Are We Ready To Get Real About Christian Nationalism?
At what point do we call a spade a spade and root out traitors to our government?
This election year promised to be electric, and it’s shaping up to be something unlike most of us have ever seen in our lifetime.
First and foremost, none of us have been in a position to see a Presidential candidate currently sitting in multiple trials mere months before an election in which he presumes to not only run… but win.
As a white former evangelical Christian, I’m here to let you know: the call is coming from inside the house. Christian nationalists have planned this for a long, long time, longer than many of us have even been alive, and their plans are coming to fruition right before our eyes.
Are we ready to call out Christian nationalism as the domestic terrorist threat that it is?
Watching your elders be brainwashed in real-time
It’s rather depressing to be at the age where you recall all the years your conservative elders told you that you’d “get more conservative as you age,” and “Once you grow up you’ll realize how wrong the ‘liberals’ are”… and the older you get, the sadder you get when you realize that the elders you respected and revered in your youth have been scammed, hoodwinked, snookered, and have followed the pied piper all the way down into the darkness.
Time, life, and maturity have given me discernment. Through that discernment, I see modern “conservatism” for what it is: a Christian nationalist power grab, and almost every elder I knew in my youth bought into it hook, line, and sinker, even when they themselves (or their immediate family members) were or are actively harmed by it.
I saw a quote recently that there is a point in your life where you realize you’ve emotionally matured past some elders in your life, and it’s extraordinarily sad and frustrating.
You cannot have discussions with them because they revert back to tactics of gaslighting, manipulation, diverting discussions, looping rhetoric that has no logical conclusion, and when that no longer works they get angry, so angry, and then usually invoke religion and say they’ll “pray for you” or some other dismissive crap.
I was in the conservative evangelical church, for over 30 years.
I am a veteran and was in military service.
You do not get to tell me how to believe and interpret what I experienced with my own eyes and flesh.
You don’t get to write my narrative of my lived experiences.
More and more veterans are coming out against this nationalist movement, thank goodness.
More and more veterans are warning that these conservatives who have used veterans as some virtue signal for a few decades now do not actually give a single shit about veterans, or sending more 19-year-old boys to die for oil or money. They’ll do it in an instant, without hesitation — but not theirs. No ‘Senator’s son’ as CCR sang….
… heck, most politicians in office now dodged a draft and that’s somehow okay…
More and more Christians are leaving the evangelical churches and even leaving the religion altogether, being so disturbed by what they’ve seen and experienced firsthand. We’re not talking about what we’ve heard through some propaganda campaign, we’re talking about what we lived.
Churches are even admitting that people are leaving in droves. Membership is down, across the board. Why could that be? Additionally, why are true Christians still in those churches not fighting this, not clinging to Scripture, and holding charlatans to account?
For example, using the name of God in vain is not saying “Oh God” when you stub your toe, it literally means using the name of God for some agenda for your own gain. That’s literally what it means, and Republichristians are following men doing this as a living.
The result of the decades of Christian nationalist propaganda is that their followers are so far out there they literally can’t see their own entrapment. They cannot, or refuse to, admit what’s so painfully obvious to everyone else. And of course, it’s hard to admit when you’re tricked. I was tricked. I bought into the evangelical schtick and only began to wake up when the nationalist shit got so pervasive and strong that it was impossible to ignore. It was no longer spirituality, at all, it was politics.
When Sunday School discussions devolved into how evil Democrats are and how we should get up and leave a restaurant if we have a ‘gay server’ [and how would you even know??], I couldn’t take it any longer.
This deception has been so long-running that you have swaths of conservatives eagerly voting for their own demise and campaigning for their own self-professed dictator. Even within these movements, you have slight glimmers of awakening, like women who fervently supported the overturning of Roe v. Wade but now they themselves (or a sister or close friend) have experienced a nonviable pregnancy and had to seek an abortion, been denied and either had to travel to another state, suffered immense medical complications, or… actually died.
But now it’s too little too late. They cannot stop the tide.
This image is from the cover of a book currently for sale on Amazon, with over 1,000 positive reviews and comments glowing about this rhetoric, complete with Bible verses and “Amens” throughout. It is not tongue-in-cheek; it’s totally for real.
This is all totally for real. If you’re not taking this seriously as the single greatest threat to our nation, you need to. You really, really need to.
Check out Project 2025, for starters. This is the conservatives’ plan if they win the White House. It’s not fear-mongering, it’s literally their actual plan for the nation told in their own words, including the first movement (which has already begun) of ousting every single federal employee in Washington, DC, who is ‘liberal’ and replacing them with ultra-conservatives who will do the bidding of the next President regardless of constitutionality or existing law.
Which, like I said, is already happening. Those positions are already being filled with radical conservatives. As far back as George W. Bush’s Presidency, the White House intern pool was 7% homeschooled Christians who went to a specific, previously unheard of private ‘college’ founded by a televangelist, a college with right around 300 students… and yet its graduates comprised seven percent (roughly ten) of the ~150 White House interns? Remarkable, wouldn’t you say?
Or very, very strategic and intentional.
For comparison, it was newsworthy when 13 George Washington University students were simultaneously accepted into Barack Obama’s final White House intern pool, and that university has over 25,000 students.
Here’s the link to the Project: I hope you’ll check it out and actually review it from a constitutional, democratic, and historical viewpoint and see how alarming it is.
So how did Trump, a non-Christian, accomplish this?
It runs so, so much deeper and further back than Trump. I’m currently reading Jesus and John Wayne, and I’ve literally had to set it down at points because I was getting angry. Legitimately angry, especially now that I’m around 2005 on the timeline in the book and I see my own deception tied in there — little elements where I was deceived by the evangelical machine while I was a mother and actively doing harm because of the lies.
The web of deceit goes back decades, involving countless televangelists, politicians (including Presidents, multiple), TV personalities, celebrities; it’s wild that the far right wants to talk about a “deep state” when they’ve been running the biggest deep state scam for over 75 years!
The Christian Nationalist movement truly began before WWII, and the GIs returning home from fighting evil incarnate were the prime target for the US-soldier-to-God’s-soldier pipeline. What was considered ‘masculine’ within the Christian church prior to WWII was a more gentle, humble version of manhood, more in alignment with Jesus Christ’s example and teaching.
What was crafted, very intentionally and with purpose, was a version of manhood that was violent and aggressive, intrinsically linked to the military and war, that heavily encouraged a male patriarch of the household (which in itself included some subtle — and not so subtle — approval of violence within the home to maintain the “Godly” order).
Kindness, humility, and a quiet spirit all became regarded as signs of weakness rather than internal strength. A man should be loud and aggressive about his faith: a warrior. Workshops and church programs at megachurches across the nation began incorporating violent sport, including martial arts and MMA, into their programs to link violent athletic training with becoming a warrior for Christ.
It wasn’t enough to love Jesus and affirm He died for your sins; you better be willing to go to war for Him. And like… now.
Combine that with the constant fear-mongering (I distinctly remember the Left Behind book series and hysteria over the imminent Rapture in the late 90s that had Christian youth in a terrified chokehold), and you reduce this entire population of people to a collective, quivering mass steeped in the perfect brew to make them malleable and prime for shaping.
This has spanned multiple decades to the point where entire generations have lived their entire lives steeped in this rhetoric.
And that is how we came to people like in the picture below.
I read an interesting quote: that most megachurch attendees should really be called ‘nontheologics’ because they actually, when quizzed, have no clue what Christian theology even states. They literally don’t know their own professed “theology”. What they actually follow as their ‘theology’ is violent, commercialized nationalism and has little, if anything, to do with Jesus Christ himself.
Jesus Christ was a radical and could be violent, yes, but He would be waging war with the multibillion-dollar nontheologic “churches” operating in his Dad’s name, not waging war with books in public school libraries and people who are gay or trans.
What He actually fought in His life is clearly outlined in Scripture, which was greed , love of power, misinterpretation of religious theology for financial gain — He was so clear about what His issues were with society and it damn sure wasn’t gay people. When did He talk about gay people?
The behavior of most conservative Republichristians indicates that they are far less interested in following the teachings of Christ Himself but rather in following the violent and power-hungry actions of their political leaders, eschewing the advice and guidance of established spiritual mentors.
When modern spiritual leaders who were previously lauded and raised to celebrity status, like Beth Moore, began speaking out against the false teachings of the evangelical nationalists, they were immediately cast out! Books thrown out of Christian bookstores, podcasts canceled, tours canceled. They aggressively denounce anyone who speaks actual scriptural truth.
In fact, pastors are starting to report that their congregations are denigrating their teaching of the actual guidance of Jesus from scripture, calling Him (Jesus Christ) “liberal” and weak.
And that is how you craft a population of millions of people who refuse to use logic and reasoning when observing the behavior of a hysterical, scammy politician and instead fall back on emotion only; he makes them feel like they are fighting the enemy, the “evil” in the world, while he himself clearly embodies everything Jesus preached against. Literally…. everything!
When we learn the history of how intentional, specifically planned, and purposefully designed the Christian nationalist movement has been in infiltrating and taking over positions of power within our government, it’s even more alarming than I realized, and I was in that culture. The last church service I attended, when they broke out the American flags, placed them in front of the altar and the cross, and everyone stood and pledged to the flag in a house of God, I looked around and was so creeped out and uncomfortable at what was happening I just couldn’t go back.
Moderate Christians, including Jimmy Carter, warned of this back in the 1970s, when they reminded us that we should be serving God above any nation here on earth and that we should never place loyalty to a nation, or its leader, above loyalty to God and His scriptures, and those men were summarily ousted from every position of power they held and replaced with the names we may recognize…
Billy Graham
Pat Robertson
Jim Bakker
Richard Nixon
Ronald Reagan….
…you getting the picture here?
These men put presidents in office. They have commandeered the direction of our nation and have for a few decades now. What we’re fighting is not a new action; it’s fighting entrenched ideologies that already govern our nation.
Trumpers are merely the lesions and boils that are rising to the surface now that the sickness has spread throughout the entire body. They are merely symptoms of the existing illness.
Democrats, Moderates, Independents, and even classic Republicans need to be super aware and realistic about what we’re talking about here. We’re not talking about squashing a fringe movement, we’re talking about rooting out an enormous cancer that has never, ever concerned itself with the holistic well-being of our democracy but rather only focused itself on gaining and maintaining power at any cost.
They want no rights for women, to make being LGBTQ+ a crime, and to penalize any citizen of our nation who is not following abjectly Christian laws and policies, regardless of their own religious affiliation.
They want their own version of Sharia law.
Election woes… are these any different?
This election, like all others, is critically important but I do feel like we’re on the precipice of a no-turning-back situation. Y’all may not have liked previous Democratic presidents but did any of them stage an insurrection of our nation’s Capitol building?
None of the hysteria of Democrats’ alleged power grabs has ever actually materialized into reality. That of the right… has. On national television. We all watched it unfold.
Smashing down doors and windows, assaulting police officers and guards, standing in viking horns at the heart of our seat of government, making a mockery of the entire institution.
We can argue that some politicians do that every day, and I agree, but not with violence, invasion, and death.
You better vote, and vote with your damn head. Use some sense. A man who has said, out loud and on tape, that he will “only be dictator for a day,” a man that has already incited violence against the very government he’s attempting to “lead”…. is that truly what you believe is best for the entirety of this nation?
I encourage everyone to do some deep soul-searching during this campaign season, and listen and watch the behaviors and words of certain candidates.
There’s no question that we don’t have very good options, but that’s what happens when we’ve elevated reality television stars, corporations, and lobbyists to astronomical heights of power. We’re experiencing the consequences of decades of a toxic culture. Now we have to figure out a way forward, but I will never comprehend how anyone believes the way forward is led by Donald Trump. Ever.
He can’t even lead his household or his dozens of failed businesses. What are we even doing here???
We’ve handled ‘Christians’ with kid gloves to this point, lest they rear their heads and cry “Persecution!” but the time has come to get real.
Christian Nationalists are terrorists and pose an imminent threat to our democracy and our very way of life, and their political movement must be stopped.
Let me be very clear: I do not take issue with actual Christians.
People who follow the teachings of Christ, who embody His virtues of humility, service, kindness, and generosity, I have no qualms with their religious beliefs. In fact, many of the Democratic leaders I’ve followed, campaigned for, and voted for are Christian.
It shows in their history of public service and the very lives they lead, lives of monogamous commitment to a wife and children, to opening America’s doors through responsible but compassionate immigration, to policies that seek to give the poorest Americans a fighting chance through social programs, robust and free public education, and affordable healthcare.
Those are true Christians. They are following the guidance through Scripture and the examples demonstrated in the life of Jesus Christ.
So vote for a Christian. Please. Vote for a Christian.
Not a ‘christian’ nationalist.
Our future may depend on it.
My name is Melissa Corrigan, and I’m a freelance writer/thought sharer/philosopher in coastal Virginia. I am a mom, a wife, a veteran, and so much more. I deeply enjoy sharing my thoughts and receiving feedback that sparks genuine, respectful conversation.
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