Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism--and What Comes Next

by Bradley Onishi

not everyone wins through equality. Those who have benefited from inequality lose their privileged place. They don’t see a level playing field as a positive. They see it as taking away their power and influence. It feels like persecution.

Thus, in the 1980 presidential election, the Christian nationalists of the New Religious Right supported a divorced Hollywood actor, with a mixed record on issues surrounding “family values” and a history of supporting abortion, over the Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher who married his high school sweetheart, served with distinction in the armed forces, and often took his Bible with him when leaving the house. It was the election that made clear that the cross wasn’t

enough. For Christian nationalists, the cross must always be accompanied by the flag.

Christian nationalists envision the American social body as straight, White, Christian, native born (and thus English speaking), and patriarchal. When White Christian nationalists imagine the “real American,” they think of John Wayne or Donald Trump or Nancy Reagan, a woman who abides by patriarchal norms. They do not imagine Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, much less a trans teenager of color or a queer immigrant. Their model American looks a certain way and has a certain body. Its phenotype, sexuality, gender, and religious practice are rolled into a singular vision of the American anatomy.

they’ve begun to look at and partner with autocratic leaders, who they actually get to officially cohost the conference. So it’s not just that they had a conference

keynote address at the “Make Families Great Again”

embassy in Washington, DC. In 2018, Putin outlawed “gay propaganda”

As I said before, Jimmy Carter was too much of a Christian to be a Christian nationalist, much less a protoauthoritarian in the vein of Putin or Orbán. His dedication to Christ actually hindered his manifestation of the types of viciousness that many White Christian nationalists see as requisite for protecting the nation from outside invaders and internal threats. Carter, in other words, was too Christian to be the kind of president many White Christians want. Instead, they prefer a self-styled barbarian, unhindered by the duty to be Christlike.

Hitler shaped the Nazis into a hypernationalist, anti-immigrant, and anti-Semitic party. He used the stab-in-the-back-myths to justify his hatred of Jews and his call to replace the Weimar Republic with a government—and a leader—that could avenge Germany’s economic, military, and political humiliation. “The literal term ‘stab-in-the-back’ (‘Dolchstoss’) does not appear in his autobiography Mein Kampf, but he referred to it in many of his speeches and publications, at times, even verbally,” notes Klaus Schwabe. “Needless to add that other Nazi publications abounded with references to the Dolchstoß.”

Such a migration is already happening from places like California, coastal Washington, and parts of the East Coast to what is now known as the “American Redoubt”—the region comprising Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, eastern Washington, and eastern Oregon. Redoubt means stronghold or fortification. Etymologically, it is similar to refuge. The American Redoubt is, in essence, a safe space to which some White Christians are fleeing in order to take refuge from the rest of the country.

In 2011, James Wesley Rawles, a former US military intelligence officer born and raised in Northern California, dubbed the region including Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and parts of eastern Washington and eastern Oregon the American Redoubt. In a now infamous blog post, Rawles identified this region of the country as the last fortress for traditional Americans to protect themselves against what he predicts will be an economic and political crisis. “I believe that it is time for freedom-loving Christians to relocate to something analogous to “Galt’s Gulch” on a grand scale,” Rawles wrote.

Doug Wilson has been building a Christian supremacist empire in Moscow, Idaho, since the late 1970s. Over the last half century, he has made it his goal to make the town of twenty-five thousand into a Christian town where the schools, city government, and businesses are controlled by evangelicals. Wilson is the controversial founder of Christ Church, a congregation that is more than a church. In Moscow, Christ Church has established a day school, a liberal arts college, and a media center from which Wilson spreads his message via radio, podcast, and his prolific writing. He has written over thirty books. His homeschooling network includes nearly two hundred schools across the country. Crawford Gribben, a scholar of religion who has written extensively about the church and Wilson, observes: “Followers believe that abortion rights and same-sex marriage, among other evidences of what they would see as moral decline, will eventually be repealed. Their goal is simple—the conversion of the people of Moscow to their way of thinking as the first step toward the conversion of the world.” Wilson has made waves in the past for his views on slavery. In Southern Slavery as It Was, coauthored with Steve Wilkins, Wilson argues that “slavery as it existed in the South . . . was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence. There has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world.” The authors go on to say t...