The Power Worshippers

by Katherine Stewart

  “Jack’s very savvy,” said Martin. Glancing at his phone, Martin boasts that Steve Bannon has just texted him. Bannon is aiming to found an institute to support a global far-right Christian coalition, or what he calls “The Movement.”

  Ed Martin hails from the religious right, but Posobiec is more a figure of the alt-right. As the conversation in Verona attests, the two movements are increasingly finding common ground. Both fear and loathe the global liberal order; both are increasingly turning to a certain kind of national identity as the vector for solution. Increasingly, members of the two groups are making contact and working together. In the figure of Steve Bannon, who has called on “the Church militant” to “fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity,” they may well have found a uniter.3

  Sarah Posner, author of Unholy: The Christian Right at the Altar of Donald Trump, has documented these developments at length. “A turn against the liberal democratic values of the EU is exactly what many on the Christian Right are hoping for,” she writes. “In an essay last year, [Allan] Carlson, the World Congress founder, scoffed at fears about Orban’s autocratic rule and the eclipse of Enlightenment values. Instead, Carlson countered, ‘May it be so!’ ”4

  Back in the auditorium, I hear Jim Garlow, the politically connected preacher who has served as a director of a division of Bill Dallas’s right-wing data-mining operation United in Purpose, speak proudly of his involvement in weekly Bible study classes in the U.S. Congress, the State Department, and the United Nations. “And so we find ourselves in the wonderful privilege of bringing specifically what does the word of God have to say about governmental issues,” he says.

  The bond between America’s far-right and this global reactionary movement is also consecrated with money. The UK-based online political media platform openDemocracy, in partnership with the Independent Media Institute, published a report estimating U.S. Christian nationalist organizations have spent over $50 million in Europe over the past decade in an effort to influence the development of right-wing politicians and policies.5

  The effects of their contributions are amplified by support from foreign allies. Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, rumored to be a funder for Steve Bannon’s planned “gladiator school for cultural warriors,”6 has reportedly offered the use of her five-hundred-room palace in Regensburg, Germany, as a summer school.

  With so much to celebrate and a world waiting to be conquered, the mood in Verona is both belligerent and triumphant. Warning the crowd of the urgent need to “break the ice cap of political correctness,” Arsuaga said, “Please try to make liberal politicians and decision makers fear you.”

  “We are not medievalist throwbacks,” Turley added. “We are the future. We are the prolife, pro-child, pro-family future, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, the secular world can do about that.”

  As I listen in on the ebullient discussions in Verona, it strikes me that the imagined future of the global holy war looks a lot like the present in Russia. “In the Russian Federation the Orthodox Church has risen to a prominence not seen since the days of the czars,” Steve Turley says in reverent tones. The enthusiasm of the crowd is palpable when Archbishop Antony of Vienna and Budapest, a young bearded man with a magisterial affect, rises to deliver a message from the Patriarch of Moscow, which he reads out in Russian.

  Alexey Komov, a ubiquitous figure at the congress, seems determined to spread the Russian formula for church-state union around the world. He sits on the board of Arsuaga’s CitizenGO and participates, along with two American activists, on a World Congress of Families panel on homeschooling. Komov, who litters his amiable presentations with casual references to “covfefe” and other terms of endearment for the American far-right, seems to have an intimate familiarity with the nuances of America’s right-wing political scene. With his charming demeanor and youthful good looks, he reminds me of Maria Butina, the Russian student at American University who ingratiated herself to right-wing politicians through her embrace of America’s pro-gun lobby and National Prayer Breakfast and has now been convicted for conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent. Komov assisted the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), along with the IOF and other organizations, in bringing a Global Home Education Conference to Russia in May 2018. The HSLDA’s founder and former chairman, Michael Farris, currently serves at the CEO and General Counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom. Like Brown, Farris too appears on the 2014 leaked membership list of the Council for National Policy.

  “By networking with Russians, the HSLDA—now America’s largest right-wing homeschooling association—has provided the Kremlin with a new avenue of influence over some of the most conservative organizations in the United States,” writes the journalist Casey Michel, who has reported on the links between America’s far right and Russia for ThinkProgress and other media outlets. “Russian ties to groups like the HSLDA demonstrate the Kremlin’s broader attempts to hold sway over American policies.”7

  According to Michel, Komov has worked with Konstantin Malofeev, a Russian oligarch with links to pro-Russian military and political leaders in eastern Ukraine. Malofeev’s television station, Tsargrad TV, which was launched with the help of former Fox News producer Jack Hanick, has provided a platform for the disgraced right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and the Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin. Dugin advocates for the establishment of a network of authoritarian, traditionalist ethno-states with Moscow at its center.8

  The World Congress of Families got its start over twenty years ago when American and Russian activists and academics gathered in Russia to study issues of mutual interest. In 2018 the congress took place in the former Soviet republic of Moldova. In 2016 it was in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, where members praised Putin’s Russia and the Orthodox Church as defenders of “Christian civilization” against a secular, decadent West. Looking around at my fellow conference-goers, it occurs to me that if the Russian government wanted to manipulate the politics of the West as effectively as it controls its own population, it could hardly have found a more useful collection of people.

  The World Congress of Families is for the generals of the global holy war. The movement’s strength in fact depends on its ground troops, operating street by street and pew by pew. Or, in the case of the Child Evangelism Fellowship, child by child. When I first reported in 2009 on the Good News Club, the Child Evangelism Fellowship’s flagship initiative for converting very young children in public elementary schools, I focused on the American aspect of their work. But theirs is a global organization; at that time their goal was to establish a presence in two hundred countries worldwide. They have nearly reached that goal today.

  In May 2017, more than 1,000 Child Evangelism Fellowship volunteers and employees gathered at an evangelical conference center in Ridgecrest, North Carolina, in honor of the ministry’s eightieth anniversary. Ken Ham, the notorious creationist, was featured as a keynote speaker. Ham has a warm history with the CEF: two years previously the leaders of the organization “spent the entire day with us at the Creation Museum, plus took a quick trip to the Ark Encounter construction site,” he boasted on his blog.9

  There was much to celebrate. The Child Evangelism Fellowship, which targets children as young as four and five years old for conversion to a deeply fundamentalist form of the evangelical Christian faith, grew at a slow and steady pace for the first six decades after its founding in 1937. Then, in 2001, the Supreme Court, dismissing concerns about the separation of church and school, threw open the doors to America’s public schools to the CEF. There are now more than 4,000 CEF-sponsored Good News Clubs operating in public elementary schools in the United States. Good News Clubs confuse small children into believing that their school endorses the CEF’s form of Christianity, and they exploit that confusion to encourage children to recruit their classmates to the clubs. As I have detailed in my book on the topic, The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, Child Evan
gelism Fellowship representatives discovered long ago that the particular qualities that make children so vulnerable—their tenderness, their innocence, their eagerness to please and to trust—also make them a fruitful focus of missionary activity. In strategy meetings that I attended, public schools were referred to as “mission fields” and children as “the harvest.”

  In recent years the Child Evangelism Fellowship has lifted its sights from the children of America to the children of the world. In this respect the organization has tracked an important shift in the thinking of the leadership of the Christian nationalist movement. In 2009, the influential evangelical missions strategist Luis Bush announced a new, unifying vision for missionaries everywhere. He called it the “4/14 Window,” and put his findings in a book titled The 4/14 Window: Raising Up a New Generation to Transform the World. The largest and most strategic group of people in the world, he observed, are children between the ages of four and fourteen, the stage of life at which most people form their religious identities. “Every major movement in history has grasped the need to target the next generation in order to advance its agenda and secure its legacy into the future,” wrote Dr. Wess Stafford, president of the youth-focused ministry Compassion International, in the introduction to the book. “Political movements (like Nazism and Communism) trained legions of children with the goal of carrying their agenda beyond the lifetimes of their founders. World religions have done the same with the systematic indoctrination of their young—even the Taliban places great emphasis on recruiting children.”10

  The Child Evangelism Fellowship embraced this global vision unreservedly, and this is what made the 2017 conference in North Carolina remarkable. The international side of the organization was the star of the show. According to the CEF, there are presently over 75,000 Good News Clubs in about 180 countries around the world.

  Today, Child Evangelism Fellowship’s ministries contribute to budding theocracies in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and—very soon, it hopes—North Korea. In a biography of the organization’s founder, titled The Indomitable Mr. O, author Norman Rohrer boasts that “several countries of the world have adopted CEF materials taught by trained CEF workers as curriculum for mandatory religion classes in their schools.” Reports from CEF workers around the world amplify the good news.11 A CEF initiative in Brazil has embarked on a Tribal Children for Christ outreach, with a Leadership Training Institute session “only for the indigenous groups.” A “program of CEF media ministry” in the Middle East region is broadcast “in many closed countries” through “social media and satellite,” according to a CEF representative working in the area. In Zambia, as one worker exults, “Thank God the government has allowed us to minister freely in schools.” A CEF regional director for the Bahamas reports that the organization “was invited to partner with the Royal Bahamas Police Force at its Annual Summer Camp 2018. Camps were held for six weeks at eight local schools in Nassau.” Richard Acquaye, CEF director for Central and West Africa, succinctly articulated the underlying philosophy of the group to a Ghana newspaper reporter: “When the tree is tender you can easily mold it.”12

  North Korea appears to be a work in progress. The country is said to be one of the most hostile places in the world for freedom of religion, and citizens can be exiled to labor camps, tortured, and even murdered for possessing religious literature or materials. But that has only served to inspire Child Evangelism Fellowship president Reese Kauffman to announce as his first prayer goal for 2019 “that children in North Korea will have Good News Clubs.” In a recent CEF document, members are exhorted to pray “that the Gospel Balloons will fly and reach every corner of North Korea, that these balloons will reach children and whoever reads the text printed on the balloons will be saved.”13

  In more accessible countries, the Child Evangelism Fellowship tends to partner with conservative local churches. A promotional video for CityKids, the CEF’s latest ministry initiative focusing on European cities, shows a charming tot being greeted at the doors of a church by a friendly woman carrying a fistful of balloons.

  The real backbone of this global movement is the growing and interconnected network of churches that emphasize strict interpretations of the faith. In many instances they are supplanting houses of worship that represent more traditional denominations. Sometimes these churches turn up where you would least expect, and they maintain ties with other, equally unexpected groups and institutions.

  In England, for instance, where more than half the population say they have no religion and only 14 percent identified themselves as belonging to the Church of England, conservative church plants are making decisive inroads. While their edges tend to be softer, likely in response to cultural norms, the strictness at their core places them comfortably at the table of ultraconservative religious movements in America and beyond.

  On a sunny Sunday in May 2018, I arrive in time for services at the Euston Church in central London. Housed in the rib-vaulted sanctuary of a neo-Gothic cathedral in Bloomsbury’s Gordon Square, the church serves about 150 congregants. The vicar is Kev Murdoch, and I’m familiar with his theological views from his sermons, which are recorded and may be accessed online. “How Can a God of Love Send People to Hell?” is the title of one.14 “It’s not a nice subject for us to think about,” he says in an apologetic tone. “Can it really be right that a God of love can put hell on decent people?” The answer is an unequivocal yes. “There will be no super-injunctions for anyone” who fails to accept a literalist interpretation of scripture, he argues. “Justice demands that there is a hell.”

  In front of every seat is a little square card, colored in red, with the words “Try Church” on one side. The other side asks the question, “IS GOD GOOD?” and reprints a quote from Richard Dawkins equating the notion of a vengeful deity with a “ ‘capriciously malevolent bully.’ ” The card invites the public to “ ‘Try Church’ Sunday.” I also learn that Dr. Andrew Sach, a pastor who obtained a doctorate in auditory neuroscience before shifting his career path to ministry, will deliver a talk, “Does Science Contradict Christianity?” “We dare you!” the card says.

  The Euston Church presently rents space to hold its services at Church of Christ the King. The cathedral, which dates from the 1800s, is embellished with buttresses, turrets, and spires. It was originally built to accommodate the Catholic Apostolic Church, a Victorian-era sect also known as Irvingites, and for a time in the 1960s through the 1990s it served the Anglican chaplaincy to the nearby University of London. But student participation dwindled, and control of the facility was returned to Catholic Apostolic trustees, who have leased the building since 2015 to Euston Church for a reasonable fee.

  “We are part of the Church of England,” a congregant explained to me when I attended services at Euston Church that Sunday morning in May 2018. “But like most Church of England churches, there are things that we think are really, really great, and there’s parts that we don’t agree with as much. So, for instance, we wouldn’t do a gay wedding.” In a February 27, 2017, sermon, Murdoch laid it out: “The battleground area, and I’m afraid it is a battleground, is sexuality.” Pointing to certain passages in the Bible, he said, “All are unambiguously negative about gay sex.”

  Murdoch’s comments clearly show where the Euston Church’s sympathies lie in the schism that has threatened to tear apart the Church of England (part of the Anglican Communion) over the past decade. In 2008 an international faction of conservative Anglicans formed the Global Anglican Future Conference, or GAFCON. Although the Euston Church is not part of GAFCON, its leaders are in tune with sentiments of GAFCON’s leader, Archbishop Nicholas Okoh of Nigeria, who declared in 2011 that “what is being known now as gay and homosexuality is contrary to God’s plan for human sexuality and procreation. It is against the will of God, and nobody should encourage it, and those who do will earn for themselves the damnation of the Almighty.”15 GAFCON also opposes the ordination of women, which the Church of Engl
and has approved since 1992.16 According to GAFCON representatives, the subordinate status of women in the church should mirror their natural submission at home. “God’s good order does not envision nor permit women to exercise the ministry of headship in the family,” wrote two church representatives who elaborated at length in a coauthored book.17 Although GAFCON’s base of support lies mostly outside the United Kingdom, with a large presence in Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, and other sub-Saharan African countries, as well as some number of churches in the Americas, its ambition is to retake the homeland. Okoh describes a plan “to help re-evangelize a nation that was once one of the greatest centers of Christian mission the world has ever seen but is now one of the most secular.”18

  The manpower driving the schism derives, in part, from the newly reactionary colleges and training institutes that feed into the Anglican hierarchy. According to Richard Howells, who was ordained in 1993 and presently serves as associate priest in the Nar Valley Group, Diocese of Norwich, the system has now passed a “tipping point.”

  “Moderate colleges are reduced in number, and therefore nowadays I would say three-quarters of the Church of England clergy are trained in an evangelical view of one kind or another,” he tells me. Another factor driving the schism, he says, comes from conservative religious organizations such as Christian Concern, which promotes reactionary policy positions among the clergy through seminars, sponsored lectures, and other events.

  Right-wing politicians and media personalities frequently mourn the emptying of England’s historic churches, pointing out that more people go fishing on Sunday than attend church. Yet the conservative offshoots of Anglicanism are strengthening. In a survey of 185 English churches that opposed women bishops, two-thirds of those churches had grown in the past decade, with a third growing by over 33 percent every year, as reported in the UK weekly magazine the Spectator.19 Approximately one in three congregants at those churches was younger than thirty. “For the rest of the church, the picture is miserable,” according to the article. “The average age of a congregation is 62 and nearly half of English congregations have fewer than five members under 16.” The situation bears similarity to that in the U.S., where mainline denominations are graying and thinning, while conservative evangelical plants thrive.