Christian Propaganda: Fomenting Fear, Anger and Violence

Evangelical rhetoric:

10:40 to 12:00: “The madder they are, the more fearful they are, 

the more money they're gonna send you.”

Boy, oh boy, those Evangelical preachers really know how to make the congregation fearful and angry. An article by The American Prospect, The Religious Right’s Rhetoric Fueled the Insurrection, makes that clear. TAP writes:

The morning after the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol interrupted but failed to stop congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election, The Dove Christian television network’s morning news program featured hard-right activist John Guandolo telling viewers that the insurrectionists showed “restraint” by not executing the “traitors” in Congress.

“I don’t see any other way out than a real armed counterrevolution to this hostile revolution that’s taking place, primarily driven by the communists,” said Guandolo, who trains law enforcement agencies to view Muslims as terrorist threats.

These leaders and media outlets inflated the stakes of Trump’s re-election campaign and post-election efforts to “stop the steal” by portraying them as part of a spiritual war between good and evil. In their telling, Trump was the divinely anointed leader of the forces of light, and his opponents were agents of Satan bent on crushing religious freedom and destroying the American republic. Prayer and calls for spiritual warfare were blended with invocations of “1776.”

Paula White, a longtime spiritual adviser to Trump, used her position as a White House aide and campaign spokesperson to engage in the fearmongering strategy to get conservative Christians to vote for Trump. “They want to take our churches,” she said at an Evangelicals for Trump rally last summer. “They want to take our freedoms. They want to take our liberties. They want to take everything.”

At that same event, Atlanta-area megachurch pastor Jentezen Franklin warned that if evangelicals didn’t mobilize to keep Trump in power, they wouldn’t get a second chance to protect their freedom or their children’s future: “Speak now or forever hold your peace. You won’t have another chance. You won’t have freedom of religion. You won’t have freedom of speech.”

In September, Pentecostal televangelist and religious-right activist Rick Joyner announced on Jim Bakker’s television show that God has “seeded” the country with military veterans to head up Christian militias in preparation for civil war. In October, he assured his viewers that life for most Americans would go on pretty much as usual during the coming civil war because the militias would be focused on “inner cities.”

At a religious-right rally on the National Mall in September, Frank Amedia, a former Trump campaign adviser who founded the POTUS Shield network to wage spiritual warfare on Trump’s behalf, warned people not to stand in the way of God’s plans to return Trump to office, saying, “This is not a time to contend with God and his plan upon this nation and this Earth right now, for the fury of the Lord has gone out and shall accomplish that which he has said he shall do.”

When it became clear that Trump had lost, and that his response would be to deny the legitimacy of the election, most of his religious-right backers joined him. The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins and other right-wing leaders associated with the Council for National Policy—a secretive umbrella group of right-wing organizations—signed a letter in mid-December urging state legislatures to override voters and stating, “There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect.”

Jericho March, organized by two Trump administration staffers who said God had given them visions to get Christians into the streets to protest “corruption” in the election, teamed up with religious-right activist Ed Martin and Stop the Steal activist Ali Alexander to organize a December 12 “prayer rally” on the National Mall. They called it “Let the Church ROAR.”

Among the roaring speakers was Stewart Rhodes, founder of the extremist Oath Keepers, who warned that if Trump didn’t use the military to stay in power, militias like his would be forced to engage in a “much more bloody war.” Metaxas, the rally’s master of ceremonies, was apparently not troubled by Rhodes’s threat, responding with a “God bless you” and telling the crowd that Rhodes was “keepin’ it real, folks.”

California pastor Ché Ahn, a leader of the dominionist New Apostolic Reformation, called the “stolen” election “the most egregious fraud” in U.S. history and said, “I believe that this week we’re going to throw Jezebel out … and we’re gonna rule and reign through President Trump and under the lordship of Jesus Christ.” (emphasis added)

The TAP article continues like this. There is plenty of evidence of how some or most pro-ex-president Evangelicals viewed the 2020 election. Those people were made fearful and enraged on the basis of blatant lies. 

After the coup attempt of Jan. 6, a few of the radical religious preachers stepped back and disavowed the political violence. That does not absolve them of their culpability or the immorality or evil of misleading their flocks and opening their minds to a civil war based on no real threat. The only threat was and still is the centuries old Christian persecution myth. 

The church is the state

Assessing threat

Lots of data from social science research makes it clear that humans are generally lousy at estimating risk. Various unconscious biases tend to skew risk assessments unless people are shown risk data. Even then, some reject the data because they unconsciously feel threat, not consciously assess threat. The unconscious mind often overrides or distorts facts and reasoning when emotions like fear and anger are in play. Uncontrolled emotions tend to make most people, me included, less rational.

In view of the rhetoric TAP article cites, what is the risk of radical right Christianity starting a bloody civil war? Some of the rhetoric explicitly calls for violence. Under current circumstances, a large-scale civil war seems very unlikely. The threat of Christian violence is now on the radar screens of everyone who is paying attention and the ex-president does not have his national platform to keep spewing his poison and lies from. Those factors probably lessen the Christian threat.

Did the preachers and others who incited violence cross the line and break laws against inciting violence? If not, should the laws be made clearer or broader, or is that too risky? Is it unreasonable to even consider pro-violence right-wing Christianity a significant threat? 

Legitimate threat or innocent posturing?

It goes from posturing to threat the instant the 

trigger is pulled and innocents are harmed or killed

Thanks to PD for pointing out the TAP article.