The Power Worshippers

by Katherine Stewart

  Just as important as the pursuit of private money to Christian nationalism is the effort to secure public sources of funding. The movement has learned to siphon public money through subsidies, tax deductions, grants, and other schemes. This flow of funds has in turn shaped the ambitions and tactics of the movement. The calls for “religious freedom” that characterize much of its activism today, though undoubtedly bound up in a sincerely held belief that conservative Christians should be permitted to discriminate against LGBT people and members of religious minority groups, are as loud and passionate as they are because they are grounded in the fear among movement leaders that their discriminatory inclinations might cost them their lucrative tax deductions and subsidies.

  Christian nationalists have put particular emphasis on the intersection of money and education. The Christian right has been hostile to public education at least since Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority called for an end to public schools in 1979. This hostility has its roots in a combination of racial animus and fears of secularism, as I will explain. But Christian nationalists now see in school vouchers—and even charter programs—a potentially vast source of public funding, too. Furthermore, by planting churches in public school buildings for nominal fees rather than purchasing and funding their own buildings or renting private facilities at market rates, they are exploiting the public schools on a widespread scale to subsidize their religion.

  In their pursuit of money, just as in their efforts to mobilize voters, Christian nationalists have displayed a high degree of sophistication and technological capability. There is a tendency on the part of those outside it to view the movement as a premodern phenomenon clinging to ancient doctrines that have long been destined for the archives of history. In fact, this is a modern movement in every respect. It is modern in its methods, which include high-tech data-mining operations and slick marketing campaigns. It is also modern in its doctrines, which notwithstanding their purported origins in ancient texts have been carefully shaped to serve the emotional needs of its adherents, the organizational needs of its clerical leaders, and the political needs and ambitions of its funders.

  At every step in its rise, popular commentators have declared that the movement is in terminal decline. Secularization and modernization, we have been told, are the immutable laws of history, and demography will put the nail in the coffin. When journalists do draw attention to the authoritarian and theocratic ambitions of the movement, some have been quick to minimize concern and complain of alarmism. It is “a movement that could fit in a phone booth,” wrote former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson in the Washington Post. Now that the “phone booth” has been installed in the White House and in the Capitol, the time has come to set aside these premature dismissals.

  I wish to underscore, because the question always comes up, that my concern here is not with religious belief systems, either in general or in particular. I do not for a moment imagine that Christian nationalists represent all Christians. I leave it for theologians to decide whether their views are consistent with Christian teachings. I am not interested in judging other people’s religious beliefs. But I think we all have a stake in understanding their political actions.

  I believe that some of the most powerful resistance to Christian nationalism may ultimately come from those who identify as Christians themselves. As of this writing, many individuals and groups who identify as religious moderates or who call themselves part of a “religious left” are organizing to meet the challenge. They have many good arguments and can draw on a long tradition in the American past to support their cause, and they may have the future on their side. But they are not in the saddle of history today, and they are not the subject of this book.

  In The Power Worshippers I will introduce you to the movement’s power players and the foot soldiers. I will tell their stories, in their words, though my real subject is the political vision that ties them together. I will take you to gatherings in Northern California, where agri-business men team up with pastors who have direct access to the Trump White House; to North Carolina, where Christian nationalist leaders recruit clergy to their partisan activism; to Arizona, where charter school operators with sectarian agendas are indoctrinating schoolchildren on the taxpayer’s dime; and to Verona, Italy, where American representatives of what they call a “global conservative movement” gather with international far-right leaders to declare war on global liberalism. We will revisit the strategy meetings of the late 1970s in which it was decreed, several years after Roe v. Wade, that abortion would be packaged and sold as the unifying issue of the movement. We’ll go back further in time to historical antecedents of Christian nationalism in some of the most fraught chapters of America’s theological past—most importantly, the chapter in which the theological ancestors of today’s religious authoritarians wielded the Bible in support of slavery and segregation. And we will examine the movement’s affinities and connections with religious nationalist movements in other countries. I will trace the flow of funds from America’s most pious plutocrats to the organizations that are packing the courts and upending electoral politics. We will sit in on gatherings organized by national activists to motivate pastors to get out the vote for Republican candidates. And we will spend time with some of the movement’s most intriguing personalities as they cast aside their “unbiblical” longings, make war against their “demonic” enemies, and stride confidently on the path to power.

  CHAPTER 1

  Church and Party in Unionville

  If you don’t know your enemy and you don’t know yourself, you’re going to get conquered every time. If you don’t know yourself and you know your enemy, you can win every other time. But if you know yourself and you know your enemy, you can prevail.

  —TONY PERKINS, FAMILY RESEARCH COUNCIL PRESIDENT, AT THE UNIONVILLE BAPTIST CHURCH, OCTOBER 2018, PARAPHRASING SUN TZU, THE ART OF WAR

  With thirty-three days to go before the 2018 midterm elections, I am headed for the fellowship hall of the Unionville Baptist Church, about forty-five minutes outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, in the passenger seat of a Ford Explorer SUV. The car seats and toys strewn in the back belong to my friend Chris Liles, a father of two and head pastor at a Baptist church in a midsized town in South Carolina. With his khaki pants and neat polo shirt and jacket, Chris looks the part of a young, sincere pastor. But the trip seems to be making him a little uneasy.

  Chris’s church is a member of the Southern Baptist Convention as well as a partner with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which takes a philosophically and theologically moderate stance on issues including women’s ordination. Chris is avowedly a Bible believer, yet his reading of Scripture is miles away from the interpretations of the fellow believers with whom we are about to gather. As we set off across the verdant farmland close to the South Carolina border, he reminds me that care for the poor and downtrodden lie at the very heart of the faith, no matter what others seem to say. “It’s just hard for me to imagine how you can read the Bible and not see themes of social justice throughout,” he says squarely. “Or where you find America’s current political landscape in a text that was finished eighteen hundred years ago.”

  When I asked Chris to add my name as his guest at the event, there was only one available box for pastors to check: “Wife.” So he checked it. Chris is about thirty years old—young enough, in theory, to be my son—and his winsome smile and baby cheeks make him look even younger. I’m not going to be his wife. I’m not going incognito, either, but I also don’t want to attract attention in any way that might affect the event.

  I’ve chosen a floral print blouse with a complicated arrangement of ribbons off to one side, a coordinating pink cardigan, and pearl earrings. Chris glances at my camouflage with a dubious look. As we pull into the parking lot he hands me the Bible he keeps in his car, a compact New International Version translation. Its black leather binding has been softened to a buttery texture from habitual use.

  “Maybe this w
ill help,” he says laconically.

  Unionville Baptist Church is a solid brick building on a country road surrounded by farmland. We enter the spacious fellowship hall on the ground floor and take our seats at one of the round tables with a clear view of the podium. Purple-and-white floral arrangements adorn the tables, and the walls are lined with colorful booths displaying promotional materials from the various right-wing policy groups in attendance.

  From the flyer publicizing the event, which is sponsored by the Watchmen on the Wall, an affiliate of the Washington, D.C.–based Family Research Council (FRC), a passerby might have formed the impression that this would be a nonpartisan occasion involving discussion of policy issues of interest to church members and their leaders. The FRC, one of the most powerful and politically connected lobbying organizations of the Christian right, has organized dozens of similar “Pastors Briefings” through its network of “Watchmen,” which claims to have nearly 25,000 members. According to its promotional material, the briefings are “focused on shaping public policy and informed civic activism.” The organization’s website boasts an endorsement by Vice President Mike Pence: “Keep being a ‘Watchman on the Wall.’ Keep doing what you’re doing. It’s making a difference.”1

  With the approach of the 2018 midterms, the rhetoric on the Watchmen’s website took a turn to the apocalyptic. “Do you not already hear the warnings of God? Do you not see that the enemy is coming in like a flood? And God is trying to raise up a standard against it. And you and I are that standard,” read one quote on the home page from the influential pastor Dr. Henry Blackaby.

  If there was any pretense of neutrality at Unionville, in any case, it didn’t survive more than a few sentences into the opening remarks by FRC president Tony Perkins. “I believe this last election, 2016, was the result of prayer,” said Perkins. “We’ve seen our nation begin to move back to a nation that respects the sanctity of life.” Perkins speaks in the calm, mid-Atlantic voice of a Beltway operator, but his words are all sulphur and rage. The host of a daily radio show to which he invites prominent guests, he is a practiced and effective speaker and knows the anger buttons of his audience well.

  “ ‘Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand the wiles of the devil, for we do not wrestle against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against the spiritual host of wickedness in heavenly places,’ ” he says, quoting a Bible verse from the book of Ephesians. “If we don’t know that to be true after what we’ve seen in the last three weeks, I don’t know what it will take,” he adds, referring to the recent fight to place Judge Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court.

  A woman seated to my left wearing a conservatively cut red-and-black suit is nodding intently. Perkins is speaking to his people, and the room is punctuated by spontaneous encouragements from members of the crowd: “Preach, brother,” and “Amen!”

  “Folks, we’re headed in a new direction as a nation. And that’s what this battle over the court is all about,” Perkins continues. “This battle over the court is not about Brett Kavanaugh.” He runs through a familiar litany of how “the Court has been used to impose a godless set of values on America,” tapping all the well-worn talking points about how the Bible was “taken out of school” and replaced with “calls for abortion on demand.” “It was the Court that imposed it on America and made all of us complicit with the taking of innocent human life,” he inveighs. “Folks, is this an evil day?”

  Then he gets to the point of the gathering. “Christians need to vote,” he says. “The members of your congregations need to vote. As pastors, you need to—I’m not going to say ‘challenge them’; you need to tell them to vote.”

  Although Perkins never says the word “Republican,” there isn’t the slightest doubt about which way he expects pastors to tell their congregants to vote. One party is determined to end abortion, he suggests, and supporting it is a matter of eternal salvation. “We are a divided nation, and someone’s values will dominate,” he warns, leaving little doubt that in his view “the rulers of the darkness” and “the spiritual host of wickedness” are to be found on the Democratic Party’s side of the aisle. “We will be held accountable for what we do with this moment,” he tells the assembled pastors. “My question to you this morning is: What will you do? What will you do with this moment that God has entrusted to us?”

  In his talk at Unionville, Perkins asks pastors to “pray, to vote, and to stand.” “Stand” appears to be a synonym for activity that will lead congregants to vote “biblical” values. An FRC video encourages pastors to form “Culture Impact Teams across the country.” These “CITs” are, alongside the Pastors Briefings, central tools in the FRC’s campaign to turn out the vote. The idea is for pastors to create within their churches teams of congregants that will “advance Kingdom values in the public arena.” Pastors are instructed to figure out which members of their congregation are politically active, well-connected with other members, and motivated to persuade them to vote according to “biblical values,” and then draft them as team leaders “to accomplish the Culture Impact Team’s mission of defending and advancing faith, family, and freedom.” Congregants on the CIT can take lead roles in the areas of communications (including written and social media outreach), research, strategy, and mobilization. Other team members will encourage “grassroots participation” and “involvement in pregnancy support centers, school board meetings, civil government gatherings,” and the like. Team members then set up a “Culture Impact Center” for church members to “give people an opportunity to become informed and, in turn, involved.”

  An unstated motivation behind the creation of the elaborate architecture of Culture Impact Teams is to skirt legal prohibitions on the direct endorsement of candidates by church organizations. Current IRS guidelines require that pastors refrain from campaigning for candidates through their office—that is, from the pulpit. But nothing stops congregants from undertaking their own church-based political activism if it’s all about “culture.” “It wasn’t me; it was the CIT” is thus seen as an alibi against any theoretical charge that pastors may be organizing de facto political action committees.

  In order to guide the CITs in their actual mission—to turn out the vote for Republican and hyper-conservative candidates—the FRC supplies dense, information-packed manuals. At Unionville, I spot a stack of such manuals, some 180 pages of material in a three-ring binder, bound in a white cover, at the FRC booth, and I take one for myself.

  According to the CIT manual, the Bible is very clear about the right answers to the political issues American voters face in the twenty-first century.2 Scripture, it says, opposes public assistance to the poor as a matter of principle—unless the money passes through church coffers. God has challenged believers “to help the poor and widows and orphans,” but He expects governments to step aside. The Bible also votes against environmentalism, which is a “litany of the Green Dragon” and “one of the greatest threats to society and the church today,” according to the CIT manual’s sole recommended resource on environmental issues, the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.3 The Cornwall Alliance has produced a declaration asserting, as a matter of theology, that “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming.”4

  According to the CIT manual, the Bible also opposes gun regulations, favors privatization of schools, and tells us that same-sex relationships are an abomination. It emphatically does not want women to have access to comprehensive, twenty-first-century reproductive medical care. The CIT manual directs readers to additional sources. I recognize one of them, Ken Ham, an author and activist known for promoting the claim that the earth is six thousand years old.

  Tami Fitzgerald, executive director of the NC Values Coalition, follows Perkins onstage. A seasoned activist with soft blond hair, a smartly cut black skirt suit, and a composed manner, Fitzger
ald leads a group with a “dual focus on impacting elections and on advancing Christian values in law and public policy.” Yet she offers some carefully worded language that seems intended to make clear to the authorities that she is not a Republican Party operative. After urging pastors to support candidates with the right values, she adds, “Notice I didn’t say members of a certain party because party doesn’t guarantee they are fearing God and living according to biblical values. We never want to be the pawns of a political party,” she points out. “Instead, as Christians, we want to use political parties as a means to an end.”

  In a curt nod to the letter of the law, she advises the pastors to speak with her privately if they are worried about what they are legally permitted to do. “I’m telling you, you can talk about issues all day long as a pastor, you can tell people who you’re going to vote for,” she assures them. But, she cautioned, “you must not publish that information in a church newsletter or state it from the pulpit.”

  From her tone of voice, I can tell that Fitzgerald’s talk is haunted by the Johnson Amendment, the federal law that bars houses of worship, charitable nonprofits, and private foundations from endorsing and financially supporting political parties and candidates. Passed in 1954 at the urging of then senator Lyndon B. Johnson, the amendment was intended to prevent public money from passing through churches via tax deductions into the hands of politicians. In theory, according to the Johnson Amendment, religious organizations that engage in activities to directly sway elections could lose their tax-exempt status. It has been a favorite target of Christian nationalists, who regularly decry it as an infringement of their religious freedom.