Last week, Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley admitted something that might have once shocked his party.
“Some will say I’m calling America a Christian nation,” Hawley told an audience at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington. “And so I am. Some will say I’m advocating Christian nationalism. And so I do. My question is: Is there any other kind worth having?”
Conservative Christian supremacy is on the march.
In Oklahoma, the state’s top education official has ordered the public schools to put a Bible in every classroom and incorporate its teachings into their lessons. In Louisiana, officials have decreed that every public school classroom must display the Ten Commandments.
What is going on in our nation, which was founded on the principles of religious freedom and separation of church and state?
“Josh Hawley would not have said that a year ago,” said Stephen Ujlaki, producer and director of the stunning new documentary “Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy.” But these days, he said, Christian nationalists “are feeling more empowered. Their goal is to act as though they have already won and cow everyone into going along with it.”
Six years ago, Ujlaki, who was ending his term as dean of the Loyola Marymount University School of Film and Television, decided to figure out how Donald Trump — adulterer, sexual abuser, compulsive liar — could become president with the rabid support of voters who espouse Christian values.
What he came to understand is that Trump’s presidency and enduring popularity among the most extreme religious conservatives are the products of a 50-year-old political movement. Christian nationalism aims to turn back the clock on a century of American social progress by exploiting white conservatives’ anxiety over the demographic and political shifts that are changing the country.
Christian nationalists don’t exactly identify with Trump; rather, he is their vessel and their wrecking ball, and he’s been wildly successful in that sense. Who would have imagined years ago that a Supreme Court reshaped by the real estate mogul would obliterate half a century of reproductive rights?
Christian nationalism is a white supremacist political ideology masquerading as religion.
“They are pretend Christians,” said Christianity Today editor Russell Moore, who left the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission over its support for Trump in 2016.
Ujlaki takes a chronological approach in “Bad Faith,” going back to the 1981 founding of the secretive, well-funded Council for National Policy by archconservative Christian activists. Among them was Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich, who once said, “I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
The Heritage Foundation’s 900-page Project 2025 is considered a blueprint for a second Trump administration. The document espouses the goals of Christian nationalism: dismantling the administrative state by replacing civil servants with Trump worshippers, slashing regulations, gutting protections for gay and transgender people, abolishing the Department of Education, requiring all pregnancies to be carried to term, making it harder for some to vote and shrinking the social safety net.
A February Pew Research Center poll found that less than half of U.S. adults said they had ever heard or read anything about Christian nationalism. “Most Republicans,” Pew reported, “say they have never heard of Christian nationalism.” It’s scary that Americans know very little about the movement that is trying to wrench them into the past.
No one has captured the warped ethos of the Christian nationalist movement better than the white supremacist homophobe Nick Fuentes, who appears briefly but memorably in “Bad Faith.”
“F— democracy,” Fuentes says. “I stand with Jesus Christ.”
Except, you know, he really doesn’t.
Robin Abcarian is an opinion columnist at the Los Angeles Times.
