From “Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism – And What Comes Next” by Bradly Onishi
This perspective is shared among Falwell’s evangelical cohorts. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, prominent evangelical megachurch pastor John Hagee said, “I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they were recipients of the judgment of God for that.” Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, had this to say: “This is one wicked city, OK? It’s known for Mardi Gras, for Satan worship. It’s known for sex perversion. It’s known for every type of drugs and alcohol and the orgies and all of these things that go on down there in New Orleans. THere’s been a black spiritual cloud over New Orleans for years.” The prevailing idea among Christian nationalists such as Falwell, Hagee, and Graham is that as a Christian nation, the United States has a covenant with God that trades obedience and loyalty for protection and blessing. The nation’s perceived decline is, in their view, a result of the United States breaking its covenant with God.
Thus, any difficulty the nation faces can be chalked up to collective disobedience and need for a return to the good old days of loyalty to God. This is why nostalgia politics, hinging on the promise to “make America great again,” tap into the lifeblood of Christian nationalism. Politicians working this angle promise to return the country to what they take to be the ideal state: an American garden of Eden, founded by American patron saints such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and destined to be the greatest nation on earth.
Lurking beneath the patriotic rhetoric of restoring the nation to its former glory is a desire to reinstate a retrograde social and political order. The goal is to return to a state wherein straight, White, native-born Christian men take their rightful places of authority and leadership. Everyone else – including women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and certainly the LGBTQ community – must accept their place as either lower on the American register or outside of it altogether. “The ‘Christianity’ of Christian nationalism represents something more than religion…It included assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity,” Perry and Whitehead write. “It is an ethnic and political as it is religious.”