her, she replied, “The Bible tells us that we don’t need to worry about anything.”

  The Christian nationalist movement is not a grassroots movement. Understanding its appeal to a broad mass of American voters is necessary in explaining its strength but is not sufficient in explaining the movement’s direction. It is a means through which a small number of people—quite a few of them residing in the Washington, D.C., area—harness the passions, resentments, and insecurities of a large and diverse population in their own quest for power. The leaders of the movement have quite consciously reframed the Christian religion itself to suit their political objectives and then promoted this new reactionary religion as widely as possible, thus turning citizens into congregants and congregants into voters.

  From the perspective of the movement’s leadership, vast numbers of America’s conservative churches have been converted into the loyal cells of a shadow political party. Here, too, there is a widespread misunderstanding of the way Christian nationalism works. Its greatest asset is its national infrastructure, and that infrastructure consists not only of organizations uniting and coordinating its leadership, and a burgeoning far-right media, but also in large part the nation’s conservative houses of worship. The churches may be fragmented in a variety of denominations and theologies, but Christian nationalist leaders have had considerable success in uniting them around their political vision and mobilizing them to get out the vote for their chosen candidates. Movement leaders understand very well that this access to conservative Christians through their churches is a key source of their power, and for this reason they are committed to overturning regulatory, legal, or constitutional restrictions on the political activity of churches.

  A related source of misunderstanding is the comforting yet unfounded presumption that America’s two-party system has survived intact the rise of the religious right as a political force. The conventional wisdom holds that the differences between America’s two parties, now as before, amount to differences over questions of domestic and foreign policy, and that politics is just the art of give-and-take between the two collections of
interests and perspectives they represent. Yet the fundamental difference today is that one party is now beholden to a movement that does not appear to have much respect for representative democracy. Forty years ago, when both sides of certain cultural issues could be found in either party, it made sense to speak of the religious right as a social movement that cut across the partisan divide. Today it makes more sense to regard the Republican party as a host vehicle for a radical movement that denies that the other party has any legitimate claim to political power.

  True, there are some Republicans concerned primarily with a conservative economic agenda and willing to practice the traditional politics of compromise and sharing of power. But few Republican politicians can achieve influence without effectively acting as agents for Christian nationalism, and almost no Democratic leaders can realistically cede enough ground to earn the movement’s support.

  Many critics of the Republican party today trace its present corruption to the influence of big money. This explanation is true enough yet incomplete. In the age of Trump, the party’s resolute rejection of the democratic and constitutional norms that it once at least pretended to champion would not have been possible without the prior success of Christian nationalism in training millions of supporters to embrace identity-based, authoritarian rule over pluralistic, democratic processes. The roots of the present crisis in the American political party system lie at the juncture of money and religion.

  In recent years the movement has come to depend critically on the wealth of a growing subset of America’s plutocratic class. Without the DeVos/Prince clan, the Bradley Foundation, Howard Ahmanson Jr., the foundations of the late Richard Scaife, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynn and Foster Friess Family Foundation, the Maclellan Foundation, Dan and Farris Wilks, the Green family, and a number of other major funders I will discuss in this book—to say nothing of the donor-advised funds such as the National Christian Foundation, which channel hundreds of millions of dollars in annual donations anonymously, and the massive flow of right-wing dark money targeting the courts—the movement would not be what it is today. At the same time, the movement has developed a large-scale apparatus for raising funds from millions of small donors. Indeed, the Christian right rose to prominence through aggressive direct-marketing operations, and much of its daily activity can be understood as part of an effort to milk its base of supporters.