This discussion, led by Dahlia Lithwick of Slate, is the most important information you will read today, this week, this month. It explains the theocratic movement that is taking control of the seats of power, imperiling democracy. It describes who they are. You will learn about “dominionism,” about “the Seven Mountains,” about a distorted view of religion that seeks power. They play the long game, with the goal of controlling our society.
This is the only post today. We really have to focus on the root issue in American political life today, the one that makes it impossible to address any problems. Religious extremism is it.
Lithwick is a lawyer, journalist, and senior editor at Slate. She interviews Rachel Laser, the president and CEO at Americans United for Separation of Church and State—a nonprofit education and advocacy organization that works in courts, legislatures, and the public square to protect religious freedom—and Katherine Stewart, an author and journalist who has closely covered religious extremism for the past fifteen years; her latest book is The Power Worshippers: Inside The Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. Her new book, Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, will be published next February.
Please open the link to Slate to read the arntire discussion. It’s terrifying.
Dahlia Lithwick: So Katherine, I think we’re going to start with you, and we’re going to talk about this movement. I would love to define it, because we put a lot under this rubric of white Christian nationalism.
Katherine Stewart: Let’s talk about what Christian nationalism is and what it isn’t. Christian nationalism is not a religion—it’s not Christianity. I think of it as a mindset, and also a machine. The mindset is this ideology, the idea of America as essentially a Christian theocracy or a Christian nation whose laws should be based on the Bible, and a very reactionary reading of the Bible. It’s also a political movement that exploits religion in this organized quest for power. As a political movement, it is leadership-driven and it’s organization-driven. It has this deeply networked organizational infrastructure that is really the key to its power. There has been five decades of investment in this infrastructure, and it’s the leaders of this network who are really calling the shots.
We can group their organizations into categories. I’ll throw out a few names, but this is by no means comprehensive. There are these right-wing groups like the Family Research Council. You have networking organizations like the Council for National Policy, which gets much of the movement’s leadership cadre on the same page, and brings them together with these very deep-pocketed funders. There are think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation. And there’s a vast right-wing legal advocacy ecosystem that includes groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, with its $100-plus-million-per-year budget; also, the Becket Fund, Liberty Counsel, First Liberty Institute, Pacific Justice Institute—and they align with the aims of the Federalist Society and related organizations that mobilize enormous sums of money to shape the courts.
Another feature of this movement that is often overlooked is the pastor networks like Watchmen on the Wall and Church United, or groups like Faith Wins, that draw together and then mobilize tens of thousands of conservative or conservative-leaning pastors as movement leaders. If you can get the pastors, you can get their congregations. Often pastors are the most trusted voices in their congregations. So they reach out to these pastors, draw them into networks, and give them tools to turn out their congregations to vote for the far-right candidates that they want.
And then, of course, there’s this information sphere—or propaganda sphere—of the type that the Alitos, with their “Appeal to Heaven” flag, are clearly tied into. It’s a kind of messaging sphere that outsiders often simply don’t know about, but it’s incredibly self-contained and repeats over and over again a certain core set of messages.
Rachel, I think we know about the ways in which these movements and groups have targeted Congress and targeted the executive branch. We have seen the laying on of hands of the clergy when Donald Trump assumed office. We know a lot about Mike Johnson, we know a lot about Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the ways in which these religious ideas have embedded themselves in the other two branches of government.
But it’s harder and murkier to understand how it intersects with the courts. I would love for you to explain when this movement really turns its attention to the courts, and how this movement manages to bring this sprawling network to making change at the federal judiciary.
Rachel Laser: I think we have to start with the Federalist Society, which was founded in 1982. That was around the time when all of the religious-right groups were getting active. They were intentionally shifting their focus from school segregation to abortion. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, we saw this shadow network of legal groups forming. That accompanied what the Federalist Society was doing with the judiciary. The Alliance Defending Freedom was founded in the early ’90s, the Becket Fund in the early ’90s, First Liberty in 1997, Jay Sekulow’s American Center for Law and Justice back in 1990, Liberty Counsel in 1989. So when we were seeing the “moral majority,” and this sort of burgeoning religious extremist movement in the country, they got really smart and decided to focus on the courts, and, boy, are we seeing the rewards of that today.
Stewart: And the movement is extremely strategic. Very patient. I think the key to their success is that long-range thinking and their strategy.
From the very beginning, they set about picking the right cases to bring to the right courts and they created these novel legal building blocks that would sideline, and in some cases obliterate, the establishment clause. They’ve turned civil rights law on its head, and expanded the privileges of religious organizations substantially, including the right to taxpayer money.
Katherine, you wrote a piece in 2022 describing how the movement gets supercharged. You flagged three things that happened after Dobbs: First, the rhetoric of violence among movement leaders appears to have increased significantly from the already alarming levels I had observed in previous years. Second, the theology of dominion—that is the belief that right-thinking Christians have a biblically derived mandate to take control of all aspects of government and society—is now explicitly embraced. And third, the movement’s key strategists were giddy about the legal arsenal that the Supreme Court had laid at their feet as they anticipated the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Can you talk about how those three themes are playing out now? I mean, we live in that world. That’s mifepristone, that’s EMTALA, that’s the in vitro fertilization decision out of the Alabama Supreme Court.
Stewart: By acknowledging the legitimacy of a state interest in zygotes and blastocysts and fetuses, they really provide a legal system with a set of purely religiously grounded rights that can be used to strip women of all kinds of rights and basically turn our bodies and lives over to federal and state authorities.
But Dobbs is really just the inevitable consequence of this movement’s power. They’re not stopping here. The movement leaders are determined to end all abortion access everywhere. When they say abortion, they also mean some of the most effective and popular forms of birth control, as well as miscarriage care that’s necessary to save women’s lives and health. We’re seeing the consequences of this all over the country, where women are suffering devastating health consequences when they can’t get the miscarriage care that they need.
I’ve been attending right-wing conferences and strategy gatherings for 15 years for my research, and they tell us over and over again what they intend to do, and then they do it, and then they boast about what they’ve done. They’re really not hiding, and their aims are not hard to discern if you’re paying attention.
In the last 15 years, the rhetoric of violence has become more extreme. Fifteen years ago, the religious right sometimes wanted to portray itself as just wanting a seat at the table in the noisy forum of American democracy, saying, “We just want to have our voices heard and be counted.” But the calls for dominion, the calls for total domination, have become louder and more explicit. And part of that is a consequence of the rise of a spirit-warrior style of religion, embodied in movements like the New Apostolic Reformation, which is a sort of charismatic Christian evangelical movement. It’s a relational network, rather than a formal denomination, and it’s grown enormously in recent years. It has deep roots in Christian Reconstructionism and Calvinism, but it didn’t really get going until Loren Cunningham and Bill Bright, these two Christian-right leaders, both said they had a dream.
They both seemed to have the same dream that God told them that they needed to take over the seven “mountains,” or spheres, of culture, which they identified as things like government, education, business, media, and the like. They shared these ideas with some figures like Lance Wallnau and Peter Wagner. Wagner was a key figure in the “church planting” movement—a movement of establishing or planting new churches. Wagner ran with the idea of taking over the seven mountains as taking back dominion from Satan.
That notion of “Seven Mountains” dominionism has spread very quickly—not just among networks like the New Apostolic Reformation and other charismatic networks, but the language and style of “Seven Mountains Dominion” and this sort of spirit-warrior religion has spread to other sectors of the movement that are not remotely identified with the NAR or charismatic Christianity.
NAR churches often cite the Watchman Decree, a very theocratic prayer, which references the seven mountains. They often fly the “Appeal to Heaven” flag. Now you have people like Mike Johnson, who’s affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, displaying an “Appeal to Heaven” flag outside his office and appearing on podcasts run by very overt “Seven Mountains” dominionists, and you have a lot of white-power and militia groups that were not particularly religious before—they were more focused on race—but now they’re adopting the language and style of “Seven Mountains” dominionism. So when you see Mike Johnson’s “Appeal to Heaven” flag, when you see the Alitos flying the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, it doesn’t mean that they are necessarily affiliated with the New Apostolic Reformation, or that they’re members of these militias at all, but it really tells us who they’ve been talking to.
Most people in the mainstream, at the center right, really don’t know anything about this flag. They wouldn’t think to fly it. It’s like a relic of the revolutionary period. And it’s been revived now, and it’s being promoted by people on the extreme far right. So when they fly it, they’ve reinterpreted it as taking a stand for the idea of America as a Christian theocratic nation rather than a pluralistic democracy. They see it as a call for profound, and even violent, revolution. It’s really astonishing to see it flying over the Alitos’ beach house. Again, it doesn’t mean that they’re paid-up members of militia groups or charismatic Christian groups. It just means they spend their time in the same information and propaganda bubbles where this flag stands for God and country and armed insurrection.
Laser: If you believe that rights are God-given, instead of given by the people, then you can see how you can jump quickly to “and I can use violence to protect those rights.” That’s what has shown up in the polls.
PRRI [Public Religion Research Institute] did a poll on Christian nationalists, and they found Christian nationalists are about twice as likely as the rest of us to believe in political violence. That’s what we saw on Jan. 6 with the parading “Appeal to Heaven” flags that were at the insurrection. I think another important point to make here is the authoritarian nature of this Christian nationalist movement. This movement is rooted in the belief that America is a country given to European Christians, and that our laws and policies must reflect the same. If you believe that, you are antidemocratic, because democracy is rooted in equality. So the end goal of this Christian nationalist movement has to be the toppling of democracy to achieve their goal. And that’s why we saw so many of them fueling the insurrection.
The antidote to Christian nationalism is the separation of church and state, because it refuses to let Christian privilege into the law, it refuses to let conservative Christianity be the guiding principle in America. It insists that America keep to its promises that are embedded in our Constitution, of religious freedom as a basic human right. And that’s why Christian nationalists have gone after the separation of church and state, and that’s why their allies at the Supreme Court are on a crusade to eradicate church–state separation—because they are in lockstep with a movement that must get rid of church–state separation in order to accomplish its goals.
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My comment:
Will we be a theocracy or a society struggling to improve democracy? Please open the link. After reading this, you can understand why it is so important to the theocrats to destroy the separation of church and state and to funnel public money into religious organizations. That’s one of the crucial issues on the ballot in November. If you don’t want to be controlled by these power-hungry zealots, get active.
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