Did Christian Nationalism Shape the 2024 Election? A Discussion on The State of Belief Podcast

REV. PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH, HOST:

And now to my first guest. Dr. Matthew D. Taylor is a scholar of religion, specializing in American religious movements, evangelical Christianity and Islamic-Christian relations. He holds a PhD in theology and religious studies from Georgetown University, and is currently a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies. Matt is widely recognized for his research on Christian Nationalism and the New Apostolic Reformation, and his new book, The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, sounded warnings that are quickly playing out since the recent election.

When I saw some of the names put forward by the incoming administration, in particular Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth, I knew right away that I needed to have Dr. Taylor back on the show. And so, Matthew Taylor, welcome back to The State of Belief!

DR. MATTHEW D. TAYLOR, GUEST:

Thank you for having me back here, Paul. I wish it was under better circumstances, but I'm glad to be back.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Oh, my goodness. Well, you know what, this is the moment. I mean your work, your research, all of what you set up before the election with your amazing book, which I was telling everyone about, The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy. All of that played out, unfortunately, and so here we are. Let's just start by asking you: when you were looking at the returns and then when you were able to, over the few days following the election, did you see trends that reflected this, what you had been looking at, as far as the role of Christian Nationalism and some of these players? Did you see that play out in this election? Were there surprises, or were you like, oh yeah, of course, that's what happened.

MATTHEW TAYLOR:

I mean, there definitely were surprises. I was not expecting the assassination attempts on Trump, and I think that those actually in the long run helped him quite a bit, in terms of consolidating some of the kind of Christian Nationalist sentiment around him. A lot of Christians read those assassination attempts as signs from God that God's favor was on Trump and God was protecting Trump.

And then, if you were paying attention, right at the very end of the campaign in October, there was a real strong push from some of these Christian Nationalist groups that I keep an eye on. There were multiple events on the National Mall trying to gather and galvanize Christians around the election. I maintain that if Trump had lost, if he had been declared a loser, there would have been an attempt to overturn this election. His campaign, his allies, were really geared up for that.

Many of the Christian Nationalist leaders that I monitor were very much geared up for a repeat of something like January 6th, if not something worse. But if you notice as well, there were a number of events right in the last week, week and a half before the election, where Trump was gathering especially with religious leaders, and especially Christian leaders. And I think that one of the brilliant things that the - and it's not so much a brilliance of the Trump campaign, it's a brilliance of the religious right overall - is that over the last 40, 50 years, they have really built an infrastructure for using religious leaders to access their congregations, access their influence networks, and they really tapped into that in this election.

I mean, the Trump campaign was not spending very much money on Get Out the Vote. They really farmed it out to groups like Turning Point USA, which has very strong Christian Nationalist roots today; to groups like Lance Wallnau's Courage Tour; to Elon Musk's networks. So there was this kind of diffusion of the Get Out the Vote effort, and a lot of that was being done by these religiously-aligned groups - and I think it was a very effective strategy. And I think there was also an effective strategy of reaching out to Christians of color, which I think the Trump campaign realized. They had maxed out their share of the White Christian vote, but they, by my observations, both anecdotally and if you look at the exit polls, it sure seems like they made real inroads, especially with Latino Christians.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

I had a chance to talk to Katherine Stewart after the election, and she was like, you know, you can bus all the people into Pennsylvania you want from New York. Knocking on doors, strangers. It's nothing compared to a Christian network, where you have these trusted messengers who are saying get out the vote. And you know the fact that you're not supposed to do that - that is just not something they pay attention to at all. So this really strong network, and then reinforced by an incredible media universe, that is every day, just making the stakes clear, the stakes clear.

One of the things that I saw you write about was, we had talked about Trump as a Cyrus figure; but then there was a shift into what you talk about. It was your analysis. So what was the shift? First of all, for those who might not have heard you the last time on the show, what did Cyrus represent in the Bible? But then who did he turn into?

MATTHEW TAYLOR:

Yeah, so the Cyrus connection with Trump: actually, almost as soon as Trump enters presidential politics, so he comes into the presidential race, the Republican primary, in June of 2015. In July of 2015, a charismatic prophet issues this prophecy connecting Donald Trump to Cyrus.

And Cyrus, if you go back in your Hebrew Bible history, so the Jewish people get conquered by the Babylonian empire, taken into exile in Babylon, and then the Persian empire conquers the Babylonian empire and Cyrus is the emperor of the Persians who sends the Jewish people. I mean, this was Cyrus's policy overall was he was trying not to displace and dislocate people, groups, the way the Babylonians had, and so he sends the Jewish people back to rebuild Jerusalem and rebuild the temple.

And in Isaiah, Chapter 45, where the prophet Isaiah is reflecting on this kind of mystery that this heathen ruler could play such a pivotal role in delivering the people of God, refers to Cyrus as the anointed of God, and that term “anointed,” in Hebrew, is mashiach, it's where we get the term Messiah. And so this analogy, or this comparison of Trump to Cyrus - and they would even say that it's not merely an analogy, it's a typology, right, that Trump kind of mimics or mirrors Cyrus. And so the idea was Trump is this outsider, he's not a conventional politician, he's not a conventional Christian, but he's this outsider that God can use as an instrument to deliver God's people, i.e., conservative Christians in this interpretation, and so this has been an ongoing analogy.

This was a major, major reason that evangelicals got on board with voting for Trump in 2016. This was one of the major theological rationales. You could argue that it was kind of crass politics that drew them to Trump, but this was the way that they rationalized it theologically, saying, hey, he's not a good man, but he's God's man, and that's carried through.

There still are people who will talk about the Cyrus thing. But I noticed, especially once Harris entered the race, this other biblical metaphor really rose to the surface and became the dominant metaphor in some of these prophecy circles. And in order to understand this one, you have to understand that the name Jezebel in charismatic circles carries a very strong negative connotation. Jezebel in the Hebrew Bible is this: she's a wicked queen, right, she's an evil queen who persecutes the godly people in the Hebrew Bible narrative.

And so in this analogy, they're comparing Trump to a king named Jehu who's responsible for killing Jezebel; and so the way that they would use the analogy is they would say that Kamala Harris is a type of a Jezebel, and in the Tears of my Serpent they'll often talk about the spirit of Jezebel as kind of an embodiment of evil. It kind of carries connotations of feminism, of malign sexuality, of LGBTQ rights, of abortion. All these things kind of get lumped together under this kind of Jezebel thing. So they directly targeted and said Kamala Harris is a Jezebel - which, if you know anything about the racial history of this term, directing that at a Black woman, it was a very loaded, loaded metaphor.

But then when they compare Trump to Jehu in the story, Jezebel's married to King Ahab, who's also seen as this very wicked ruler. Ahab dies, and Jehu is anointed king after Ahab's death - but Jezebel's still alive. And so in the story - this is 2 Kings 9 and 10 - Jehu finds where Jezebel's hiding out. She's up in this high tower with her servants. He rides up with his commanders on their horses, and he commands her servants to throw her out of this tower. And they do, and she hits the ground and dies and her blood splatters on their horses, and then he proceeds to trample her corpse with his horse and then wild dogs come and eat her body.

And the message of this story is that Jezebel is such a profane figure, she's so vile, that she has to be reduced to dog feces; that all memory of her has to be eradicated. And this is the imagery that they're using. They're saying Donald Trump is a Jehu, Kamala Harris is a Jezebel, and in and they're prophesying, in this election, Jezebel will be cast out or cast down. So they're literally using this image of the execution of Jezebel.

This is this very violent, visceral, ugly, biblical image that I think actually does reflect Trump's rhetoric, as well. In 2016, Trump's the outsider, and it's these outside threats - it's migrants and it's China and it's unfair trade practices and it's NATO, it's all these external things. But now the enemy is internal, and now it's the enemy within, and so they've changed their biblical metaphor. But now it's justifying not Trump as the ruler God has anointed, but Trump as the violent figure that they want to embrace, his violence. And it's very, very ugly.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

It is. I mean, I remember Jezebel coming up and I don't actually remember who was saying it. Did Trump ever say it? I'm not sure he ever said it, but you know it was being used. After the debate, they were calling her Jezebel because she tricked Donald Trump. So it's really disgusting. I mean, like hearing you lay it out like that, it makes me sick and it really makes me angry.

MATTHEW TAYLOR:

If that makes you angry, just a few days before the election, Trump was gathered with his faith advisors. And it was this gathering in Florida, with a bunch of his faith advisors, and one of these figures named Jonathan Cahn. He's a Messianic rabbi. He gets up and issues this prophecy, like a three-minute prophecy, over Trump, where he says: you are destined to follow the template of Jehu. It's not like, oh, here's an interesting analogy. And then he goes on to say Jehu drained the swamp in his capital city - and that's not merely referring to the death of Jezebel. After Jehu just annihilates Jezebel, he goes on a killing rampage and slaughters Ahab and Jezebel's family, piles their children's heads up at the city gates, slaughters anyone who's affiliated and associated with them.

So when they're talking about draining the swamp and the template of Jehu, they are conditioning their Christian followers to endorse and embrace Donald Trump's violence and to say that that's just part of the script, that's what he has to follow.

And so it was such a fascistic theology that was being promoted at the very end of this campaign to say Donald Trump is righteous, no matter how violent he gets.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Now I feel sicker. Thanks, that's great, well done, well done. And now let's talk about Pete Hegseth. I mean, here's the thing. You know, this is not 2016, where, like, I wonder what's going to happen. We know it - I mean, he's told us what was going to happen, and now it's happening. And there's a few - maybe all, but you know there's lots of problematic figures.

Hegseth is maybe singular in his problematicness. This is a Fox News correspondent who is now being put up for Secretary of Defense. And why don't you lay out a little bit about how you understand Pete Hegseth? Because you probably have a pretty good insight into where he's coming from, given your own research, and he's someone familiar to you. So let's talk about Pete.

I swear we're going to get to something that's not as bad, but maybe not, I don't know. It's good to know what we're up against, to figure out what we can do about it, but this is pretty serious and it's going to be serious over the next several weeks, and I think it's really important that this guy gets exposed for the serious Christofascist that he is.

MATTHEW TAYLOR:

Yeah, so just as a piece of background knowledge that really helps to contextualize and understand who Pete Hegseth is: I study the Christian far right. And in the Christian far right, in these circles, in these kind of theological circles, these discussion circles, there's a lot of valorization of the Crusades. And so part of the idea is that the Crusades are seen as kind of exemplifying a sort of clash of civilizations, a clash between Islam and the quote unquote West or the Judeo Christian civilization. And so there's this kind of valorization, this appropriation of the Crusades in many of these kind of far-right circles, the symbolism, the rhetoric of the Crusades.

So when I looked into Pete Hegseth - because some people asked me if he had ties into some of this far-right Christian world - I dug for just a couple hours looking at him, and there's all kinds of evidence of his immersion in this kind of neo-crusader discourse.

So he's very close to a couple pastors in Tennessee, that he attends their church, and this is part of the CREC. It's a denomination of the far-right Calvinist denomination, what we would call Reformed denomination, and this is a group that endorses this denomination and the theologians within it endorse ideas like theonomy, applying biblical law to modern societies. They like the idea of talking about a new Christendom. And Christendom is the physical territory that Christian rulers rule over, and so the idea of the Crusades is it's an expansion of Christendom.

And in the legend of the Crusades - because we don't have detailed historical accounts, but in the legends of the Crusades - Pope Urban II in 1095 gathers a group of Church leaders at the Council of Claremont and declares the need for Christians to go and take back the Holy Land, take back the Eastern Mediterranean, because it's Jesus's country. It's where Jesus walked, and these infidels, the Muslims, are ruling over. I mean, at this point the Muslims have been ruling over for like 300 years, so it's not exactly news, right, but he's saying, no, we as Christians need to take this back.

And according to the legends, after he kind of declares and preaches the sermon, the whole crowd echoes back “Deus Vult, deus Vult,” which means God wills it, God wills it. And this becomes a sort of slogan of the Crusades, that this violence is not merely at the instigation of the Pope, it's not merely in response to Islam, but it is the will of God for Christians to go and slaughter Muslims. And this is what Pete Hegseth has tattooed on his arm: he has “deus vult” tattooed on his arm. This is a slogan that we even saw on January 6th, along with crusader symbolism.

And on his bicep, on his chest, he has the Jerusalem cross. So when the crusaders come and conquer jerusalem, they slaughter most. And on his bicep, on his chest, he has the Jerusalem cross. So when the crusaders come and conquer Jerusalem, they slaughter most of the people in the city. And the crusader accounts themselves, the accounts they write, describe blood flowing up to their ankles in the city of Jerusalem. And then, as they're still spattered in the blood of their enemies, they go and worship Jesus in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the Temple Mount.

And then, once they've conquered Jerusalem, they establish the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem that lasts for about 100 years, where European Christian powers hold control over Jerusalem, and that's the symbol that he has on his chest as well.

And then he wrote a book called American Crusade, where he talks about - this was in 2020 - he talks about valorizing the Crusades, how we need to be crusaders now. We need to fight back against Muslims. So there's a theme of Islamophobia, of violent aggression towards Muslims, and this is a very far-right ideology. I mean to the point where because of those tattoos, when Pete Hegseth’s National Guard unit was called up for Joe Biden's inauguration two weeks after January 6^th - his unit got called up because they had to protect the capital city - people in his unit flagged and said, I'm not sure he should be serving right now. He's got extremist tattoos. And the army had to investigate and say yeah, okay, okay, we probably should not let him be on protecting our capital city.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Was he actually removed?

MATTHEW TAYLOR:

Yeah, he was. He was blocked from serving with his National Guard unit, just him personally and a few other members who had these extremist tattoos.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

That's shocking. I mean, all of this should be disqualifying because how can you represent the symbol of national defense, if you are so out of step? But you know, this is who Trump puts forward. But what we have to do right now is, we have to let the American people know about this and, of course, there's some American people who are going to be like, yeah, awesome. We have to just hope that that will not be the majority. You know that there'll be people who are really - the fact that he was removed from his squadron or troop or whatever, because he was too radical to defend the Capitol. It's unbelievable.

So you know, this is really important information, and he's not the only one who could be tied to Christian Nationalism among those who have been presented as cabinet members or other parts of his administration. Certainly there are others.

I'm curious, for you as someone who's so steeped in this, what are you hearing among your colleagues in the religion… You were just at the American Academy of Religion, what's the sense among those who are really studying religion, what moment are we in?

MATTHEW TAYLOR:

I mean, yes, I was gathered with about 10,000 religion scholars in San Diego this past weekend and I mean, as religion scholars, we're trained in pattern recognition. We're trained in kind of observing these historical connections and patterns. And you don't have to stretch very far to see analogs to what's going on in the United States today around the rest of the world.

And when we talk about Christian Nationalism, sometimes we can get very myopic and think, oh, this is an American thing, or this is a Christian thing. Religious nationalism is a thing across the board. There's Islamism, there's Buddhist nationalism, there's Hindu nationalism, there's religious Zionism. I mean, there's all kinds of forms of religious nationalism in the world, and it often gets attached to these kind of populist authoritarian leaders in the form of, say, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, or Narendra Modi in India, or Viktor Orban in Hungary, or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. There's a long-going pattern of these far-right populist, authoritarian movements appropriating kind of religious nationalist tropes to rise to power and then to change these societies, to restructure these societies.

And so you know, the people I talk to who are dialed in and watching this stuff are extremely concerned about what comes next; extremely concerned about the fact that Trump has basically carte blanche to run his agenda. I mean, he functionally controls all three branches of the US government. There aren't really many checks and balances left to block him.

There were a lot of norms that we were counting on in the first administration, but I think we realized those norms are not walls, they're speed bumps, right, and Trump has kind of trampled all over the norms that kept many previous presidents in check. So I think we're very concerned, and I also just think we need to be attentive to the fact that part of the playbook when a populist authoritarian like Trump comes to power is that they start to change the system of government, moving it more away from liberal democracy - liberal with a lowercase “l” - in terms of liberty and protections for individual rule of law, freedom of speech, all these sorts of things. Moving it away from that into what we would call an illiberal democracy, one where it's often more of a one-party rule, where there might be kind of a veneer of democracy, kind of, okay, we'll have elections - but there are elections in Russia. It’s just if you run against Vladimir Putin, you'll probably end up dead.

I'm not saying that that's necessarily what's in the immediate future for us, but there are a lot of levers a party in power, especially one that doesn't adhere to principles and norms, can pull that can start to rig the system against other parties, against any competitors. And Trump has promised retribution on his enemies. He's promised a campaign of vengeance. I mean, if Trump fulfills even a third of what he promised in this campaign, it would radically restructure American society in a very, very dangerous and deleterious direction.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Yeah, I think that you've laid it out. I'm curious, you are in some ways a product - not of this movement, I'm not doing that. But you came from, you know, if a few things had not happened, you could imagine yourself almost like being a true believer in this kind of ideology. And I'm just wondering, in your mind, what are the levers that are for those of us who believe in a multi-religious, multi-racial, liberal democracy? What do you think are the levers specifically for those of us who are kind of functioning within the religion realm? What do you think we should be doing? You know the kind of organization I run, Interfaith Alliance. You know we're around the country, we're talking to people, all of whom are very disturbed by what we're seeing right now. What should we be doing?

MATTHEW TAYLOR:

Well, so I think what we saw in the first Trump administration is that litigation can be very, very helpful in at least slowing the march of some of this stuff. And I think we're going to need a lot of Christian lawyers, we're going to need a lot of Christian organizations filing amicus briefs, participating in protecting the victims of a lot of Trump's worst impulses. You know, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who himself was very important in resisting Nazism, has this very interesting delineation of how the Church - I mean you could extend it to religious organizations as a whole - can relate to the State, especially a State that's becoming authoritarian, and he says there's three different ways. One is that you can hold the mirror up to the State to show what's actually going on, and I think we really need that right now, where the Trump administration is going to be characterized by just a panoply of disinformation, when they're just going to flood the zone with chaos and chaff and just try to distract us from things. I think Christians and religious people of conviction need to hold up the mirror.

The second way that Bonhoeffer talks about is, you can care for the victims of the State. When the victims of the State - and he even uses the image of the State kind of as a cart that's crushing people under its wheels, and part of the role of religious organizations is to care for the migrants, to care for the refugees, to care for the people of color, the LGBTQ individuals - it might not be sufficient to simply care for the victims of the State. Maybe you need to throw something into the spokes of the wheel to stop the State.

And ultimately, Bonhoeffer himself participated in an assassination attempt on Hitler, and so I'm not saying that - again, I'm not saying we've gotten there yet. I think we need to always be kind of measured and cautious, and I would not at all advocate violence by any religious organizations, but I do think that we're coming to a time where some of the things that Donald Trump has promised and threatened in this campaign are very serious violations of human rights, and I think we need to get ready to stand and be courageous and protest and not merely let this stuff proceed as though this is just business as usual or, oh, they're so strong that we just have to kowtow. I think part of the role of religious communities is to have principle, to have conscience, to have conviction, and to stand firm in the midst of a society where principles and conviction are being thrown out the door in favor of the naked pursuit of power.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Thank you for that. That is an excellent summation of Bonhoeffer's offerings, and I think each one of them are like, stop abusing the memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Have you been following that? I don't know if any of that came up at AAR or in any of your conversations, but I do think it's very interesting. I mean, this is like a very neat trick to take over one of the true, I mean heroes of religion, who studied at Union, who worked at Abyssinian, who had no truck with the more conservative evangelical tradition. That was not the one he was attracted to when he came to the United States, and yet there's people who are trying to take over his image and claim him as their own. What is your take on that film? And I haven't seen it, I don't know anything about it, but aside from that, it's controversial.

MATTHEW TAYLOR:

I have been following it, and part of it is that Eric Metaxas is one of the major actors in this - and he's definitely one of the leaders that I'm tracking. Eric Metaxas was kind of casting himself as a sort of public intellectual of American evangelicalism in the 2000s, early 2010s, and then he really has thrown in hard with Donald Trump. He was actually the emcee at the big Jericho March, it was one of the preceding events leading up to January 6^th. And he wrote a biography of Bonhoeffer - not well reviewed by scholars who actually studied this stuff - but it was very popular. A lot of people liked his approach to writing this biography.

But now he's appropriated Bonhoeffer as a symbol and a tool of Christian nationalism, which is just one of the most disgusting bastardizations of a true theological hero. I mean, one of the things that Bonhoeffer - if you've actually read or studied Bonhoeffer is famous for is his rejection of nationalism, his rejection of violence. Even when he did kind of participate in this plot to kill Hitler, he did not use theology to justify that. He was very, very ambivalent about finding any way to use theology to talk about violence, but instead he renounced nationalism.

Even some of the portrayals - I have not seen the film yet, I think it's about to come out, but there's some of the images showing Bonhoeffer holding a gun on some of the movie posters. He refused to hold weapons, and so there's this way, and some of the people, some of these Bonhoeffer scholars who have kind of organized these petitions and challenges, are friends of mine. And it is just a disgusting appropriation of a heroic figure, but then flipping the narrative and using him as a kind of tool of authoritarianism. It is really, really disgusting, and I think that those of us who care about theology, who know about Bonhoeffer, need to speak out in this moment and say that this is not accurate and this is a real harmful utilization and instrumentalization of a figure that we should actually be reading and caring for and who guides us in the opposite direction.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

The idea that a figure who resisted fascism in Germany is being twisted into someone who might support Donald Trump. I mean, come on now. People, hold up. Let's hold up a mirror to that.

Dr Matthew D. Taylor is senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies. An expert on Christian Nationalism and the New Apostolic Reformation, he's the author of The Violent Take it by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.

Wow, Matt, thank you so much for being with us here today. You are truly the bearer of bad news and I never want to talk to you again - except for all the time, because you also are so good at illuminating what is happening in a way that people can understand, and also that people just aren't aware of - because, honestly, it's not getting through. What you're talking about is not getting through as a major message, and I really appreciate you, your scholarship and you being with us here on The State of Belief.

MATTHEW TAYLOR:

Well, thank you for having me, Paul, and I really appreciate the work that you are doing.