Many of the ministries and groups of the NAR—including the International House of Prayer, Bethel Church, and Morningstar Church—fulfill criteria of the BITE model, such as deceptive recruitment, restricting access to critical information and people, and instilling phobias in members, as we will see in chapter 8. (The Australia-based Hillsong Church and its New York leader, Carl Lentz, recruited pop singer Justin Bieber and other celebrities.)
Followers are taught that God is working through their divinely appointed leaders, who receive revelations, speak in tongues, exorcise demons, and do faith healings. They believe that through prayer, they can perform miracles: in addition to freeing Andrew Brunson, they believe their prayers helped Brett Kavanaugh become a Supreme Court justice and put Trump in the White House. In the Cult of Trump, NAR followers are among the most fervent believers in the Dominionist vision and the idea that Trump was chosen by God to lead them.
Though they embrace Trump now, Ted Cruz was the preferred candidate of many NAR leaders during the Republican primaries. When it became clear that Trump was the likely Republican nominee, a steering committee of Christian right figures, including top NAR leader Joseph Mattera—whose website’s tagline is “Influencing the Leaders Who Influence Culture”—organized a meeting at Trump Tower with more than a thousand evangelical and Christian right leaders.48 Most of the attendees came out of the meeting feeling reassured that they could support Trump, despite his history of un-Christian indiscretions.
Once Trump arrived in the White House, he set to work making good on promises to the NAR and the broader Christian right. During their meeting with Trump, Christian right leaders had discussed their concerns about what they perceived to be the government’s assault on religious freedom, defined as the right to practice their own brand of Christianity, even if it meant refusing to perform medical procedures, bake cakes, or perform services for people they might deem un-Christian. Trump delivered, signing religious freedom executive orders and making judicial appointments. Meanwhile, the NAR and other factions of the Christian right were making historic inroads at the state and local level. Several Christian right groups had organized a legislative campaign, called Project Blitz, providing state legislators with a manual outlining how to write laws that would further their goal of theocratic Christian dominion.49 Included in the manual were a set of “model bills.” In 2018, at least seventy-five bills were introduced in more than twenty states, many of which resemble these model bills. In five states bills were passed allowing, and sometimes requiring, that the phrase “In God We Trust” be posted in public buildings, schools, and vehicles, including police cars. They are only the tip of the iceberg. The goal is to introduce legislation governing issues from school prayer to gay marriage to a woman’s right to choose and in this way advance their theocratic vision.
That vision was framed by Weyrich and Lind as a struggle between a theocratic insurgency against what they perceived to be an increasingly secular anti-Christian culture and government. In promoting their Dominionist vision, and their retooled concept of freedom of religion, the ministries of the NAR pit themselves against the Democrats, the establishment Republicans, and government in general. They even claimed that the FBI and Department of Justice were trying to destroy Trump’s presidency. In a blog post, “Apostle” Dutch Sheets described how the NAR would use their “kingdom authority” to break “the back of this attempt to render President Trump ineffective. We will release favor over him, enabling him to accomplish everything for which God sent him to the White House—including the turning of the Supreme Court! President Trump will fulfill all of God’s purposes for him,” Sheets wrote.50
RALPH DROLLINGER AND CAPITOL MINISTRIES
Ralph Drollinger is a big man, over seven feet tall, with a sweeping reach. He is founder and director of the international Capitol Ministries, which has as its stated mission “to make disciples of Jesus Christ in the political arena throughout the world.”51 Once a week, Drollinger ventures from his office to a secret location where he conducts a Bible study meeting with members of the Trump Cabinet.52
At these meetings, Cabinet members like Rick Perry, Mike Pompeo, Sonny Perdue, and Mike Pence study the Bible, verse by verse, and receive a lesson that Drollinger writes and puts online each week. Though Trump does not attend, he receives transcripts of the teachings and, according to Drollinger, often returns them with scrawled comments. “He’s got this leaky Sharpie felt-tip pen that he writes all capital letters with. ‘Way to go Ralph, really like this study, keep it up.’ Stuff like that,” Drollinger said.53
It’s extraordinary access—and Drollinger also hosts Bible studies in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives office buildings and in many state capitol buildings. Yet his teachings are often misleading or outright incorrect and out of touch with basic biblical scholarship standards, according to André Gagné, a former evangelical pastor turned critic and associate professor in the Department of Theological Studies at Concordia University in Montreal.54
There are other reasons for concern. In his 2013 book, Rebuilding America: The Biblical Blueprint, Drollinger claims that it is the state’s “God-given responsibility to moralize a fallen world through the use of force.” In an op-ed for the New York Times, Katherine Stewart describes Drollinger as believing that “social welfare programs ‘have no basis in Scripture,’ that Christians in government have an obligation to hire only Christians, and that women should not be allowed to teach grown men.”55 An early supporter of Trump, he once called on him to create a “benevolent dictatorship.”56 According to the Capitol Ministries website, “Drollinger’s comments were made in passing reference to a divided Congress that fails to accomplish business. He was speaking of the nation’s need for a strong leader with gifts of persuasion.”57 It may be worth noting that Drollinger has also been quoted as saying that Catholicism is the “world’s largest false religion,”58 that homosexuality is an “abomination,” and that it is “a sin” for “women with children” to “serve in public office [or be] employed.”59
OPUS DEI AND THE CATHOLIC RIGHT
Catholics and Protestants have been at odds, sometimes even open warfare, for hundreds of years. Even now the relationship can turn bitter, as Drollinger’s comment suggests. A historic shift occurred in 2009—one year into the Obama presidency—when Catholic and Evangelical Christian Right leaders, along with a few leaders of the Eastern Orthodox Church, pledged to “join across historic lines of ecclesial differences” and affirm their commitment to defend three “truths”—“the sanctity of human life, the dignity of marriage as a union of husband and wife, and the freedom of conscience and religion.” Contained in the manifesto, known as the Manhattan Declaration—which was signed by 150 leaders including fifty sitting bishops, archbishops, and cardinals—was a vow to defend the vision at all costs. “Through the centuries, Christianity has taught us that civil disobedience is not only permitted, but sometimes required,” it declares.60 According to Frederick Clarkson, the Declaration’s three-part formula would serve as a kind of rallying cry for the Christian right. Its “integrated approach to abortion, marriage, and religious liberty, is designed to unite key leaders of major factions around common arguments and to function as a catalyst for political renewal,”61 he writes.
A principal drafter of the Declaration—which at last count had over 550,000 signatures—was Princeton jurisprudence professor Robert P. George, a leading light among Catholic neo-Conservatives with deep ties to a network of conservative political and religious groups across the country. “If there really is a vast, right-wing conspiracy, its leaders probably meet in George’s basement,” writes Anne Morse, in an article for the conservative Catholic magazine Crisis.62 Among those relationships—though George downplays it—is the secretive organization, Opus Dei. The organization has supported several of George’s projects, most notably the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton, which, according to Max Blumenthal writing in The Nation, “
serves as a testing ground for the right’s effort to politicize college campuses.” According to Blumenthal, “George’s program is funded by a stable of right-wing foundations and a shadowy web of front groups for the Catholic cult known as Opus Dei.”63 (According to a 2005 article in The Daily Princetonian, the organization has funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to Princeton campus projects—there is even an Opus Dei residence on campus—many of which included on their boards a man named Luis Tellez, who served for years as the director of Opus Dei in Princeton.)64
Translated as “The Work of God,” Opus Dei came to widespread popular attention in Dan Brown’s bestselling novel The DaVinci Code, which depicts a self-flagellating, murderous albino Opus Dei monk who carries out the orders of his cultlike and power-hungry organization. While Brown’s depiction was fictional (Opus Dei does not have monks) and sensationalized, the organization is, by many accounts, highly demanding and ambitious. “It is a closed, disciplined group guided by an authoritarian ideology,” writes Robert Hutchison in a 1997 Guardian piece, “The Vatican’s Own Cult”—one that “labours silently and stealthily” to align government with its own policies. “Its primary goal is to return the Catholic Church to the center of society, as in medieval times,” writes Hutchison, who is also author of a book about Opus Dei, Their Kingdom Come.65
Among the defining features of the group—which was founded in 1928 by the Spanish priest Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer and elevated in 1982 by Pope John Paul II to a “personal prelature” that answers directly to the pope—are a need for secrecy and obedience, which often entails “putting away one’s scruples” to serve the organization. Members and associates are organized in an internal hierarchy made up of numeraries, who are unmarried, celibate, and often living with the group; supernumeraries, who may be married and work outside the group but turn over a portion of their earnings; and cooperators, who are sympathetic nonmembers. Numeraries, and even some supernumeraries, live under high-demand circumstances—often cut off from family members, as was the case with the daughter of Dianne DiNicola, a prominent critic of the group and founder of the Opus Dei Awareness Network (ODAN),66 and with a number of former members whom I have counseled. They participate in secret initiation rites, swear obedience, and submit to “formative norms,” which Hutchinson describes as a form of “mind-conditioning,” including reporting weekly to a director who oversees all activities, personal and professional, and confessing once a week. “Celibates must regularly wear a cilis—a spiked thigh chain used by religious communities in the middle ages,” he writes, and practice self-flagellation.
Membership is small—only 3,000 in the United States and 85,000 worldwide. Only some of these are priests. Most are lay members. But as with the Family, the focus is on “quality, not quantity.” As Frank L. Cocozzelli, a Catholic writer, attorney, and stem cell research advocate, writes, “They seek out the elite and the wealthy.”67 In Washington, D.C., Opus Dei operates out of the Catholic Information Center (CIC), in a building located two blocks from the White House that houses offices, a bookstore, and a chapel, where daily mass is held (and where Robert George blogged that he attended the Catholic conversion ceremony of a formerly Jewish colleague68). For years, the center was under the direction of Reverend C. John McCloskey—a brash and charismatic leader who in 2002 was accused of groping a young woman and was relocated the following year. (Opus Dei later settled the suit for $977,000.)69 During his heyday at the Catholic Information Center, McCloskey attracted a who’s who of Washington luminaries to Catholicism, including then-Senators Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback70 (who converted from mainline Protestant Presbyterianism); Lawrence Kudlow, a financial analyst and, since 2018, director of the National Economic Council; and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.71
Though McCloskey is long gone, the Catholic Information Center72 still maintains a strong presence in Washington, D.C. The center’s board continues to include Leonard Leo, conservative legal activist and vice president of the Federalist Society, which has worked for decades to organize the right wing takeover of the Supreme Court.73 Leo helped to block Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland and campaigned to put conservative (Catholic) judges Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court—the very same justices who, along with fellow Catholic Clarence Thomas, are considered mostly likely to overturn the landmark Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade, which declared that restricting access to abortion is unconstitutional. Aiding those judicial campaigns was a nonprofit organization that Leo helped to found, the Judicial Crisis Network, which according to The Guardian, spent $17 million to quash the Garland nomination and elevate Gorsuch74—and which was originally run out of the home of Ann Corkery, an avowed member of Opus Dei.
According to The Washington Post, Opus Dei’s small Washington center continues to have “an outsize impact on policy and politics.”75 It is not clear if Leo—who has Trump’s ear76—played a role in nominating William Barr for the position of attorney general. But Pat Cipollone—who also served as a Catholic Information Center board member—probably did. He was brought on as White House Counsel77 two months before Barr’s nomination in December 2019. (Cipollone was an assistant to Barr when he was attorney general to George H. W. Bush.) It turns out, Barr was himself a member of the eight-member Catholic Information Center board of directors. As part of his confirmation process before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Barr completed a questionnaire which reveals that between 2014 and 2017, he served as a director of the Catholic Information Center—a period overlapping the tenures of Leo and Cipollone, according to the Catholic Information Center website.78 Barr’s connection to Opus Dei goes back further. From 1992 to 1993, an Opus Dei numerary, John Wauck, who later became a priest, served as Barr’s speech writer.79
In his article, “Did Opus Dei Teach A.G. Barr to ‘Put Away his Scruples,’ ” Cocozzelli describes Barr’s presentation of the Mueller Report to Congress. “When questioned about his famous four page memo and repeated mischaracterization of the Mueller Report, time and again, Barr obstructed, bobbed and weaved—all while refusing to answer basic questions put forth by the Democratic Senators,” Cocozzelli writes. “We also know that Barr gave misleading testimony before the House Appropriations committee,”80 claiming that he had not heard any criticism from Mueller, who had sent Barr a letter precisely to that effect two days after Barr made his memo public. According to Cocozzelli, Barr’s obfuscation and obstruction may be part of his Opus Dei “put scruples aside, ends justifies the means” mindset.
As to what those ends might be, Opus Dei is an extremely wealthy group, with assets of nearly $2.8 billion—the organization owns a building in Rome and a $42 million building in New York City. But its riches are a means to furthering a theocratic goal: to return the Catholic Church to the center of society. Barr made his own theocratic views known as early as 1992, in a speech to the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, when he called for the “imposition of God’s law in America.”81 Barr let Trump off the hook with regard to the Mueller Report, despite the weight of evidence showing that the president attempted to obstruct justice by trying to interfere with the Mueller investigation. Though many have speculated about Barr’s motives, it is possible that he holds Trump above the law because he believes that the president could serve a higher purpose. Certainly, for Opus Dei, the desired payoff would be not just overturning Roe v. Wade, but overturning secular democracy itself by elevating conservative Catholics to key positions in government and public life, including and especially the judiciary. By replacing two conservative Catholic Supreme Court justices, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, with two new ones, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh—and by placing conservative judges in federal courts across the country—Trump is already delivering.
HEART OF DARKNESS: THE ALT-RIGHT82
Trump has encouraged all kinds of erroneous and pernicious thinking, nowhere more dangerously than in his dealings with the “alt-right.” Short for “alt
ernative right,” the term refers to a set of ideologies, groups, and individuals that, according to the Anti-Defamation League, “reject mainstream conservatism in favor of forms of conservatism that embrace implicit racism or white supremacy.”83 These include white nationalists, Confederate apologists, Klansmen, neo-Nazis, John Birchers, anti-Semites, isolationists, and antiglobalists. White supremacist leader Richard Spencer claims to have coined the term alt-right, which has been described as a euphemism for racist, neo-fascist, and neo-Nazi beliefs. At the heart of the mindset is the idea that “white identity” is being attacked—by Jews, Blacks Muslims, gays, Communists, and other multicultural forces—under the banner of “political correctness” and “social justice.”84 “The Alt-right is a pushback against our ethnic dispossession,” wrote an alt-right Reddit user, quoted in a Medium article. “It’s an attempt to jumpstart white people into fighting for their ethnic interests the same way other races do, because our current policies are a net detriment to whites.”85
Portraying the white majority as an oppressed insurgency, struggling against the globalist left, the alt-right is taking a storyline right out of Lind and Weyrich’s fourth-generation warfare playbook. One of the tactics advocated by Weyrich and Lind is “an unrelenting barrage of criticism” against the left and other opponents. While the alt-right uses propaganda and other fourth-generation techniques, it has also taken the struggle into the streets. Fighting is something the alt-right has become known for, both through their growing—often inflammatory and hate-filled—online presence and in real life. Trump has done little to stop it—indeed the opposite. As shown by the white nationalist march on Charlottesville, where a white supremacist killed a young woman and injured many others, and by attacks in South Carolina, Pittsburgh, and New Zealand, there has been a rise in hate crimes and hate-inspired violence since Trump took office.86
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