Christian nationalism, the belief that America was founded by and for Christians, has become a catchall designation for the Americanized spirituality we saw on January 6. But there are many compartments and subdivisions of American Christian nationalism, and the broad-strokes label gets applied to a warren of different communities, ideologies, and theologies. Some of what gets called “Christian nationalism” is deadly serious, and other manifestations are actually fairly benign and sentimental. I’m a religion scholar, and the fact that some churches sing historic Christian nationalist hymns like “God Bless America” or the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” doesn’t keep me up at night. Such mashups of piety and patriotism aren’t my cup of tea, but neither do they pose a grave hazard to American democracy.
Other versions of American Christian nationalism are overtly racist and white supremacist or misogynistic and, clearly, are not benign at all. Those are real and malignant forms of Christian nationalism. However, those openly racist and misogynist tendencies are not precisely what I have in view here either. Indeed, this investigation into the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and the broader phenomenon of what we might call the Independent Charismatic style of Christian nationalism may surprise readers who come with a strong prior impression of what Christian nationalism looks like.
First, outside observers of Christian nationalism often assume that it is a uniformly white, racialized phenomenon, bound up with American racism and nativism; hence, many analysts prefer to write about white Christian nationalism. The Independent Charismatic corner of American Christianity, as we will see, is highly multiethnic and even transnational in its orientation. Indeed, among the religious leaders who were designated advisers to Donald Trump, almost all the Christian leaders of color in those circles were Independent Charismatics. This is not to say that race and racism are not relevant here; they certainly are. But it’s a more perplexing picture of race and religion than one might surmise at first glance.
Second, observers frequently draw an explicit connection between Christian nationalism and patriarchy. As sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry write, “Christian nationalism advocates for a particular social order that lionizes hierarchies between men and women.” This is broadly true, and Independent Charismatic leaders and communities certainly do have strong views on gender and gender-attuned topics like abortion. But we’ll also discover their surprisingly egalitarian sensibility when it comes to gender and leadership, with women moving within every echelon of charismatic religious leadership in a way that scandalizes other Christian nationalists and many other Christian traditions.
Third, it is commonly asserted that Christian nationalism is detached from Christian belief. As one popular resource claims, it is “a cultural framework . . . [that] is more about identity than religion,” implying that Christian nationalists subordinate theology and biblical interpretation to more mundane political interests. But I’m going to argue that the NAR’s long-standing alliance with Donald Trump (not to mention their mobilization for January 6) has been every bit as much about theology and biblical interpretation as it ever was about politics.
I raise all this not to invalidate or undermine existing conversations about American Christian nationalism but to illustrate why we need more in-depth examinations of the strands and subcurrents within it. The predominant form of Christian nationalism that generated the Christian countenance of the Capitol Riot was not simply reducible to racist, misogynistic, or abstract political motivations. The Capitol Riot was also propelled by potent theological ideas.
Littered among the endless scroll of social media posts about January 6 from charismatic Christians who were present at the Capitol or cheering them on at a distance are thousands of prophecies, exhortations to stand with Trump, and Bible verses. So many Bible verses. One of the most repeated biblical citations you can find there, appearing in post after post, is the passage in which Jesus said, “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force” (Matt. 11:12).
Christian commentators disagree mightily about how to interpret this verse. Some argue that Jesus is lamenting the persecution of Christians by “the violent,” a lá Herod executing Jesus’s cousin, John the Baptist. In other words, they maintain that Jesus is being descriptive rather than prescriptive. Others argue that Jesus is using a positive metaphor of violence to describe the passionate intensity in laying spiritual claim to the kingdom of heaven “by force.” Still others, like the NAR leaders we’ll encounter in this book, understand this verse as a mandate, from the mouth of Jesus himself, for Christians to employ spiritual violence to advance the kingdom of God on earth.
Some Trump-supporting Bible-quoters, in the lead-up to January 6, amended their citations of the verse with one word: “the violent take it back by force.” Make America Great Again became synonymous with the flourishing of the kingdom of God.
Experts in political violence and democracy tell us when a surge in violence threatens the democratic order, as we saw on January 6, that violence is merely the tip of the iceberg. The relatively small group of people who actually commit violence is only the visible outcropping, one that indicates the existence of a much larger mass of people who participate in the discourse of violence, believe violence is necessary, imagine and cheer on that violence, and support the people who commit it. In short, if we stop our analysis of January 6 at the people who beat Capitol Police officers or trashed the seat of Congress, we miss the bigger picture of what transpired that day. For every person who assaulted the Capitol Building, thousands more were praying for and urging them on, either in person in the surrounding crowds or online at a distance. The rule of law involves the prosecution of those who commit antidemocratic political violence. But if we don’t acknowledge and deal with the iceberg, we are just waiting for another outcropping to surface.
This book is about the iceberg: the invisible mass of invective, violent ideation, and aggression that has taken hold among many, many American Christians in the Trump era and that is with us still. Since the mid-1990s, based on verses like Matthew 11:12, charismatic leaders have created an entire vernacular of spiritual violence: of Christian war campaigns against Satan, of literally demonizing their human opponents by accusing them of being possessed by evil spirits, and of advancing a belligerent theological orientation toward the rest of American culture.
Most of the time, these theologies of violence and aggression are so diffuse, so spiritual, so rhetorical, and so causally detached from actual violence that drawing a straight line from the Christian leaders using violent rhetoric to the people enacting violence becomes dreadfully difficult. But the Trump administration and the aftermath of the 2020 election were crystallizing events—a turbulent microcosm that mirrored our embedded forms of extremism back to us. What had been subtext became text. What had been innuendo became a riot. The forcible discourse of spiritual violence tipped over into actual violence before our very eyes.
This is an excerpt from the introduction of The Violent Take It by Force.
