Last week, Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley made an admission that might have once surprised his party.
“Some will say I’m calling America a Christian nation,” Hawley told attendees at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington. “And I am. Some will say I’m defending Christian nationalism. And I am. My question is: Is there any other kind of nationalism worth having?”
Conservative Christian supremacy is on the march.
In Oklahoma, the state's top education official has ordered public schools to place a Bible in every classroom and incorporate its teachings into their lessons.
In Louisiana, officials have decreed that all public school classrooms must display the Ten Commandments.
What is happening in our nation, which was founded on the principles of religious freedom and separation of church and state?
“Josh Hawley wouldn’t have said that a year ago,” said Stephen Ujlaki, producer and director of the startling new documentary “Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy.” But these days, he said, Christian nationalists “feel more empowered. Their goal is to act like they’ve already won and bully everyone into following them.”
Six years ago, Ujlaki, who was finishing up his term as dean of Loyola Marymount University’s School of Film and Television, decided to figure out how Donald Trump — adulterer, sexual abuser, compulsive liar — could become president with the rabid support of voters who say they embrace Christian values.
What he came to understand is that Trump’s presidency and his enduring popularity among the most extreme religious conservatives are the product of a 50-year-old political movement. Christian nationalism seeks to roll back a century of American social progress by exploiting white conservatives’ anxiety about the demographic and political changes that are reshaping the country.
Christian nationalists don’t exactly identify with Trump; rather, he is their vehicle and their wrecking ball, and he has been wildly successful in that regard. Who would have imagined years ago that a Supreme Court reformed by the real estate mogul would wipe out half a century of reproductive rights in one fell swoop?
In fact, one Republican member of Congress told the House of Representatives on Thursday that the country should “go back” to 1960 if Trump is elected, decrying the emasculation of men by an “angry feminist movement.”
Christian nationalism is a white supremacist political ideology disguised as a religion.
“They are fake Christians,” said Christianity Today editor Russell Moore, who left the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission over its support for Trump in 2016.
The movement did not emerge, as is widely believed, in response to the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. It formed years earlier in response to decisions ending tax-exempt status for racially segregated schools, such as Bob Jones University. Abortion simply became a more acceptable excuse than racism.
“The big idea of Christian nationalism is that God created America for a particular kind of white Christian with a particular ideology and worldview,” he said. Eboo Patel, founder of Interfaith America, which promotes religious diversity: “That group is supreme and all the others are subordinate, and they need to be kept subordinate by violence if necessary.” (See: January 6.)
Following the advice of his friend and fellow documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, Ujlaki takes a chronological approach in “Bad Faith,” going back to the 1981 founding of the secretive and extremely well-funded Council for National Policy by ultraconservative Christian activists. Among them was Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich, who once said, “I don’t want everybody to vote. In fact, our influence on elections increases, frankly, as the voting population decreases.”
The Washington Post described the council in 2021 as “the most unusual and least understood” conservative organization in the capital. It bars the press from its events and its members, including former Vice President Mike Pence and insurrection supporter Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, “agree to remain silent about their activities.”
One of the council’s many interconnected allies is the Heritage Foundation, whose 900-plus-page Project 2025 is seen as a blueprint for a second Trump administration. The document espouses the goals of Christian nationalism: dismantling the administrative state by replacing civil servants with Trump loyalists, slashing regulations, eliminating protections for gays and transgender people, abolishing the Department of Education, requiring all pregnancies to be carried to term, making it harder for some people (guess who?) to vote, and shrinking the social safety net (because if you’re poor, that’s your fault).
“This is not Jim Crow,” says the Rev. William Barber II, who founded the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School, in “Bad Faith.” “This is James Crow, Esq. He went to school, got his law degree, and he’s back to shut down every progressive voice in this nation.” (Exhibit A: Hawley, Stanford ’02, Yale Law ’06.)
A Pew Research Center survey in February found that less than half of American adults said they had heard or read anything about Christian nationalism. “Most Republicans,” Pew reported, “say they have never heard of Christian nationalism.” It is alarming that Americans know very little about the movement that is trying to take them back in time.
No one has captured the distorted spirit of the Christian nationalist movement better than homophobic white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who appears briefly but memorably in “Bad Faith.”
“Fuck democracy,” says Fuentes. “I am with Jesus Christ.”
Except, you know, it really doesn't.
