Christian Nationalism and Violent Christian Extremism

A long Politico article, It’s Time to Talk About Violent Christian Extremism, reports an interview with Elizabeth Neumann. Neumann is a former official at the Department of Homeland Security. She is a devout Christian. She resigned from the T**** administration in April 2020. Politico reports:

Now, after the dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory helped to motivate the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, with many participants touting their Christian faith — and as evangelical pastors throughout the country ache over the spread of the conspiracy theory among their flocks, and its very real human toll — it’s worth asking whether the time has come for a new wave of outreach to religious communities, this time aimed at evangelical Christians.

“I personally feel a great burden, since I came from these communities, to try to figure out how to help the leaders,” says Elizabeth Neumann, a former top official at the Department of Homeland Security who resigned from Trump administration in April 2020. The challenge in part is that, in this “particular case, I don’t know if the government is a credible voice at all,” she says. “You don’t want ‘Big Brother’ calling the local pastor and saying, ‘Hey, here’s your tips for the week.’”

Neumann, who was raised in the evangelical tradition, is a devout Christian. Her knowledge of that world, and her expertise on issues of violent extremism, gives her a unique insight into the ways QAnon is driving some Christians to extremism and violence.

She sees QAnon’s popularity among certain segments of Christendom not as an aberration, but as the troubling-but-natural outgrowth of a strain of American Christianity. In this tradition, one’s belief is based less on scripture than on conservative culture, some political disagreements are seen as having nigh-apocalyptic stakes and “a strong authoritarian streak” runs through the faith. For this type of believer, love of God and love of country are sometimes seen as one and the same.

Christian nationalism is “a huge theme throughout evangelical Christendom,” Neumann says, referring to teachings that posit America as God’s chosen nation. Christians who subscribe to those teachings believe the United States has a covenant with God, and that if it is broken, the nation risks literal destruction — analogous to the siege of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible. In the eyes of these believers, that covenant is threatened by cultural changes like taking prayer out of public schools and legalizing abortion and gay marriage, Neumann says.

“[Christian nationalists] see it in cataclysmic terms: This is the moment, and God’s going to judge us,” she says. “When you paint it in existential terms like that, a lot of people feel justified to carry out acts of violence in the name of their faith.”

We saw any number of people spending more time online looking for answers. You had increases in militia movements. The Moonshot CVE Group, which studies radicalization, said that in states with stay-at-home orders that lasted 10 days or longer, [online] searches for white-supremacist content increased by 21 percent. In states where there either weren’t stay-at-home orders or they lasted nine days or fewer, that increase was only 1 percent. We weren’t sure how it was going to happen, but we predicted that we would see violence in some form or fashion. The militia that attempted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — that was horrible, but not really shocking. The violence at protests? Not surprising. And the fact that you had white-supremacist groups using the protests to commit accelerationist violence was also not surprising — even though the president thought it was Antifa. We knew we were going to see more radicalization and violence.

The combination of that on top of a pandemic, on top of a campaign where the president was sowing his own conspiracy theories and laying the groundwork for what eventually became [the lie] that the election had been stolen — well, some would say he started laying the groundwork four years ago. For people who studied disinformation, it became clear that the call was coming from inside the house. That kind of primordial soup makes conditions ripe for vulnerable individuals to move into this space. QAnon is not designed to be logical; it’s designed to meet these emotional and psychological needs. 

Q: Do you see anything about the evangelical tradition that could make its believers more susceptible to QAnon? 

A: I really struggle with this question. I’ve been trying to figure out how it is so obvious to me — and I don’t mean to pat myself on the back. I actually do read the Bible. Yet there are people who read scripture and attend church but are also die-hard into believing the election was stolen or have gone down the QAnon rabbit hole. What’s the distinction there? I find that hard to answer.

There is, in more conservative Christian movements, a strong authoritarian streak, where they don’t believe in the infallibility of their pastor, but they act like it; they don’t believe in the infallibility of the head of the home, but they sometimes act like it; where you’re not allowed to question authority. You see this on full display in the criticisms of the way the Southern Baptist Convention is dealing with sexual abuse, which is so similar to the Catholic Church [sex abuse scandal]. There is this increasing frustration that church leaders have [this view]: “If we admit sin, then they won’t trust us to lead anymore.” But if the church is not a safe place to admit that you messed up, then I don’t know where is — or you clearly don’t believe what you preach. 

Another factor is Christian nationalism. That’s a huge theme throughout evangelical Christendom. It’s subtle: Like, you had the Christian flag and the American flag at the front of the church, and if you went to a Christian school, you pledged allegiance to the Christian flag and the American flag. There was this merger that was always there when I was growing up. And it was really there for the generation ahead of me, in the ’50s and ’60s. Some people interpreted it as: Love of country and love of our faith are the same thing. And for others, there’s an actual explicit theology. 

What [threatens] that covenant? The moment we started taking prayer out of [public] schools and allowing various changes in our culture — [the legalization of] abortion is one of those moments; gay marriage is another. They see it in cataclysmic terms: This is the moment, and God’s going to judge us. They view the last 50 years of moral decline as us breaking our covenant, and that because of that, God’s going to remove His blessing. When you paint it in existential terms like that, a lot of people feel justified to carry out acts of violence in the name of their faith.  

Now, here’s the caveat: Some of that fear is not out of thin air. There is a real “cancel culture,” where you see a mob mentality swarm on somebody who holds a biblically based viewpoint on, say, gay marriage, and you see someone forced out of a position or lose sponsorships or advertising. But they follow that to what they think is a logical conclusion — that eventually, pastors will not be able to preach against homosexuality or abortion, and if [they do], they’re going to end up arrested and unable to preach. I’ve heard that argument made multiple times over the last 10 years. The irrationality is the idea that there are no protections, that the courts wouldn’t step in and say, “No, the First Amendment applies to Christians as well.” (emphasis added)

The article goes on at length in this vein. One point is clear: Christian Nationalism and other Christian practices has led to a fusion of God with country and violence in defense of God and country is justified. This is the kind of mindset that fits with anti-democratic authoritarianism, including fascism.

A past discussion here discussed the tactics that church leaders use to generate money. At ~10:40 to 12:00 of the interview below, Evangelical Rev. Rob Schenck discusses what he was told by professional fundraisers about how to keep his revenues flowing. Specifically, to keep revenues up he had keep his congregation angry and fearful: “The madder they are, the more fearful they are, the more money they're gonna send you.”

It is easy to see that congregations are irrationally being made fearful and angry by church leaders they trust, the Christian persecution myth. In turn, that unjustified fear and anger can lead to acceptance of fascism and use of violence in defense of God and country, which are one and the same. Democracy and political opposition become the enemy of the people.