Religious studies scholar details 'Christian supremacy’s' influence on Trump campaign

24 September 2024

In his new book, "The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy," Dr. Matthew D. Taylor — a religious studies scholar who has taught at Georgetown University and George Washington University in Washington, D.C. — discusses Christian nationalism and the far-right New Apolostolic Reformation (NAR) movement.

Taylor has been warning that the NAR beliefs are way outside the mainstream of Protestant Christianity. And he laid out some reasons why he finds them so troubling in a Q&A interview with Salon's Amanda Marcotte published on September 24.

NAR, according to Taylor, enthusiastically encouraged the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building and efforts to keep Donald Trump in the White House after he lost the 2020 election to now-President Joe Biden.

"The NAR leaders had a theology that was primed for a figure like Trump," Taylor told Marcotte. "They were some of the first Christian leaders to embrace him, to endorse him. They created the theologies and the propaganda that made Trump palatable to broader American evangelicalism. They became some of his closest advisers and helped structure a lot of the policy during the Trump era. They truly believed that God had willed Trump to win the 2020 election. They had hundreds of prophecies about that idea."

Taylor continued, "When Trump refused to concede, all these prophets and apostles decided that it was that their prophecies were not wrong, but that God was going to intervene in a miraculous way to reinstate Donald Trump. They started a mass spiritual warfare campaign, mobilizing charismatic Christians to pray against the demons that they believed were stealing the election. That spiritual warfare campaign was a major factor in the Christians who showed up on January 6."

The scholar/author stressed that "NAR theology" is "very much a departure from the mainstream, even mainstream evangelical theology."

Taylor told Marcotte, "They embrace Christian supremacy, this idea that Christians are supposed to be in charge of society and are mandated by God to take over societies and transform them into conservative Christian utopias. We might use the term theocracy, although it's a little more complicated than that. But they want Christians at the top of every part of society."

Taylor continued, "They want to create a new vanguard of Christian leadership that will take over every nation in the world. And they've especially targeted the United States right now…. It's troubling to see a movement that 10 to 15 years ago would have been seen as quite extreme now being mainstreamed in Republican politics. It's also moving into the center of American evangelicalism and the assumed leadership of the Religious Right in America."

Read Amanda Marcotte's full Salon interview with Dr. Matthew D. Taylor at this link.

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