Fox News just distorted CNN's documentary on Christian nationalism

Kayleigh McEnany at the 2022 Young Women's Leadership Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in Grapevine, Texas (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

This Sunday night, February 22, CNN is airing reporter Pamela Brown's documentary on Christian nationalism, a far-right form of evangelical fundamentalism closely tied to the MAGA movement. Brown, in the documentary, notes that Christian nationalists are hailing the late Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk — who was fatally shot during an event in Utah last year — as a martyr for their cause. And she interviews Matthew Taylor, a religious scholar at Georgetown University; Taylor makes a clear distinction between "radicalized" Christian nationalists and the many Christians who reject their belief system.

In a February 21 segment, Fox News' Kayleigh McEnany — who served as the fourth White House press secretary during President Donald Trump's first administration — attacked the documentary as a "hit piece on the resurgence of Christianity in America." But according to Mediaite reporter Colby Hall, McEnany's comments were both misleading and painfully lacking context.

Hall, in an article published on February 22, points out that Brown interviewed self-described Christian nationalist Andrew McIlwain, a Texas resident, in the documentary and discussed Kirk's murder with him. During that part of the documentary, according to Hall, Brown made a statement that "Fox's audience never heard" — which was, "Kirk's death happened at a moment of unprecedented alignment between Christian nationalists and the Trump Administration."

Hall explains, "That sentence is not an aside. It is the documentary's thesis in miniature. It clarifies that the project is not an attack on churchgoing or orthodox belief. It is an examination of the political alignment between a self-described Christian nationalist movement and executive power. Fox cut it. Instead, McEnany presented the film as an assault on faith itself and amplified a Georgetown professor's warning about 'radicalized' Christians. She insisted the framing was 'so off base,' collapsing any distinction between Christianity as religion and Christian nationalism as an ideology seeking to shape public policy…. By trimming Brown's contextual line and McIlwain's own articulation of a faith-centered political vision, Fox transformed a documentary about political theology into an imagined attack on believers."

Hall adds, "The audience was invited to reject a caricature while being shielded from the actual argument…. The central question Brown is asking — whether a movement that openly ties America's future to 'scripture' and enjoys 'unprecedented alignment' with a presidential administration warrants scrutiny — never made it to the people most likely to vote on it."

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