Part 7 of a 10-part Series:

The Unholy Alliance Between Socio-economic Elites

and White Christian Nationalism

…the religious right has become more focused and powerful even as it is arguably less representative. It is not a social or cultural movement. It is a political movement, and its ultimate goal is power.”

Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 2019

Oligarchs, plutocrats, extreme inequality, the dominance of corporations and Wall Street in public life—all are not unexpected results (indeed they were the very purpose) of the Powell memo. Harder to connect is how all of this is related to January 6^th, where it looked like a mob of “ordinary” Americans were fed up with a Congress that had lost touch with them. However, in their zeal to keep “the people” disconnected and distracted, the masters of the universe have created a population full of anger, angst, alienation, and anomie. Religion can fill the void of belongingness in such a system, and it can also be co-opted into the war against the people.

Anyone who has watched video footage from January 6^th can see that Christian iconography was everywhere. Certainly, there were plenty of regular American flags and Trump regalia. There were also symbols that many of us would consider “un-American,” including Confederate flags and Nazi symbolism. But even more jarring was the juxtaposition of white supremacy and nationalist hate groups (Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, III Percenters) with Christian themes:  crosses, ichthys (the Jesus fish), along with Jesus-themed flags (“Jesus is my Lord, Trump is my President,” “Make America Godly Again,”  “GOD GUNS TRUMP”) and even a picture of a white Jesus wearing a red MAGA hat—images which many Christians find blasphemous (this writer included). 

One seeming paradox is the incestuous relationship between Christian nationalism and plutocracy. How can a greed-is-good, everyone-for-himself, winner-take-all ethos come wrapped in a religion which is purportedly all about loving one’s fellows and helping one’s neighbors?  So-called “Christian nationalism” however, is not merely a patriotic form of Christianity, but rather a very specific ideology that is authoritarian, patriarchal, and hierarchical. This is not the “Jesus loves you” Christianity that supports missions of feeding, healing, and teaching; but rather something more like 17^th century Calvinism—which included practices of torture and witch-burning—or (farther back), the Holy Crusades.

According to Katherine Stewart in The Power Worshippers (2019), modern American Christian nationalism had roots in proslavery theology. Robert Dabney (1820-1898), a Presbyterian Pastor from South Carolina who had served as a chaplain in the Confederate army, turned to God in order to justify the ownership and enslavement of other human beings. Dabney began preaching the gospel of the “Redeemer Nation,” or the idea that slavery was divinely ordained, and that God would protect the white man’s property. Included in Dabney’s theology was the argument that God had also ordained the social subordination of women (based on the “first transgression” of Eve). Even after the Civil War and slavery was abolished, the “idea of the redeemer nation” persisted.

Fast forward to 1916, where an Armenian family who had fled the Turkish genocide arrived in America and bore a son they named Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdooney.  Rushdooney (1916-2001) grew up hearing stories of graphic persecution of Christians at the hands of Muslims, thus developing an intellectual and emotional attachment to the notion of Christian victimhood. Rushdooney attended the University of California at Berkeley, followed by the Pacific School of Religions (also based in Berkeley). Already, “all the distinctive features of his intellectual persona” were obvious: “a resolutely binary form of thought [which is a classic feature of authoritarianism], a craving for order, and a loathing for the secular world and secular education in particular.” Rushdooney became a disciple of Dabney’s works, including Dabney’s defense of slavery. Here we see the establishment of the dominionist movement, which takes up the theme of the Redeemer Nation: The United States was chosen by God, that its holy purpose is to become a Christian nation, where women are subordinated to men, education is wholly Christian-based, and no one pays taxes to support Black people.

Rushdooney found an ally in another Congregational minister named James W. Fifield, Jr. Fifield (1899-1977) can likely be credited for the marriage between big money and Christian nationalism. Fifield preached against the New Deal and the “social gospel” of helping those less fortunate. “With a talent for whispering into the ears of plutocrats,” Fifield was able to obtain corporate funding from the likes of Sun Oil, Chrysler and General Motors, who were happy to patronize a theology that “demonized labor unions and in general anything that required government to work on behalf of the people.” They teamed up with libertarian economists like Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Henry Hazlitt, who “warned that the modern welfare state would soon overwhelm the free market and put humanity on the road to serfdom….The fusion of hyper-capitalist ideology with hyper-Calvinist theology purveyed by the likes of Fifield …[and Rushdooney]…secured the financial future of Christian nationalism.”

Stewart argues that Rushdooney and Fifield did not necessarily create anything new, but they were able to tap into the darker side of humanity that had much deeper roots in American history—not just slavery, but the whole anti-democratic notion that certain people are intended (by God) to rule, and others are intended to serve or submit. The goal of government was to preserve the privileges of the rulers and keep everyone else in line. Democratic goals like equality—especially when applied to non-Whites or non-Christians—were heresy.

Stewart argues that Republicans were not always anti-abortion. Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, yet there was no immediate “pro-life” uprising. Indeed, then-First Lady Betty Ford actually praised the decision, and many Catholic Democrats opposed it. The anti-abortion “strategy” (yes, it started as strategy and not as a visceral reaction based on faith) began with the formation of a group associated with the ascendance of the New Right: Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, a few members of the former Nixon administration, and the Southern Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell.  

This group of right-wing evangelicals were searching for a spiritual bogeyman they could rally people against. At this time, one of the primary objectives was raising money and advocating for tax exemptions to support “Christian” schools. Although there was an urge to proselytize children, Christian schools were the right’s “solution” to avoid desegregation. Obviously, one could not make a moral argument in favor of segregated schools and tax exemptions for rich people, no matter how “religious” they were presented to be. Using focus group techniques more often associated with marketing and political campaigns, they came up with the name “Moral Majority.”

Now that they had a name that resonated with the voting public, the next step was to find (or manufacture) an emotional “hook” that was consistent with issues of faith. Someone suggested taking on “women’s liberation,” but this was the late 1970s and the Equal Rights Amendment was going nowhere. Another suggestion was abortion. Here they found both a foil for victimhood (nothing could be more blameless and helpless than an unborn baby) as well as a convenient way to demonize your adversaries as “baby killers.”

In order for abortion to work as a rallying cause, it had to be presented as a moral issue of utmost urgency rather than a matter of reproductive medical care. Thus, a decision was made to reframe abortion as being about “life,” essentially ignoring the science of reproduction. An alliance was forged with a group of Catholic conservatives, along with a message of “rebuilding America on the basis of Christian principles.” As this tactic began to solidify and produce converts, it also served as a convenient distraction from the erosion of workplace rights and the fact that most folk were working harder for less. Not to mention the immoral acts of certain pastors.

All Christians are exhorted (with varying degrees of coercion) to evangelize (bring the “good news” of Jesus), proselytize, and convert. For Christian nationalists, this exhortation not only comes with the urgency of holy war, it also comes with the opportunity for the enterprising to make a lot of money. So-called “prosperity gospel” ideology gained popularity in post-World War II America. An offshoot of Pentecostal revivalism, prosperity gospel proclaims that God wants people to be rich, and wealth is a sign of both one’s own degree of faith and God’s grace. One can see how this is an easy segue to an apologetics for the very rich. The message is that anyone can become a millionaire through faith and hard work—which distracts from suggestions that fortunes might have been made through exploitation, expropriation, corruption, and opportunism.

Prosperity gospel also gave the ministers who preached it a new way to increase their own fortunes. The amount one gave to the church was directly correlated with one’s own degree of faith, so the more you gave, the more that God would reward you.  One site has compiled a list of the 15 richest pastors in America, along with an estimate of their net worth. This group apparently does not strictly adhere to the more patriarchal and white supremacist wing of Christian nationalism, as four of the richest fifteen pastors are African Americans and two are women. But we see a few names that we recognize from the radical right:  Franklin Graham (heir to the Billy Graham dynasty), Pat Robertson, and Paula White (who has been connected with Trump).

Carrying forward Rushdooney’s condemnation of secular education, Christian nationalists have been instrumental in the school voucher and school privatization movements. Snagging public money to support religious schools (and thereby depriving same to secular education) is certainly one of the primary objectives. But, of course, there are always opportunities to make money. A number of Michigan-based cronies of the DeVos family have made fortunes on religious-based charter schools and private colleges: National Heritage Academies, Cornerstone Education Group, Hillsdale College. These schools serve the dual purpose of indoctrination into right-wing ideology as well as pumping money into the political system to further erode the separation of church and state.

Leonard Leo, an ultra conservative Catholic, has served in a leadership capacity at the Federalist Society for over 25 years. Realizing that the Christian right had little hope of winning the culture war at the ballot box, Leo has forged connections with big money, and was instrumental in growing Federalist Society membership and influence. The Federalist Society has connections to many of the “usual suspects” of dark money: the John M. Olin Foundation, the Scaife Foundation, the Prince and Devos Foundations, Rebekah Mercer (who is known for connections to Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica), as well as religious groups like Focus on the Family, Campus Crusade for Christ and the National Christian Foundation. In addition to money, Leo is connected to the dominionist movement, who believes that Christians must take control of all aspects of government, business and culture in order to prepare for the return of Christ. The six Federalists on the U.S. Supreme Court seem hell-bent on installing a theocracy.

The irony of the Dabney-Rushdooney-Fifield dogma is its obvious and ongoing hypocrisy. An early form of this was the insistence on “states rights,” while at the same time demanding that the Federal government help with the return of escaped slaves (a reason many Southerners opposed secession—slaves would now have a safe place to escape to). Government support for the underprivileged, or what is condescendingly termed “welfare,” is vilified as enforced theft from hard-working Americans (i.e., rich white people), yet there is all manner of grift and con to extract taxpayer money to fund their own schools of indoctrination. But the biggest hypocrisy of all is the flouting of purported moral superiority at the same time one is flagrantly engaging in at least three of the seven deadly sins: Pride (more accurately described as arrogance, hubris, and entitlement), greed, and lust (especially for power).