The Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, presents a yes-or-no question for November’s ballot. Are you willing to forget, ignore or justify the Capitol riot that caused $2.8 million in damage and injured 140 police officers?
According to Fox News, the intruders “defecated in the hallways” and “stomped in their own feces” in their mission to keep President Trump in office by stopping the Electoral College’s certification and disrupting the peaceful transfer of power.
If you choose to rationalize such mayhem, then pray for your nation and continue to vote for Donald Trump. But if you are undecided, be aware that the former president is supported by a Christian nationalist movement that had strong ties to the Jan. 6 perpetrators — the jailed ones he calls “hostages,” whom he will free if elected.
There is no single agreed-upon definition of Christian nationalism. Some erroneously define it as the mere acknowledgment, contained in our Declaration of Independence, that all rights come from God. A more sensible definition that evinces a true threat to the republic would include the belief that America is a Christian nation whose divine destiny must be preserved, even if that entails open rebellion against lawful constitutional authority.
This belief flies in the face of traditional Christian teaching, going back to the words of Jesus and Saint Paul’s epistles, requiring obedience to just laws — including, for example, tax laws, election laws and laws against pillaging public buildings.
Christian nationalism is also antithetical to our founding documents. The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause not only protects religion from state interference, but also protects individual Americans from state enforcement of religious orthodoxy. Christian nationalists, in contrast to our nation’s founders, would condone the latter.
Since 2021, and primarily among Trump’s white evangelical supporters, Christian Nationalism has experienced mainstream growth and acceptability as a viable political movement embedded within the Republican Party. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, only 10 percent of Americans consider themselves Christian nationalists, but another 20 percent sympathize with the idea.
It is common to hear Trump’s most ardent supporters claim that “he’s anointed by God.” And Trump, although his own religiosity is dubious, has hardly discouraged the idea that he is God’s special creation, even circulating his own Trumpian version of Paul Harvey’s homage to farmers.
His supporters’ religious fervor puts real teeth into the presumptive nominee’s dark, authoritarian and apocalyptic campaign of revenge against those who, he insists, stole the 2020 election from him. And this, in turn, points back to Jan. 6, when Trump tried to overturn its result.
Among the testimony presented to the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack, the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s Andrew Seidel described the overt and even ostentatious religiosity of at least some of the attackers. To be sure, one must consider the source — a group hostile toward religious belief. But what Seidel describes can be seen on video by anyone.
“The attackers were not shy about declaring their motivations,” Seidel said in his written testimony. “They held Bibles aloft, prayed in the Senate, carried Christian flags, and openly confessed to their motivations on video. The many disparate identities and ideologies visible during the attack were united under a banner of Christian nationalism, which created the permission structure necessary for Americans to attack their own government.”
Did Trump help create that “permission structure” to rebel against the United States? And would he do it again? All signs point to yes — especially his new litmus test for a vice presidential pick, to choose only someone who would not have done what Mike Pence did on Jan. 6 in fulfilling his constitutional and legal duty to certify Joe Biden’s victory.
Trump has never been known as a Christian, but he knows how to harness the fervor of the victorious warriors who waved Bibles from atop the Senate dais on Jan. 6, shouting, “Jesus Christ, we invoke your name!” He casts the current election in dark, apocalyptic terms as a quasi-spiritual battle in speeches like the one he gave March 4 in Richmond, calling 2024 “our final battle.”
“With you at my side,” Trump said, “we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists, and we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, we will drain the swamp, and we will liberate our country from these tyrants and villains once and for all.”
It should come as no surprise that this speech closely echoed the prayer offered inside the Senate chamber on Jan. 6 by the so-called Q-Anon Shaman, the infamous face-painted man wearing Viking horns during the riot: “Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government. We love you, and we thank you. In Christ’s holy name, we pray. Amen.”
At the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville, Trump framed the election not as a choice between two parties or two leaders, but as a battle between good (that is himself, of course) and wickedness.
“Remember,” he said, “every communist regime throughout history has tried to stamp out the churches, just like every fascist regime has tried to co-opt them and control them, and, in America, the radical left is trying to do both. They want to tear down crosses where they can and cover them up with social justice flags, but no one will be touching the cross of Christ under the Trump administration, I swear to you.”
America saw what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. Do we really want to go back there again?
My national and Christian prayer for Nov. 5 is, “God help us.”
Myra Adams writes about politics and religion. She served on the creative team of two GOP presidential campaigns, in 2004 and 2008.