How far-right Christian Nationalists will help MAGA Republicans sell the Big Lie in 2024: panel

Former President Donald Trump is an unlikely icon of the White evangelical movement. He’s been through two divorces, he isn’t known for being very religious, he had an extramarital affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels (according to his former personal attorney Michael Cohen), and he’s a native New Yorker who speaks with a strong Queens accent.

The Trump of the 1990s was known for his appearances on “The Howard Stern Show,” not the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr.’s “The Old Time Gospel Hour” or the Rev. Pat Robertson’s “The 700 Club.”

But far-right White evangelicals and Christian nationalists continue to be a devoted part of his MAGA base. And a recent online panel discussion, hosted by The New Republic’s Michael Tomasky, examined the role that Christian nationalists could play in promoting the Big Lie in the 2024 presidential election.

The journalists who joined Tomasky during that event included David Daley, Adele Stan and Katherine Stewart, who reported on Christian nationalism’s role in promoting the Big Lie in an article published by The New Republic on January 10. Stewart’s article was headlined “The Shock Troops of the Next Big Lie,” and that’s how she views Christian nationalists who have been promoting Trump’s false claim that he really won the 2020 election — as shock troops who are more than happy to help Republicans overturn election results they don’t like.

During The New Republic’s panel discussion, named “Worshippers of the Big Lie,” Stewart explained, “The goal is really to persuade these pastors to turn out their congregations to vote the supposedly correct way. These kinds of get-out-the-pastors events are not new.”

Such events, Stewart added, have been promoting “whoppers” and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. And the events, according to Stewart, are designed to “stoke the persecution narrative” that’s “really important to the Christian nationalist movement” and “kind of prepare” evangelicals for “the next attempt to steal an election or delegitimize the consequences of an election that they don’t like.”

Stewart went on to explain what Christian nationalism is.

Stewart told Tomasky, Daley and Stan, “Christian nationalism is the idea that America was founded as a so-called Christian nation…. It’s completely, unfortunately bound up these days with a lot of Republican Party politics. The Republican Party sort of saw value in exploiting this movement, and they’ve now really been taken over by it, unfortunately.”

Watch the video below:

TNR Live: Worshippers of the Big Liewww.youtube.com