Searching for God # 97

Anyone who happened to watch “The Whole Story” with Anderson Cooper, hosted by Pamela Brown, Sunday March 22, 2026 featuring the religious scourge being propagated by some Doug Wilson, including their intimate links to the White House, would have to be shocked, and dismayed.

Not only is the ‘putative’ saviour of these people the current occupant of the Oval Office, and the current Secretary of War one of the more prominent disciples of this quasi-religious behemoth, but the religion being preached is little more than another literal, fundamental and highly motivated political cult.

Essentially conceived and executed it is a religious war against Islam, along with several other hot-button social issues, like ‘women must be obedient to their male partners’ who, themselves, are the head of the house. Of course, there must be no abortion, and there must be ‘compliance’ to a rendition of parts of scripture that suit the purpose of these mostly men.

Under the rubric of Christian (and implied white) nationalism, these people are attempting to generate a theocratic nation within the United States.

Fortunately, there are voices who stand ready to engage these religious zealots with both theological and political arguments.

In providencemag.com, in a piece entitled, The Case Against Christian Nationalism, by Mark Tooley, March 12, 2026, we read:

…(S)elf-identified Christian Nationalists, at least the intellectuals, want a confessional state that will punish apostasy and blasphemy. The nonintellectual advocates usually articulate a less sympathetic arrangement, where government promotes of privileges Christian beliefs. …Both Temperance/Prohibition and Civil Rights were spiritual and mostly bipartisan movements that surged through public opinion, generated by churches and civil society, only later enacted in law, unsuccessfully for the former, and more enduringly in the latter. The same could be said for women’s suffrage and the larger drive for legal equality for women.

From the idahostatesman.com, in a piece entitled, Idaho Christian nationalists embrace the immoral if they have power, by Bryan Clark, August 15, 2025, we read:

The point is to gain power for a reactionary kind of political and cultural view-hence the movement’s constant insistence on the submission of women to men; the sympathy for the Old South, even to the point of defending slavery: constant attacks on gays and transgender people occasionally downplaying the Holocaust and so on—and Christianity is a pretty cloak to wrap that foul project in. This explains their consistent embrace of individuals who relentlessly exhibit personal debauchery—so long as they have political power—people like Hegseth and Trump…..The Christian nationalists movement’s embrace of people like this can be understood in much the same way as the massive board of pornography found in the outwardly pious Osama ben Laden’s hard drives after his death; it shows that terrorism was his primary commitment, and his religion was a situationally dispensable secondary matter. ….Asked if Muslims in Idaho should have to live by Christian law, (Doug) Wilson (the leader of this movement) responded: If I went to Saudi Arabia, I would fully expect to live under their God’s laws….What the Christian nationalist movement proposes is not a return to Idaho’s older and better days; it is the imposition of a new and fundamentally alien order…..The point isn’t for America or Idaho to be Saudi Arabia with a  different religion. The point is for American and for Idaho to be free. If Wilson doesn’t like that, maybe he should find another vineyard. Maybe the aforementioned Saudi Arabia, where it’s illegal to be gay, where women can’t vote,, where institutions quite like slavery persist, where most of what Wilson and his cohort want for Idaho is already accomplished.

From motherjones.com, in a piece entitled, Christian Nationalists Dream of Taking Ove America. This Movement is Actually Doing It, subtitled, ‘The New Apostolic Reformation is ‘the greatest threat to democracy you’ve never heard of,’ by Kiera Butler, Photography by Caroline Gutman, November-December 2024 Issue, we read:

The devotees….(are) leaders in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a charismatic evangelical Christian movement led by a loose network of self-appointed prophets and apostles, who claim that God speaks directly to them, often in dreams. They believe that Christians are called to wage a spiritual battle for control of  the United States. In the vanguard of an ascendant Christian nationalist movement, they are seeking an explicitly Christian command of public schools, public policy and all levels of government, including the courts….Its laser focus on starting a spiritual war to Christianize America has led the  Southern Poverty Law Center to call NAR ‘the greatest threat to US democracy that you have never heard of. Estimates of Christians influenced by NAR vary widely, from 3 million to 33 million. But the number of adherents isn’t the extent of its influence; its main tenets have moved beyond the confines of churches and into the political mainstream, largely thanks to traveling apostles and prophets who preach at evangelical churches all over the world. Fred Clarkson a senior research analyst with the extremism watchdog group Political Research Associates, described the New Apostolic Reformation as a seismic cultural shift. ‘It’s the transformation of an entire society with this certain kind of Christo-centric worldview,’ he told me. ‘We’re talking about something so transcendentally revolutionary that most people never even thought about something like this.’

According to Britannica.org:

According to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institute whose results were published in February 2023, more than half of all Republicans either identified themselves as Christian nationalists or sympathize with Christian nationalist views.

From the website of the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, ambs.edu, in a section entitled ‘What is Christian nationalism?’ Drew Strait, PhD, Associate Professor of New Testament and Public Faith, contends:

Christian nationalism, in short, is a worldview where one’s theological imagination is coopted by state power. It exchanges the church’s loyalty to the Lord of Peace for a false god fashioned by the myth of American exceptionalism. In fact, Christian nationalism is a form of political idolatry that distorts our knowledge of God and neighbor through a xenophobic, radicalized and militarized gospel that ios at odds with the life and teaching of Jesus.

From gs2025.anglican.ca, The Anglican Church of Canada, we find these intriguing and assertive notes:

Opposition to Christian Nationalism

Be it resolved that this General Synod

1.    Condemn Christian nationalism as a distortion of the gospel of Jesus and a threat to Canadian democracy

2.    Reject the damaging political ideology of Christian Nationalism and oppose this threat to our faith and to our nation

3.    Encourage individuals, congregations, dioceses, and other communities within the Church to educate themselves about this issue and its negative effects on marginalized groups.

Explanatory notes/Background

As Christians, our faith teaches us everyone is created in God’s image and commands us to love one another. In our Baptismal Covenant, we promise to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbours as ourselves, and to strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being. As Christians we are bound to Christ, not by citizenship, but by faith. As Canadians, we value our systems of government and the good that can be accomplished in our parliamentary democracy.

It is our hope that this motion reaffirms our beliefs that:

·      People of all faiths and none have the right and responsibility to engage constructively in the public square

·      Canada has no second-class faiths

·      Patriotism does not require us to minimize our religious convictions

·      One’s religious affiliation, or lack thereof, should be irrelevant to one’s standing in the civic community

·      Government should not prefer one religion over another or religion over non-religion

·       Canada’s historic commitment to religious pluralism enables faith communities to live in civic harmony with one another without sacrificing our theological convictions

·      Conflating religious authority with political authority is idolatrous and often leads to oppression of minority and other marginalized groups as well as the spiritual impoverishment of religion

·      We must stand up to and speak out against Christian nationalism, especially when it inspires acts of violence and intimidation—including vandalism, bob threats, arson, hate crimes, and attacks on houses of worship- against religious communities at home and abroad.

I  can think of nor find a more appropriate quote from a favourite theologian about the escapism of some religionists, especially those who have been induced (seduced)into the Christian Nationalism Reformation: This quote is from Moltmann’s Ethics of  Hope 2012,  from sdmorrison.org, in a piece entitled, Jurgen Moltmann on the Rapture and ‘Left Behind’ by Stephen D. Morrison, November 18, 2017, we read:

(A) religious escapism is coming to the fore especially in the present spread of a vague Gnostic religiosity of redemption. The person who surrenders himself to this religiosity feels at home in ‘the world beyond’ and on earth sees himself merely as a guest. So, it is only by the way he is concerned about the fate of life on this earth. His soul is going to heaven, that is the main thing. In the body and on the earth he was no more than a guest, so the fate of this hostelry really has nothing to do with him. Religious practices lauding an indifference to life are offered under many high sounding names…American pop-apocalyptic offers an especially dramatic escapism. Before the great afflictions of the end of the world, true believers will be ‘raptured’ ---snatched away to heaven, so that they can then build with Christ as the Second Coming. All unbelievers unfortunately belong to the ‘Left Behind’, the people who are not ‘caught up’ and who will perish in the downfall of the world. (Left Behind is the title of an American book series read by millions). Whether people throw themselves into the pleasures of the present or flee into the next world because they either cannot or will not withstand the threats, they destroy the love for life and put themselves at the service of terror and annihilation of the world. Today life is in acute danger because in one way or the other it is not longer loved of but is delivered over to the forces of destruction.

Readers of this space will already be familiar with my own “Left Behind” by such  fundamental religious extremism, although in 1958, the enemy for the Presbyterian clergy was Roman Catholicism. “If you are a Roman Catholic, you are going to Hell!” is a sentence verbatim from the pulpit on a Sunday morning. I was 16 at the time, seated in the pew with my parents, on this, the last Sunday I worshipped in that church. Imagine, if today, that brand of religious bigotry had the target of Islam to provoke and invoke its vengeance!