Whose version of Christian nationalism will win in 2024?
Final week the ReAwaken America Tour, a Christian nationalist roadshow co-founded by former Trump nationwide safety adviser Michael Flynn, rolled as much as the Trump Nationwide Doral Miami resort. Two audio system who’d appeared at different stops on the tour, the net streamers Scott McKay and Charlie Ward, had been jettisoned on the final second due to dangerous publicity over their reward of Hitler. (“Hitler was really combating the identical those that we’re attempting to take down immediately,” mentioned McKay, not inaccurately.) However as of this writing, the tour’s web site nonetheless contains McKay and Ward, together with Eric Trump, as featured audio system at an upcoming extravaganza in Las Vegas.
ReAwaken America’s affiliation with antisemites didn’t cease Donald Trump from calling into the rally to supply his help. “It’s an exquisite resort, however you’re there for an much more vital objective,” he advised a shrieking crowd, earlier than promising to carry Flynn again in for a second Trump time period.
Flynn has lengthy been a paranoid Islamophobe, and towards the tip of Trump’s presidency, he emerged as a full-fledged authoritarian, calling on Trump to invoke martial regulation after the 2020 election. Now he’s change into, along with an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and QAnon adherent, one of many nation’s most outstanding Christian nationalists. “If we’re going to have one nation underneath God, which we should, we’ve to have one faith,” he mentioned at a 2021 ReAwaken America occasion. “One nation underneath God and one faith underneath God, proper?”
A serious query for Republicans in 2024 is whether or not this militant model of Christian nationalism — one usually rooted in Pentecostalism, with its emphasis on prophecy and revelation — can overcome the qualms of extra mainstream evangelicals. The problem isn’t whether or not the following Republican presidential candidate goes to be a Christian nationalist, which means somebody who rejects the separation of church and state and treats Christianity as the muse of American id and regulation. That’s a foregone conclusion in a celebration whose state lawmakers are falling over themselves to go ebook bans, abortion prohibitions, anti-trans legal guidelines, and, in Texas, payments authorizing faculty prayer and the posting of the Ten Commandments in school rooms.
What’s not but clear, although, is what kind of Christian nationalism will prevail: the elite, doctrinaire number of candidates like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, or the violently messianic model embodied by Flynn and Trump.
ReAwaken America’s Miami cease had simply concluded when Trump ran afoul of some extra conventional evangelical leaders in his effort to set himself other than DeSantis. In a Monday interview with The Messenger, he criticized the six-week abortion ban DeSantis signed in Florida, at the same time as he wouldn’t say whether or not he’d signal an analogous one himself. “He signed six weeks, and many individuals throughout the pro-life motion really feel that that was too harsh,” mentioned Trump.
After all, numerous individuals consider that the Florida regulation is simply too harsh, however they’re not typically members of the anti-abortion motion, the place Trump’s assertion was poorly acquired. Rebuking Trump, Bob Vander Plaats, most likely essentially the most influential evangelical chief in Iowa, tweeted, “The #IowaCaucus door simply flung broad open.” Proper-wing Iowa discuss present host Steve Deace tweeted that he was “probably throwing away the Iowa Caucuses on the pro-life subject.”
There’s an apparent opening for DeSantis right here.
If DeSantis treats Christianity as an ethical code he’d wish to impose on the remainder of us, Trump treats it as an elevated standing that ought to include particular perks. That’s how he can slam DeSantis for being “sanctimonious” at the same time as he wraps his personal marketing campaign in biblical raiment. If a Republican wins in 2024, the victor will preside over a Christian nationalist administration. The query is whether or not that particular person will champion an orthodoxy or a cult.
Michelle Goldberg is a New York Occasions columnist.
