The main sanctuary pews were hardly full at North Arlington’s Rock Springs United Church of Christ last Sunday afternoon, but those who did show up were confronted with a mighty challenge coming from an otherwise unassuming professor of New Testament studies.
Dr. Greg Carey from the Lancaster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania systematically laid out what confronts all major mainstream religions, and society in general, in this century with what ought to be recognized as perhaps our greatest crisis ever.
It goes by the name of “Christian Nationalism,” a fairly recent term coined as a shorthand for identifying the way in which a fundamentalist movement operating under the cloak of Christianity evolved since at least the 1970s when it first took on a political form to now be spearheading the attempted re-election of Donald Trump and the frighteningly anti-democratic, pro-tyranny contents of the Heritage Foundation’s infamous Project 2025 report.
Dr. Carey spoke calmly but with grave conviction about this movement to hijack his faith which has evolved to a magnitude that confronts all civilization with a huge stumbling block to its very survival.
For many who have been aware on some level of how the conservative wing of Christian faith in the U.S. has been morphed into a battering ram for Trump and the insidious “unitary executive” policies contained in the Project 2025 report, this arch-authoritarian, socially-fascist offensive has been wholly underestimated and allowed to fester and grow in the name of religious freedom.
Thinking persons perhaps scratch their heads in amazement at how people avowedly morally grounded in faith could be veritably worshiping Trump at this stage in our history, and at best are left to write it off as a “cult-like” response, which, of course, it is. But as Dr. Carey spelled it out plainly, it has a lot more behind it, and is far more toxic to our culture than just some people falling under the spell of a single charismatic leader.
Some groups have begun to come together to tackle this phenomenon from within the faith community, such as the Public Religion Research Institute led by Robert P. Jones, the author of the best-selling “The End of White Christian America,” the Christians Against Christian Nationalism, the non-Southern Baptist “Baptist Joint Committee,” and the Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Some of these groups have been opposing the rise of Christian Nationalism for decades when the problem was identified as the “Christian Nation Thesis.” J. Brent Walker, former executive director of the Joint Baptist Committee and a member of Falls Church’s Columbia Baptist Church, and City resident Holly Holliman and others have been identifying and combating this for years.
But it has been very slow in coming, with a big reason being what the pastor of the Rock Springs Church identified Sunday, that some members of her congregation were opposed to the idea of Sunday’s forum on grounds that it violated the commitment to a free, non-judgmental exercise of religious freedom.
Still, this June, the Baptist Joint Committee’s executive director Amanda Tyler appeared on the MSNBC news network to assert, “We need to normalize speaking out against Christian Nationalism” as a “gross distortion of the teachings of Jesus” aimed at “teaching the Bible as an authoritarian text.”
She said the movement “is an attack on our religious freedom just as much as it is an attack on the religious freedom of our neighbors who practice different faiths or those who don’t claim a faith tradition.”
Tyler said, “It’s incumbent on Christians to take their place in the public square to advocate from their faith-based perspective against Christian Nationalism…We are seeing the foundation of religious freedom under attack by Christian Nationalism right now.” Tyler is having a book on the subject coming out next month.
Sunday, Dr. Carey said that another name for this movement is “Dominionism.” He said that under that name, there is a doctrine of “Seven Mountains Dominionism,” that was begun in 1975 and asserts there are seven aspects of society that believers should seek to influence: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government, totally disregarding the U.S. Constitutional mandate for the separation of church and state.
Increasingly this movement has adopted a posture of “spiritual warfare” against democracy and the U.S. government, picking up on expressions by Trump ally Roger Stone, who said he “saw demons over the White House,” and so-called “post-millennial” doctrines that claim it is the mandate of the faithful “to bring God’s reign to earth.”
These heresies have led to the assertion that Trump is “God’s anointed one,” or messiah, and that violence is justified to take the reins of government by force.
Dr. Carey noted how these themes were prevalent during the January 6, 2021 siege of the Capitol, and current slanders against Vice President Kamala Harris as having “Jezebel’s spirit.” Then there was Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn who accused Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of being a demon, herself.
Dr. Carey cautioned that the effort to subvert the U.S. government is already well organized for the aftermath of this November’s presidential election, including the fact that as many as three members of the U.S. Supreme Court are heavily influenced by this.
