Christian Right on the March

Guy Miller

Money, Lies, and God
Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy
By Katherine Stewart
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025, 245 pages, $26.99 hardcover.

KATHERINE STEWART’S INTEREST in the Christian Right was triggered when she became aware of an insidious project of piggy-backing an evangelical propaganda machine, masquerading as a school club, in her daughter’s public school building.

This resulted in her 2012 book The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children. In 2020 Stewart wrote The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. In 2025, she has completed her trilogy with Money, Lies and God (ML&G).

In ML&G Stewart wastes no time. In its first paragraph she parachutes us into a Reawaken America Tour stopover in July 2023 in Las Vegas. At the meeting Stewart noticed a dramatic change in tone: the rhetoric was harsher and the t-shirts nastier.

The Reawaken America Tour, founded in 2021, was a tour that promoted Christian Nationalism and conspiracy theories including the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen.”

At the meeting Stewart encounters a participant wearing a MAGA cap and a t-shirt emblazoned with “Size Matters.” The t-shirt also pictures an array of ammunition ranging from hand gun size to bazooka grade. This is not the sedate world of Billy Graham.

On the new normal of the Christian Right, Stewart comments:

“It can sometimes seem that the anti-democratic reaction snuck up on us and suddenly is in our living room. I confess that when I look back over the last decade and a half that I have spent reporting on the subject the escalation of the threat appears breathtaking.” (4)

Stewart isn’t the only one whom the explosion “snuck up on.” Mark Galli, the former editor of Christianity Today, the foremost evangelical journal in the United States, just weeks before the 2016 presidential election, claimed that he did not know a single evangelical who was going to vote for Trump. That November, Trump received 81 percent of the white evangelical vote.

Material Roots of “Nihilism”

ML&G does a solid materialist job in tracking the roots of right-wing evangelicalism. The book points to the massive increase in income inequality and deindustrialization that have resulted in economic dislocation since the 1970s.

Stewart doesn’t view this as the only cause, but as a major contributor in what she calls “status anxiety.” Her overall diagnosis for this new mood is “reactionary nihilism.”

The action, characters and organizations in this 245-page book move around at dizzying speed. To make sense of this torrent of information, Stewart provides a useful — if admittedly simplistic — guide.

She breaks down the division of labor of the Christian Right into five categories: Funders, Sergeants, Infantry, Thinkers and Power Players. It’s helpful to keep Stewart’s definitions of these actors’ different functions in mind. (9-13)

Stewart also provides another useful guide for what she calls the four basic dispositions that characterize Christian Nationalism — Catastrophism, Identitarianism, Persecution Complex, and authoritarianism.

I use CIPA as a mnemonic device for this summary:

1) Catastrophism: Time is running out. Thanks to the unbelievers, the nation is doomed, only spiritual warfare can save us. The end is nigh!

2) Identitarianism: it’s up to American (White) Christian Nationalists to take total charge and rule the country.

3) Persecution complex: Conservative Christians are the principal victims of discrimination.

3) Authoritarianism: Children must obey their parents, wives must obey their husbands, workers must obey their bosses, and everyone must obey the strong leader (e.g. Donald Trump).

In the chapter “A Tale of Two Busches,” Stewart looks at the Roman Catholic component of the primarily Protestant story of Christian Nationalism.

Robert Busch is a “Francis Catholic.” This places him in the progressive tradition of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Timothy Busch (no relation,) on the other hand, is on the opposite end of the spectrum, about one good confession away from the Christian Nationalists.

While right-wing Catholics may lack the pizzazz of their Protestant brethren, they make up for it in their behind-the-scenes importance. Consider this roster of right-wing Catholic influencers: Five of the nine Supreme Court Justices; Vice President J.D. Vance; Leonard Leo, the point man of the Federalist Society; Christopher Rufo, the man responsible for destroying New College in Florida; and Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and the driving force behind Project 2025.

Power Couple

Katherine Stewart calls the partnering of the New Right and Christian Nationalism, the “Power Couple” of our time. While not exactly marital bliss, this combination seems to work, as both partners have the same ultimate goal: the destruction of liberal democracy.

Moreover, they are willing to wage a long-term war of position to get there.

In the middle chapters, Stewart shifts her attention to the more secular half of the power couple.

At least in my little corner of the American left, the word “woke” is hardly, if ever, spoken or written. But when reading books about the Christian Right, the word is ever-present.

Stewart asks herself: “(W)here did this one tune of the anti-woke anthem come from?” Steward soon answers her own question: “The Claremont Institute.”

Since its founding in Claremont, California in 1979, the Institute has always been a voice on the right. Its public face, the Claremont Review of Books, was designed to mimic the layout of the genteel New York Review of Books.

In their early days both the Institute and the Review strived for a veneer of respectability. No longer: In recent years Claremont has, in Stewart’s words, “gone off the rails.”

Claremont specializes in handing out fellowship programs designed to boost the careers of young right wingers. Many of Claremont’s alumni make up a significant number of the players who now inhabit the Trump orbit.

ML&G strings together a number of quotes from the more traditional right wingers, who have taken their distance from the Institute. Bill Kristol calls it “off putting and depressing and stupid.”

My favorite quote comes from Steve Schmitt, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, who doesn’t mince words, “It (Claremont) is becoming like the West Point of American Fascism.”

Stewart traces the intellectual roadmap of the Claremont Institute. It runs from its long-time professor and distinguished fellow Henry Jaffa, who was mentored by Leo Strauss, who as a model looked to — wait for it — the arch-Nazi Carl Schmitt.

Several of Schmitt’s ideas have filtered down to much of the New Right, including the idea that all politics boils down to a war between friends and enemies. (Neither Schmitt nor Claremont does nuance.)

Schmitt’s hatred of Weimar Germany translates, for his followers, into a hatred of all liberal democracies. Schmitt also taught that the real enemy is the enemy within. Unless there is an illustrated edition of Schmitt’s writing, it’s unlikely that Trump has ever read his books — yet  Trump certainly reflects Schmitt’s world view.

New Apostolic Reformation

The driving force of contemporary Christian Nationalism is the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) — a movement more than a denomination.

In fact, non-denominational is where the action is in today’s American Christendom. It allows for freedom to improvise and adjust. At the same time, the movement is highly coordinated and capable of acting as a unit: Witness the massive, though underreported, intervention of the Christian Right into January 6.

NAR’s theology is a mash-up of two very disparate Christian traditions:

Charismatic/Pentecostal and Calvinism. The charismatic component features healing, speaking in tongues, prophecies and miracles. (In one of the few humorous episodes of ML&G, parishioners at a church in Odessa, Texas tried to get Katherine Stewart to speak in tongues. She tried, but she just couldn’t fake it.)

If the charismatic aspect fills an emotional need in new converts, then the Calvinist emphasis on Dominionism appeals to a need for order. The concept of Dominionism has its roots in Genesis 1:28, where God instructs humans “to have dominion … over all the earth.”

Dominionism leads to the Seven Mountain Mandate, a blueprint for attaining absolute power over the state. This is to be done by achieving hegemony over: government, the media, education, arts and entertainment, business, family and religion.

Religious historians often point to R.J. Rushdoony, a member of the hardcore Calvinist Orthodox Presbyterian denomination, as the inspiration for the Seven Mountain Mandate.

The MAGA movement has been active in six out of those seven mountains. Education: The attack on academic freedom at universities (Columbia, etc.), the abolition of the Department of Education. The Family: The Dobbs Decision. Media: Defunding PBS and NPR. Business: Tariffs and the resulting potential trade wars. Government: The Republican Party is now a fully owned subsidiary of the Christian Right. Entertainment: Driving Stephen Colbert and The Late Show off the air.

As for Religion…God help us.

The media treat the dangerous threat of Christian Nationalism with deference and little research. For example, the decades-long deep involvement of Vance Boelter — the assassin of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Horton and her husband Mark — is treated as an almost irrelevant aside.

In reality, the line between spiritual warfare and actual warfare is rapidly fading. Katherine Stewart describes this process well on page 5 of The Power Worshippers:

“[Christian Nationalism] is not a social or cultural movement. It is a political movement and its ultimate goal is power. It does not seek to add another voice to American pluralism, but to replace our foundational democratic principles and institutions with a state grounded in a particular version of Christianity.”

November-December 2025, ATC 239