Two recent books describe the decades long plan to establish one religion – extreme “fundamental” right-wing Christianity – as the sole system in control of human civilization. Does that sound a bit hysterical and overblown? It sure does, but the very audacity of the plan and its widespread success demands our close attention, because it leads to outcomes that only a few would be happy with, not even perhaps many of its willing collaborators.
The books are Matthew D. Taylor’s The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening our Democracy (Broadleaf Books, 2024) and Katherine Stewarts’s Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025).
Taken together, these well-researched and documented works provide a 20,000 foot view of an issue which should be of serious and deep concern for progressive people worldwide (Stewart), and a ground level insider description of ideological underpinnings of the movement (Taylor).
While many current publications, books, essays, opinion pieces, and podcasts deal with the threats to Freedom (see for instance works by Yale historian Timothy Snyder, specifically On Tyranny and his latest On Freedom), they often miss the impact and reality of the forces sustaining and rationalizing the movement, a movement which is sold as arising from organic grass root sources, but which in fact is deliberately constructed by not only the most extreme Christian ideologues, but articulated and funded by a host of wealthy benefactors who support it for personal gain and power. This reality is lost on the many of the supporters who provide the ground troops in a war which they believe will allay their fears and address their grievances. They have in fact been coopted by unscrupulous politicians who see them as votes for gaining their own ends. These recruits perhaps also do not recognize the peril that the ultimate goals that the movement’s architects envision. Many people feel empowered by the movement, but do not recognize the extent to which they have been exploited, for their money and for their votes.
Katherine Stewarts’s Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy – Introduction and Chapters 1-7
Katherine Stewart has covered the intersection of faith and politics for over 15 years, with interviews and attendances at conferences and gatherings, and with wide ranging research and reporting. Some of the characters in her exposition are familiar to anyone paying attention to the political news, but many are not, at least to this reader. These all play critical roles in the web of influence and ideas which sustain this movement. This work expands the narrower focus of her previous works, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, and The Good News Club, and presents a sobering 20,000 foot view of the powerful forces which are combining to establish a serious threat to Democracy, both in America and worldwide.
One critical element for the success of this movement is that associated with the Evangelical Christian community, in particular the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). Stewart deals with this briefly, but the book by Matthew D. Taylor does so extensively.
Stewart writes that a political movement has emerged which does not believe in the American idea as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, but calls for a perverted brand of Christianity (no Sermon on the Mount, thank you) to “redeem” America and create a country where a certain type of people rule, and others obey. She poses the question: How did this take root in America? It is an existential threat to the survival of American democracy, and any feel-good suggestions that all will be well if Red and Blue just talk and reason together is a fatal delusion. Economic disparity contributes to a wave of unreason, with no faith in the concept of the common good, unleashing an epidemic of status anxiety which is susceptible to conspiracy and disinformation.
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She calls this the New American Fascism. It is a political pathology rather than a political program, with grievance vented on the “other” as the cause of all ills. The cultivation of anxiety about gender roles is rocket fuel for a new American authoritarianism, with a particular effect on young men. Reason and democracy are rejected – fear and grievance are embraced. Hope is abandoned.
Stewart identifies five key roles in the organization of this movement – Funders, Thinkers, Sergeants, Infantry, and Power Players.
The Funders are super wealthy benefactors – not particularly smart, but convinced that destroying democracy is a way to increase wealth. They have outsourced Thinking to other people.
The Thinkers – anti-intellectual intellectuals – thinly cover their aggression and insecurity with Nazi-like ideas, such as the support for January 6th.
The Sergeants manage the ground forces of the movement – Moms For Liberty, school board members, conservative pastors, the Black Robe Regiment, the Watchmen, On The Wall, Faith Wins, Pastors For Trump.
The Infantry are middle and lower class troops who support book banning, anti-LGBTQ, anti-black history, hard line evangelicals, “Spirit Warriors”. These are courted not for satisfying their needs but as a way to harvest their votes.
The Power Players are luminaries like Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins, leaders of anti-democratic ideologies and Christian Nationalism – a movement that is NOT a religion and doesn’t require being a Christian but is a political ideology.
Christian Nationalism is a political mindset which considers: a) the Nation to be doomed because of the Faithless; b) that conservative Christians are victims; c) the real or authentic are entitled to rule; d) the need for a strong man as a savior.
It needs the Funders and the Thinkers to organize the Sergeants and the Infantry. The funders consider Democracy a threat to their power.
Stewart suggests that expecting the crumbling of this movement is wishful thinking. It may destroy the Nation before it destroys itself. It uses the politics of unreason – the first and last resort of the enemies of Democracy – and is a symptom, not a cause, of the American crisis.
After this introduction, Stewart identifies and explains the many components of this well-orchestrated attack on American Democracy, identifying a host of well-heeled Funders and the organizations which they bank roll. One example is Pepsi heiress Joan Lindsey, a major Funder of Christian Nationalism and architect and supporter of the Good News Club, which meets in public schools and teaches Fundamentalist Christian ideology, conveying the impression that schools support these teachings.
A sampling of other groups elaborates on this theme – Faith Wins, which is focused on “election integrity”, mixing religion with a campaign against democracy and laying the foundation for an anti-democratic future which entrenches minority rule under the guise of “democracy” and bolstered by the lie that GOP voters are being cheated.
The quaint notion of the separation of Church and State – the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution – is repudiated and is part of a cynical attempt to harvest votes of those whose fear loss of their status as heirs of Christian Founders.
Christian Nationalism was front and center at the January 6th Insurrection, which is described as “politics as usual” and is organized not just on economic and cultural grounds, but as a way to demean democracy by creating a) an information bubble to maintain a state of denial, b) an apocalyptic vision of moral catastrophe, c) an understanding that elections do not reflect “true” nature, but must submit to a “higher” authority, requiring minority rule, and d) a disbelief in the value of the democratic process.
It is a media myth that the Religious Right is headed towards irrelevance. It is pouring money into essentially a political campaign. There is no room for Jesus-is-Love in Christian Nationalism.
The Catholic Right has a major impact on Christian Nationalism. JD Vance was not in the Senate to serve the people whose grievances he exploited, but to serve Peter Thiel – a Funder. But God is bisexual – “God Created Mankind in His image, both male and female”. The lack of prayer in schools because of SCOTUS rulings is responsible for declining SAT scores. Turning public schools into right-wing and religious academies is bound to fail – so the plan is to destroy them – if you can’t own it, break it. Moms for Liberty is funded by the Religious Right, and using public tax money to fund religious charter schools is warranted in the cause of “religious liberty”. These goals align with that of the new American Fascism, anti-education having roots that go back to Reconstruction. In Pennsylvania, such a Funder is Jeff Yass. The school wars are not waged by individual parents but by well funded National groups, with the profit motive the prime objective behind the assault on education. Liberal donors do not fund building political infrastructure and instead rely on evidence based solutions – but that’s not how politics works. The Christian Right has concluded that public schools are a threat and can’t be trusted, even if school prayer were allowed. Trump is executing their plan to destroy education.
John Eastman – a close trump adviser – advised at the World Congress of Families: “When the Church is awakened, great things can happen.“
Much of the intellectual superstructure of the New Right comes from the Claremont Institute, an American conservative think tank based in Upland, California. It was founded in 1979 by four students of Harry V. Jaffa, whose life’s work was to develop an American application of Leo Strauss’s revival of “natural-right” philosophy against the alleged relativism and nihilism of our times. It has since become, to the dismay of the founder, the headquarters of anti-woke ideology, with dehumanizing labels for liberal ideologies and “pathologies”. There is no room any more for the idea “love the sinner, hate the sin”, and it aligns with the “AR-15 crowd” in promoting the end of democracy. It is, in Stewart’s words, the West Point of American Fascism, legitimizing the use of violence, a theme we will describe later with a summary of Taylor’s book. The Thinkers at Claremont invoke Plato’s “Natural Right” to mean anything that Nature doesn’t prevent you from doing – there is no truth beyond power, and no value beyond victory. They maintain that the defect of liberalism is the unwillingness to be in a “state of exception” or “state of emergency” – a ruler who isn’t willing to “break all the rules” ostensibly in the name of the Common Good isn’t much of a leader at all. They were early in making the case for Trumpism, giving credence to actions symbolized by Flight 93 – “storming the cockpit” in an action blowing through the guardrails to save the Country.
The “emergency” of Claremont fuels their “war on woke”, now a major component of the mainline GOP like DeSantis, invoking “woke” as for the treatment for which earlier generations used the word “Jew”. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is seen as the “last resort” to save the Country from this “emergency”, with “Natural Right” superseding the Rule of Law. Rules for thee, and not for me; replacing “free people” with libertarian “free markets”. This movement is not content with “a seat at the table” but is engaged in an undisguised pursuit of totalitarian power. They men in Claremont put Jefferson Davis in a top hat and call him Lincoln; they read Atlas Shrugged and call it Aristotle; women who are raped are the causes of male victimization by getting an abortion and depriving them of their free speech rights. Male victimization is a pretext for authoritarianism – a sign of fear in weak men. Inequality is considered by the weak men of Claremont as having been given a bad rap – it has its uses, and ugly people are the problem. Extreme suppression of women boosts male egos, and “woke” is an assault on “manliness” – more white babies needed. Trump is the model for bringing back the Bronze Age. Making Trump a King is first received as a joke, but is completely sincere. The elite Funders envisioned a “Red Caesar” (Trump), the rank and file Sergeants and especially the Infantry supported him in the name of “authenticity”, and the unhappy men at Claremont paved the way.
The GOP candidates in 2024 all vowed, without exception, to destroy the “administrative state”. It is the modern face of tyranny. It is the New Politics – setting aside reason and going with one Party, with a Hitler salute, embracing the logic of fascism. In the Reagan era of old politics, mega donors wanted government to serve their interests. In the 2000s, the donors want to tear everything down to serve the New Right ideology. JD Vance, Ron DeSantis, and Josh Hawley are creatures of the donor class – they want government too small to defend the public, but big enough to defend their private interests. The men of Claremont (the New Right) and the Funders don’t understand the lessons of history and what they are buying – fascism looks promising for Big Money, but always ends badly. The end state of deconstructing the administrative state is corruption and cronyism. These Thinkers maintain that America needs a “Caesar” to protect “Freedom” and “Liberty” because democracy threatens the privilege of those who “built” the country. In fact, fascists need the cooperation of wealthy conservatives. When you pay people to be unreasonable, you attract many unreasonable people – a problem as old as Plato. If your power depends on lying to the people, that doesn’t make you noble. It leaves you with a choice: accept that you are a fraud, or embrace the lie.
Mathew D. Taylor: The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening our Democracy.
In Chapter 8 of Stewarts’ book she delves into a brief consideration of the movement described more fully in Taylor’s book. The following expands on the work which is a more ground level exploration of an important, and arguably crucial aspect of this whole anti-democratic movement.
Mathew D. Taylor is a religious study scholar and expert on independent charismatic Christianity as well as Christian Nationalism. As a scholar trained in the evangelic stronghold of Fuller University and holding a Doctorate in religious studies at Georgetown, Taylor had access to the movement’s leaders, archives, internal conference calls, and correspondence.
This threat to democracy has emerged out of Independent Charismatic Christianity, and its important version known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). This movement is not well known in the press, but is hugely influential in many mega churches. Through many figures, mostly unfamiliar to the public, but some with close ties to the Trump administration, a worldwide organization has been created. In America, it was an early supporter of the candidacy of Trump. Its foundational belief finds a basis in a misreading of a verse from the gospel of Matthew 11, where Jesus spoke of the kingdom of heaven suffering violence, and “the violent take it by force”. While the reference was likely Jesus’ prediction of persecution, NAR’s original architect, C. Peter Wagner, saw this as support for a vision of “spiritual warfare”. The emphasis on spiritual violence may have spurred on physical violence, especially on January 6th, and Taylor links many of the leaders with that distressing day. The close spiritual advisor to Donald Trump, the prosperity-preaching televangelist Paula White, served as a mediator between Trump and Independent Charismatic leaders, who hold themselves to be Apostles and Prophets. The resulting connection is one of the reasons why Trump has been able to attract such a loyal following among white evangelicals. The strength of this connection and the forceful support of such groups like Pastors For Trump (which campaigned for him from the pulpit in defiance of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution) was arguably a tipping point on November 5, 2024.
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Taylor continues with a historical recounting of the actors, or as he calls them the ”generals of spiritual warfare” in the development of the NAR, and of the origins of such notions as the Dominion theory, and the idea of the domination and control of the Seven Mountains, or spheres, of human society that shape nations and control minds. These are family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business and government. The Seven Mountain Mandate is to control each of these and thus get complete control, not just of America, but of the entire world. In fact, the movement has already gone global, and has hundreds of millions of adherents and organizations worldwide. While Donald Trump was not an evangelical Christian in any sense of the world, his role for controlling the government mountain was compared to that of Cyrus, the Persian heathen warrior king, who God appointed to help the Jewish people defeat the Babylonians. A main actor in the effort to employ Trump is Lance Wallnau, who now stands at Trump’s shoulder in his new administration.
Chapter 6 of Taylor’s book introduces the element of “Worship as a Weapon”. Its proponents maintain that evangelicals are being persecuted, like with restrictions being placed on congregations during the pandemic. He then moves on to the idea of “A Government War, using strategic-level warfare, apostolic governance of the church, the Seven Mountain Mandate and the charismatic worship experience, with speaking in tongues and prophesy for right-wing political ends. Government officials and even Supreme Court justices have embraced this, displaying, for instance, the Appeal to Heaven flag prominent at the January 6th insurrection and flown by Justice Alito and next to GOP offices in Congress.
Back to Stewart and conclusion
Pentecostal beliefs in the reality of demons and speaking in tongues drive adherents into an unquestioning acceptance of whatever lies suit the narrative of those who exploit them. The Watchman Decree – a call to stand against wokeness – is not used just to win elections, but to Rule The Earth in the name of God, and uses such techniques as “demon blasting” – surrounding the skeptics with hours long shouting and abuse. Demons are everywhere – in experts, scientists, rational thinkers, Netflix, and transgender bathrooms. The fit of such beliefs is more associated with the Right, with GOP leaders such as Senator Rick Scott of Florida viewing Democrats as demons. Finding demons in the here and now works best for those for whom the here and now doesn’t work. Clay Clark, a Tulsa based entrepreneur and business coach who discovered a whole new angle on life during the COVID pandemic, blamed his business decline on mask mandates, and started ReAwaken America, a source of rallies (paid admission, of course) espousing pandemic cures and conspiracy theories, and getting support at his rallies from the likes of Mike Flynn and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. These events provide answers for a sad life of a frustrated lower middle class, including rising numbers of Hispanics and Blacks. The dominant emotion at these events is fear – of liberals who will come for you in your churches and your schools and destroy your health – and that Trump is your savior. This is not a laughing matter, to be ignored as from a huckster, but is embraced by mainstream GOP
Stewart maintains that anti-Trump Republicans think that when Trump finally goes, the GOP will go back to where it was. But this is self-censorship – sort of considering the current ideology as a form of Free Speech. We just need to listen and empathize and things will go back to normal. But ReAwaken America has no interest in any other perspectives – it only wants to promote as much incivility as possible, while achieving its goal of separating the anxious from their money and making them politically useful. This gives the people the license to ignore reality altogether and deny any fact that contradicts their emotional desires, which includes the desire for revenge – “The Violent Take It By Force” resonates.
While spending some time in the UK, Stewart discovered the reality that Christian Nationalism was being exported from America to our British cousins. With Grace Community Church as the sower, the seeds of the movement are being planted and nurtured by means of “church plants”, identical to those being established throughout rural America. The message – received by an enthusiastic audience, and funded by the backers of Moms for Liberty – is one that is overtly and without apology anti-gay, anti-women, anti-abortion, etc. Allowing women speakers is “against scripture”, and they are instead counseled to submit to abusive husbands. Gay = Sin, contraception is evil, and a pregnant 10-year-old rape victim must carry to term. The spread of the message goes worldwide, from Eastern Europe to the Americas south of the Mexican border. These anti-democratic religious conservatives are part of a well funded global attack by a powerful political force – it is not about just saving babies.
In conclusion, Stewart maintains that the descent into Fascism will be the most likely path through which the American experiment ends. To resist this she reminds us that we, the supporters of Democracy – are the majority, and we must keep united in protecting it. Certain kinds of religion have been exploited and weaponized. The separation line between Church and State is being repudiated and dissolved and congregants with honest spiritual claims are being exploited to achieve power and money.
A key reform and change of this trajectory could come from within churches and religions – Jesus is more about loving thy neighbor than about chasing pregnant women across state borders, destroying child labor laws, and owning AR-15s.
Exposure to Truth can cause the anti-democratic alliance between religious extremists and big money to wither away, but strong public education and a working media system is needed at a minimum. Anti-democracy advocates are raising a population compliant with authoritarian rule. “A People cannot be Free and Ignorant,” as Thomas Jefferson wrote. The unsymmetrical abuse of the Media to spread disinformation games the compulsion of the Media to be non-partisan.
Finally, Stewart posits a four point plan to promote Democracy:
- think long term, not just the next election
- invest in organizations and people – the Left seeks policy victories, the Right fields an army
- build coalitions, make plenty of bedfellows
- go local – poll watchers, door knockers, school board members and meetings, town councils
The message of these two works is stark. The unholy alliance of Christian Nationalism and oligarchs is a real, present, and growing danger. These powerful forces are in league to reshape and control America and the World for their own purposes. Madmen are leading the willfully blind. These forces can only be thwarted by an informed and united opposition, with eyes wide open. The work begins now.
