What’s Driving Trump’s Christian National Crusade Against America
Connecting the power players to the network behind the scenes - a special report.
There was a transcendent moment during the five-hour Christian revival memorial for assassinated MAGA star Charlie Kirk when his widow Erika Kirk riffed on Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount.”
“That man, that young man … I forgive him,” a tearful Kirk said of the 22 year old man charged with murdering her 31 year old husband. “I forgive him because it was what Christ did and is what Charlie would do. The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the gospel is love and always love. Love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.”
The Christian star seemed to be refuting the text admitted killer Tyler Robinson sent his roommate before shooting Charlie Kirk: “I had enough of his hatred.”
Arizona’s State Farm Stadium erupted in euphoria at Erika’s profound gesture that Sunday, Sept. 21. To outsiders, there seemed a new possibility for bridge-building between Kirk’s ultra-conservative Turning Point USA movement and peaceful liberal Christians over mutual love for the First Amendment and moral Sunday School parables about “the Golden Rule” and the Good Samaritan.
Erika’s grace mirrored that shown to White Supremacist Dylann Roof by families of the nine worshippers killed June 17, 2015 during bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina who forgave the mass murderer at his bond hearing.
Rev. Anthony Thompson, husband of victim Myra Thompson, told CBC radio that God told him what to say. “I said, ‘I forgive you. My family forgives you….[I]f you give your life to the one who your life means the most to, you’re going to be OK.’”
Later, President Obama spontaneously sang “Amazing Grace” at the funeral for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who had invited Roof to sit with him an hour before the mass murder.
But Christianity’s dark shadow hung like a malevolent pall over Kirk’s memorial.
“We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion,” President Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, a Jewish Christian National, thundered to the rapt massive audience and prospective enemies. “What do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing.”
Trump puffed up and dissed Erika. “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent. (Audience laughter.) And I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry. I am sorry, Erika,” Trump said. “But I can’t stand my opponent.”
During a Rose Garden ceremony on Oct. 14, Trump posthumously awarded Charlie Kirk the Medal of Freedom on what would have been his 32nd birthday. Kirk was a “fearless warrior for liberty, beloved leader who galvanized the next generation like nobody I’ve ever seen before.”
Trump also asserted that Charlie hated his enemies. “They have the devil’s ideology. They are failing and they know it. They feel it and they become violent. They seem to become very violent on the left,” Trump said.
Violence is a persistent Republican theme, even when blatantly incongruous. “They call it the ‘No Kings’ rally,” Speaker Mike Johnson told Real America’s Voice about the national protest Oct. 18. “We call it the ‘Hate America’ rally. It will have all the Marxists collected, all the Antifa people, the Black Lives Matter remnants, the pro-Hamas wing of the Democrat Party, and they’re going to be out here screaming and wailing.”
Approximately 7 million peaceful demonstrators in more than 2,700 “No Kings” rallies across the country partied against authoritarianism instead.
“Millions and millions engaged in nonviolent protests on Saturday and there was basically no violence. That is something that is truly historic,” Harvard Kennedy School Prof. Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. “That is a truly remarkable fact.”
For Democratic Illinois Gov. J. D. Pritzker, Trump’s confused, provocative and absurd insistence on violence is a gaslighting trick to allow him to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy military troops on American streets, in addition to ICE, Border Patrol, DEA, and local law enforcement in advance of next year’s elections.
Trump’s response to the 7-million march was an AI-generated video of himself as a crown-wearing “Top Gun” in his ”King Trump” jet dumping crap on the heads of citizens he vowed to protect.
Speaker Johnson, second in line for the presidency, said Trump was “using satire to make a point. He is not calling for the murder of his political opponents, and that’s what these people are doing.”
Though jaw-droppingly immature, the “own-the-libs” video fits into Trump’s plan for a fascistic takeover: “The path back to national unity is to decisively win the culture wars,” he told the Heritage Foundation, which includes appealing to youth and identifying and going after the “enemies within.”
For Trump, that’s anyone who crosses him. But for the Christian National cabal propping Trump up and running the government, that means eliminating any obstacle to global dominance by any means necessary and recruiting and indoctrinating the next compliant generation.
Turning Point USA’s new wave of Christian youth are already primed to serve as masculine grassroots ground forces - similar to TPUSA’s previous election work with former Trump strategist Steve Bannon.
“They are the lost boys of the West,” Charlie Kirk told Fox News last July. “They’ve been told that they were toxically masculine.” Going back to church “is the most important thing. As they start to give more of their lives to Jesus Christ and put God first, they will have more purpose,” Kirk said.
That purpose is defined by Trump and Christian extremists.
“We’re sick and tired of hearing about toxic masculinity, when we are drowning in toxic femininity!” Charlie Kirk said during the Dec 2024 AmericaFest convention. Trump - “the most overtly masculine political figure of the last hundred years” - “doesn’t care about what sensibilities he offends.” Taking Orwellian cues from Trump, Kirk turned victimization into a right to offend and seek revenge against anyone perceived as an enemy.
On April 1, 2024, for instance, Kirk called for gender-affirming clinics to be banned: “We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor,” comparing compassionate healthcare providers to Hitler’s top generals and deliberately ignoring the well-publicized link between anti-abortion rhetoric and the deaths of at least 11 abortion providers and threats to many more.
Kirk revealed his selective Christian bias during a June 8, 2024 podcast when he attacked Ms. Rachel on her Songs for Littles YouTube series for quoting “love your neighbor” to defend Pride celebrations, according to Uncloseted Media.
“Ms. Rachel, you might wanna crack open that Bible of yours,” Kirk said. “Leviticus 18 [says] that ‘thou shall lay with another man, shall be stoned to death.’ Ms. Rachel, you quote Leviticus 19, ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’ The chapter before affirms God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.’”
Kirk skipped Leviticus 19 laws such as “Do not turn to idols,” which apparently doesn’t apply to Trump.
Other Leviticus 19 laws Christian Nationals deliberately ignore include: “Do not lie. Do not deceive one another…. Do not go about spreading slander among your people. Do not do anything that endangers your neighbor’s life….Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself….
“When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt….Keep all my decrees and all my laws and follow them. I am the Lord.”
TPUSA “has become the dominant force of campus conservatism, claiming to have over 800 college chapters and over 1,000 high school clubs across the U.S., is now under the leadership of Kirk’s widow. And the group says they’re experiencing a surge of new interest and attention,” reports Uncloseted Media. And TPUSA is doubling down on Christian Nationalism, with Kirk now officially considered a free speech and “Christian martyr.”
But everything about Kirk’s story “is pure fiction,” writes journalist Brent Molnar in “Charlie Kirk: The Manufactured ‘Boy Wonder’ of the Right.” “Like so much of the MAGA machine, Kirk was manufactured” by billionaires Bill Montgomery, Foster Friess, the Koch donor network, and the DeVos family.
The Kirk myth illuminates “the machinery of American conservatism,” Molnar writes. “These people don’t grow movements organically. They don’t rise from the grassroots. They are cultivated, recruited, and bankrolled. They are test-tube populists. Charlie Kirk wasn’t a prodigy. He was a project. And when you look at TPUSA today, raking in nearly $80 million a year, the fingerprints of that project are all over it.”
But the rich and powerful can also be true believers - such as the rich creationist-believing DeVos family. Betsy DeVos’ father, Edgar Prince, helped launch the fervently anti-LGBTQ+ Family Research Council.
Meanwhile, leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) Christian supremacist movement are using Trump as a front man, excusing his amorality as a modern biblical idol like Cyrus or King David, while they amass power.
NAR leaders decreed in 2022 that “they have the God-given right to rule the United States and that they ‘have been given legal power and authority from Heaven.’ These far-right figures claim to be ‘God’s ambassadors and spokespeople over the earth’ who ‘are equipped and delegated by Him to destroy every attempted advance of the enemy,’” according to a 2024 Southern Poverty Law Center report.
The NAR leaders see Trump “as a vehicle for their own power, as someone who is backstopping their movement, someone who will defend Christianity,” Matthew Taylor, author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, told PBS. “And because they have all these prophecies about him coming out of the prophets in their movement, they believe that he is — has a special anointing to lead America, to redeem America.”
Vice President J.D. Vance, is cozy with Lance Wallnau, who Taylor called “a Christian supremacist leader.” Kirk promoted Vance for VP on his podcast and Wallnau explained Christian Nationalism as a “badge of honor.”
Wallnau was “one of the most effective organizers for Christians” during the Jan. 6th riot at the Capitol, Taylor said. “It’s good versus evil. It’s angels versus demons. It’s Trump versus evil.”
Vance is building trust with Trump’s loyal Christian National superstars and Kirk’s youth coalition. He shrugged off “I love Hitler” leaked text messages by “Young Republicans,” calling them “kids.” Mother Jones determined those “kids” ranged in ages from 24 to 35.
Vance is also in synch with Stephen Miller, equating “sympathy for foreigners with hatred of America,” writes Kettering Foundation political theorist Derek W. M. Barker. “Using this logic, he deduces that liberals, ‘seem to hate citizens of their own country.’”
In the run-up to the 2016 election, Miller “promoted white nationalist literature, pushed racist immigration stories and obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols after Dylann Roof’s murderous rampage,” according to leaked emails reviewed by Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch.
Miller’s immigration deportation plan appears cruel and boundless. “Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them,” ProPublica reports. “Among the [more than 170] citizens detained are nearly 20 children, including two with cancer.”
Sec. of Defense Pete Hegseth, the poster boy for tattooed toxic masculinity, is considered a “serious threat,” advancing his idea that America has “a geo-political mandate to advance a narrow religious agenda across the world,” the Interfaith Alliance posted on Dec. 10, 2024.
Hegseth has publicly praised the Crusades in his book American Crusade “as a necessary effort to ‘push Islamism back’ both culturally and militarily—alarmingly describing our current era as ‘much like the 11th century,’” says Interfaith Alliance.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State issued a report indicating that the Jan. 6, 2021 Christian Nationalist domestic terrorist insurrection at the Capitol “was effectively led by U.S. military service persons, whether active or veterans.” More than half “were collectively affiliated with the militant, Christian Nationalist-oriented, white supremacist groups Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and Three Percenters.”
An Oct. 25, 2024 investigation and analysis by the Associated Press found that “since 2017, more than 480 people with a military background were accused of ideologically driven extremist crimes, while nearly 100 people were killed or injured in plots involving current or former military members, most in service of a far-right agenda.”
Russell Vought of Project 2025 and heartless federal program and budget-cutting fame, also exercises his Christian National beliefs. “We need to be a country that is for God,” Vought said as president of The Center for Renewing America think tank. Office of Management and Budget director in both Trump terms, ProPublica calls Vought “The Shadow President.”
The Christian cabal’s most public-facing enforcer is Mad Magazine/Alfred E. Neuman look-alike, Speaker Mike Johnson, who has repeatedly said he’s committed to an ultra-conservative Christian “biblical” worldview.
From November 2002 to July 2010, Johnson was a lawyer with the anti-LGBTQ+ organization Alliance Defending Freedom, with which Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett has ties. Johnson’s job seems to be keeping House Republicans in line and protecting repeated alleged sex offender Donald Trump from the Jeffrey Epstein files. Might there be videotape of Trump’s alleged rape of 13-year-old “Katie Johnson” who twice filed lawsuits against Trump and Epstein, then withdrew them and disappeared?
“This case, based on the sworn declarations of the victim and two corroborating witnesses, will be tried in court, where the defendants will be required to answer questions under oath and pursuant to the rules of evidence,” Katie Johnson’s attorney Cheney Mason said in a statement to BuzzFeed News in 2016. Trump “vehemently denied the rape claims.” (Journalist Tara Palmeri is following the Epstein scandal.)
R.G. Cravens, an extremism expert and political scientist at the Southern Poverty Law Center, and author of Yes Gawd!: How Faith Shapes LGBT Identity and Politics in the United States, suggests that Johnson’s Christian Nationalism might be more extreme than reported.
In a Jan. 2024 report on the Speaker’s appearance at a Family Research Council National Gathering with major NAR leaders, Cravens noted that pastor Jonathan Cahn described how demonic spirits have “come to America… to drive God from public life, seduce the culture through ‘sexual revolution’ and drive parents to ‘sacrifice their children.”
The demons were able to return to earth “because the 1969 Stonewall riots – which birthed the modern LGBTQ+ movement – opened a portal to another realm,” CBC reported. Johnson followed Cahn onstage and emphasized the “cultural upheaval” in the United States.
In a recent Zoom interview (see below), Craven discussed numerous issues, including how the 2015 defeat on marriage equality “was a serious problem for a lot of anti-LGBTQ+ groups” who relied on the issue to raise visibility and funding.
A Dec. 2023 report entitled “Group dynamics and division of labor within the anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience network” spells out how the anti-LGBTQ+ movement changed focus to create an anti-transgender wedge strategy.
“The general amount of information about transgender people, trans identity and their experiences was relatively low,” Cravens said, and a lot of people didn’t have an opinion.
With ADF playing a really important role, “a large network of groups coalesced around limiting trans people’s rights,” using junk science to create a miasma of credibility, Cravens said. That “created an entire ecosystem of groups that play different roles in perpetuating anti-trans pseudoscience.”
SPLC reports that in 2024, the number of anti-LGBTQ+ groups increased by about 13% from the previous year. These hate groups “opportunistically exploit division to advance a political agenda and, in this case, it’s still informed by that false notion of LGBTQ people being dangerous to society,” Craven said.
While attention is on Trump’s latest bizarre move, behind the scenes this cabal of Christian Nationals is dedicated to its mission.
“The strength of the [Christian Nationalist] movement is in its dense organizational infrastructure: a closely interconnected network of right-wing policy groups, legal advocacy organizations, legislative initiatives, sophisticated data operations, networking groups, leadership training initiatives, and media and messaging platforms, all working together for common political aims,” Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, wrote in Christian Nationalism and the January 6, 2021, Insurrection.
Meanwhile, Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sex trafficking victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who died by suicide last April, has most reviewers in tears. Epstein told author Michael Wolff that Trump is basically heartless.
Why is Speaker Johnson, a deeply Christian man who is deeply worried about online pornography, protecting Epstein’s “closest friend” Donald Trump? Does he believe in a manufactured masculine Trump or a peace-loving Jesus Christ?
Johnson is partially right about satire making a point. Comedy Central’s South Park, for instance, produced an AI-generated Donald Trump in their “Sermon on the Mount” episode in which Emperor Donald has no clothes.
Interestingly, Paramount allows posts of South Park episodes dealing with Trump and Christianity – but “Sermon on the Mount” is not available. (Check out this excellent breakdown and analysis here.) Selective censorship ain’t a “woke” thing anymore.
Well done. An extremely important topic for every LGBT+ person to understand as well as all Americans....heck...the world. Christian Nationalism is a cancer on our society.
I agree with most of what you say here. Your piece covers so much ground, I wonder if it should have been a series? Nonetheless, it is wonderful to have your strong voice still fighting the good fight.
Just a couple of points. While I do appreciate your connecting the dots, in the immediate aftermath of Charlie Kirks death (I'm unclear when murder becomes "assassination," the reaction of the far right and "Christian" Nationalists was to attack HBCUs some with vile threats and explicit hate filled emails. I think this should be telling us who are allies are. Also, I think we as a community are too quick to think all Christians are on one side, and our community is on another. I am not a Christian, and I understand the deep wounds that tradition many traditional churches have inflicted upon many of our brothers and sisters, but I have come to better understand Christ's central message of our mission on earth is to relieve human suffering and that agape love is always ultimately more powerful than hate. The way this message has been corrupted these days and thru history is a tragedy. I find many media coverages of gay political issues to create the false dichotomy of the "truly" devout on one side and the "pro-gay" on the other, as if there are no "pro-gay" devout people and worse that hate is given equal weight to life-affirming. More, it confuses many when I tell them that in the early days of the HIV epidemic (before ACT-UP or for that matter HIV) I found my greatest support among progressive Jews and devout Catholic Nuns (I think of them as truly devout).
It is still a wonder to me that there wasn't more pushback by Democrats over the election of Mike Johnson as speaker, who openly disclosed his money making business with his wife, torturing and lying to LGBTQ youth struggling to come out. I expect more from our "allies." What's up with that??