The Three Souls of American Christian Nationalism

MAGA doesn't have one spiritual center — it has three.

[This is the third installment in an ongoing series attempting to describe the landscape of contemporary American Christian nationalism. I recommend reading Part One and Part Two in the series for context.]

To follow the news coverage of American “Christian nationalism” is to come away with the strong impression that this phrase describes a unified, cohesive movement embracing the same agenda, the same narrative about American history, and mostly the same theology. Here’s how the standard narrative goes: Christian nationalism is the animating ideology — the spiritual center — of MAGA. It is patriarchal, disempowering for women, rooted in a vision of male leadership and female submission. It is built by and for white Christians who want to impose their white Christianity on the country — hence the adjective “white” so often appended to signal the intrinsic connection between racial hierarchy and religious hierarchy. It is fundamentally backward-looking, aiming to return the United States to some (probably mythical) past when the nation was overtly Christian and racial minorities and women were subservient to white men. Sound familiar?

There’s a lot of truth in that narrative, but it is also gravely misleading. It’s the sort of caricature that someone with zero sympathy for or connection to Christian nationalism would proclaim: they are bad, medieval, patriarchal, racist, retrograde. The reality is that American Christian nationalism, like American Christianity as a whole, is massively diverse and scattershot.

Some analysts talk about Christian nationalism as a movement, but that implies a coherent leadership marching in unison toward shared goals. I prefer to imagine it as a vast field of iron filings — millions of individual Christians with some interest in the idea of a Christian nation — with different magnets sweeping over them, pulling them into shifting patterns. These magnets, representing both political causes and theological movements, pull individuals into their orbits dynamically, in multiple directions at once. Right now, I would argue, there are three major magnets. American Christian nationalism isn’t presently one movement — it’s three.

I’ve previously identified these as the Calvinist Christian Reconstructionists (the Theobros), the Independent Charismatics (the NAR), and the Anti-Vatican II Catholics (the Traditionalists). By naming this triumvirate, I’m not trying to be exhaustive — you could subdivide Christian nationalists into 10 or 15 different expressions. What I’m tracking is thought-leadership and cultural currency: the ideas, and the articulators of those ideas, that are finding real purchase among Christian nationalists. Because Christian nationalism is so enmeshed with MAGA today, this also means tracking power flows within the Trump administration — which leaders have juice, who’s getting face time, whose agenda is getting enacted. These three movements are both attracting followers (especially young people) and wielding real influence in Trump’s inner circle.

Put differently: if you’re concerned about a friend who has gotten sucked into a MAGA wormhole, radicalized by Christian nationalist ideas, my wager is that they’ve fallen into the magnetic field of one of these three. Track the influencers, because they are good barometers of cultural currency. And if you follow the most up-and-coming Christian MAGA influencers, you’ll realize that MAGA doesn’t have one spiritual center — it has three.

That tripartite soul is also hugely important for understanding the spiritual rifts and tensions within the MAGA coalition. Independent Charismatics — the folks I study most closely and have written a book and podcast about — see Donald Trump as a sort of secular messiah, a Cyrus figure sent by God to help bring about a grand End Times revival. They believe in modern prophecy — in actual Christian prophets receiving fresh revelation from the Holy Spirit right now — and they have enshrined Trump in hundreds of such prophecies about his special cosmic destiny. Their power in the administration centers on Paula White-Cain, Trump’s spiritual advisor and director of the White House Faith Office. Put simply: if you’ve seen a photo of Christian leaders surrounding Trump, most of those people are probably Independent Charismatics.

[December 2025]

The Christian Reconstructionists, by contrast, are rarely in close proximity to Trump — theologically or physically. These guys (and they are almost exclusively guys) pitch themselves as the more intellectual and politically incorrect Christian nationalists. They publish books and hold conferences where bearded men lecture about rebuilding Christendom and theonomy — the application of Old Testament law to modern societies. Doug Wilson, the pastor actively turning Moscow, Idaho into his own spiritual fiefdom, is the living godfather of this cohort. Because they don’t get along well with Paula White-Cain, the Reconstructionists’ main avatar in the administration is Pete Hegseth, who has invited Wilson and other luminaries to preach at the Pentagon and has been enacting their ideas in personnel and policy within the military in ways that pose a grave threat to the future of our democracy.

The anti-Vatican II Catholics are a more diverse crowd, ranging from constitutional law scholars talking about postliberalism and “common good constitutionalism” to far-right influencers celebrating trad wives. Part of what unites this reactionary motley crew is opposition to the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Historically, they have concentrated their energy on the Supreme Court — it is no accident that five of our six conservative justices are Catholic, with Gorsuch, the sixth, having been raised Catholic before becoming Episcopalian. But now, for the first time, the hardline Catholics have a man on the inside of MAGA central: J.D. Vance, a Catholic convert (with a few critical notes for the pope) who has landed in a very extreme lane of modern Catholicism.

OK, so that helps us see that Christian nationalism is not a monolithic movement, but rather a field of diverse free actors presently pulled into MAGA by three differing visions of Christian power. Now let’s come back to that standard narrative of Christian nationalism (white, patriarchal, backward-looking) and see how it matches these three ascendant paradigms of Christian nationalism in practice.

---

We can start with a fairly simple comparison: women in leadership. There is a roiling Christian theological debate in some circles about whether and how women can exercise leadership in the church. Mainline Protestants are mostly egalitarian in that they allow women to serve equally at all levels of leadership. But they also tend to range politically from center-right to far left, so they aren’t much a part of MAGA Christian nationalism discussions today.

The hardline Calvinists (Protestants) and the entirety of the Roman Catholic Church hold what is generously called “complementarian theology” — the view that men and women hold different but complementary roles in the church. It just so happens that within this complementarity, men tend to hold all the positions with real power. Complementarianism is what the rest of us call “patriarchy.” So, with regard to the standard narrative of Christian nationalism, as far as the Reconstructionists and the reactionary Catholics go, the narrative is spot on.

But the Independent Charismatics are different. Across most of Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity — the most fast-growing and energetic forms of Christianity in the world — they have tended to embrace a more egalitarian sensibility. From the rise of Pentecostalism in the early 20th century, many of the most significant and talented leaders have been women: Lucy Farrow, Aimee Semple McPherson, Kathryn Kuhlman, Tammy Faye Messner (Bakker), Paula White-Cain. Mainline Protestants sometimes look down their noses at the unenlightened evangelicals and Catholics who still bar women from the pulpit, while the cultured Mainliners had evolved on these issues in the 1950s or 1960s. Well, the Pentecostals had the Mainline Protestants beat by 50 or 60 years in terms of ordaining and supporting women in leadership.

Paula White-Cain is, arguably, the most empowered Christian woman in the world: Director of the White House Faith Office — gatekeeper for religious leaders to the president — and trusted advisor to the president himself. She has to navigate a complicated coalition with a great many misogynistic, patriarchal male leaders. Because she is that gatekeeper, she has tended to ensure that more female Christian nationalist leaders get face time with Trump than you might expect.

We can observe a similar dynamic in terms of race and questions of diversity. The leadership of both the Reconstructionist and reactionary Catholic movements is overwhelmingly male and white. The Catholic Church, as a globe-spanning entity, has more built-in diversity than the narrow — and frankly often racist — American hardline Calvinist movement. Still, the most prominent intellectuals and influencers of far-right American Catholicism are far whiter than the American Catholic Church as a whole.

But here, again, the Independent Charismatics are the outliers. While many people associate the word “evangelical” with “white,” the Independent Charismatic sector is the most diverse segment of American evangelicalism. As with questions of women’s leadership, charismatic spirituality has tended to have an empowering effect for marginalized peoples. Independent Charismatic churches are be dynamic and multiethnic, often the most hip megachurches. And the celebrity leadership of the Independent Charismatic subculture is also very diverse. Have you ever wondered who the Christian leaders of color — Black, Latino, Asian — are that you see surrounding Trump in the photos? Dollars to donuts, those are Independent Charismatic leaders.

This complicates the narrative of “white Christian nationalism” in significant ways. Yes, if we’re talking about the Reconstructionist or hardline Catholic species of Christian nationalism, “white Christian nationalism” is a quite apt description. But what about the diverse movement surrounding Trump and the White House Faith Office? When Trump launched his 2020 “Evangelicals for Trump“ campaign, he did so at the church of his trusted advisor, Independent Charismatic apostle Guillermo Maldonado. That church, El Rey Jesús (King Jesus International Ministry) in Miami, is one of the largest bilingual churches in the country. Maldonado, a Honduran immigrant to the United States, oversees a network of more than 500 churches scattered around the world, with more than 700,000 people looking to him for leadership. These are the kinds of leaders Paula White-Cain has recruited to surround Trump. Is Guillermo Maldonado a “white Christian nationalist”? No — he’s something more complicated.

I’ll conclude with a story to illustrate the wild and woolly world of American Christian nationalism. About a year ago — a few months into the second Trump administration — I was in conversation with one of Trump’s Latino Christian advisers, a member of Paula White-Cain’s circle and another New Apostolic Reformation figure. This leader has the ear of very powerful people in the Trump administration. I was pressing him on why he wasn’t intervening even as Latino churches — including churches in his own network, with pastors who were his friends — were getting targeted and raided by ICE and CBP. He told me he had been in touch with Tom Homan, Trump’s immigration czar, about it and had asked immigration enforcement agencies to keep the rounding up of non-criminals to a minimum, and that DHS officials had agreed.

Here’s what he then said to me: I believe that Donald Trump has a special anointing from God to fix the immigration system in this country. We have prophecies about this. But he just needs to get rid of all the criminal immigrants, who are the crux of the problem, and then he can fix it.

And I asked him: What about Stephen Miller? He’s the person Trump has put in charge of the whole immigration enforcement apparatus, and he is the epitome of white supremacy and anti-immigrant rhetoric in this administration.

He said: I have been praying for God to remove Stephen Miller from the administration since 2017, and God has not answered that prayer yet.

Whatever you want to call this man, he isn’t a “white Christian nationalist.” He’s something else. This Independent Charismatic style of Christian nationalism is more global, more transnational, more inclusive of women and non-white people. But make not mistake: many Independent Charismatic influencers and top leaders (the crowd that surrounds Trump) believe Christians are entitled by God to rule over everyone else.

This is why we must be cautious about the standard narrative of Christian nationalism. A lot of the time, it accurately captures a big swath of what passes for Christian nationalism today. But if you get too locked in on the “white, patriarchal Christian nationalism” narrative, you actually lose the ability to make sense of people like this Latino Trump adviser and Paula White-Cain.

---

In my next post, I'll reflect on how these three movements have different agendas, rooted in different theologies — and how they're presently pulling MAGA in different directions at the same time. Understanding these distinctions matters — and producing this kind of analysis takes real time and research. If you find it valuable, please consider a paid subscription. Reader support is what keeps this work going.