White Christian Nationalists Led by Putin are New Globalist Threat
And Other Tales from the Left
In 2022, Heidi Przybyla joined the left-wing outlet Politico as, of all things, an investigative reporter. She has 16 years of experience covering Washington politics and she had formerly written for USA Today and she served as an NBC news correspondent. Barney Fife has more investigative acumen that Ms. Pryzbyla, but that is not a problem if you work for the mainstream media where journalistic skills are not in high demand. In a February 29, 2024 article in Politico, she wrote that the Constitution protects both freedom of worship and the separation of church and state, creating a unique type of American tension. She says that if a person’s religious values inform their political opinions, then “expect journalistic scrutiny.”
Well, until we find an actual journalist willing to scrutinize our religious perspectives, we’ll have to settle with Ms. Przybyla’s ruminations, which I expect she pronounces while wearing a tinfoil hat.
Ms. Przybyla said that Christian Nationalists—a movement she claims exists and which is different than mere Christianity—believe that rights derive from God rather than the government and, as such, Christian Nationalists pose a threat. So I don’t put words in her mouth, here is verbatim what she said:
“The thing that unites them as Christian Nationalists is that they believe our rights as Americans and as all human beings do not come from any earthly authority. They don’t come from Congress, from the Supreme Court, they come from God.”
A good 16-year political investigative reporter might have read the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence (something that used to be required of school children) which maintains that all humans are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among those are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In case you’re not well informed about theology or you’re a liberal Democrat, the term “Creator” means God.
The importance of that statement—indeed the importance of the Declaration of Independence—is that government functions in service to the people. The government doesn’t give us anything—we fund the government and we send people there to represent our interests. Those government people are public servants and not “our leaders.” The President, Congress, and everyone else in government work for us. The government doesn’t make money or create jobs or launch their own agendas—they serve as hired help to do what we want. The government does not “grant” us rights—we are endowed with the rights. The government is the machinery—like the garbage truck that empties the dumpsters—to get done what we need to get done. If the government could give us rights, it could also take them away.
(Granted, the government through the court system has the right to deprive of us of many rights, but that requires due process and an equitable legal system. If the government gave us the right to liberty, it could deny us liberty without due process, even without any cause at all, as Whoopi Goldberg recently suggested when she argued that Biden might under certain conditions imprison all Republicans.)
The separation of church and state is a phrase not found in the Constitution; Thomas Jefferson coined it in 1802 in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Church. Ironically, Jefferson was addressing the concerns of that church about the possible imposition of a state religion. America had its roots deep in British culture and the British, even today, have an official state church. It’s called, aptly, The Church of England. The Danbury Baptists were fearful that there might one day be a similar institution established in America, and Jefferson wrote to convey to them the assurance that no such church would ever be established and individual congregations were free to worship as they saw fit. Baptists could keep on being Baptists.
Legal scholars believe that the First Amendment or the “establishment clause” built the wall between church and state, although it never used those words. The First Amendment is more about protecting citizens from compulsory worship than protecting the state from people who worship. In this country, people are free to worship as they see fit and their choices in this arena “shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities” (1786 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, by Thomas Jefferson.)
Jefferson was not banning religion from the public square; he was saying that people, even politicians, had the right to practice their religion. The separation of church and state was more about protecting the church from the state than the other way around.
Religious freedom is not some dusty old political theory. To this day, it does not exist in certain countries. There are parts of the world where Christian churches may exist but only under government supervision (China) or where you cannot have a Christian church at all (North Korea, Saudi Arabia). In the nation of Mauritania, Islam is the state religion and religious conversion is not allowed. Christians are routinely imprisoned in Iran and Iraq. It is illegal to pass out a Bible in Saudi Arabia and although non-Muslims may become naturalized citizens of Saudi Arabia, they must convert to Islam to obtain citizenship. Religious freedom even today is rare in parts of the world and ought to be valued.
The U.S. government and U.S. citizens can make reference to religion in their official duties and in public spaces. The Establishment Clause states that the government cannot favor one religion over another. If we allow a Christian prayer, we must be willing, if the request arises, to accommodate Hindu prayer. A city may allow a Christmas festival, but if a Jewish congregation wants to hold a public Purim celebration, that request must be handled in similar fashion. When Minnesota wife-beater and now Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison was sworn in to Congress, he opted to do so on the Koran rather than the Bible; the Koran has been used by a few other representatives for the swearing-in ceremony since then.
In 2014, the Supreme Court of the United States in The Town of Green vs. Galloway said that the government could not “coerce its citizens to support or participate in any religion or its exercise.” In practical terms, that means if Congress opens with a prayer, members are not required to join in, although a certain measure of respectful decorum is appreciated.
So where does all the Christian Nationalism come in?
Christian Nationalism, like climate change and Russian collusion, is a made-up narrative designed to scare liberals and punish Conservatives. There is no Church of Christian Nationalism. You can’t go to Amazon and pick up the Christian Nationalist Bible or the Christian National Articles of Faith. I have never met a clergyperson from the church of Christian Nationalism.
And according to Wikipedia, the government mouthpiece, Christian Nationalism is a global movement. This is ironic, considering it’s both nationalistic and globalist. (The left might want to get a better class of conspiracy maker-uppers.) This worldwide band of ardent nationalists is bringing their religion into public life—even politics. For instance, making Christmas a federal holiday has been called an act of Christian Nationalism. I suspect saying “Merry Christmas” is a Christian Nationalist micro-aggression. Putting a Christmas tree in front of City Hall is a blatant act of Christian Nationalism. A church that displays the American flag is a Christian Nationalist church, although curiously, houses of worship that display the pride flag are welcoming and inclusive.
Now this is where things get really convoluted and bizarre. (If you ever want to know what the alphabet agencies want you to think… read Wikipedia. They write it. And a lot of what they write is convoluted and bizarre.) From Langley to your ears: One of the leaders of Christian Nationalism is Vladimir Putin. Wikipedia tells us that Putin is a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church; Putin is an outspoken supporter of said church; and, last but not least, Putin has close contacts with certain church authorities. Therefore, Putin is a Christian Nationalist. That somehow aligns Putin into the camp of the American Christian Nationalists. Furthermore, Wikipedia tells us that in Russia, there is a Christian Nationalist group that is affiliated with Neo-Nazis. Those degrees of separation are going to melt soon and all Christian Nationalists will become known as Nazis who support Putin, who as far as I can tell, is not a Nazi. I also do not see how Putin is the leader of an American religious group.
It’s international, this nationalist activity. The Scottish Family Party has been smeared as Christian Nationalist because they promote family values over the pride agenda. What fiends. Certain political agendas, quite apart from religion, can make you a Christian Nationalist. This almost makes me wonder if the whole LGBTQ alphabet society was created to reverse-engineer Christian Nationalism out of it. Christian Nationalists in America are going to stand for Constitutional values (freedom of speech, right to bear arms, due process) and this is a nice backdoor way to sully those principles.
Christian Nationalism, even with its international ramifications, is not as new as you might think. This conspiracy theory has been waiting in the wings for over 70 years. In 1942, the former South African Prime Minister, B. J. Vorster, said that he favored Christian Nationalism because it was an ally of National Socialism. Vorster was pro-Hitler in World War II. Vorster, who died in 1983, also promoted apartheid, so you can see that Christian Nationalism must also be aligned with racism. So Christian Nationalism in America promotes apartheid, racism, and supported Hitler in World War II.
CNN has coined the phrase “White Christian Nationalism” which is, at least on February 3, 2024, regarded as “the most serious threat” to democracy. It’s one of those “most serious threats” like climate change that does not actually exist. CNN reports that White Christian Nationalism twists Biblical language to “justify violence, sexism, and hostility toward people of color.” They make this sweeping and terrible statement with no evidence or references to why they would say that. You can read their ridiculous report here. (Say this like James Earl Jones:) This is CNN.
Further, these alleged reporters say that “whiteness is the default setting for Evangelical Christianity.” This is fearfully and wonderfully wrong. On a global basis, 84% of Evangelical Christians are people of color, that is, not white. Americans are so laughably parochial and think the whole world is exactly like America— this is wrong. Christianity is a global religion and is widely practiced in countries that have only small white populations.
CNN goes on to state that two-thirds of the people who support Christian Nationalism are White Evangelicals. This comical statement is saying that White Evangelicals endorse Christian Nationalism, when most of them have never heard of Christian Nationalism. In fact, 50% of all Americans have never heard of Christian Nationalism because it is a thing that the left just now dragged out of their big bag of hoaxes. CNN gets this statistic from Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) which claims, amusingly, to be nonpartisan. To get a glimpse into how unbiased they are, the survey was entitled, “Understanding the Threat of Christian Nationalism to American Democracy and Culture.” You couldn’t fit more lefty buzzwords into a survey title if you had a shoe horn.
Despite tying religion to white skin color, the survey paradoxically has to admit that 52% of “other Protestants of color” might count as either sympathizers or adherent to White Christian Nationalism, so it isn’t exactly an exclusively white club. In fact, nonwhite Evangelicals appear to be more likely to be White Christian Nationalists than not. So if the White Christian Nationalists in the US were to have a meeting, most of them would not be white.
And, in another bizarre bit of reporting, PRRI notes from its survey that 61% of Jewish Americans do not identify as Christian Nationalists. This suggests that 39% of Jewish Americans are Christian Nationalists, which implies that many Jewish respondents did not bother reading the survey questions.
The PRRI stated these as a few of the core Christian Nationalist values: the United States is a Christian nation, laws should be based on Christian values, and being Christian is important to Americans. Note that they did not get this list from an organization of Christian Nationalists, because there is no organization of Christian Nationalists. PRRI made this stuff up.
Those who scored high on these alleged Christian Nationalist values were more likely to be active in their churches; those who scored low on Christian Nationalist values were not likely to be active in their churches or to attend church at all. This puzzled the hapless survey takers who thought that being a Christian Nationalist or even worse, a White Christian Nationalist, would make you a Christian in name only and the more you were involved in church, the less likely you were to hold Christian Nationalist values. The opposite turned out to be true. The survey changed tack and ultimately recognized that if people wouldn’t go to church, Christian Nationalism would die out. Here is the survey.
In this survey, the five so-called correlates of Christian Nationalism were presented. These represent the evils that these leftists say Christian Nationalism seeks to promote throughout society and the world. Remember, there is no organization of Christian Nationalists, so this is a list they themselves made up.
White supremacy or, by its other name, “Anti-Black Racism.” Racism is a tough thing to measure—it’s not like age or height or blood pressure; it’s subjective. So I checked how the survey measured white supremacy. If you said that racism against Blacks was NOT a major problem right now in modern American society, you were a white supremacist. That’s it. So even some Blacks counted as white supremacists.
Anti-immigrant. This is defined as people who think there is some validity in the “replacement theory” (that mass immigration is a ploy to juke demographics and ensure a broader Democrat voter base) and those who in any way think unvetted unrestricted mass immigration is not a great boon. Mayor Adams in New York, who once proudly boasted his city was an Sanctuary City, would today be called anti-immigrant by this metric because he now wants the spigot turned off or at least turned down a little.
Antisemitic. This is established by surveying whether respondents thought Jewish people hold a disproportionate amount of positions of power. This survey did not ask about the recent Middle East conflict, the state of Israel, Palestine, or the two-state solution, nor did it ask about the Holocaust or Jewish persecution. Biden’s cabinet has at least 11 Jews in it, which is a disproportionately large number, considering the U.S. Jewish population is 2.5%. Those are facts and not proof of antisemitism, except in this survey.
Anti-Muslim. The survey established anti-Muslim prejudice by asking if the US should prevent people from Muslim-majority nations from coming to the United States and found that the majority of Christian Nationalists agreed. It did not ask questions about Sharia law, honor killings, or female genital mutilation.
Pro-Patriarchy. This was ascertained by asking if the man should be the head of the family. If you said yes, you support the patriarchy and that is not good. Further, the survey found that 60% of Christian Nationalists think that our society has become too feminized.
You get the picture. Christian Nationalists are also authoritarian (that’s because when asked if we should obey civil authorities such as police, most Christian Nationalists said yes). So Christian Nationalists are authoritarian racist antisemitic bigots led by Putin. Are you starting to see where this is going?
The head of PRRI, Robert P. Jones, said that the “more racist attitudes a person holds, the more likely he or she is to identify as a White Christian.” I’m not sure he has actual statistical data to back that up. I suspect many people in China and the Middle East have some racist ideas but would not call themselves White Christians.
Jones also points out that if you wanted to recruit White Supremacists to join a militant organization, you’d do better to hang out “in the parking lot of an average White Christian Church—evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, or Catholic” than approaching people at, say, the local coffee shop. So you can see Jones is the ideal candidate to conduct an unbiased survey on Christian Nationalism.
In case you are puzzled by the term “evangelical,” it is a movement among various Protestant denominations that emphasizes evangelism (sharing the Good News), being born again, and having experienced personal transformation through Jesus Christ. Many church denominations and Christians proudly identify as “evangelical,” which is not a pejorative term in religious circles. Catholics are generally not considered evangelical and the Protestants that do not believe in sharing the Gospel or being born again are often called “mainline” Protestant churches. Some mainline churches endorse extremely liberal social and political views, such as being pro-choice and pro-pride; these churches do not self-identify as evangelical because they consider the term evangelical to mean a person who is a “Neanderthal terroristic Trump supporter who hates people of color and wants all immigrants dead.”
In the United States, Wikipedia (remember, the alphabet agencies write this content) tells us that Republicans who identify as either Evangelical and/or born-again believers are the base of support for Christian Nationalism, with older people more likely to be Christian Nationalists than younger people.
And like all leftist conspiracy theories, this one has to include the person of Donald J. Trump. The PRRI survey found that 71% of Christian Nationalists have a favorable impression of Trump while only 17% of Christian Nationalists have a favorable view of Biden. See, Trump supporters are Christian Nationalists and therefore proven racists, bigots, and antisemites.
Finally, the PRRI report tells us that in the January 6 event at the Capitol, Christian Nationalism fused with White Christian identity politics and extremist ideologies. Without examples, the PRRI survey findings conclude that, “Christian Nationalist symbols were proudly on display at the violent riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.” Christian Nationalist symbols? Like what? An American flag? A cross? The dollar bill with its “In God We Trust” logotype? What are the symbols of Christian Nationalism? And what does it mean to “proudly display” such symbols?
Christianity is a big religion. The Democrats like to boast that they have a big tent. Well, step aside, Democrats, the Christian tent accommodates over 2 billion Christians walking the earth right now, the world’s largest religion. In the United States, 230 million of our 330 million citizens claim Christianity as their religion. Now we all know that any group of 2 billion or even 230 million people is not going to be ideologically homogeneous. There are different denominations and even within denominations, different practices. There are many Christmas-and-Easter Christians and there are those who claim Christianity but are not affiliated with a church. They couldn’t even give you directions to the nearest church, but they still identify as Christians. Within this conglomeration of people, I do not know of one single Church of Christian Nationalism or one single person who calls himself or herself a Christian Nationalist. I certainly have never heard of a church that had White in its name, like the Church of the White Christian Nationalists.
Make no mistake; this is a full frontal vicious and demonic attack. What is happening here is that Christians in the United States are starting to assert themselves. Some things going on in this country defy Christian values, and Christians have taken to speaking up or even showing up to protest. Christians are letting their faith influence their political concepts which is not only allowed in the United States, it’s desirable. It was intended to be so. Politics should be downstream of religious affiliation—not the other way around.
Christians are starting to make themselves noticed. No longer content to be pushed into the background and shamed into silence, Christians are speaking up, praying up. This new war cry raging against Christian Nationalism and attempts to affiliate it with Putin, Russia, and the Nazis tells me that our enemies are getting very nervous.
But why should Politico and our government be worried? Well, one reason is that Christianity teaches fundamental principles and our current liberal political narrative is based on relative (not absolute) truths. Relative truths are like sifting sand; ever changing and not foundational. Relative truth allows a political system to shift its ideology to capture the most votes or to change policy when it’s expedient. Relative truth is why Barack Obama signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 2008 and promoted same-sex marriage in his second term. Values, like gender, are fluid things to lefists. Christians tend to be much more fixed.
Christianity also teaches that there is an authority greater than Congress, greater than the Supreme Court, even greater than the White House. In other words, if what Biden says differs from what Jesus says, there are certain people who think Jesus has more authority. Joe is jealous.
Christianity changes people. It transformed pompous Saul into the Apostle Paul. It makes people take a long view of history instead of an immediate one. It allows space for long-suffering and acute suffering in pursuit of larger goals. It seeks truth and recognizes lies.
Malleable people are not Christian and Christians—when they are well grounded—are not malleable by puny government forces. Paul told us that government exists to keep us safe and keep us functional (Letter to the Romans) but beyond that, government is not to dictate how we worship. And worship changes hearts and minds, which is exactly what mainstream media outlets like Politico fear.
If you are Christian, take heart. They may call you a White Christian Nationalist or other things, but that means we’re winning. And, yes, in the Christian world winning often means losing. As we lose our worldly safety and reputations, we are gaining our eternal strength and spiritual integrity.
Here are some inconvenient facts for the left.
About a third of all American Evangelicals (the alleged base of White Christian Nationalism) are nonwhite.
Black Christians are much more likely to call themselves Evangelical Christians than White Christians, so Black Christians are a more significant part of White Christian Nationalism than whites.
In the US, the fastest-growing Evangelical Church growth occurs among Latinos, so Latinos are a growing part of White Christian Nationalism
Many of our elite universities have Evangelical student groups and 80% of their membership is Asian. So well-educated Asians are prominent members of White Christian Nationalism.
White Christian Nationalism a hoax. No matter what religion you practice, do not let yourself be defined by Politico or the Democrat Party. But I repeat myself. Don’t left the leftists interpret Scripture for you or tell you what your faith is all about.
They don’t know.