I n a media ecosystem with no use for religion as anything but a bogeyman, countless words and warnings have been devoted to the rising — and amorphous — specter of Christian nationalism. The efforts of pro-lifers, concern over minors undergoing gender-transition treatment, and even support for school choice have been chalked up to this malignant and allegedly pervasive ideology.
MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle recently warned, before welcoming a panel for a particularly hysterical discussion of more than ten minutes, that Christian nationalists hope to “tear down the wall between church and state.” One of her guests fretted over Christian nationalism’s threat to freedom of religion. Another upped the ante, calling the “dangerous and malicious” movement a threat to democracy itself. And in one particularly egregious moment on MSNBC last month, a reporter insisted that the distinction between Christians and Christian nationalists was the belief of the latter that “our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority” but from God.
The most cynical aspect of this panic is its purpose of painting any biblically informed point of view as inherently authoritarian or illegitimate. It’s an objective that not only reeks of political motivations but suffers from a lack of basis: None of the mainstream views that the media have characterized as Christian nationalism constitute an attempt at establishing a system of Christian supremacy, which is the aim of true Christian nationalists.
There is a danger in the rhetorically religious Right. But the Left has mistaken fraud for fervency.
No doubt, some number of would-be theocrats seek not just to implement policies consistent with certain religious assumptions but to place the rights of their coreligionists above those of nonbelievers or otherwise use the power of the state to advantage them. Yet this remains a small fringe whose agenda most Christians oppose. Indeed, demand for anything that resembles Christian nationalism remains so low and the prospect of it so unlikely that it’s impossible to rationalize the amount of energy expended agonizing over it. Moreover, the overwrought campaign against Christian nationalism obscures a much more sinister development. While some fret over the potential application of Christian principles in the public square, it is the fists of self-interest and power-worship, hidden within the velvet gloves of Christian rhetoric, that should trouble believers and nonbelievers alike.
Enter the Christian-coded nihilists.
Perhaps no figure epitomizes this group more proudly than Candace Owens, the right-wing provocateur who parted ways with the Daily Wire last month following a monthslong flirtation with and eventual embrace of overt antisemitism. That embrace was notable not just for its brazenness — Owens inveighed against “political Jews” and a “small ring” of Jews exercising disproportionate power in Hollywood and Washington, D.C., for example — but for how she sought to excuse it.
During a row with her then-colleague Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, last fall, Owens declared that “you cannot serve both God and money,” in a thinly disguised antisemitic attack on him. “Christ is King,” she added, in her first use of the refrain on X. She and her fandom have since abused the phrase, working feverishly to turn it into an antisemitic dog-whistle while pretending that it is merely an expression of benign faith.
She was laying the groundwork for a new grift. Since the Owens–Daily Wire divorce was finalized, Owens has insisted that it was the result of the company’s disdain for devout Christians. This is a tenuous claim, given the Christian faith of most of the company’s other key faces (Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles) as well as its CEO (Jeremy Boreing), but logic has proven no deterrent to Owens.
“To my brothers and sisters in faith who are recognizing that we need to stand by one another,” Owens wrote in a post after her firing. “There is a deep-seated hatred in the media for Christians. The worldwide persecution of Christians rarely receives coverage and is readily dismissed. . . . The attempt by the media to equate biblical scripture with white supremacy must be our red line. It is always appropriate, in every scenario to share biblical scripture. Because it is truth.”
“The reason why some people believe that with enough insistence they can convince American Christians that the basic truth, ‘Christ is King’ is actually antisemitic, is because they have been successfully spiking the ball on Christianity for the past 60 years,” she asserted in another post. “Inch by inch, by pretending to be our friends and making us fearful of having the media project us as overzealous is how they have scored so many wins.”
Owens’s trick here is to use truth to advance lies. As Klavan has pointed out in an astute reaction to the split, no Christian can deny that Christ is the king of the universe, just as no honest observer can deny that there’s bias against Christians with traditional views in political media, academia, and entertainment. Using these truths to excuse bigotry and cultivate a new audience you hope to monetize, however, represents a forfeiture of your claim to them.
And while Owens’s flameout at the Daily Wire serves as a near-perfect illustration of Christian-coded nihilism, she’s hardly its only exemplar.
Donald Trump, too, has of course cast himself as a defender of the Christian faith to secure the benefits he believes such a designation confers. It is striking, if not surprising, that this month has seen Trump both promise to make November 5 (that’s Election Day this year) “Christian Visibility Day” and come out against any federal limits on abortion, urging states to chart their own path. Shortly after that latter pronouncement, he renounced his hours-old, principled federalist position to call for a more permissive abortion framework in Arizona.
His “Christian Visibility Day” stunt was not an expression of faith or admiration for the faithful, it was a ploy to associate the faith with his attempt at political resurrection. That the former president conceives of Christianity as a means rather than an end was made plain yet again days before Easter Sunday, when he released a video hawking his new “God Bless the U.S.A.” Bible — “the only Bible endorsed by President Trump!”
“You have to have it for your heart, for your soul,” insisted the man who struggles to name his favorite Bible verse (he should survey Matthew 21) and whose reelection, it has been warned, would represent a triumph of Christian nationalism. Steve Bannon — he who boasted about creating a platform for the alt-right and allegedly swindled conservatives into donating to a fund with the stated purpose of building a border wall and the revealed purpose of lining its administrators’ pockets — has actually described himself as “a proud Christian nationalist” in an attempt to needle his political opponents. Even Nick Fuentes, an online antisemitic troll whom the mainstream Right has condemned, has presented his unrepentant hatred of his fellow man as a function of his love for Christ — a practical impossibility.
These self-interested and corrosive voices don’t see Christianity as an antidote to America’s problems. They see professed devotion to it as an avenue to wealth and influence, as well as an excuse for wickedness. America’s progressive establishment is invested in Christian nationalism as a bogeyman. It’s not difficult to see why. It’s a convenient and seemingly forbidding label that can be hurled at a large swath of its cultural opponents.
But what Democrats and their media allies are eager to identify as a dogmatic Christian worldview can be better described as Christian-coded nihilism, a faux religious permission structure for a particularly noxious wing of the GOP and right-wing political-entertainment industry. It’s this cynical exploitation of Christianity, not a sincere embrace of the faith, that threatens the spiritual and civic health of both the United States and its conservative movement.