"... [T]he forces of Christian nationalism—those who seek to demolish the wall between Church and state, asserting far-right religious dominion over the government as well as the country’s core institutions—are now ascendant both inside the Church and inside the Republican Party. It is no coincidence that, just recently, Donald Trump began suggesting that he would ban any migrant from entering the United States unless they are Christian. Those who don’t share 'our religion,' the famously impious ex-president pronounced, won’t be welcome here if he’s elected again. Many of the people poised to hold high-ranking posts in a second Trump administration don’t view today’s societal disputes through the lens of Republican versus Democrat or of conservative versus progressive, but rather of good versus evil.
"Perhaps the only thing more dangerous than authoritarianism is
authoritarianism infused with religious justification. It hardly matters
whether the would-be tyrant is personally devout; Vladimir Putin’s lack
of theology didn’t stop him from partnering with the Russian Orthodox
Church to frame the bloody invasion of Ukraine as God’s ordained
conquest of a satanic stronghold. To believe that it couldn’t happen
here—mass conflict rooted in identitarian conviction and driven by
religious zeal—is to ignore both 20th-century precedent and the
escalating holy-war rhetoric inside the evangelical Church..." -- Tim Alberta, writing in The Atlantic. Alberta, who was raised an evangelical Christian and still self- identifies as a follower of Jesus Christ, is the author of "The Kingdom, The Power, And The Glory - American Evangelicals In An Age Of Extremism." More than many observers of the dangers of Christian nationalism, the evangelical movement, the Christofascist Republican Party and their cult leader Malignant Loser, he speaks with the authority of one who has been inside the belly of the beast, and has seen the transformation of the evangelical church into the Manichean, paranoid threat to American democracy that it's become.
