“It’s pretty common to have people involved in a Christian nationalist narrative, a Christian nationalist agenda, a Christian nationalist philosophy but not be very deep Christians themselves,” Taylor said. “If they’re a regular Fox News person, if they hang out in right-wing circles, it’s the media they consume, the cultural tribe they belong to.”
“It’s a very useful way to get around the Christian imperative to love your enemy,” Matthew Taylor told me. “For the most part, that is the ironclad command. So how do you get Christians to hate their enemies? Or to hate them even if they love them? Demons are easy to hate. They are irredeemable objects of hatred.”
Matthew Taylor sees Pursuit’s new leadership as deliberately choosing the Pacific Northwest for its oppositional potential, comparing their strategy directly to Mark Driscoll’s at Mars Hill, who relished in his opposition to Seattle culture.
“Christian nationalism isn’t one thing,” Taylor told CT. “We’re using this one phrase to capture a number of different phenomena.” Some proponents are nostalgic for a time when Christianity was more culturally prominent, Taylor said. Others want Christians to be a privileged class in society, which he classifies as “Christian supremacy.”
“There’s this very sharp tension going on right now, I’d even call it a low-grade civil war, between the more Christian Zionist factions that are very pro-Israel, very pro-war in Iran … versus this kind of rising tide of antisemites in the far-right coalition,” Taylor said.
Many religion scholars, Weaver-Zercher says, see the rise of authoritarianism under Trump as a deeply theological problem. “We have to have a robust theological response,” she explains, pointing to Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus in a World of Christian Antichrists (Broadleaf, Oct.) by Matthew D. Taylor, an expert on Christian extremism. The book draws on scripture to challenge people who abuse power in the name of Jesus.
Taylor’s forthcoming book, Defying Tyrants, is a theological manifesto that speaks directly to Christians who are drawn to so-called Christian Nationalism... “If they [the Christian Right] are the only ones making religious arguments, they’re going to win that argument over people speaking only in the language of Enlightenment values,” he says.
Taylor said the invocation of ancient Scriptures invoked amid modern military conflict raises a “very, very significant question.”
“Do the Geneva Conventions apply to a holy war? Do the Geneva Conventions apply to an apocalyptic war? Because that is what Trump is threatening,” said Taylor.
“Hegseth's Christian nationalist rhetoric is part of a broader effort…to run back the clock and take us back to a time before all that diversity and complexity became part and parcel of U.S. culture and identity,” Taylor said.