The MAGA New Right

Christian Nationalism

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Christian Nationalism

The belief that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that government must enforce Christian values; umbrella term covering at least three distinct traditions (Christian Founding Exceptionalism, Independent Charismatic/NAR, and Catholic Integralism); became the dominant public theology of Trumpism by 2023, culminating in Mike Johnson’s election as Speaker of the House (October 25, 2023)

What It Is

Katherine Stewart (journalist, author of The Power Worshippers) defines Christian nationalism as the belief that “our national identity and government should be based on a particular and exclusionary form of Christianity.” Field distinguishes at least three strands:

  1. Christian Founding Exceptionalism (CFE) — the claim that America was founded as a Christian nation and that Christian principles are embedded in the founding documents
  2. Independent Charismatic / New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) — Pentecostal/charismatic “prophets and apostles” seeking spiritual and political dominion; the most numerically significant strand globally
  3. Catholic Integralism — Vermeule/Pappin/Deneen camp; church authority superior to state; see separate page

Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Jesus and John Wayne, 2020) identifies the historical pattern: “For conservative white evangelicals, the ‘real America’ is a place where true [Christian] patriots [must] stand up against the liberal enemy, whether the godless commies or their secular humanist allies.”

Christian Founding Exceptionalism (CFE)

Origins

CFE’s modern political form grew out of the Cold War synthesis: Goldwater mobilization (1964) → Moral Majority (Jerry Falwell, 1979) → Reagan coalition. The core claim: America’s founding documents reflect Christian principles; the nation is in covenant with God; departure from Christian governance invites divine judgment.

New Right Adoption

The Claremonters have made CFE central to their constitutional theory — Declarationism, in Jaffa’s version, treats the Declaration of Independence’s “Nature and Nature’s God” as implicitly Christian. Larry P. Arnn at Hillsdale College teaches a CFE-inflected curriculum. The 1776 Commission Report gestures toward CFE themes.

Hillsdale’s CFE Scholars

Clifford Humphrey — Hillsdale PhD; director of Edmund Burke Foundation; later appointed EVP of the Florida College System by DeSantis. His CFE scholarship situates him at the intersection of Hillsdale, NatCon, and Florida education policy.

Ben Crenshaw — Hillsdale PhD candidate; presented at an ISI/Claremont conference in Fort Lauderdale (February 24, 2023, final day) on CFE. His talk drew on typological and theological readings of the founding documents to argue for Christian constitutional interpretation.

The Counter-Evidence Problem

Field identifies three standard pieces of counter-evidence to CFE that are consistently avoided in CFE scholarship:

  • Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786, Jefferson) — explicitly secular basis for religious liberty
  • Washington’s Newport letter (1790) — addressed to Hebrew Congregation; “the Government of the United States… gives to bigotry no sanction”
  • Treaty of Tripoli (1797) — Article 11: “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion”

CFE scholars like Crenshaw navigate these by arguing that “Christian” does not mean “sectarian” — a gambit that makes CFE simultaneously vacuous and totalizing.

Escalation: The “Christian Prince”

By 2024, Crenshaw had escalated beyond CFE’s historical arguments to a theocratic political theory invoking the figure of the “Christian Prince” — the magistrate who rules in accordance with divine law. This represents the convergence of CFE with something closer to integralist or theocratic territory: no longer just “America was founded Christian” but “Christian rulers should govern Christianly.”

Independent Charismatics and the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR)

Scale

312 million Independent Charismatics worldwide — distinct from mainline Pentecostals (Assemblies of God, etc.) and from evangelical Protestants. The movement has no formal denominational structure but is organized around networks of self-proclaimed “prophets” and “apostles” who claim direct divine revelation and spiritual authority.

Matthew Taylor (The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, 2024) is the key secondary source. Taylor identifies the NAR as the most politically radicalized strand of American Christianity, with documented involvement in the January 6 insurrection.

Theology: “Prophets, Apostles, Revival, and Warfare”

NAR theology centers on:

  • Dominion theology: Christians must take dominion over the “Seven Mountains” (government, media, education, religion, family, arts, business)
  • Spiritual warfare: political conflict as literal demonic warfare; prayer as military operation
  • Apostolic authority: living apostles and prophets with binding revelation
  • Revival as conquest: mass religious revival as precondition for political transformation

The movement’s emphasis on spiritual “shaking” — catastrophic disruption as divine intervention — maps directly onto the New Right’s catastrophist politics.

Trump Connection

Paula White — televangelist; named chair of Trump’s Faith and Opportunity Initiative (White House office); prayed at Trump’s 2017 inauguration; a charismatic figure with NAR adjacent theology. She became the bridge between Trump and the charismatic Christian nationalist network.

NAR prophets declared Trump a divinely appointed figure — Cyrus the Great being the standard typology (Cyrus was a non-believing king used by God for divine purposes, permitting Jews to return to Israel after Babylonian captivity; Trump is cast in the same role).

January 6 Connection

Taylor documents NAR’s role in organizing and spiritually framing January 6 as a spiritual warfare operation. The “Stop the Steal” movement was infused with NAR prophetic language; figures like Dutch Sheets (NAR apostle) had been prophesying Trump’s re-election victory for months.

Jim Garlow

Jim Garlow is identified as a key organizer at the intersection of Independent Charismatics and the CFE tradition. He organized the World Prayer Network call on October 2, 2023 at which Mike Johnson participated — weeks before Johnson was elected Speaker.

Mike Johnson and the Speaker’s Race (October 2023)

On October 2, 2023, Mike Johnson participated in a World Prayer Network call organized by Jim Garlow. Johnson spoke about America as “a nation subservient to Him” and about divine “shaking.” He cited a theology of America as divinely founded and specially covenanted.

On October 25, 2023, Johnson was elected Speaker of the House — the third in line to the presidency. Field presents this as a culmination: a figure with explicit NAR-adjacent theology and strong CFE commitments at the highest level of House leadership.

Marjorie Taylor Greene

On July 24, 2022, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) declared: “We should be Christian nationalists.” The explicit embrace of the label — previously euphemized or denied — marked a threshold moment in Christian nationalism’s mainstreaming within the Republican Party.

Relationship to Other New Right Currents

Christian nationalism intersects with:

  • National Conservatism — Hazony’s NatCon explicitly incorporates Christian nationalist themes, particularly CFE; the “nation” in national conservatism is implicitly Christian
  • Catholic Integralism — shares the goal of Christian political governance but from a specifically Catholic theological tradition; tension between Protestant CFE (majority evangelical base) and integralist theory (elite Catholic intellectuals)
  • Claremont Institute — Claremonters provide academic scaffolding for CFE; ISI provides institutional infrastructure
  • Hillsdale College — curriculum and scholars reproduce CFE; DeSantis’s Florida appointments come from this network
  • Hard Right — Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism (2022) represents the most radical academic defense; Wolfe’s co-podcaster Thomas Achord was exposed as pseudonymous white supremacist

Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism (2022)

Wolfe’s Biography

Stephen Wolfe — West Point 2008; Army captain for five years. Two master’s degrees at LSU (political science, 2016; philosophy, 2019). PhD in political science from LSU, 2020; dissertation: “Protestant Experience and Continuity of Political Thought in Early America, 1630–1789” — an erudite defense of Protestantism as “the tradition that supplied the underlying principles of early American political thought.” Advisor: James Stoner (conservative LSU professor). Postdoctoral fellowship at Robert P. George’s James Madison Program at Princeton.

The Case for Christian Nationalism published by Canon Press (Douglas Wilson’s press) on November 1, 2022. Canon is not an academic or mainstream press; it is the platform of Douglas Wilson, a Reformed Presbyterian (Calvinist) theologian based in Moscow, Idaho, associated with Christian Reconstructionism. Wilson’s press published Southern Slavery, As It Was (1996), which claimed “slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races.”

Yoram Hazony provided the cover blurb: “A Pioneering Work… Relentlessly Innovative.”

Christian Reconstructionism

Wolfe is not himself a Reconstructionist, but he published with Wilson’s press, situating himself in adjacent territory. Christian Reconstructionism traces to Rousas John Rushdoony, Gary North, and David Chilton — Calvinist thinkers committed to “restoring” full Christian dominance to America, including government under Old Testament (Mosaic) law. Slogan: “Christ or chaos, God’s law or tyranny.” As Jerome Copulsky writes in American Heretics (2024): “Reconstructionists believed that restoration of law and order would require a return to the ultimate source of law and order — submission to the sovereignty of the triune God.” Rushdoony was enormously influential on the New Christian Right in the 1980s, but his influence was consistently denied — because, Copulsky answers: “Rushdoony was a fearless advocate of theocracy.”

What the Book Actually Argues

Wolfe claims from the outset to be a political theorist, not a theologian — he proceeds on the assumption that the Reformed theological tradition is true without making scripture-based arguments. As Mark David Hall wrote: “Unless one assumes the truth of Reformed theology, there is little reason to read this work.” Hall suggests the book’s actual audience is “Douglas Wilson and some of his followers, but I’m not sure it extends much beyond this quirky collection of patriarchal Calvinists.”

Field’s counter-argument: “the book is also BAPism for Protestants, a red-pill for the Christian crowd.” Whatever the intended audience, the book functions as a gateway drug for Protestant readers toward the same Hard Right politics as BAP.

Key positions:

  • Non-Christians deserve “justice, peace, and safety, but not political equality; heretics and atheists will be treated harshly”
  • America should be a nation that is “self-consciously Christian”
  • A great “Christian Prince” should lead the nation and “do everything in his power to make his people’s culture, as a whole, Christian”
  • Wolfe calls the contemporary liberal regime a “gynocracy” — echoing BAP: “We live under a gynocracy — a rule of women. This may not be apparent on the surface, since men still run many things. But the governing virtues of America are feminine vices, associated with certain feminine virtues, such as empathy, fairness, and equality.”
  • Wolfe argues explicitly that “men should go their own way” (MGTOW) in civil affairs; women should be kept out of politics; on social media he has asserted that he does not affirm women’s right to vote
  • Uses the acronym GAE (“Globalist American Empire”) — borrowed from Darren Beattie and Raw Egg Nationalist

The “Kinism” Problem

The book uses ethnicity and nation “almost synonymously” and claims “no nation (properly speaking) is composed of two or more ethnicities.” It contains references to “blood relations,” “the volk,” “community in blood,” and “the principle of similarity.” Wolfe’s podcasting partner Thomas Achord was outed in 2023 as the operator of a pseudonymous account posting anti-Black and misogynist content — exposing the NETTR dynamic in Christian nationalist circles. Wolfe disavowed Achord but does not disavow the “Kinist”-adjacent positions in his text.

Epilogue: “Now What?”

The book’s epilogue is the most manifesto-like section — pseudo-Nietzschean aphorisms including:

  • “The rise of Christian nationalism necessitates the fall of gynocracy”
  • Secular liberal elites are “enemies of the human race”
  • Extended disquisitions on “the Globalist American Empire” (GAE)
  • “We have to retrain the mind by the strength of will. We might feel, for example, that it is wrong for public space to be exclusively Christian, but it still ought to be… We must overcome ourselves.”
  • Call to arms echoing Mircea Eliade: “We are gripped by a slavish devotion to our secularist captors. But we do not have to be like this. We have the power and the right to act. Let us train the will and cultivate our resolve.”

Field: Wolfe “knows how to check” the boxes for archetypal features of fascist movements: “nostalgia for a purer, mythic, often rural past; cults of tradition and cultural regeneration… the universalizing of some groups as authentically national, while dehumanizing all other groups… anti-modernism; fetishized patriarchal masculinity.”

Fort Lauderdale Behavior

At the ISI/Claremont Fort Lauderdale conference, Wolfe reined himself in. He clarified he was not working in the Reconstructionist, Dominionist, or Postmillennial traditions; he was against pastors directly participating in politics; he did not believe America had a special covenant with God. He wants a nation that is “self-consciously Christian” — deliberately more modest than Wolfe on social media.

The Q&A was revealing: the first question came from Nathan Pinkoski, who wondered what the panelists thought about “ethnic nationalism” and “ethno-nationalism.” Pinkoski “conceded he probably wouldn’t want to fight the battle to return to a world of racial nationalism” but “might fight the battle on the other front and point to countries in the world that define themselves in terms of an ethnos.” Wolfe disavowed race and DNA as the basis for nationalism, preferring a “phenomenological account emphasizing commonalities of place and historical experiences.” Field: “It was prudently done.”

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