Love thy neighbor: It’s one of the most commonly uttered biblical verses in the Christian faith. But when it comes to Christian nationalists, they don’t exactly practice what they preach. Such is the subject of Inside the Hive’s latest episode, featuring two experts on the religious right, Katherine Stewart and Samuel Perry, who discuss why Christian nationalists are now “much more ideological than theological,” how Donald Trump has wielded them as a political voting bloc, and whether the former president’s failed assassination reinforces his messiah-like mythology. “Everybody’s saying it’s providence, he was saved by God,” says Stewart. “We’ve had eight or more years of this…. A sector of the movement has, frankly, consistently framed the contemporary political landscape as being one of spiritual warfare.”
The Christian right, according to Stewart, has long had a persecution complex. And part of what makes Trump so appealing to the group is that the former president appears willing to protect its members at all costs. There’s this idea, she says, that “conservative Christians are the most persecuted groups in society. And therefore, you need a strongman to come in and crush your perceived enemies. You don’t want a nice guy to be in control; you want a mean guy who’s gonna crack heads, as long as those heads belong to your perceived enemies.” Stewart continues: “It shows how the party as a whole has, frankly, abandoned democracy. They’ve abandoned the idea that they might need to share power or compromise. And they’ve really embraced a full authoritarian mindset, which says that they alone are the godly rulers, and they’re going to seize power by any means necessary.”
Since Christian voters overwhelmingly align themselves with the GOP, Perry argues that Democrats, too, need some sort of shared value system to fight back. “Democrats have been floundering trying to discover what is a way that we unite this diverse coalition of people who also are bothered by the antidemocratic impulses that we see in Trump,” he says. “I think we are struggling…to rally behind the story that is being presented to us in terms of, ‘What are we about as a people? Who are we?’ Now, that is actually something that the Republican Party has done a lot better job of over the last several years—coming up with this common narrative and saying, ‘What unites us as a people?’ Well, in their mind, it’s this Christian heritage and ethnic culture that they adhere to. But for the rest of Americans, what does unite us?”
