Among the seemingly never-ending flurry of authoritarian executive orders signed by Donald Trump during the incredibly long first month of his second term was a February 6th directive entitled “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.” According to the order, previous administrations had been involved in the “anti-Christian weaponization of government,” and in response to this imagined persecution, the White House claims that it will “ensure that any unlawful and improper conduct, policies, or practices that target Christians are identified, terminated, and rectified.” A subsequent executive order signed the following day established a “White House Faith Office,” to be led by Paula White-Cain, the controversial Pentecostal minister and “spiritual adviser” to Trump, arguably among the most impious of men to ever occupy the Oval Office.  To that end, the Trump administration and its Faith Office have promised to, among other activities, tabulate all of that which they consider to be examples of anti-Christian bias in American government.

If this office is looking for reports of such anti-Christian bias, there are several examples that could be submitted. A litany of anti-Christian attacks in the last month could include the vitriol directed against Washington DC’s Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde after her inauguration sermon when Trump said that her calls for Christian mercy were “nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart,” or Georgia Representative Mike Collins’ calls for the cleric (a natural-born American citizen) to be deported. Another example would be former Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, a convicted felon and proponent of noxious conspiracy theories, denouncing “the ‘Lutheran’ faith’” as being a “money laundering operation.” That slur was in regards to the church-affiliated charity Lutheran Family Services which has been targeted by the unelected plutocrat Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” as part of the nonprofit’s work with USAID. There is also the case of J.D. Vance – a baptized convert who practices a traditionalist variation of Roman Catholicism while being recently criticized by Pope Francis over the vice president’s interpretation of doctrine – who in January accused the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ humanitarian relief work with undocumented immigrants as simply being about “their bottom line.”

Nobody should seriously imagine that White-Cain, or anyone involved in the White House Faith Office, will release a report enumerating the many ways that the Trump administration has targeted Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Catholics through rhetoric and threat of financial distress as examples of “anti-Christian bias,” though they are. This isn’t to say that White-Cain is a hypocrite per se, only to imagine that she doesn’t interpret Bishop Budde, the leaders of the Lutheran Church, or the members of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops as being Christians like she is. Indeed, the Florida-based proponent of the hyper-capitalistic “Prosperity Gospel” favored by some Pentecostals has a long, controversial record of animus against mainline Protestants and Catholics, as well as even against conservative evangelicals. Nor should the inconsistency of Trump’s religious policies, which slam many mainstream denominations while elevating increasingly popular fringe beliefs, be understood by a variant of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy, whereby the establishment of the White House Faith Office need only be interpreted as cynical posturing. What these recent executive orders actually portend is something far more disturbing, an attempt not just to rent asunder the wall of separation between church and state, but in someways to forge a radically new, civilly-supported reformation in Christianity, or of even establishing what could be regarded as an entirely new faith, emboldened and empowered to now persecute that which it regards as heretical. White-Cain, after all, is the same woman who at an invocation delivered before the January 6th insurrection, denounced “every demonic network that is aligned itself against the purpose, against the calling of President Trump.” In the minister’s understanding, to be against Trump is to be against God. In such a context, being Christian means nothing to White-Cain, for “anti-Christian bias” simply means disagreement with the president. 

Trump’s governing coalition is three-pronged, including the nativist alt-right that came to public attention a decade ago in the form of figures like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, the now-emerging tech-authoritarians exemplified by crank blogger Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, and Musk, and the Christian Nationalists who conceive of the MAGA movement as a means of transforming the United States into a theocracy. For sure the elements of Trump’s supporters include more factions, and these particular groupings can be ambiguous or blur together even while there are potential fissures of interest between diverging camps. Yet while many have been focused for understandable reasons on the machinations of the growing influence of Silicon Valley tech-oligarchs over the administration, the Christian Nationalist contingent that helped land Trump in the White House a second time are every-bit as present, as powerful, and as disturbing, working patiently to build and extend their power.

Regular readers of Religion Dispatches are no doubt aware of the various terms associated with Christian Nationalism, from “Dominionist” theology to the ecumenically extremist “New Apostolic Reformation” and its “Seven Mountain Mandate.” True to its name, the leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation, such as the founder of the Global Harvest Ministries, the late C. Peter Wegner who christened the movement, understand themselves to be involved in a revolution altering Christianity as fully as the Reformation of a half-millennia ago did. True to that sentiment, Wegner understood the role of his movement as not to ensure religious liberty, but to root out that which he claimed was heretical within Christianity, writing in his 2005 Freedom from the Religious Spirit that “Cults and false religions are easily discerned and discarded, but the religious spirit is extremely subtle. It has attempted to thwart possibly every revival or movement of God to date, and it still retains an undeserved seat of honor throughout a huge part of today’s Church.” In this context, his acolyte the self-declared apostle White-Cain understands that her job isn’t to preserve religious liberty through the White House Faith Office, but rather to persecute those whom the New Apostolic Reformation views as being un-Christian, ironically despite the heterodox nature of her own beliefs.

Emerging from Pentecostal and Charismatic traditions, though affiliated with figures across Christianity, including a few who are Catholic, the New Apostolic Reformation promulgates a profoundly supernatural understanding of politics, seeing themselves as engaged in battling demons in the form of liberals and leftists, Democrats and moderate Republicans. Furthermore, the Seven Mountain Mandate offers a movel for proponents of the movement to acquire and consolidate power across the domains of family, religion, education, media, arts, entertainment, business, and government. Combining a literal belief in “spiritual warfare” alongside a Christian supremacism, the New Apostolic Reformation, or at least portions of it, have been associated with elected and public officials including pundit Charlie Kirk, failed Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, representatives including Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Green, the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Trump advisers including Roger Stone, Mike Lindell, and Flynn, as well as White-Cain. Even Vance, who seems to have rather opportunistically embraced the Latinate enthusiasms of traditionalist Catholicism, has spoken to congregations and conferences associated with the New Apostolic Reformation, appearing during the presidential election at a Monroeville, Pennsylvania town hall with the minister Lance Wallnau who said he believed that former Vice President Kamala Harris was literally a practitioner of witchcraft.

Frederick Clarkson and Andre Gagne in a Religion Dispatches article from last year describe how the New Apostolic Reformation is becoming more powerful in the “context of tectonic changes in global Christianity… a significant organizing element that has also become the cutting edge of the Christian right in the US and other countries.” Many mainline and liberal Christians, though even some conservative ones as well, may be tempted to label the New Apostolic Reformation with its nationalistic overtones as idolatrous, and its obsession with civil authority as being incongruent with the spirit of the gospels, though it’s always risky to claim that any particular group – no matter how idiosyncratic their theology may be – is somehow not actually Christian. For sure, every aspect of the New Apostolic Reformation from speaking in tongues to theocracy, spirit warfare to contemporary prophecy, has forerunners among some sect or denomination in the long, diverse, complicated, and varied history of Christianity. But that doesn’t mean that the broader shifts in faith that have been observed since the beginning of the Trump era, of which the New Apostolic Reformation must be included, don’t signify something novel. Nor does it mean that all of these movements aren’t in some way coalescing into a genuinely new religious phenomenon, a kind of Church of Trump (that now has its own Office of the Inquisition).

Referring to the intricate, paranoid, and bizarre belief systems that have developed around Trump, The Atlantic editor Adrienne LaFrance argued in a 2020 essay that “To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory but the birth of a new religion” while journalist Jeff Sharlett has compared that same cultish movement as akin to ancient Gnosticism with its promise of occult secrets revealed. While it would be a mistake to collapse the New Apostolic Reformation into QAnon – though certainly a Venn diagram of adherents to either would show substantial overlap – the former with its ramblings about demonic cabals certainly bears some similarity to the later with its fantasies concerning Democratic politicians and celebrities harvesting the blood of children. Maybe what the New Apostolic Reformation is most similar to, however, are other instances when the church hasn’t just capitulated to political authoritarianism, but been an exuberant handmaiden to the state, bending and altering Christianity to suit the needs of an autocrat.

Here a useful comparison might be made to the movement known as German Christians who during the period of Nazi rule attempted to reform the faith along specifically fascist lines. Ministers and theologians such as Ludwig Muller and Wilhelm Kube eliminated the Jewish elements from Christianity (including the Hebrew Scriptures), while claiming that Christ was an Aryan, and that highest devotion should be reserved for the Fuhrer and the Nazi state. In building a unified Protestant “Reich’s Church,” the German Christians movement served a function not unlike what we may be seeing the beginnings of now, an unholy synthesis of religion and state to the detriment of both (and everyone else as well). But, in opposition to the German Christians there emerged the Confessing Church, an underground contingent of mostly Protestant ministers and congregants who actively resisted the “Aryanization” of Christianity, adhering to their own beliefs, aiding resistance, and facing persecution because of it. If Trump’s executive orders and his theocratic Office of Faith signal a covenant with Caesar, the replacement of Christ’s cross with Constantine’s sword, then the United States is in need of its own Confessing Church to bear prophetic witness. “Who stands fast?” asked the murdered Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a member of the Confessing Church killed at the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp in 1945. “Where are these responsible people?” In ascertaining who the members of that congregation may be today, one should look at those Christians persecuted for their beliefs and statements by the current administration, those who’ve already begun to suffer persecution at the hands of those ironically cawing about anti-Christian bias.

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Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine and a contributing editor to The Montreal Review. His latest book is The Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Heavenly Virtues: A Visual History, published this month by Cernunnos/Abrams.

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