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A new poll gives us insight into a troubling anti-American movement

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Washington Post
By Jennifer Rubin

When you hear the phrase “Christian nationalists,” you might think of antiabortion conservatives who are upset about the phrase “Happy Holidays” and embrace a vaguely “America First” way of thinking. But according to a Public Religion Research Institute-Brookings Institution poll released Wednesday, Christian nationalists in fact harbor a set of extreme beliefs at odds with pluralistic democracy. The findings will alarm you.

“Christian nationalism is a new term for a worldview that has been with us since the founding of our country — the idea that America is destined to be a promised land for European Christians,” PRRI president and founder Robert P. Jones explained in a news release on the survey of more than 6,000 Americans. “While most Americans today embrace pluralism and reject this anti-democratic claim, majorities of white evangelical Protestants and Republicans remain animated by this vision of a white Christian America.

A Christian Nation? Understanding the Threat of Christian Nationalism to American Democracy and Culture

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The rising influence of Christian nationalism in some segments of American politics poses a major threat to the health of our democracy. Increasingly, the major battle lines of the culture war are being drawn between a right animated by a Christian nationalist worldview and Americans who embrace the country’s growing racial and religious diversity. This new PRRI/Brookings survey of more than 6,000 Americans takes a closer look at the underpinnings of Christian nationalism, providing new measures to estimate the proportion of Americans who adhere to and reject Christian nationalist ideology. The survey also examines how Christian nationalist views intersect with white identity, anti-Black sentiment, support of patriarchy, antisemitism, anti-Muslim sentiments, anti-immigrant attitudes, authoritarianism, and support for violence. Additionally, the survey explores the influence Christian nationalism has within our two primary political parties and major religious subgroups and what this reveals about the state of American democracy and the health of our society.

To measure Christian nationalism, the PRRI/Brookings Christian Nationalism Survey included a battery of five questions about the relationship between Christianity, American identity, and the U.S. government. Respondents were asked whether they completely agree, mostly agree, mostly disagree, or completely disagree with each of the following statements:

  • The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.
  • U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.
  • If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.
  • Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.
  • God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.

 

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The Mundane History of White Christian Nationalism

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Religion and Politics

By Neil J. Young | February 14, 2023

Of all the songs I loved singing as a child at my church’s Vacation Bible School every summer, my favorite was one called, “I’m in the Lord’s Army.”

We sang the lyrics—“I may never march in the infantry, ride in the cavalry, shoot the artillery. I may never fly o’er the enemy, but I’m in the Lord’s army, yes, sir!”—to what sounded like a rousing military parade song. But the real fun came from the hand and body motions we got to perform as we belted the tune out in our pews, movements where we pretended to be valiantly marching, riding, shooting, soaring, and, finally, saluting when we yelled out the “yes, sir” line at the top of our lungs.

What had been an almost forgotten song—and an equally distant memory—came unexpectedly rushing back to me as I was reading Bradley Onishi’s new book, Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—and What Comes Next. Onishi, a religious studies scholar and co-host of the popular podcast, “Straight White American Jesus,” is a former evangelical minister who no longer identifies as a Christian. Watching the horrific events of the January 6 Capitol insurrection on his television in 2021, however, Onishi found himself confronted by an unrelenting thought: “I could have been there.”

Onishi grew up in what was the conservative hotbed of Orange County, California, and became an evangelical Christian as a teenager in the 1990s, a conversion that, he writes, was “extreme” and that ushered him into a zealous life of religious revivals, purity pledges, anti-abortion pamphleteering, and earnest, if frantic, efforts to convert others. Reflecting back on his past and mindful that some of those he once worshipped alongside were among the violent January 6 rioters who breached the U.S. Capitol—and that far many more of his former fellow churchgoers supported the events of January 6—Onishi is haunted by the idea that, had he not left the faith while in graduate school, he could have been one of them, another righteous crusader who believed he was saving the nation by any means necessary.

In Preparing for War, Onishi situates memories of his own religious fervor within the “extremist history,” as the book’s subtitle states, of white Christian nationalism from the 1950s to today. Yet what comes alive in Onishi’s absorbing and often disturbing work is the simple ordinariness and ubiquity of a lot of what he explores. How so much of what often passes as regular—and unremarkable—features of American life and culture have also helped cultivate the context in which a radical white Christian nationalism could take hold.

Onishi is right to trace the history of religio-political extremism from the John Birch Society’s rabid anti-communism in the 1950s through the Moral Majority’s anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ backlash in the 1980s to the recent sight of MAGA vigilantes attacking the Capitol while holding “Jesus Is My Savior—Trump Is My President” flags. Onishi’s most significant and startling contribution, though, to the growing body of works on Christian nationalism is in how he portrays an American past where the seemingly anodyne—from bland, soulless suburbs to “See You at the Pole” school prayer events to the persistence of nostalgia—has facilitated a rising acceptance of and even longing for political authoritarianism in the United States in the guise of restoring the nation to its “proper” heritage where white Christian men sit in authority. It’s this understated revelation of Preparing for War that had me suddenly recalling the drumbeats of “I’m in the Lord’s Army” and pondering how a bunch of white suburban kids singing a militaristic hymn almost 40 years ago in a different Orange County—in my case, Florida—may have foreshadowed the army of January 6 insurgents, complete with crosses and “Jesus Saves” banners.

Onishi rightly distinguishes white Christian nationalism from white evangelicalism, noting that many Catholics and Mormons subscribe to white Christian nationalist ideas. Onishi also points out that a significant number of Christian nationalists do not attend church, have meager religious literacy, and often live lives not in keeping with conservative evangelical theology. Some evangelical thought leaders have especially glommed onto this fact, eager to show white Christian nationalism as a fringe and areligious peculiarity, thus rescuing “pure” evangelicalism from the mess. (Such insistence feels similar to those who fixated on some of the data that showed evangelicals with lower church attendance rates were stronger Trump supporters, despite the more important statistic that, overall, self-identified white evangelicals, whatever their churchgoing habits, gave the thrice-married casino magnate more than 80 percent of their vote in two different elections.) Onishi contends, however, that it is evangelicalism’s “apocalyptic cosmology” that has shaped the notions of those, religious and secular alike, who believe the United States is on the “precipice of catastrophic decline” and has provided them with a righteous justification to “save the nation” from the ravages of demographic change and progressive transformation, especially in regard to issues of sexuality and gender.

Onishi’s nod to the non-churchgoing minority within the white Christian nationalist camp provides a potentially rich subject matter for future scholars to investigate more deeply. Especially in a time of declining church attendance rates and as Christian-affiliated Americans approach a minority status over the coming decades, understanding non-religious Americans’ use of white Christian nationalism as a form of political expression may help us rethink the secularization thesis for the United States and shift our ideas about religious affiliation in a period of institutional freefall.

At the same time, Onishi loses some of the subtle complicatedness of his own narrative when he contends, several times, that January 6 was the next “logical step” of white Christian nationalism. It’s an argument that threatens to reduce the big and sprawling history he has compellingly laid out into a sort of secularized form of the deterministic theology many Christians hold of how history unfurls. It also fails to account for the many other factors that played into that violent day.

This quibble with Onishi’s argument doesn’t discount the important case he makes in Preparing for War, nor does it detract from his urgent contention that we must understand what led to the January 6 attack to better prepare for what is coming. January 6, Onishi writes, “was the first battle in MAGA Nation’s war on American democracy.” Anyone watching the headlines of the last two years, not least the ongoing collapse of the GOP into full-scale extremism, should recognize this.

Yet, one might easily grow hopeless wondering what sort of counterforce can possibly stand up to the powerful movement Onishi is spotlighting. At the conclusion of his book, Onishi writes about the emergence of the “American Redoubt,” the name given to the region of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and the eastern parts of Oregon and Washington, where thousands of white Christian conservatives have begun moving at an accelerating rate. (Many of those who are relocating are Californians, including from Orange County where demographic shifts have made white Christian conservatives there a minority.) Journalists have reported on this development in recent years, but their often-quizzical coverage has tended to treat this phenomenon, even in our age of fracture and violence, as an outlier: a place of COVID-denying wackos and survivalist separatists who are building their alternative theocratic society in the middle of nowhere.

Onishi sees something different in the American Redoubt: not the early signs of a breakaway republic but instead the continuation of a history seven decades in the making. Smartly, Onishi connects this current “geographical consolidation” to the earlier mass migration of white Southerners into Southern California in the mid-twentieth century, a resettling that turned Orange County into the conservative stronghold from which a powerful religious right emerged to take over the Republican Party and transform the nation.

“Only this time,” Onishi writes, “the goal is not to take control of a political party. The goal is to prepare for the collapse of the United States and the chance to rebuild a theocratic state.”

“Why didn’t we see this coming?” Onishi asks. It’s a good question, especially considering how much of the history he sketches has been thoroughly documented by a score of scholars of white evangelicalism and of the Christian right for more than two decades now. Yet these scholars, myself included, may have been too generous in our treatment of the politics of conservative Christianity, too eager to find a place for culture war extremists calling for the nation’s destruction within the mainstream of American politics, and too willing to interpret all their talk of warfare, righteous soldiers, and “good and evil” as spiritual metaphors rather than literal statements of reality and messianic calls to action. As political violence escalates and as a Christo-fascist worldview increasingly dominates the American right, we might heed Onishi’s admonition to revisit this history with an eye attuned to its violent and extremist impulses.

Neil J. Young is the author of We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics and co-host of the history podcast, “Past Present.”

Roberto Clemente book removed from Florida public schools.

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COMMENT ABOUT THIS ARTICLE:
There is movement in several states to censor books that do not agree with Christian Nationalism ideology. This article is about that movement in Florida. These actions are in keeping with the Seven Mountain mandate to control eduction.
Paul Borene

 

(nbcnews.com)

By Nicole Acevedo

A book about late Afro-Puerto Rican MLB legend Roberto Clemente can’t be found in the shelves of public school libraries in Florida’s Duval County these days.

“Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates” by Jonah Winter and Raúl Colón — and other books about Latino figures such as the late Afro-Cuban salsa singer Celia Cruz and Justice Sonia Sotomayor — are among the more than 1 million titles that have been “covered or stored and paused for student use” at the Duval County Public Schools District, according to Chief Academic Officer Paula Renfro.

School officials are in the process of determining if such books comply with state laws and can be included in school libraries.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed laws last year that require schools to rely on certified media specialists to approve which books can be integrated into classrooms. Guidance on how that would be implemented was provided to schools in December.

Books must align with state standards such as not teach K-3 students about gender identity and sexual orientation; not teach critical race theory, which examines systemic racism in American society, in public grade schools; and not include references to pornography and discrimination, according to the school district.

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Celebrating Religious Freedom Day by Taking Back the Revolutionary Meaning of ‘Religious Freedom’

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RELIGION DISPATCHES
BY  

Religious freedom has been at the center of American history since the founding. (And by the founding, I mean of the United States of America, not including the roughly century-and-a-half of colonial era.) There’s a story of religious freedom in the U.S. that isn’t widely or well understood—and is fiercely contested by the Christian Right.

Religious freedom was and is a revolutionary and liberatory concept that can disrupt entangled religious and political establishments and corrupt alliances of convenience. On Religious Freedom Day (January 16th) some will praise faith, and maybe the Founding Fathers, and some will call for interfaith understanding. Nothing wrong with all that. But if they fail to discuss the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which the day is intended to commemorate, they will have muffed the meaning and power of the moment.

There are many roots of religious freedom, but the story of religious freedom as a constitutional right in the US begins with the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which was originally drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1777 and shepherded through the Virginia legislature by James Madison in 1786. The following year, Madison served as the lead author of the Constitution, and in 1789, as the lead author of the First Amendment. Thus, the Virginia Statute is rightly understood to be the clearest statement of the intentions of the Framers in matters of the right relationship between the individual, religion, and government.

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Not Content with Right to Opt Out, Conservative Christians Ask Courts to Eliminate Rights of Others and they are Winning

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RELIGION DISPATCHES
ELIZABETH REINER PLATT JANUARY 9, 2023

Last week, the Texas Tribune reported that 156 federally-funded family planning programs in Texas must now require parental consent in order to provide teen patients with contraceptive services. Why? Because one Texas parent wants to raise his daughters “in accordance with Christian teaching on matters of sexuality,” something he claims is not possible so long as anyone under the age of 18 has access to contraception.

How can a single faith practitioner’s right to “religious liberty” allow them to stymie an entire government program that provides healthcare to millions? This alarming prospect is now at issue, not just in the family planning case mentioned above, but in multiple lawsuits in which plaintiffs argue that the mere existence of government programs they oppose wrongfully burdens their religious exercise.

In most religious liberty lawsuits, it’s extremely clear when the government is placing a “substantial burden” (the legal term of art in these cases) on religious activity. Policies that bar a Sikh soldier from wearing a turban, require a Seventh Day Adventist government employee to work on Saturdays, or deny a Jewish or Muslim person access to kosher or halal food in prison have been extensively litigated. If and when such plaintiffs win their claim, they gain a right to personal accommodations that allow them to practice their faith—for example, an individual right to wear a turban or receive kosher food.

Seizing the opportunity to vastly expand religious rights in an era when the courts are increasingly sympathetic toward claims brought by conservative Christians, we’re now seeing plaintiffs argue that the existence of a government social or health program that benefits the public at large violates their religious exercise. Rather than requesting personal religious exemptions from government policies, they are demanding that entire government systems be altered or shut down to accommodate their religious beliefs.

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Who are the Christian nationalists? A taxonomy for the post-Jan. 6 world

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This article is the last in a series on Christian nationalism supported by the Pulitzer Center.

January 6, 2023 By 

(RNS) — “Christian nationalist” once summoned images of fiery extremists — stark racists concerned with keeping immigrants out of the United States or politicians who argued that the Ten Commandments ought to coexist in law with the Constitution. Then came Jan. 6, and suddenly the term became a culture-war acid test: One member of Congress began selling “Proud Christian Nationalist” T-shirts, while First Baptist Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress said if opposing abortion, transgender rights and illegal immigration made him a Christian nationalist, “count me in.”

For the record, sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry describe Christian nationalism as “a cultural framework that blurs distinctions between Christian identity and American identity, viewing the two as closely related and seeking to enhance and preserve their union.” But not everyone who meets the definition claims the moniker “Christian nationalist,” and some who do are only barely recognizable as traditional Christians.

Here are six loose networks of faith leaders and followers who fit some part of the definition:

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Chirstian Right Bill Mill, Project Blitz, Hasn’t Gone Away, It’s Just Gotten More Secretive

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Religion Dispatches
Frederick Clarkson

In the Fall of 2019, the secretive Christian Right state legislative campaign, Project Blitz, became even more of a secret. When RD first reported on Project Blitz in April 2018 the website featured their annual state legislative playbook of model bills and talking points. They also named the members of the State Legislative Prayer Caucuses that drew on the model bills for their own legislation. But in the face of public scrutiny, RD’s revelation of a second playbook  and the unwanted media attention that followed our reports (from The New York Times, Salon, The Guardian, Religion News Service, USA Today, Church & State magazine and many more) the sponsoring Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation (CPCF) scrubbed everything under the rubric of Project Blitz from their site. One Ohio state senator went so far as to lie to a reporter about even knowing about Project Blitz—despite being the state’s co-chair.

The Project Blitz playbooks for the state legislative sessions of 2019-2020 (PDF) and 2020-21 (PDF) remained hidden—until now. They’ve added some new bills—including a dramatic attack on the integrity of public libraries—but the Dominionism-driven Christian nationalist agenda remains the same. The playbooks advise legislators to cloak their religious mission in the guise of more secular intentions and they’ve renamed several bills to make them sound more appealing.

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What is Christian Nationalism?

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In a Christian Chronicle Q&A, scholars discuss the trend and its impact on Churches of Christ. Bobby Ross Jr. Editor-in-Chief
Since President Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Christian nationalism has been a subject of much discussion and debate.

The Washington Post reported this week that Trump’s four years in office have sparked a rise of “Patriot Churches.”

To help readers better understand the subject, The Christian Chronicle asked three scholars to weigh in. Each responded to the same questions independently. The scholars are:

• Jeremie Beller serves as congregational minister for the Wilshire Church of Christ in Oklahoma City and as an adjunct professor of communication for Oklahoma Christian University. His Ph.D. dissertation focused on religion and racism.

• Tanya Smith Brice serves as dean of the College of Professional Studies at Bowie State University in Maryland. She is the author of “Reconciliation Reconsidered: Advancing the National Conversation on Race in Churches of Christ.”

• Lee Camp serves as professor of theology and ethics at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tenn. He is the author of “Scandalous Witness: A Little Political Manifesto for Christians.”

Question: What is Christian nationalism?

Beller: Christian nationalism is the intertwining of the Kingdom of God with the kingdoms of men. In the American context, it is often displayed by describing America through language reserved for the Kingdom of God.

For instance, to speak of America as a “city on a hill” borrows from Jesus’ image for God’s kingdom. The marriage between patriotism and righteousness further blurs the line between the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of the world.

Brice: It is a form of civil religion that places one’s earthly citizenship above one’s obligation as a follower of Christ.

Camp: It’s a perversion of Christian eschatology. It perverts the gospel in at least two ways:

• One, by falsely giving to a nation-state a Messianic identity. The nation-state, and the interests of the nation-state, are seen as the primary mechanism for “saving” human history. Thomas Jefferson called the United States “the world’s best hope.” Abraham Lincoln said that the unity of the U.S. and its form of government is “the last best hope of earth.”

Woodrow Wilson said that he believed that he would live to see the day in which America would reach all its hopes and would say, “At last, the world knows America as the savior of the world!” Donald Trump said, “We must keep America first in our hearts. … And we must always keep faith in America’s destiny — that one nation, under God, must be the hope and the promise and the light and the glory among all the nations of the world!” All of these are classic examples of the Messianic pretense which characterizes nationalism.

• Two, by embracing Satan’s third temptation of Christ: to take up the way of might and “greatness” as the way of saving the world.

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The Seven Mountain Dominion Strategy

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The ‘Seven Mountains’ prophecy

Jamie Seidel
 December 20, 2018 
News Corp Australia Network

There’s a plan to seize control of every aspect of the US; government, law and media. And it’s based on the bible’s Book of Revelation.

The Dark Ages have a certain appeal to some religious people. It was a time when good and evil was white and black. Church overruled state. And the word of priests was as law. 

It was when the Roman Catholic church effectively ruled the whole of the Western world. Under idealized eyes, it controlled every aspect of civil life. Parish priests held sway over small towns and communities. Cardinals and Popes could bend kings and nobles to their will. In reality, things rarely worked out that way. But it was the accepted doctrine of the times.

Now, some evangelical groups want that all-encompassing power back. They call themselves Dominionists. Their declared goal is to take control of society. And the US government is in its sights. It wants ‘One nation, under God’ … their god.

Only once this is achieved, followers believe, will Jesus return in the Second Coming, initiating the End of Days and the prophecies of the Book of Revelation. It’s a cross-denominational movement which appears to have been born among television and radio evangelists in the 1970s. They cite one passage, Genesis 1:28, as justification:

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

It is interpreted as being God’s mandate for his followers to control every aspect of life.

Now new apostles are preaching a message which puts church above state, and their interpretation of Christian lore above secular law. And they have a plan to have this enforced.

SEVEN HEADS ARE SEVEN MOUNTAINS
The argument goes something like this: The long-awaited Second Coming has not yet happened as the criteria outlined in the Bible have yet to be met. Christians have not been taking part in their communities. Instead, they’ve been huddled in their own churches. This has exposed the very pillars of society susceptible to the influence of the devil.

It’s up to believers to change this, they argue, by seizing control of key institutions.

Some evangelical movements believe this is demanded by prophecy. They argue the Bible verses of Isiah 2:2-3 instruct their followers to take control:

And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it. Many people shall come and say, “Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,

To the house of the God of Jacob; He will teach us His ways, And we shall walk in His paths.”

It argues there are seven such ‘mountains of the Lord’. The key to this thinking is Revelation 17:1-18, which hinges on verse 9:

And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains

The prophetic passage talks of an evil woman ‘drunken with the blood of the saints’ who rides a beast of ‘seven heads and 10 horns’. It ends telling how this beast will be turned against the woman, destroying her. Most theologians see the reference to ‘seven’ as being Rome — famously built upon seven hills.

But some evangelicals argue this beast — and its seven heads that are mountains — represents the structure of society itself. “So this is now called the Seven Mountain Prophecy,” says advocate David Barton. “If you’re going to establish God’s kingdom, you’ve got to have these seven mountains, and again that’s family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business and government.”

  • RELIGION: “With a plethora of categorized religions around the world, it’s the Church’s responsibility to reach the lost with the love and Gospel of Jesus Christ, and expand the Kingdom in ministerial efforts, both nationally and internationally.”
  • FAMILY: “God is calling fathers and mothers (both spiritual and biological) to bring order to the chaos that the enemy has unleashed against families in America.”
  • EDUCATION: “A reintroduction of biblical truth and Bible-centric values is the key to renewal and restoration in America’s failing educational system.”
  • GOVERNMENT: “We must see a shift in this arena in order to preserve the Christian heritage that America was founded upon. The goal is to put in place righteous political leaders that will positively affect all aspects of government.”
  • MEDIA:  “The arts and entertainment industries wield significant influence. The body of Christ needs powerful, righteous men and women who are not afraid to take their God-given talent into the arts and entertainment arenas.”
  • BUSINESS: “We believe it is the Lord’s will to make his people prosperous and that He desires for His Church to use its wealth to finance the work of Kingdom expansion. Simply put: Prosperity with a purpose.”

 

SEVEN MOUNTAINS MANDATE
White Christian evangelicals in the United States remain a powerful voting bloc. Though they are a diminishing group. In the 1990s, they represented about 27 per cent of the total US population, Now, they amount to some 15 per cent. And that loss of prominence has proved galvanizing.

Dominionist thinking is becoming mainstream among this minority group, and Seven Mountains is regarded by many as a road-map to ‘regain’ control of the country.

The idea first emerged In 1975 when Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade, and Loren Cunningham, founder of Youth With a Mission (YWAM), had what they describe as a miraculous revelation. Both had been given a dream by God, they declared. Its message revealed the need to dominate the Seven Mountains (or Spheres) of influence.

Since then, the theology has been pushed into political circles through media events, youth movements and campaign activities. Central to its teachings is that members must build the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. And that starts with turning the United States into a Christian state. 

The movement first met with some sympathy under the Presidency of Ronald Reagan.

At the 1980 Republican National Convention, attended by some 17,000 evangelical Christians, Ronald Reagan famously declared: “I know you can’t endorse me, but … I want you to know I endorse you and what you are doing.” Reagan won in a landslide, primarily attributed to a ‘Moral Majority’. And his governance has since been called ‘the God strategy’ after evangelicals were appointed as Secretary of the Interior, Surgeon General and to the Department of Education.

But, under the Bush Republican presidencies, evangelical influence waned. The Seven Mountains movement’s leaders felt they had been betrayed. Despite encouraging words during their campaigns, Presidents George H. Bush and George W. Bush just did not follow up with the desired appointments. President Trump, however, represents a new opportunity: an opportunity that has been delivering.

THE KING CYRUS FACTOR
The Seven Mountains movement experienced something of a revival in the early 2000s under evangelist Lance P. Wallnau and political activist David Barton. Wallnau is one of the theology’s most vocal prophets. He is a forceful advocate of the need to ‘go and make disciples of all nations’.

But, now that only a few remote tribes in South America’s Amazon and the Bay of Bengal’s the Andaman Islands have not been ministered to, Wallnau is endorsing a broader interpretation of the passage. He sees it as an instruction to inject his version of Christianity into the way societies are run. And President Trump is the vessel for such change.

Wallnau has declared Trump has a ‘Cyrus anointing’ upon him — a reference to the ancient Persian King Cyrus who, despite being no friend of Israel, defeated the Babylonians and set that nation free. Cyrus was therefore blessed by God for doing his work.

In the modern context, the ‘anointing’ of Trump means evangelical Christians can also set their religion ‘free’. To that end, Wallnau boasted to fellow evangelical leader David Barton that he had ‘ninja sheep’ working with activists, politicians — and members of Donald Trump’s presidential transition team.

OF ‘NINJA SHEEP’ AND ‘UNDERGROUND’ AGENTS
Wallnau asserts Satan is in control of academia, entertainment, politics and business: “Our real enemies are the ones that are shaping laws, shaping media, and shaping the next generation.” To fight them, he’s promoting what he calls the ‘7M Underground’ — an affiliation of producers, directors, attorneys, politicians and economists.

“We should be moving to the top of these mountains,” Wallnau said. “Christians are called to go into proximity to the gates of hell. That’s why they’re showing up in government. They should be showing up in journalism …

“I’m working with believers that I call ninja sheep — those are believers that are actual believers but have to maintain discretion with their public profile. “And what we want to do is we want to reinstall a culture that honours God and that revives again a morality that’s essential to the survival of America as a Christian-influenced nation.

“So the underground is where we meet and we basically have now mobilized nationwide believers to intercede, pray and be informed and then show up at the decisive flashpoints in culture where there can be a presence behind what Trump’s assignment is. So it’s pretty exciting.”

Barton seized upon the Seven Mountains as the logical outcome of his controversial (but incorrect) belief that the Founding Fathers of the United States were all born-again Christians. This means, he says, that the Constitution should be interpreted through Christian — not secular — eyes. This can be done through the Seven Mountains.

“ … those are the seven areas you have to have, and if you can have those seven areas, you can shape and control whatever takes place in nations, continents, and even the world,” Barton said in a 2011 radio interview. “Now that’s what we believed all along if you got to get involved in this stuff. Jesus said ‘you occupy ‘til I come.’ We don’t care when he comes, that’s up to him. What we’re supposed to do is take the culture in the meantime, and you got to get involved in these seven areas.”

‘TAKE BACK THE COUNTRY FOR CHRIST’
Separation of Church and State is enshrined in the US Constitution. Though this has always been an intense arena of dispute. It’s intended to prevent the repeat of the crises many fled during the founding of the United States: combinations of individual churches and states that oppressed other faiths.

The Constitution itself specifies “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States”. The First Amendment reads: 

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …”

Seven Mountains and Dominionist evangelicals don’t see this as a problem. The United States is a Christian country, founded by Christians, they argue, so the Constitution should be interpreted through a Christian perspective. The Country’s motto is ‘In God We Trust’, after all.

“We realized that it only takes 3-5 percent of a leadership operating at the top of a cultural mountain to shift the culture’s view of an issue,” the promotional page of an upcoming 7 Mountains ‘International Culture Shapers Summit’ declares. http://www.7culturalmountains.org/

Under Trump, they’ve been getting more than that. His Vice President, Michael Pence, is an outspoken evangelical. The former conservative talkback radio host has even been declared a ‘covenant man’ — putting him alongside the likes of Moses, Jacob and Noah — for his apparent obedience to God in a corrupt and sinful political arena.

Trump’s new Attorney-General, Matthew Whitaker, once proposed banning non-religious people from being appointed to the judiciary. He also said judges needed a ‘biblical view of justice’: “What I know is that as long as they have that worldview, that they’ll be a good judge. And if they have a secular worldview, that ‘this is all we have here on Earth’, then I’m going to be very concerned about how they judge.” The President regularly trumpets the Christian character of his cabinet.

His first Chief-of-Staff, the since-sacked Reince Priebus, was a devout member of the Greek Orthodox Church. Ousted Adviser Steve Bannon came from an Irish-Catholic background, as did disgraced National Security chief General Michael Flynn. Former Attorney-General Jeff Sessions is a Methodist, while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is Presbyterian. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos belongs to the Christian Reformed denomination. Former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley was born into a Sikh family but converted to Christianity and now attends a Methodist congregation.

That’s just a sampler.

But Trump’s even given an evangelical group open access to the White House — Capitol Ministries — to conduct bible study groups. This is why — despite the never-ending cloud of controversy surrounding the president — his support among evangelical leaders has remained steadfast.

KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
Charismatic, Pentecostal and Evangelical Christians are among President Trump’s most devoted supporters. And he knows this. He won 81 per cent of their vote in 2016. A poll published shortly before the 2018 midterm elections by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 72 percent of white evangelical Protestants still had a favorable opinion of him. And Trump continues to tell them what they want to hear.

In a closed-door meeting with more than 100 evangelical leaders in August, President Trump said he had repealed a law preventing them from preaching politics from the pulpit. He hadn’t, though it is something he sometimes talks about. He also said he had dismissed a law that prevents US religious and other tax-exempt institutions from endorsing political candidates. He hadn’t, though he has signed an executive order smoothing the way for religious groups to engage in politics.

It was enough to motivate the religiously conservative groups focused on abortion rights, a conservative majority in the Supreme Court, and support for Israel, to back his midterm election campaigns. But US progressive churchgoers are increasingly bristling at Trump’s brash character, and divisive approach to race, immigration and women.

They’ve started to push back.

Among those raising their voice in opposition is Anglican bishop Michael Curry, who officiated at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding. He’s pushing a manifesto — Reclaiming Jesus — and warning of a “dangerous crisis of moral and political leadership at the highest levels of our government and in our churches”.

The manifesto rejects white nationalism, calls out political exploitation of racial bigotry, denounces misogyny and sexual misconduct, defends immigrants and refugees — and advocates renewed focus on the poor.

“Representatives of Christianity were buying into political agendas that very often do not reflect the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth,” Bishop Curry said.

But the religious right is showing little sign of being moved. And Trump’s keen to keep them on side. Elections, he warned, were “a referendum on your religion, it’s a referendum on free speech and the First Amendment.”

“We’re going to protect Christianity,” Trump declared. “I can say that. I don’t have to be politically correct.”

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