As I’ve mentioned previously, I was initially slow to understand the frantic warnings I was seeing in my social media timelines about the rise of Christian nationalism or, as it was sometimes referenced, white Christian nationalism.
I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian home, and my inclination was to dismiss such concerns as an overreaction by some people who simply could not relate to people with more conservative religious perspectives.
Then, I read Matthew Taylor’s insightful book, The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That is Threatening Our Democracy.
In the book, Taylor documents the role of a network of apostles and prophets in the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol—people who had gone there praying for a modern-day equivalent of the fall of the walls of Jericho.
Next, I dove into Bradley Onishi’s “Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—And What Comes Next,” which describes his passage from being a minister in an evangelical church to someone who would come to recognize the dangers of the Christian nationalism they had embraced.
As you will see in this interview, Onishi does not come to the conversation prepared to indict all people of faith.
Far from it.
Instead, in his previous book and his forthcoming American Caesar: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy, Onishi hopes to open the eyes of Christians to what he sees as a movement that has nothing to do with Christ and everything to do with power.
And he has some ideas about how Christians can respond to that threat.
Please watch, then tell me what you think.
