( Michigan Advance ) – You may be among the 35% of Americans who have never heard the term “white Christian nationalism.” But of those citizens who are knowledgeable of the concept, it carries a decidedly negative view. The belief is becoming more and more important to understand as cultural diversity, racism, immigration issues, political divisiveness and political candidate pandering is before us.

What is white Christian nationalism? Generally – according to the Southern Poverty Law Center – it “refers to a political ideology and identity that fuses white supremacy, Christianity and American nationalism, and whose proponents claim that the United States is a `Christian Nation.’”

Research conducted by the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute  with the nonpartisan Brookings Institution as well as a poll sponsored by Southern Poverty Law Center/Tulchin have the same conclusion: The white Christian nationalism movement is a growing threat to America’s democracy.

The far-right antigovernment and religious rights movement of the 1990s is getting stronger and stronger and will play a major role in the 2024 local, county, state and federal elections.

During the Nov. 21-Dec. 14, 2022 time period, 6,212 Americans were asked by PRRI/BI for their reply to these five statements: 1) the U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation, 2) U.S. laws should be based on Christian values, 3) if the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore, 4) being Christian is an important part of being truly American and 5) God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.

Answers across all five questions were found to be highly correlated (Cronbach’s alpha of 0.92) with a margin of error of +/- 1.6% at the 95% level of confidence.  This is a take-it-to-the-bank research endeavor.

Fifty-four percent of the GOP faithful are adherents of Christian nationalism vs. 23% of independents and 15% of Democrats.

Thom Hartmann: “The Hidden Roots Of White Supremacy Revealed w/ Robert P. Jones”

The PRRI/BI research notes five core attitudes are often associated with Christian nationalist beliefs: anti-Black, anti-Semitic (Jewish), anti-Muslim, anti-immigration and patriarchal adherence of traditional gender roles (for example, the husband is head of the household).”

Furthermore, research revealed “Christian nationalism beliefs are strongly correlated with support for QAnon, an extremist movement of the political right,” whose tenets include:

The Southern Poverty Law Center offers a summary of the movement that should be a wake-up call to Americans: “White Christian nationalism is a key ideology that inspired the failed Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection and fueled multiple failed political campaigns in 2022 . . . however, white Christian nationalism remains a persistent and growing threat to U.S. democracy.”

Any person with a modicum of intelligence knows European colonists immigrated to America to escape religious persecution, expand their economic opportunities and live in a country where there was separation of church and state. Followers of the white Christian nationalism movement want to contradict the principles and norms of democracy and make America an authoritarian country.

Adherents of white Christian nationalism are the drivers of antidemocratic conspiracy theories and election denialism and possibly book banning, LGBTQIA denigration, “sanitized” black history curriculum, anti-female reproductive rights, gerrymandering and attacking diversity, equity and inclusion.

Currently, there are 14 Republicans and three Democrats wanting to win the Nov. 5, 2024, presidential election. Hundreds of candidates will be seeking local, county, state and federal offices of power. Citizens must be vigilant.

This column first appeared in the Advance‘s sister outlet, the Daily Montanan.

 

Steve Corbin

Steve Corbin is Professor Emeritus of Marketing at University of Northern Iowa.

Michigan Advance

Republished under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

(The Conversation) – When they entered the Senate chamber on Jan. 6, 2021, a group of insurgents stopped and bowed their heads in prayer to consecrate the building and their cause to Jesus. When the Senate reconvened later, its chaplain, retired Navy Adm. Barry Black, also prayed, but called the insurgents’ actions a “desecration of the United States Capitol building.”

Both sides appealed to the Christian God as the authority for their actions and values.

Outside, at the rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol, there was a similar focus on God, in the form of Christian nationalism, which frames the U.S. as a Christian country whose politics and institutions should be guided by Christian principles.

As cultural anthropologists who study politics and religion, we attended the Jan. 6 rally, which some called “Save America” and others called “Stop the Steal,” because we were interested in observing the symbols on display and in talking with the people there. Having studied political demonstrations before, we wanted to document this event and what it meant for its participants.

Most of the people we encountered were peacefully expressing their own political views and were not part of the insurrection. But they nevertheless expressed longstanding ideas that were ultimately echoed and amplified in their most extreme form by those who did engage in violence at the Capitol.

Focus on violence

Maintaining social order and a functioning democracy requires holding people responsible for their actions. That’s why much of the public focus on the insurrection has – rightly – been on the violence and the political conspiracy behind it, through which then-President Donald Trump and his allies sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The congressional hearings on the insurrection, including the violent minority and the conspiracy of which they may have been a part, have concluded, and the committee’s report is out. However, the committee’s goal had never been to understand the tens of thousands of people who attended the rally to express their collective identity and their solidarity with what they saw as a just cause: maintaining America’s political and religious heritage. Its focus has been on Trump, as Jesus fades into the background.

Research on the events of that day reveals that most of the attendees at the rally – even those who were later arrested for their actions – were ordinary Americans, people committed to what they believed were the true results of the election. Most of them were not members of organized groups such as the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers or the Three Percenters.

Ordinary citizens

What we observed at the rally was an optimistic occasion where the people gathered expressed pride in their collective identity. The atmosphere was celebratory, even carnivalesque, perhaps like a tailgate party preceding an American football game. When we arrived we were greeted by a woman who called out, “Welcome to the party!”

The people we saw there were expressing their concern for American democracy and the ideals of law and order. We saw them answering the call of a president and seeking to protect the integrity of the American political system. Most strikingly, we saw proud Americans standing up for Christian values.

Expressions of identity

Anthropologists have long known that public displays are a common way of crafting identities. In the U.S. this is evident in ethnic and holiday parades, museum exhibits, popular demonstrations and highly orchestrated conferences.

On Jan. 6, the images and slogans deployed by the crowd included a wide variety of American flags and recycled Trump 2020 campaign gear, as well as pointed insults toward his opponents. Gun rights were a major theme; flags with images of assault rifles read “Come and Take Them!” Other signs focused on individual freedom by refusing COVID-19 restrictions. American flags with a central blue stripe indicated support for law enforcement.

Christian symbols were pervasive throughout the rally. People took pride in Christian identity and often conflated Jesus and President Trump as figures of national salvation, “Chosen Ones.”

There were flags and T-shirts proclaiming, “Jesus is my Savior and Trump is my President”; posters showing a white, blond, blue-eyed Jesus wearing the Trumpian MAGA hat; and a wide variety of other flags and banners bearing Christian themes.

Some of the Christian displays were starkly militant, such as a flag depicting a raging fire with both a bald eagle and a lion roaring – symbolizing both the United States and a militant Christ. Significantly, such militant themes in broader Christian culture are not restricted to evangelical Protestants, who are often perceived as primary drivers of religious participation in U.S. politics.

God and nation

Despite their professed devotion to God and nation, from the very beginning the Capitol insurrectionists and those at the earlier rallies on Jan. 6 were labeled “extremists.” That term suggests a moral flaw causing people to act in unacceptable ways, such as attacking members of the Capitol police or calling for the vice president to be hanged.

But “extremism” can also be understood as a more intense or committed version of what is otherwise ordinary. As scholars of the cultural politics of religion, we suggest this ordinariness is actually more alarming than its extreme expressions, because it’s harder to notice. Political theorist Hannah Arendt called this “the banality of evil.” Arendt and her generation of scholars were concerned about how totalitarianism could emerge from the very principles we think make us free.

People don’t need to break windows or bones to erode human rights, endanger democracy or form a basis for authoritarianism. Instead, they can ignore what had been expected social behavior because they find a personal or political advantage or formulate or assent to unjust laws. In Arendt’s view, these people are avoiding the human responsibility “to think” from others’ perspectives and to interrogate commonly held ideas.

It was precisely the ordinariness of most of the rallygoers that day that caught our attention. We met people who were real estate agents, firemen and retired construction workers, as well as grandmothers with their children and grandchildren. They seemed familiar to us, as though they could be our Christian neighbors.

People arrived in Washington in carpools or buses with friends or family members. They wanted to take personal responsibility for the political health of the republic and the country’s Christian European heritage and freedoms. They came to uphold the country’s founding myth that injustice can be met by the popular unity of mass rebellion. As one handmade sign read, “Let’s 1776 this place.”

They were relentlessly deceived by their leaders through media owned by wealthy corporations that reaped huge profits from those lies. But that does not change their motivations. Instead it raises questions about the manipulation of democratic and Christian values and highlights the problem of whether people can think for themselves in the face of such an overwhelming barrage of lies.

Editor’s note: This story is an update of an article previously published on Sept. 26, 2022.

Joyce Dalsheim, Professor, Department of Global Studies, University of North Carolina – Charlotte and Gregory Starrett, Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina – Charlotte

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Featured Image: Shirts for sale on Jan. 6, 2021, combined loyalty to Jesus and to Donald Trump.
Joyce Dalsheim, CC BY-ND

She said, “What it is, is Satan’s controlling the church. The church is not doing its job, and it’s not adhering to the teachings of Christ, and it’s not adhering to what the word of God says we’re supposed to do and how we’re supposed to live.”

In many ways the success of the contemporary Republican Party depends on an Evangelical-Catholic political alliance against abortion rights and the sexual revolution. Evangelicals in Congress have been willing to vote six Catholics onto the Supreme Court for this reason. Greene’s vitriolic diatribe, however, raises the possibility that the QAnon white nationalists who are taking over the Republican Party are breaking with the Church over some of its social policies, which are often liberal or at least humanitarian.

She later said that foreign aid should be cut to countries from which refugees are fleeing to the US and that “If the bishops were reading the Bible and truly preaching the word of God to their flock and not covering up child sex abuse and pedophilia, loving one another would have the true meaning and not the perversion and the twisted lie that they’re making it to be.”

She had said that the Christian principle of “loving one another” should not involve surrendering to a “globalist agenda” to make “America become something that we are not supposed to be.”

I have thought about her diction here and I can’t make it mean anything other than “we Christian white people are supposed to love one another but that doesn’t mean we have to love brown or Black people, and certainly doesn’t mean we have to minister to non-white refugees. And if the Roman Catholic Church interprets Christianity as requiring charity to all, then it has itself become a tool of Satan.”

In other words, she views Christianity only through the lens of white nationalism.

But the (literal) demonization of Catholicism stands out in her remarks because it resonates with a long-term strand of Protestant white nationalism, as with the mid-19th century “Know-Nothing Movement,” a conspiratorial hate group that burned Catholic churches and attacked Catholic Americans.

Although Greene was brought up Catholic, she says she fell away from the church.

Being an army brat, I traveled around the world growing up, but in between postings we would spend time in Northern Virginia. I can’t remember now how it happened, but somebody once dragged me to a Baptist revival meeting when I was a kid and I was given a pamphlet about how the Pope was the antichrist and had 666 sewn into his mitre. Our branch of the Coles are fallen-away Catholics, but I remember being appalled. My generation had a positive impression of Pope John XXIII and the reforms of Vatican II. In fact, the latter helped inspire my BA thesis, the field work for which I conducted in Beirut, about the inter-religious dialogue it kicked off with Muslims.

The vicious anti-Roman Catholic sentiments expressed by Greene, as I said, evoke an ugly side of American history.

Three decades ago, historian Bryan Le Beau wrote in his address “Saving the West from the Pope”: Anti-Catholic Propaganda and the Settlement of the Mississippi River Valley,”

“Arthur M. Schlesinger, the elder, once told John Tracy Ellis, dean of the historians of American Catholicism, that he regarded prejudice against Roman Catholics to be “the deepest bias in the history of the American people.” By this, he did not intend to suggest that it was the most violent, though at times it certainly was; or that it was the most consistent, as it tended to wax and wane throughout American history; but rather, that the roots of anti-Catholicism lay buried in the depths of the American consciousness, bearing fruit over time across the American cultural landscape.”

On the East Coast from the 1820s forward, as German and Irish Catholics came to the country, the slogan of “no popery” was raised and riots were staged against the latter. In 1844 St. Michael’s Catholic Church in Philadelphia was burned and 20 people were killed. Between 1800 and 1840 a million Roman Catholics immigrated. (My paternal ancestor Georg Kohl [Anglicized as Cole] arrived in 1830, so he and his family would have known that atmosphere.) A Protestant riot greeted papal nuncio Archbishop Gaetano Bedini when he came to Cincinnati in 1853, Le Beau reminds us.

Catholic associations that had begun in Austria and France were attacked as threats to Republican liberties, since, it was alleged, the Church supported royal absolutism and opposed the idea of a Republic with the sort of individual rights adumbrated in the US constitution. Although it is true that the 19th-century Church profoundly disliked the French Revolution and its ideals, and much preferred monarchies that would back Catholicism, it isn’t the case that American Catholics were seditious. Some did object to Protestant hegemony, especially in public schools, and one man burned some King James Version Bibles, which made a bad impression.

It is ironic that in the 19th century Catholic Americans were attacked for being too conservative, and now Greene is attacking them for being too liberal. I pointed out some time ago that some right-wing Catholics make a big deal of their faith but completely ignore or even oppose the contemporary church’s social teachings.

The 19th century hate groups, however, did associate Catholics with immigration and saw a danger that they would convert the other immigrants, so that Nativist concern is common to our moment and the 1840s.

If Greene’s anti-Catholic sentiment becomes widespread in today’s GOP, it could be fatal to the party, since of the 72 million Catholic Americans, about half now vote Republican.

Trump had a three prong strategy to overturn the election of Biden. Part 1 was a propaganda campaign maintaining that he had won the election and it was stolen from him by irregularities in the swing states of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia. In all those states, minorities, coded by Trump and Trumpies as not real Americans, provided the margin of victory to Biden. The claim of electoral fraud was therefore in part a racist dog whistle.

Trump spread around his propaganda that Biden actually lost with his vast and effective communications machine. He reached his 70 million myrmidons on Twitter directly and frequently. He gave televised speeches carried on mass media like CNN in which he said he had won by a landslide. CNN tried to contextualize the lie, but video of a president speaking is more powerful than the tut-tutting of television reporters. The fascist media put in his service by the billionaires whose taxes he cut– Breitbart, Newsmax, Fox News, OAN all cast doubt on Biden’s legitimacy. Much of the Republican Party state and national leadership adopted Trump’s Big Lie, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and over 140 members of Congress. Even non-crazy Republicans adopted the mantra of irregularities, as in Pennsylvania, questioning the ruling of that state’s Supreme Court. You can argue the court made a bad ruling. You can’t argue that its ruling is not the law of the land.

The propaganda campaign was so successful that half of Republicans believe the big lie, some 23 million people, nearly the population of all of Australia.

It is a terrifying success, that Trump could hypnotize a population the size of the fifth continent into fervently believing a rank falsehood without a shred of truth to it.

Part II of the coup was to threaten, browbeat, and menace Republican officials in the four swing states into refusing to certify the Biden win. Monica Palmer and William Hartman, the two Republican canvassers for Wayne County in Michigan, initially refused to certify the results, in accordance with Trump’s wish, threatening to hold up the declaration of Biden’s win there. Only a massive public outcry made them back down. Trump then called Republicans from the Michigan state legislature to the White House for consultations, urging them to refuse to certify Biden. Trump repeatedly called the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and other officials in that state, using organized-crime code words to intimate that something bad would happen to them if they didn’t “find” the 11,000-some votes he needed to beat Biden. Raffensperger, to protect himself from any Trump retaliation, made and released a tape of the threatening conversation.

When the Republican state officials and legislators defied Trump and certified Biden’s election, Trump turned his attention to Congress. He worked the phones like a maniac, cajoling and threatening. He menaced any senators or congressmen who refused to vote against certifying the state tallies in the four swing states with being primaried. He told Kelly Loeffler, a Republican candidate for the senate in Georgia, that he would “do a number on her” if she didn’t reject Biden’s win in her state.

Trump’s scenario appears to have been this: Enough Republicans in the House and the Senate would reject the results in the four swing states to raise serious questions about a Biden win. Then Mike Pence, the president of the senate, would use this substantial dissent about the results to cast doubt on the results. Trump crony Michael Flynn suggested that Trump at that point use the military to “rerun the election,” according to the NYT. It became clear to Trump, however, that Pence would not play ball, and that he could only count on twelve Republican senators to try to overturn Biden’s election. He needed some way of applying even more pressure or of sowing enough turmoil to create an opening for some sort of decisive action on his part.

Part 3 of the coup attempt was to put pressure on Congress to challenge the Biden win through a massive rally of the far Right before the Capitol on January 6. Trump called for the rally, and came to address it in the late morning. Although he urged them to be peaceful, he did say “We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Trump had done a dry run for this mob action in Michigan. When, last spring, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer imposed an economic lockdown to combat the rapid spread of the coronavirus, Trump tweeted out “LIBERATE MICHIGAN.” In response, an assemblage of white supremacists, conspiracy theorists, gun nuts and restaurateurs (!?) showed up at the state capitol in Lansing. Guess what? They invaded the statehouse and the lawmakers had to suspend their work that day. Trump’s attacks on Whitmer also had the effect of encouraging a far right domestic terror cell to make a plan to kidnap and possibly kill her.

With the Michigan example before him, it is impossible that Trump was unaware that his dog whistles to the far right, his demonization of leaders who defied him, could produce violence.

The mob of black shirts he assembled was intended to intimidate Pence and the legislators and to create chaos, of which he clearly thought he could take advantage. He used them to make clear to the Republican senators and representatives that the party faithful (the QAnon/ white supremacist mob) would not put up with anything else and that not only their careers but their very lives hung in the balance. Hence his glee when the Capitol was invaded.

Elements of the mob who invaded the Capitol were chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” and others wanted to get Nancy Pelosi. The politicians were in real danger, and it was only the efficiency of the Capitol police in whisking them away to safe rooms or the basement that saved their lives. Had Pence or Pelosi been kidnapped, wounded or killed, it would have halted the Biden certification process for some time, giving Trump the opportunity to find a way to remain in office. It is not that Trump himself urged or planned the breach of the Capitol or the infliction of harm on the legislators, it is that he was attempting to create an unnamed chaos, which he viewed as advantageous to his efforts to remain in office.

The unusual lightness of the police presence in DC compared to all the other demonstrations held in the past year raises questions about whether Trump’s security officials were attempting to make sure the mob was not interfered with. Gov. Larry Hogan said that it took 90 minutes for the Pentagon to give him permission to send in the Maryland National Guard once he asked. This was at a time when thugs were roaming the Capitol chanting “Hang Mike Pence.” An hour and a half response time seems a little slow under the circumstances.

It was a coup attempt of sorts. It reminds me of the much more successful 1953 CIA coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran. CIA field officer Kermit Roosevelt bought mobs with millions of dollars in the capital to intimidate parliament and encourage anti-democratic forces to depose the prime minister.

Trump’s was a crackpot conspiracy-theory coup attempt, though. It was never plausible except in very fevered minds like those of Trump, Alex Jones and other exotic flora and fauna. But over 140 congressmen and 8 senators did join the attempt to overturn the election even after the mob tried to kill or kidnap them, which means it wasn’t as implausible as I wish it was. And the buy-in Trump has in the Republican Party for this coup attempt signals severe trouble ahead.

——-

Bonus Video:

Gen. McCaffrey: A Coup Led By Trump Against The Constitution | Morning Joe | MSNBC

Fundamentalist pastor John Hagee’s Cornerstone megachurch runs religious schools, which insisted on staying open as if they did not have to obey the law. A compliance officer received a tip that they were endangering San Antonio residents with this reckless and lawless behavior, and shut them down. Hagee and other pastors of the 20,000-strong megachurch sued for them to stay open. He was supported by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who argued that school closure orders by municipal authorities should not affect private religious schools.

On Monday it was announced that Hagee, 80, had fallen ill with the virus.

I guess he didn’t read my Tomdispatch article on what fundamentalists could learn about the pandemic from the skeptical Persian poetry, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

Hagee also slammed the US government and state governments for releasing nonviolent offenders from prison because of fears of the spread of the coronavirus in tightly packed jails, insisting that murders and rapists were let go. He called the pandemic an opportunity for a new world order.

No, it is just an opportunity for people to get sick if they don’t wear masks, practice social distancing, and behave sensibly.

Hagee is a big supporter of Trump, who lives in a similar state of denial (though one born of narcissism rather than an abundance of religious faith). Both of them are now sick together. I hope they recover. But let us not pretend that they didn’t visit this on themselves by their stupid behavior. And let us not pretend they haven’t made a lot of other people sick too, and killed some.

Hagee is also a booster of Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu. The cynicism of the far right Likud Party is visible in its welcoming of Hagee’s support even though the pastor has said revolting anti-Semitic things. He once alleged that God had authorized Hitler to kill six million Jews because they dragged their feet on moving to Israel. What kind of monster says a thing like that?

Netanyahu is widely felt in Israel to have mismanaged the pandemic. Israel had a spike of cases in October and had to go into a second lockdown. The fundamentalist Haredi or ultra-orthodox community, 10% of the Israeli population, has had 40% of cases. Palestinian-Israelis have also suffered disproportionately, but that is likely because they perform menial tasks and are front line workers who are more exposed than those who can work remotely.

Many Haredi rabbis have defied lockdown orders, and a funeral for a rabbi yesterday attracted thousands of mourners, contravening public health guidelines. Secular Israelis are upset by this behavior.

In the US, some evangelical megachurches have been at the forefront of coronavirus denialism and have continued to insist on holding large, packed meetings. Vice president Mike Pence and other Trump officials attended such a church service this past summer in Dallas, that of Robert Jeffress, giving their blessing to the unsanitary practice.

Calvary Chapel in Universal City, Texas, actually allowed hugging early this past summer, and saw a major outbreak when 50 staff and parishioners were stricken.

The novel coronavirus is a respiratory disease that spreads when an infected person breathes, coughs, or sneezes on another person. For crowds to be indoors without masks and engaging in activities like singing or preaching or hugging (!) allows an infected individual to spread the disease to many other people. Many super-spreaders are themselves asymptomatic, i.e., they have the disease without significant symptoms, and so do not know that they are spreading it around.

Texas-based televangelist Kenneth Copeland told his electronic congregation last spring that the could be cured of COVID-19 if they watched his church services on television.

Fundamentalists dedicated to irrationality, whether it is the irrationality of refusing to distance socially or the irrationality of trying to occupy 5 million stateless Palestinians forever, are causing a great deal of trouble in the world. Hagee and the rabbis do it out of a misplaced belief that faith triumphs over reality, whereas Trump and Netanyahu do it for economic and political advantage. The latter is also a sort of magical thinking, which holds that if only a policy is good for a narcissist politician’s career, then reality can be bent to the will of the politician. It can’t.

Amy Coney Barrett reportedly will be Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court.

Questions have been raised about her alleged association with the “People of Praise,” a nondenominational Christian charismatic community, seen by some as being a potential influence on her legal thinking, particularly concerning abortion rights.

The People of Praise leave it to individual members to disclose their affiliation, and Barrett has not spoken about her membership. And so, the question remains: What is charismatic Catholicism?

Pentecostalism in the U.S.

Catholic charismatics practice forms of Pentecostalism that embrace the belief that individuals can receive gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Modern Pentecostalism in the United States began on Azuza Street in Los Angeles.

Starting in 1909, African American pastor William J. Seymour led a congregation in the city that claimed to have received miraculous gifts from God, such as prophecy and the power to heal. The movement came to be known as Azuza Street revival.

Members of the Azuza Street congregation believed that they had been given the same blessings as those received by the disciples of Jesus. According to the Bible’s Acts of the Apostles, on the Pentecost – the Jewish Shavuot harvest festival 50 days after Passover – the Holy Spirit came down in the form of flames over the disciples’ heads. Afterward, it is believed, the disciples were able to speak in languages they did not know in order to proclaim “the wonders of God.”

In Christianity, the Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity and is associated with God’s action in the world.

The Catholic charismatic movement

These Pentecostal teachings went on to influence the Catholic charismatic movement that initially took hold in the U.S. in the 1960s.

During a 1967 prayer meeting at Dusquesne University in Pittsburgh, a group of students and professors spoke about special “charisms,” or gifts, received through the Holy Spirit.

According to firsthand accounts, faculty were deeply influenced by two books from the Pentecostal tradition, “The Cross and the Switchblade” and “They Speak with Other Tongues.”

Similar experiences of the Holy Spirit were later reported at prayer meetings at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Michigan.

From these beginnings, the Catholic charismatic movement has spread throughout the world.

For Catholic charismatics, the central experience is “the baptism of the Holy Spirit.” The baptism of the Holy Spirit differs from the traditional Catholic infant baptism with water. Adults baptized in the Holy Spirit have their faith reborn and strengthened by members of the congregation laying their hands on them.

Often a sign of baptism of the Holy Spirit is “glossolalia,” or “speaking in tongues.” Speaking in tongues refers to using an unintelligible language, which is often interpreted by someone else in the congregation. Usually glossolalia is considered a form of prayer. But other times, glossolalia is believed to contain prophecies about present or future events.

Participants in the Catholic charismatic movement also claim spiritual and physical healing associated with the power of the Holy Spirit working through believers.

Catholic charismatic prayer services are enthusiastic and involve energetic singing, hand clapping and praying with arms outstretched.

Controversy and support

There are also forms of charismatic Catholicism that believe in driving out evil spirits.

A Catholic charismatic community in India that I researched practiced exorcism as well as faith healing. The group also had a list of evil spirits that they claimed to have dealt with.

[Insight, in your inbox each day. You can get it with The Conversation’s email newsletter.]

Not all Catholic charismatic groups perform exorcisms, especially since the Vatican tightened exorcism procedures by allowing them to be formally performed only by priests. But Catholic charismatic practices remain controversial for some because they differ from mainstream Catholic worship.

Recently, Catholic charismatics have found a strong ally in Pope Francis. In fact, at Rome’s Olympic Stadium, the pope once knelt and was blessed by a gathering of thousands of Catholic charismatics, all speaking in tongues.

Commentators disagree about whether Barrett’s membership in a charismatic religious community should be an issue in any potential nomination hearings. But charismatic or Pentecostal groups and churches represent the fastest-growing segment of Christianity throughout the world. For this reason, Amy Coney Barrett’s beliefs may be shared by many contemporary Christians.

Mathew Schmalz, Professor of Religious Studies, College of the Holy Cross

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

—-

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

CNN: “Listen to Amy Coney Barrett’s full speech after Supreme Court nomination”

Followers of the QAnon movement believe in wild and dangerous conspiracy theories about U.S. President Donald Trump. Now a faction within the movement has been interpreting the Bible through QAnon conspiracies.

I have been studying the growth of the QAnon movement as part of my research into how extremist religious and political organizations create propaganda and recruit new members to ideological causes.

On Feb. 23, I logged onto Zoom to observe the first public service of what is essentially a QAnon church operating out of the Omega Kingdom Ministry (OKM). I’ve spent 12 weeks attending this two-hour Sunday morning service.

What I’ve witnessed is an existing model of neo-charismatic home churches — the neo-charismatic movement is an offshoot of evangelical Protestant Christianity and is made up of thousands of independent organizations — where QAnon conspiracy theories are reinterpreted through the Bible. In turn, QAnon conspiracy theories serve as a lens to interpret the Bible itself.

Trump vs. the ‘deep state’

The QAnon movement began in 2017 after someone known only as Q posted a series of conspiracy theories about Trump on the internet forum 4chan. QAnon followers believe global elites are seeking to bring down Trump, whom they see as the world’s only hope to defeat the “deep state.”

OKM is part of a network of independent congregations (or ekklesia) called Home Congregations Worldwide (HCW). The organization’s spiritual adviser is Mark Taylor, a self-proclaimed “Trump Prophet” and QAnon influencer with a large social media following on Twitter and YouTube.

The resource page of the HCW website only links to QAnon propaganda — including the documentary Fall Cabal by Dutch conspiracy theorist Janet Ossebaard, which is used to formally indoctrinate e-congregants into QAnon. This 10-part YouTube series was the core material for the weekly Bible study during QAnon church sessions I observed.

The Sunday service is led by Russ Wagner, leader of the Indiana-based OKM, and Kevin Bushey, a retired colonel running for election to the Maine House of Representatives.

Bible and QAnon narratives

The service begins with an opening prayer from Wagner that he says will protect the Zoom room from Satan. This is followed by an hour-long Bible study where Wagner might explain the Fall Cabal video that attendees had just watched or offer his observations on socio-political events from the previous week.

Everything is explained though the lens of the Bible and QAnon narratives. Bushey then does 45 minutes of decoding items that have appeared recently on the app called QMap that is used to share conspiracy theories. The last 15 minutes are dedicated to communion and prayer.

At a service held on April 26, Wagner and Bushey spoke about a QAnon theory, called Project Looking Glass, that the U.S. military has secretly developed a form of time-travel technology. Wagner suggested to e-congregants that time travel can be explained by certain passages in the Bible.

On May 3, the theme of the QAnon portion of the service was about COVID-19. Bushey spoke about a popular QAnon theory that the pandemic was planned. (There is no evidence of this.) And when an anti-vax conspiracy theory documentary called “Plandemic” went viral , the video was shared on the HCW websites as a way for e-congregants to consume the latest in a series of false theories about the coronavirus.

Leveraging authority

What is clear is that Wagner and Bushey are leveraging religious beliefs and their “authority” as a pastor and ex-military officer to indoctrinate attendees into the QAnon church. Their objective is to train congregants to form their own home congregations in the future and grow the movement.

OKM’s ministry is rooted in Taylor’s prophecies. Wagner regularly mentions that if it wasn’t for Taylor, he would have never started this ministry.

On its website, OKM references the Seven Mountains of Societal Influence. Seven Mountains utilizes the language of Dominionism — a theology that believes countries, including the United States, should be governed by Christian biblical law. Its goal is to attain sociopolitical and economic transformation through the gospel of Jesus in what it calls the seven mountains or spheres of society: religion, family, education, government, media, entertainment and business. This blends QAnon’s apocalyptic desire to destroy society “controlled” by the deep state with the need for the Kingdom of God on Earth.

Wagner and Bushey have taught their congregation to stop listening to any media —even Fox News — because they’re are all “Luciferian.” What they provide instead is a road map to QAnon radicalization comprised of QAnon YouTube channels for the congregation’s daily media diet, the Qmap website that lists new QAnon conspiracy theories and Twitter influencers.

‘Deep state church’

They further insist that as Trump continues to “drain the swamp” in Washington, it’s “our” responsibility to drain the deep state church swamp. They believe the same deep state that controls the world has also infiltrated traditional churches. As Wagner stated in his April 12 service: “I am here to focus on the deep state church. This goes beyond our church and involves our culture and our politics. Kevin is here to talk about QAnon and the military operation to save the world.”

Like any church, they also run outreach ministries. OKM is currently raising funds for something called Reclamation Ranch, which Wagner describes as a safe place for children rescued after being held underground by the deep state. Children at risk is an ongoing theme in many QAnon conspiracy theories, including the famous fake “Pizzagate” theory.

As of May, OKM moved from Zoom to YouTube to accommodate the growth in attendees. At last count, approximately 300 accounts participated in the recent services.

While that’s not a lot of followers, we should be concerned about these latest developments. OKM provides formalized religious indoctrination into QAnon, a conspiracy movement that is both a public health threat by spreading false information about the coronavirus pandemic and a national security concern.

Marc-André Argentino, PhD candidate Individualized Program, 2020-2021 Public Scholar, Concordia University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.