Understanding the US Coup d'Etat Pt2 - Christian Nationalism

The development and aims of the theocratic faction behind the second Trump administration.

Part 2 of a series outlining the background to the ongoing coup d’etat in the United States. In Part 1, I highlighted Brooke Harrington’s work to describe one faction behind the coup - what she calls the tech broligarchy. In Part 2 I describe the Christian nationalist faction.

It is almost certainly no coincidence that the day after Russ Vought, formerly of Heritage Action, the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, and key architect of Project 2025, was confirmed by the Senate as director of Office of Management and Budget (OMB), President Trump signed Executive Orders for for “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias” and for the “Establishment of the White House Faith Office.” Vought’s appointment represents the Christian nationalist faction among those behind the Trump presidency.

Vought, who served in the OMB during part of the prior Trump administration, is a self-described Christian nationalist. The tech broligarchs, the other major faction behind the Trump presidency, described in Part 1 of this series, have some overlapping interests with the Christian nationalists and some differences. While both advocate authoritarianism and a form of uber capitalism, the tech broligarchs are not religious and seek to destroy the nation-state. Christian nationalists see authoritarian power as vested in the presidency; the broligarchs think it should be vested in themselves.

Vought describes Christian nationalism as a political philosophy that views strong nation-states as rooted in biblical teachings and the best way to organize governments. It is a commitment to “prioritize the needs and interests of one’s own country over others.” Christian nationalism asserts that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and not intended as a secular society. Vought’s specific definition is:

An orientation for engaging in the public square that recognizes America as a Christian nation, where our rights and duties are understood to come from God and where our primary responsibilities as citizens are for building and preserving the strength, prosperity and health of our own country. It is a commitment to an institutional separation between church and state, but not the separation of Christianity from its influence on government and society.

Trump appointed his long-time “spiritual advisor” and controversial televangelist Paula White-Cain to head up his faith office. Like other key Trump appointees, she is a criminally-inclined fraudster. With her second husband Randy White, she founded the Tampa Christian Center in 1991, through which they appropriated “tax-exempt ministry money to pay for a private jet, salaries to family members and nearly $900,000 for a waterfront mansion.” During Trump’s first administration, the “prosperity gospel” advocate was accused of “running a ponzi scheme out of the White House,” having told her followers to “donate their first paycheck of the year to her ministries as a ‘first fruit’ offering or face God’s wrath.” Her third husband, Jonathan Cain, is the keyboardist and rhythm guitarist for the band Journey. White-Cain has been accused of breaking into the band’s bank account and stealing thousands of dollars. Usefully for Trump, she has told her followers that to oppose Trump is to oppose God.

Trump’s anti-Christian bias Executive Order must be a dream come true for Christian nationalists. It makes the claim that Christians are under attack and calls for the establishment of a task force, on which the Attorney General will serve as chair, and that will include the Secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Education, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security; as well as the directors of OMB and the FBI, administrators of FEMA and Small Business Administration, the Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the US representative to the United Nations. The mission of the task force is to identify any “unlawful anti-Christian policies, practices, or conduct by an agency.”

The necessity of such a project would seem to imply that Christians are being persecuted in every area of American life. Yet, somehow, Christian nationalists keep chalking up legal wins. In 1993 Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, ensuring that cases involving religious discrimination would apply the highest level of judicial scrutiny to any law that “burdens religious freedom.”

In Good News Club v. Milford Central School (2001), the Supreme Court ruled that disallowing bible clubs in public after school programs violated the free speech of those sponsoring the religious activities. The club’s organizers had been offered “free and better space in the evangelical church next door,” but refused it, insisting on conducting their activities in the public school.¹ In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), the Court ruled that for-profit privately held corporations do not have to comply with Affordable Care Act mandates to provide birth control in health care plans for their employees if the owners have religious objections. And the Court ruled in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis (2022) that businesses that “create expressive designs” can refuse to serve customers who want them to create something that conveys a message with which a designer disagrees. This case involved a website designer who wanted to start creating wedding websites, but wished to refuse same sex couples her services. She hadn’t yet created a single wedding website, nor been asked to do so for a same-sex marriage.

The real goal, it would seem, is not to combat persecution, but rather to impose a certain set of Christian beliefs on the rest of the citizenry. Katherine Stewart, who has studied Christian nationalism for more than a decade, says of the movement:

While many Americans still believe that the Christian right is primarily concerned with “values,” leaders of the movement know it’s really about power. Trump’s supposedly anti-Christian attributes are in fact part of the attraction. Today’s Christian nationalists talk a good game about respecting the Constitution and America’s founders, but at bottom they prefer autocrats to democrats. Trump believes in the rule of force, not the rule of law. He is not there to uphold values but to impose the will of the tribe. He is a leader perfectly suited to the cause.²

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The origins of Christian nationalism lie in the US history of slavery, which was justified, in part by scripture. Two key passages were Genesis IX, 18–27, the story of Noah’s son Ham seeing him naked when he was drunk, while the other two sons covered their father without looking; and Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, VI, 5-7, wherein he exhorts servants to be obedient to their masters. “When the South declared war, the Confederate States of America were established to be a Christian nation,”³ and this was enshrined in their Constitution. In the decades to come, Christian nationalism was invoked to oppose communism, the black Civil rights movement, feminism, homosexuality, and religious minorities. The 9/11 attacks “presented a new wave of white Christian nationalism… fueled by the rhetoric of crusade.”⁴ The election of the first black president, Barack Obama, was another flashpoint for the movement.

Stewart describes the movement as involving numerous organizations with varying degrees of connection:

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.⁵

A key development for the movement occurred in the late 1970s when several young Republican operatives, tired of losing elections, and seeking to roll back the gains of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, got together to figure out how to connect “the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of Western plutocrats”⁶ to create a winning electoral strategy. Paul Weyrich, sometimes called the “father of the New Right,” and Richard Viguerie, who had pioneered “direct mail” as a way of bypassing the mainstream media to reach voters, discovered that 70% of evangelicals did not vote in the 1976 election.

They connected with Jerry Falwell, a Southern Baptist preacher who opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which he called “civil wrongs.” In order to circumvent mandated desegregation of schools, Falwell and others set up their own private segregated institutions. When President Nixon ordered the IRS to deny tax exemptions to all segregated schools, Falwell sought a way to fight back. Upon discovering that only 55% of evangelicals were registered to vote, compared with a national average of 72%, he organized voter registration drives in church parking lots and lobbies.⁷

The evangelical vote proved crucial to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Weyrich’s Heritage Foundation, which he created in 1973 with funding from the Coors Brewing family, as a right wing counterpart to the Brookings Institute, provided the new president with its first “Mandate for Leadership.” The mandate offered 2000 specific ideas for reducing the federal government, increasing military spending, and ending affirmative action programs for women and racial-ethnic minorities. The Reagan Administration adopted 60 percent of them.

Buoyed by their success, Weyrich and his colleagues set about building the Council for National Policy (CNP), a network of think tanks, policy advocacy organizations, and media uniting corporate and theocratic interests to create what Shadow Network (2019) author Anne Nelson calls a “pluto-theocracy.” Key early organizations included Heritage Foundation, the American Legal Exchange Council (ALEC), to promote the network’s interests at the state level, and Concerned Women for America (CWA), founded by Beverly LaHaye to oppose the women’s movement, and whose husband Timothy LaHaye was the first CNP president.

Today the network includes three legal organizations; Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the American Center for Law and Justice, and the Federalist Society, whose leader Leonard Leo was largely responsible for providing the list of far right Supreme Court justices appointed by Donald Trump. Other affiliate organizations include Women’s Independent Forum, American Family Association, National Rifle Association, Eagle Forum, and many more. All are coalition partners on Project 2025, Heritage’s latest “Mandate for Leadership.”

The architects of the CNP knew that to achieve continued success they would need to create an integrated messaging strategy. There are two broad components to the strategy: one is media, and the other the churches. Viguerie’s success in bypassing mainstream media and targeting his audience with direct mail pointed the way. CNP strategists joined forces with right wing broadcasters on religious radio programs, later cable television, and eventually internet platforms. Reagan’s repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which had required broadcasters to allow time for opposing views of controversial issues, and to notify individuals attacked on their programs to provide them a chance to respond, allowed disinformation and propaganda to proliferate.

Unfettered by regulation, or conventions like fact-checking and civility, that had previously governed broadcasting, right-wing media allowed the basest demagoguery free rein. Steve Rendell, senior writer for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), describes the content:⁸

I couldn’t believe what I heard. I’d hear overt, gutter racism. I’d hear black people referred to as “savages.” The allure of the [Rush] Limbaughs and the [Bob] Grants is that they tap into a kind of resentment, a kind of insecurity on the part of mostly… white guys on the right railing against the women’s movement, the civil rights movement…

This content developed a zealous Christian nationalist voter base by manufacturing a sense of persecution and resentment and by:

creating a population… receptive to certain forms of disinformation and immune to other types of information, which the present leadership often denigrates as “fake news” or “the lying media.”⁹

The second key component to the Christian nationalist messaging strategy involves harnessing pastors and churches. What began with voter registration in church parking lots has by now developed into a sophisticated and multi-faceted strategy for targeting church-goers. It involves things like speakers on “Values Buses” traveling the country and helpfully showing up where preferred political candidates are making an appearance to deliver voter guides; a voter guide website where one can type in their demographic information to receive a personalized guide; a Church Voter Lookup app which pastors can use to receive a report indicating what percentage of their congregation is registered to vote, and had voted in the last election; and programs for training pastors on delivering political messaging. In recent years, they have expanded their outreach to Latino congregations in order to begin peeling off that historically Democrat-voting demographic.

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In the early 1980s, CNP leadership was disappointed with the Reagan administration. Given they were key to his election, they had expected him to act forcefully on their social issues, like abortion, and to implement more of their desired economic agenda. Instead, he appointed moderates to his cabinet and displayed a willingness to compromise with the Democrats.¹⁰

Today, Heritage’s current mandate for leadership, Project 2025, is underway and its chief architect has been installed as director of OMB. Prior to the election, video surfaced of Vought talking to what he thought were potential funders, but were instead undercover British activists with the Centre for Climate Reporting. He told them he was currently spending 80% of his time working on plans for how to take over government agencies.

Our founding document assigns to the Congress the power of the purse - to allocate funding for government purposes. Vought believes that the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 is invalid and aims to arrogate this power to the executive. The Act was passed when Nixon refused to release funds appropriated by Congress for items with which he disagreed. The Act requires the president to get Congressional approval to rescind government spending. Vought’s aim is to eliminate, or bring under the president’s control, all government agencies by making agency heads political appointees, seizing control of funding, curtailing their independence, and “traumatizing” government workers. “We want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains,” he said.

To date, through the work of unelected, unvetted tech broligarch Elon Musk gaining access to sensitive systems at several federal agencies, a number of funding streams have been frozen, lawsuits filed, and judges have ruled that the freezes must stop. It appears, however, that the Trump administration has no intention of complying with the orders. On Monday, Chief Judge McConnell for the Federal District Court of Rhode Island ruled that the Trump administration is violating his order to lift the freeze on funding, directed that funds be released immediately, and suggested that non-compliance may result in contempt proceedings.

However, as George Conway points out, enforcement in cases of noncompliance is carried out by the US Marshals Service - which is part of the Department of Justice, where Trump has already installed his partisan appointee, and former defense lawyer during his first impeachment trial, Pam Bondi, as Attorney General. We are now in dangerous territory as we are faced with the choice to either allow an authoritarian dictatorship to be established - or to find some extraordinary means to stop it.

Christian nationalist movement leaders are now poised to seize the power they have been working towards for nearly half a century. They aim to create a theocratic authoritarian state, a hierarchical regime that reverses progress towards equality for women, racial-ethnic minorities, and LGBT people, that enacts economic policy to benefit the rich and removes social safety nets for the rest of us. For now, they are working with the tech broligarchy. However, the aims of the two factions do not fully align; at some point the two power hungry factions will become embroiled in a fierce conflict. Who will win remains to be seen. It is clear, however, that whatever happens, the American people are the losers.

1. Stewart, Katherine. The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), p1.

2. The Power Worshippers, p40.

3. Butler, Anthea. “What Is White Christian Nationalism?” Christian Nationalism and the January 6, 2021 Insurrection, p5. BJC Online.

4. What Is White Christian Nationalism? p5.

5. The Power Worshippers, p3-4.

6. Nelson, Anne. Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019).

7. Shadow Network, p16.

8. Senko, Jen. Documentary film. The Brainwashing of My Dad. 2016.

9. Stewart, Katherine. “Network of Christian Nationalism Leading up to January 6.” Christian Nationalism and the January 6, 2021 Insurrection, p11. BJC Online.

10. Shadow Network, p44.