'In bed together': How Christian nationalists and big donors are 'demolishing democracy'

27 April 2024

The burgeoning Christian nationalist movement and well-heeled conservative donors have become increasingly entangled with each other, according to a new film.

In her review of the documentary Bad Faith: Christian nationalism's unholy war on democracy, Guardian writer Adrian Horton remarked on how filmmakers have shown that far-right Christian evangelicals and their financial backers have a shared common goal: replacing representative democracy with an autocratic regime. The film kicks off by juxtaposing footage of participants in the deadly January 6, 2021 siege of the U.S. Capitol with former President Donald Trump's spiritual advisor, Paula White, praying to overturn the 2020 election.

"I think a lot of Americans have a very difficult time accepting and understanding the fact that such treason, such anti-democratic activity, could be carried out by people who basically look like Sunday school teachers," Bad Faith director Stephen Ujlaki told Horton. "[W]hen they talk about recreating the kingdom of God on earth, they weren’t talking about something spiritual. They were talking about demolishing democracy so that God, i.e. themselves, could rule. And for that reason, I call it a conspiracy carried out in broad daylight."

The ideology of Christian nationalism is centered around the erroneous belief that the United States was founded as a Christian nation (many of the framers were actually Deists). Its proponents want to elect explicitly Christian conservative leaders to firmly establish a government that establishes a hierarchy in which white, Christian men are at the top, with women, minorities, the LGBTQ+ community and practitioners of other faiths forced to live under their rule.

In the film, author Anne Nelson — a longtime scholar of the religious right — explored the financial connection between Christian nationalists and major donors like the far-right Koch network. She argued that even though the movement's financial backers may not share their religious fanaticism, they nonetheless see Christian nationalists as useful tools in their goal of dismantling democracy in order to further enrich themselves.

"They’re in bed together, based on economic principles, not theology," Nelson said.

Later in the film, Ujlaki delves into the far-right Heritage Foundation think tank's controversial Project 2025 initiative. He explained it as the next logical step in the Christian nationalist movement to install an autocrat to bulldoze any remaining institutions standing in the way.

"The divisiveness and the distrust of institutions that we’re seeing today was part of a plan,” Ujlaki told the Guardian. “It was a result of an actual plan, successfully executed to get to this point. And once the institutions are weakened and people have lost faith in elections, there’s room for the strongman to come in.”

Nelson attributed the movement's rise and eventual violent insurrection on January 6 to the media's failure to connect the dots and contextualize the co-mingling of Christian nationalism with big conservative megadonors.

"They look at these events as independent grassroots eruptions, like the Tea Party,” Nelson said. “And they’re actually fully integrated as a strategy with massive coordinated funding and implementation. If you don’t see that, you miss the story.”

Click here to read the Guardian's full review of the film. And click this link to watch the film's trailer.

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