I grew up in an NAR church in the 1980s and 1990s—thanks for helping mainstream folks understand the *special* brand of delusion running in that stream!
That’s a good question. I’m planning to to this some in the next post, but I don’t view legacy religious right figures like Franklin Graham as part of a unified Christian supremacist ideology or movement. I’d also put the legacy religious right institutions a bit outside of that frame. In some ways, because those institutions largely cater to evangelicals and are broadly Christian Zionist, they tend to align with –– and play along with –– the Independent Charismatics (i.e., Paula White-Cain and the White House Faith Office) for now. Many of them have become quite radicalized and profoundly support Trump. Graham, for his symbolic connection to his father, is an important bit player in that. But he’s not neatly in any of these camps.
I am more hopeful about Franklin’s ability to one day see the fatal flaws in Trump as his father seemed to with Nixon. I post biblical reflections regularly on his sites in that hope.
I don't share your hope at all. I'm not a Billy Graham booster or anything, but I think Franklin is a good step more radical and reactionary than his father.
I'll get into that some in future posts. There are a lot of free radicals left over from the old religious right who don't neatly align with any of these movements. They're definitely part of the landscape, but I don't see a coherent vision or clear agenda uniting them. They can make common cause with most of these folks. Mike Johnson is a great example: he's a creature of the old religious right (longtime lawyer for ADF). He's a Baptist. He's actually very closely aligned with the NAR and the Independent Charismatics today -- he flies an Appeal to Heaven flag outside his office that was given to him by an NAR leader. But I wouldn't categorize him as part of that movement.
That's helpful. Also, Julie Ingersoll offered some clarity in our interview with her in saying that these labels can often be difficult since they can be fluid as those in other Christian networks adopt some of each...
Mike Johnson is a power seeking politician. He betrays his stated faith every single day in service of party power. I don’t think he qualifies as a Christian of any kind. The same applies to Franklin Graham. Their primary allegiance is not to anything but the Republican party and today that means the President.
I hope you're going to talk about the important place of anti-Semitism in these movements. This has largely flown under the radar as Trump has weaponized anti-Semitism and the Evangelicals masquerade as philosemites.
Yes, that’s a very important dimension that I’m hoping to cover in the next post or the one after. Basically, the hardline Catholics and Reconstructionists have proven very open to (and even at times embracing) of contemporary right-wing antisemitism, where the Independent Charismatics have a high-octane version of Christian Zionism that is also very harmful. A lot of the tension among these different visions of Christian supremacy split along the lines of eschatology.
Thank you! I’m really excited to read your new book!
I am an Orthodox Christian and am quite amused by all this. Christians did just fine without a Bible for almost 400 years and when Constantine institutionalized the church many ran to the desert to be with God and from them we got nuns and monks! I have to admit I find these people quite odd and amusing but unfortunately dangerous…to their own souls and to our world.
Ahhhhh. The NAR. I live in Redding, CA, home of the western HQ of this movement, Bethel Church. To witness dominionism at work, take note of Bethel's takeover of political/deliberative bodies in this county. They militantly enforce tithes, giving them unlimited dark money to fully fund candidates with plenty of backing. The counter-force is a scattered and electoral minority gaggle of leftists and libertarians without much organization. It all works because the majority of voters are disaffected by all government and won't ever get off their asses to vote. To the extent they are "political" at all, they skew right and "other religious." They accuse the Jeremiahs and Cassandras among us of anti-religious overreaction. Betheloids have redone downtown as nothing but a hyper-expensive housing and entertainment zone for betheloids who've moved here to enroll in their holy wizard school, Bethel School for Supernatural Ministry (BSSM). Their long-term campaign is to join with/take over an existing Christian college, Simpson, to piggyback on academic accreditation, thus enabling the little BSSM grifters-in-training (they all see themselves leading flocks someday) to tap financial aid and student loan sources for their very expensive tuition--for which they need mom/dad's help or they GoFundMe for it.
Bethel is currently trying to weather investigations of two senior pastors who've been accused of grooming young women and putting their hands on other women.
Mike Flynn, he of recently pardoned "fame," is a huge ally of the NAR.
I am curious about your thoughts on the influence of Opus Dei on the Catholic component of the Christian Nationalist triumvirate in the current administration
But since they WORK together politically, does it matter if John Roberts of SCOTUS and Kevin Roberts of Heritage’s Project 2025 are playing in different parts of the field? They are moving the ball together and we are flummoxed by their passes and ball movement and looking into their Beliefs rather than their Tactics.
These and most other brands of Christianity left Jesus a long time ago. Their belief system is nothing like Jesus' original teachings. One has to sincerely look within and ask with honesty:
I know less about the first two, but I am confident to say that the description of the last group is misleading. Slipping in all the Catholic supreme court justices under the anti-Vatican II Catholic Supremacist category is just sloppy.
Yes, there are many great conservative Catholic philosophers and legal minds, but they don't represent some cabal set on domination. I take it that to be a supremacist means that one thinks one's group should have power AND that others should be deprived of their existing political rights. In other words, supremacists seek to disenfranchise other voters or alter our form of government so that it is no longer a liberal democracy.
I understand that it is appropriate to identify each of the three groups as including supremacists in this strict sense. There are some Catholic scholars that would like a return to something like a Catholic monarchy! But that doesn't bear on the many (even VERY) socially conservative Catholics who don't share such views.
If "supremacist" in your usage comes to mean that a person believes their view of justice and the good is correct and that they vote, organize, and hold office guided by that conception while adhering to our current system of government, then everyone's a supremacist! Our system of government is adversarial by design, it presupposes groups at odds organizing to pass their positions into law, guided by reason and conscience (including religious perspectives).
No, it absolutely was not. Most of the founders were or had been Christian, which I believe is why they emphatically founded a nation with religious freedom for all. Also it hadn’t been 100 years yet since the Salem witch trials, which were a Christian Puritan undertaking that may have scared sense at least temporarily into people deciding how society should be run.
A very important question. I'm hoping to cover that in the next one or the following post. There's been a huge surge in Catholic antisemitism within the MAGA coalition, and I think a lot of that has to do with their theological effort to retrieve a pre-Vatican II version of Catholicism. There's also no real eschatological role for Israel within Catholic teaching, so they tend to be mystified by the evangelical Christian Zionists. There's a lot more lurking under the surface of that divide.
I’m curious about the cross-pollination you mentioned between the Reformed dominionists and the NAR. Bill Bright comes to mind, hanging out with Loren Cunningham, but that’s all I can think of.
I’m also having a hard time seeing where the dangerous and influential phony history “Christian nation” crowd (David Barton, Mike Johnson) fits in this typology.
Excellent! All believe in male headship, women's submission. Even Paul White believes wives submit. I do believe many hard core complementarians should be on this list...of course many of their leaders supported Doug Wilson. The SBC is a significant voting bloc...
I’d actually challenge this. Paula White-Cain is a complicated figure, and she has espoused some agreement with male headship, but I’d argue that is more idiosyncratic and tied to her own coalitional politics. She’s trying to bridge among some very difficult internecine struggles. Though there are still strains of patriarchy and complementarian theology among Independent Charismatics, they are overwhelmingly officially egalitarian in their views of women in leadership. That’s a long-running distinction of the Pentecostal-charismatic currents.
I have a whole chapter on Paula in The Violent Take It by Force. She's very ideologically flexible and has gone through many evolutions in her life and ministry. It's possible that the dynamics of her third marriage (to Jonathan Cain from the band Journey) actually do adhere to a more conventional male headship model, but I sincerely doubt it. He's her third husband, and she has publicly outshone each of her previous husbands. I think it's completely off-kilter to try to understand Paula through the lens of complementarianism. She has been preaching and pastoring since the 1990s, sometimes with a husband, sometimes not. She's one of the most powerful Christian women in the country, and Jonathan Cain plays a very small role in her overall work today (he sometimes sings a song at her church other other events). In my book, I compare her to Aimee Semple McPherson: an ambitious and entrepreneurial female leader who has to abide by certain gendered Christian scripts but who also is constantly pushing the envelope of what women are allowed to do in the church. I'll also note that she gave those comments about submitting to Jonathan right when some of these conflicts (particularly with the Reconstructionists) were starting to heat up early in the Trump administration. She sees herself as a bridge-builder, and while she has stacked Trump's advisory circles with her kinds of charismatic leaders, she is technically also supposed to be the open door to all Christian leaders for their access to the White House. I would wager that she was trying to paper over their resentment of her being a female pastor in that role by throwing her critics a rhetorical bone.
Well said and helpful! And your book is on my to-read soon list, eager to read that chapter for the reasons you mention. It resonate with what you say in that she is trying to paper over the female pastor resentment...I sense not only with Reconstructionists but also the complementarians like Robert Jeffress she's often in photos with...I find that of interest given he absolutely is against women preachers. Last video with her he look a bit strained clapping for her comparison of DT to Jesus.
Yes, Jeffress is another one of these free radical figures from the old guard of the religious right. Best as I can reconstruct, he had a televangelism show on Daystar in 2015. Paula White did too. She was inviting in the people that she knew, so he got an invite.
There's a lot of ideological flexibility on the other side too. A lot of Baptists like Jeffress or conventional evangelical right-wingers like Franklin Graham have apparently found ways to swallow their complementarian scruples and work with Paula. The hypocrisy goes both ways. In some sense, that's the secret sauce of the religious right.
A secret sauce filled with hypocrisy, about right! They're all such a psychological study, there needs to be a new set of psychological categories for the whole bunch.
I grew up in an NAR church in the 1980s and 1990s—thanks for helping mainstream folks understand the *special* brand of delusion running in that stream!
Where is Franklin Graham in this typology...I see Franklin and Trump as today's expression of Billy and Nixon...
That’s a good question. I’m planning to to this some in the next post, but I don’t view legacy religious right figures like Franklin Graham as part of a unified Christian supremacist ideology or movement. I’d also put the legacy religious right institutions a bit outside of that frame. In some ways, because those institutions largely cater to evangelicals and are broadly Christian Zionist, they tend to align with –– and play along with –– the Independent Charismatics (i.e., Paula White-Cain and the White House Faith Office) for now. Many of them have become quite radicalized and profoundly support Trump. Graham, for his symbolic connection to his father, is an important bit player in that. But he’s not neatly in any of these camps.
I am more hopeful about Franklin’s ability to one day see the fatal flaws in Trump as his father seemed to with Nixon. I post biblical reflections regularly on his sites in that hope.
I don't share your hope at all. I'm not a Billy Graham booster or anything, but I think Franklin is a good step more radical and reactionary than his father.
And Billy was a Depression-era farm boy who described a revival-driven teenaged conversion experience.
Franklin grew up as the scion of an international family business that had political influence.
You may be right…I may be wrong. Either way, let’s keep speaking truth to power Matthew.
Would like if you explain more why many complementarian leaders/ like Mike Johnson & more arent part of this list?
I'll get into that some in future posts. There are a lot of free radicals left over from the old religious right who don't neatly align with any of these movements. They're definitely part of the landscape, but I don't see a coherent vision or clear agenda uniting them. They can make common cause with most of these folks. Mike Johnson is a great example: he's a creature of the old religious right (longtime lawyer for ADF). He's a Baptist. He's actually very closely aligned with the NAR and the Independent Charismatics today -- he flies an Appeal to Heaven flag outside his office that was given to him by an NAR leader. But I wouldn't categorize him as part of that movement.
That's helpful. Also, Julie Ingersoll offered some clarity in our interview with her in saying that these labels can often be difficult since they can be fluid as those in other Christian networks adopt some of each...
Mike Johnson is a power seeking politician. He betrays his stated faith every single day in service of party power. I don’t think he qualifies as a Christian of any kind. The same applies to Franklin Graham. Their primary allegiance is not to anything but the Republican party and today that means the President.
Exactly !!!
Thank you! Very illuminating, if depressing.
I hope you're going to talk about the important place of anti-Semitism in these movements. This has largely flown under the radar as Trump has weaponized anti-Semitism and the Evangelicals masquerade as philosemites.
Yes, that’s a very important dimension that I’m hoping to cover in the next post or the one after. Basically, the hardline Catholics and Reconstructionists have proven very open to (and even at times embracing) of contemporary right-wing antisemitism, where the Independent Charismatics have a high-octane version of Christian Zionism that is also very harmful. A lot of the tension among these different visions of Christian supremacy split along the lines of eschatology.
Thank you! I’m really excited to read your new book!
I am an Orthodox Christian and am quite amused by all this. Christians did just fine without a Bible for almost 400 years and when Constantine institutionalized the church many ran to the desert to be with God and from them we got nuns and monks! I have to admit I find these people quite odd and amusing but unfortunately dangerous…to their own souls and to our world.
Thanks again for your important analysis!
This is SO good.
Ahhhhh. The NAR. I live in Redding, CA, home of the western HQ of this movement, Bethel Church. To witness dominionism at work, take note of Bethel's takeover of political/deliberative bodies in this county. They militantly enforce tithes, giving them unlimited dark money to fully fund candidates with plenty of backing. The counter-force is a scattered and electoral minority gaggle of leftists and libertarians without much organization. It all works because the majority of voters are disaffected by all government and won't ever get off their asses to vote. To the extent they are "political" at all, they skew right and "other religious." They accuse the Jeremiahs and Cassandras among us of anti-religious overreaction. Betheloids have redone downtown as nothing but a hyper-expensive housing and entertainment zone for betheloids who've moved here to enroll in their holy wizard school, Bethel School for Supernatural Ministry (BSSM). Their long-term campaign is to join with/take over an existing Christian college, Simpson, to piggyback on academic accreditation, thus enabling the little BSSM grifters-in-training (they all see themselves leading flocks someday) to tap financial aid and student loan sources for their very expensive tuition--for which they need mom/dad's help or they GoFundMe for it.
Bethel is currently trying to weather investigations of two senior pastors who've been accused of grooming young women and putting their hands on other women.
Mike Flynn, he of recently pardoned "fame," is a huge ally of the NAR.
Motherfuckers are a cancer.
I am curious about your thoughts on the influence of Opus Dei on the Catholic component of the Christian Nationalist triumvirate in the current administration
But since they WORK together politically, does it matter if John Roberts of SCOTUS and Kevin Roberts of Heritage’s Project 2025 are playing in different parts of the field? They are moving the ball together and we are flummoxed by their passes and ball movement and looking into their Beliefs rather than their Tactics.
These and most other brands of Christianity left Jesus a long time ago. Their belief system is nothing like Jesus' original teachings. One has to sincerely look within and ask with honesty:
If you Follow Jesus, What Do You Believe?
https://benefitgreatly.substack.com/p/who-is-a-jesus-follower?r=fzbc6
''The Politics of End Times Mobilization''
This essay examines how Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric was not random excess but targeted political language aimed at Christian nationalist listeners already primed for prophecy... https://essayx.substack.com/p/speaking-to-the-end-times-base
I know less about the first two, but I am confident to say that the description of the last group is misleading. Slipping in all the Catholic supreme court justices under the anti-Vatican II Catholic Supremacist category is just sloppy.
Yes, there are many great conservative Catholic philosophers and legal minds, but they don't represent some cabal set on domination. I take it that to be a supremacist means that one thinks one's group should have power AND that others should be deprived of their existing political rights. In other words, supremacists seek to disenfranchise other voters or alter our form of government so that it is no longer a liberal democracy.
I understand that it is appropriate to identify each of the three groups as including supremacists in this strict sense. There are some Catholic scholars that would like a return to something like a Catholic monarchy! But that doesn't bear on the many (even VERY) socially conservative Catholics who don't share such views.
If "supremacist" in your usage comes to mean that a person believes their view of justice and the good is correct and that they vote, organize, and hold office guided by that conception while adhering to our current system of government, then everyone's a supremacist! Our system of government is adversarial by design, it presupposes groups at odds organizing to pass their positions into law, guided by reason and conscience (including religious perspectives).
I am a Christian nationalist. America was founded as a Christian nation.
No, it absolutely was not. Most of the founders were or had been Christian, which I believe is why they emphatically founded a nation with religious freedom for all. Also it hadn’t been 100 years yet since the Salem witch trials, which were a Christian Puritan undertaking that may have scared sense at least temporarily into people deciding how society should be run.
To what degree are the anti Vatican II group against the changes made towards Jews and Judaism?
A very important question. I'm hoping to cover that in the next one or the following post. There's been a huge surge in Catholic antisemitism within the MAGA coalition, and I think a lot of that has to do with their theological effort to retrieve a pre-Vatican II version of Catholicism. There's also no real eschatological role for Israel within Catholic teaching, so they tend to be mystified by the evangelical Christian Zionists. There's a lot more lurking under the surface of that divide.
Looking forward!
Great question!
I’m curious about the cross-pollination you mentioned between the Reformed dominionists and the NAR. Bill Bright comes to mind, hanging out with Loren Cunningham, but that’s all I can think of.
I’m also having a hard time seeing where the dangerous and influential phony history “Christian nation” crowd (David Barton, Mike Johnson) fits in this typology.
Excellent! All believe in male headship, women's submission. Even Paul White believes wives submit. I do believe many hard core complementarians should be on this list...of course many of their leaders supported Doug Wilson. The SBC is a significant voting bloc...
I’d actually challenge this. Paula White-Cain is a complicated figure, and she has espoused some agreement with male headship, but I’d argue that is more idiosyncratic and tied to her own coalitional politics. She’s trying to bridge among some very difficult internecine struggles. Though there are still strains of patriarchy and complementarian theology among Independent Charismatics, they are overwhelmingly officially egalitarian in their views of women in leadership. That’s a long-running distinction of the Pentecostal-charismatic currents.
Are you saying her views here are more a political move, but she doesn't actually believe or practice it? https://www.joemygod.com/2025/04/paula-white-wives-should-submit-to-their-husbands/
I have a whole chapter on Paula in The Violent Take It by Force. She's very ideologically flexible and has gone through many evolutions in her life and ministry. It's possible that the dynamics of her third marriage (to Jonathan Cain from the band Journey) actually do adhere to a more conventional male headship model, but I sincerely doubt it. He's her third husband, and she has publicly outshone each of her previous husbands. I think it's completely off-kilter to try to understand Paula through the lens of complementarianism. She has been preaching and pastoring since the 1990s, sometimes with a husband, sometimes not. She's one of the most powerful Christian women in the country, and Jonathan Cain plays a very small role in her overall work today (he sometimes sings a song at her church other other events). In my book, I compare her to Aimee Semple McPherson: an ambitious and entrepreneurial female leader who has to abide by certain gendered Christian scripts but who also is constantly pushing the envelope of what women are allowed to do in the church. I'll also note that she gave those comments about submitting to Jonathan right when some of these conflicts (particularly with the Reconstructionists) were starting to heat up early in the Trump administration. She sees herself as a bridge-builder, and while she has stacked Trump's advisory circles with her kinds of charismatic leaders, she is technically also supposed to be the open door to all Christian leaders for their access to the White House. I would wager that she was trying to paper over their resentment of her being a female pastor in that role by throwing her critics a rhetorical bone.
Well said and helpful! And your book is on my to-read soon list, eager to read that chapter for the reasons you mention. It resonate with what you say in that she is trying to paper over the female pastor resentment...I sense not only with Reconstructionists but also the complementarians like Robert Jeffress she's often in photos with...I find that of interest given he absolutely is against women preachers. Last video with her he look a bit strained clapping for her comparison of DT to Jesus.
Yes, Jeffress is another one of these free radical figures from the old guard of the religious right. Best as I can reconstruct, he had a televangelism show on Daystar in 2015. Paula White did too. She was inviting in the people that she knew, so he got an invite.
There's a lot of ideological flexibility on the other side too. A lot of Baptists like Jeffress or conventional evangelical right-wingers like Franklin Graham have apparently found ways to swallow their complementarian scruples and work with Paula. The hypocrisy goes both ways. In some sense, that's the secret sauce of the religious right.
A secret sauce filled with hypocrisy, about right! They're all such a psychological study, there needs to be a new set of psychological categories for the whole bunch.