The Three Major American Brands of Christian Supremacy

They disagree on almost everything — except that Christians should be in charge.

[This is the second part of a series reflecting on the currents, tensions, and evolving structure of Christian nationalism in the United States today. Part one is here.]

Have you noticed that theology is threaded everywhere through our headlines? I mean that quite literally. There are three distinct theological currents that comprise most of what we call “American Christian nationalism” — and they shape the pronouncements we hear from Trump administration figures, lurk beneath our Supreme Court’s rulings, and undergird Christian support for Donald Trump.

As I argued in my previous post, to speak simplistically of Christian nationalism as a unified movement is to miss the varying degrees of severity, divergent impulses, and complex local dialects that make it more a cacophony than a harmonized chorus. It’s more useful to think of Christian nationalism as an ideological spectrum of extremism. Some of it is basically harmless — maybe annoying to the most secular among us, but mostly a sentimental preference for patriotic God-talk. Other varieties pose an enormous threat to our democracy: I wrote a whole book (The Violent Take It by Force) about one such movement, the New Apostolic Reformation, and how it provided the spirituality for January 6th.

So how do we know which forms are really extreme and dangerous and which are mostly benign?

Let’s begin by clarifying our terminology. I call the dangerous and extreme end of the Christian nationalism spectrum Christian supremacy: the idea that Christians are better than other people — more moral, more enlightened, more holy — and are therefore entitled to rule over everyone else. This is not a new idea. You can trace it back (at least) to the conversion of Emperor Constantine and the subsequent adoption of Christianity as Rome’s official religion. Almost overnight, Christianity went from being a sometimes persecuted and generally disfavored religion to being in the seat of power. Over time, violent forms of Christian supremacy became the militant religious ideologies of Christian empires, leading down the road to Crusades, inquisitions, pogroms, colonialism, the enslavement of Africans, and, to a disturbing degree, the Holocaust itself. My new book (Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus in a World of Christian Antichrists) argues that all forms of Christian supremacy are bastardizations of the gospel according to Jesus. Christian supremacy is the modern version of what the New Testament calls “the spirit of antichrist” (1 John 4:3), the act of claiming power and harming others in Christ’s name in contravention of Christ’s clear teachings.

Christian supremacy is a real force in our world. In fact, in the United States, there are three forms of Christian supremacy that are on the rise, jockeying for power through the Trump administration, and all pushing in slightly different directions. Each frequently gets painted with the broad-brush phrase “Christian nationalism,” but that generic labeling obscures the rivalries and internecine battles beneath the surface. Let’s go through them one at a time.

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1. The Christian Reconstructionists

First up: the godfathers of modern Protestant extremism. These are Calvinists — uber-Calvinists. You may have seen them online as the so-called “TheoBros“: almost universally bearded men who wear their retrograde misogyny and Christian authoritarianism on their sleeves. The movement traces back to theologian Rousas John Rushdoony and his son-in-law, economist Gary North, who galvanized a group of hardline Calvinists in the 1960s and ‘70s. The Reconstructionists are the kind of people Margaret Atwood was warning us about in The Handmaid’s Tale.

They espouse a totalizing vision of Christian power — a realized kingdom of God on earth, where Christians take dominion over creation and over everyone who doesn’t happen to be Christian. This is called “dominion theology,” rooted in a legislative agenda called “theonomy” (from theo, God, and nomos, law): the application of biblical law to modern societies. Reconstructionists tend to be erudite and assertive, almost always led by white men who host conferences with titles like “Blueprints for Christendom 2.0.” (Christendom, in case you’re not hip to the neo-medieval revival: the realm and peoples ruled over by Christian tyrants.)

The foremost Reconstructionist luminary today is Doug Wilson, a pastor, author, and Confederate apologist whose Christian fiefdom is actively taking over Moscow, Idaho. He superintends a church, a small college, a publishing house, and a small denomination — the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches — from that Idaho home base.

Wilson’s most prominent acolyte is Pete Hegseth, our Secretary of Defense — but he really wants to be called the Secretary of (Holy) War. Raised Baptist, Hegseth found his way into Wilson’s flock in recent years. You can’t really make sense of his Bible-laden chest-thumping and violent rhetoric — especially amid the current war with Iran — without understanding his Reconstructionist framework. His obsession with the Crusades (he wrote American Crusade, has three Crusade-referencing tattoos, and had the imagery engraved on his Bible cover) is part and parcel with the Reconstructionists’ Christendom fixation. The Crusades were the paradigmatic wars to expand European Christendom.

Here’s the catch: the Reconstructionists make a lot of noise, but they aren’t that popular. Wilson’s denomination has only about 150 churches, many of them in Canada or overseas. They are more interested in ideological purity than in drawing crowds, and they’re especially focused on education — homeschooling, classical Christian academies — as incubators for future generations of Christian supremacists. They are the intellectual champions of the MAGA right’s extremist Christian vision, enormously influential with thought leaders and activists, but with a relatively small ground-level reach.

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2. The Independent Charismatics

If we want to follow the crowds, we turn to the second brand of Christian supremacy: that found within nondenominational Pentecostalism. Scholars like me prefer to call this segment “Independent Charismatics,” because “nondenominational Pentecostalism” is a mouthful, and because, if anything, these folks are “post-denominational.” They’re trying to reinvent how Christians do Christianity. In fact, this is the fastest-growing segment of both global and American Christianity — roughly doubling in size every 20 years. It’s the realm of megachurches, televangelism, prophecy conferences, and worship-music rock stars. It is tech-savvy, multiethnic, and the Wild West of the American church.

(Source: Ryan Burge — Note: Not all nondenominational folks are charismatic, but that’s where most of the growth is these days.)

Not all Independent Charismatics are into Christian nationalism — but most are. Paula White-Cain, the director of the White House Faith Office and Trump’s closest spiritual advisor, is an Independent Charismatic televangelist and she has tended to stock the Christian leadership circles around Trump with her kinds of ambitious, entrepreneurial charismatic leaders. These make up the lion’s share of the people you see in those semi-staged photos of Trump surrounded by Christian leaders laying hands on him.

What holds this diffuse, nondenominational world together is a chummy global celebrity leadership culture, sort of a charismatic Hollywood. These celebrities carry a variety of titles — apostle, prophet, revivalist, worship leader, megachurch pastor, Messianic rabbi — but they all inhabit the transnational currents of charismatic Christian celebritydom, and that class of leaders is deeply invested in Trump. They see him as a revolutionary leader, anointed by God for transforming America. I’m especially interested in one Independent Charismatic leadership network called the New Apostolic Reformation, because its leaders are among the most important innovators in this brand of Christian supremacy.

What makes the Independent Charismatics intriguing in contrast to the Reconstructionists: where the militant Calvinists are narrow and gruff, the charismatics are diverse, celebrative, and welcoming. The Calvinists are long-term planners, imagining cultural conquest playing out over generations; the charismatics believe they can bring the eschatological kingdom of God to earth right now, through the right combination of spiritual warfare, revival preaching, and politicking.

But underneath the hood, both movements run on the same fuel: dominion theology. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was significant intermingling between Reconstructionist thinkers and key Independent Charismatic leaders, and dominion ideas crossed over from the gradualist Calvinists to take root among the accelerationist charismatics. The theological pillars of Independent Charismatic political theology — the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” ekklesia theology, much of their spiritual warfare framework — are all downstream of dominion thinking. Despite their surface differences, these two brands of Christian supremacy share significant theological DNA.

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3. The Anti-Vatican II Catholics

The third character in this play requires us to leave American Protestantism for the more organized but no less fractious world of the Catholic right.

Most of what unites the reactionary faction within Catholicism is deep antipathy to the 1960s Vatican II reforms. For many Catholics, Vatican II — which moved the Mass from Latin to the vernacular, downplayed clericalism, and opened the Church to interreligious dialogue — was a watershed of renewal. For others, it was a rupture. And ruptures produce backlashes. Many priests and bishops want to return global Catholicism to its pre-Vatican II, hard-nosed, frankly anti-democratic theological bent. This vision is sometimes called “Integralism”: the idea that the Catholic Church should directly shape civil law and government. You can also sometimes hear it referred to as “Catholic traditionalism.”

The most prominent activist voice for this vision today is J.D. Vance, our Vice President. Raised vaguely nondenominational Pentecostal, he converted to Catholicism and recently announced a forthcoming book about that conversion. He moves in close orbit with Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, an arch-Catholic activist.

Beyond Vance, the Catholic right’s other main prize is the Supreme Court. It is not an accident that five and a half of the six conservative justices are Catholic (Neil Gorsuch is a complicated Catholic-Episcopalian hybrid). Catholic intellectuals have long flourished in philosophy and law, and the Catholic far right — with deep support from the broader religious right’s evangelical voter base — has supplied a steady pipeline of hardline justices over several generations.

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All three movements are angling for power within the second Trump administration. All three envision a society in which their Christianity is dominant and holds coercive power over everyone else. Which means, inevitably, there are real tensions among them — and that’s what I’ll turn to next.

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