Excerpts from the guardian…. Book review of:
Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy by Robert P Jones. Macmillan Publishers
To understand how a major religious tradition arrived at this moral impasse, Jones turns to the arithmetic of demographics. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, white Christian Americans still constituted 54% of the US population. By 2014, that figure had dropped to 47%. Today, white Christians account for 41% of the country. (My comment here, Although, overall close to 75% of American Adults identify as Christians.)
The decline among white evangelicals, long considered a bedrock of conservative politics, is even steeper. At the turn of the 21st century, white evangelicals represented a quarter of all Americans; today, they make up barely 13%. The Southern Baptists, the country’s biggest evangelical denomination, has lost more than 3 million members……….
….This transactional alliance marks a complete departure from the religious right of the late 20th century, which wrapped its political ambitions in the language of morality.
“You don’t hear those words any more,” says Jones, contrasting today’s movement with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority or the “Values Voters” summits of the George W Bush era. “What we have now is an overtly anti-democratic Christian nationalism flying under the banner of: ‘We believe this country belongs to us, and we’re going to use the power we can to claim it.’
….Today, this blend of Christian nationalism and military authority reaches into the upper echelons of the national security apparatus. The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, sports tattoos featuring Crusader iconography – including the medieval battle cry Deus Vult (“God wills it”) next to a Jerusalem cross – while renaming the Department of Defense as the “Department of War”. Hegseth has welcomed vocal Christian nationalists such as Pastor Doug Wilson to lead a worship service at the Pentagon.
Jones comments: “I can’t imagine much more dangerous than somebody who thinks, ‘I am the instrument of God, I alone understand how the forces of good and evil are aligned,’ while holding the power to deploy the most powerful military force the world has ever seen. While George W Bush took care after 9/11 to explicitly state that the US was not at war with Islam, today we are making radicalisation propaganda films for extremists by presenting ourselves as a Christian nation at war with Islam.”
Behind the public spectacle of rallies and political theatre, ideologues such as Russell Vought, a key architect of Project 2025 and advocate of the “unitary executive” theory, are laying the groundwork for a government rooted in Christian nationalist principles. “They are building an apparatus designed to institutionalise this worldview across the federal government,” Jones warns. “It is an intentional, long-term project to reshape American democracy in their own image.”
