Charlie Kirk wants to remind you that you have to obey an Asian sky god because he delivered you out of Egypt... but wait a minute. You were never in Egypt, were you? When Charlie Kirk says that environmentalism is just nothing more than a god that you worship, it's only because he has become such an obsessed fanboy of ancient Middle Eastern mythology that he has become incapable of paying attention to anything else.

No, TikTok is not a god. Environmentalism is not a false idol. Atheism is not a psyop from Satan.

Christian Nationalism is lost in a bizarre fantasyland. We need more serious political leadership from people who are willing to pay attention to the reality we're actually living in.

Why does JD Vance get weird over the idea that women might live happily with a cat instead of pumping out babies in a marriage? Why do Christian Nationalists get so obsessed with other people's sex lives? It's all about control.

When churches are able to control people's access to sex and affection, they can control every other part of people's lives too. That's why Christian Nationalism supports totalitarianism. The Christian Nationalist hunger for control cannot be satisfied until its control over society is complete.

In defiance of Christian Nationalist schemes for control, cats, and the single women and men of America, will not be leashed.

Donald Trump recently promised Christian Nationalists that if they elect him, they will never need to vote again, because he’s going to make sure the government is “fixed” in their favor. What many people didn’t note was the way that Trump then praised the Puritan pilgrims that settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He said they came to America for freedom, when in fact they came to America to establish a hellish torture-filled authoritarian city on a hill.

The city on a hill of Puritan times wasn’t a utopia. It was a place of misery that people were desperate to escape. Puritan leaders themselves made it plain that they were opposed to democracy. They wanted Christian theocracy instead. Puritan leader John Winthrop wrote:

“If we should change from a mixed aristocratic to mere democracy, first we should have no warrant in scripture for it: for there was no such government in Israel. We should hereby voluntarily abase ourselves and deprive ourselves of that dignity, which the providence of God has put upon us, which is a manifest breach of the Fifth Commandment, for a democracy is, amongst civil nations, accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government.”

Donald Trump’s Christian Nationalism movement is seeking to return the United States to the bad old days of Puritan extremism. Ben Zeisloft, a prominent Trump Supporter online advocate for Christian Nationalism, declared this a few days ago:

“We need to restore true blasphemy laws. For centuries the entire Western world had statutes that prohibited the brazen public blaspheming of the Triune God. Now most of the Western world has the same types of laws, except to protect sodomy and other forms of perversion. We need the former and not the latter.”

Then Zeisloft cited a specific law from colonial times he wants to be re-enacted: The Act against Atheism and Blasphemy from the Massachusetts Bay Colony of 1697. This law provided for the public torture and execution of atheists and blasphemers.

“Be it declared and enacted by the Lieutenant Governor, Council and Representatives, convened in General Court of Assembly, and it is enacted by the Authority of the same, that if any person shall presume willfully to blaspheme the holy Name of God; Father, Son, or Holy Ghost; either by denying, cursing or reproaching the true God; his Creation or Government of the World: or by denying, cursing, or reproaching the holy Word of God; that is, the canonical Scriptures contained in the Books of the Old and New Testament; namely Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel, Samuel, Kings, Kings, Chronicles, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, The Song of Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkak, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Romans, Corinthians, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians, Thessalonians, Timothy, Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews, James, Peter, Peter, John, John, John, Jude, Revelation: Every one so offending shall be punished by imprisonment, not exceeding six months, and until they find sureties for the good behavior; by fitting in the pillory; by whipping; boring through the tongue, with a red hot iron; or setting upon the gallows with a rope about their neck; at the discretion of the Court.”

Brad Sherman, an Iowa State legislator and member of Donald Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition, supports an extremist restoration of the cruel and violent Christian Nationalism of ages past. Sherman perceives the purpose of Christianity as to conquer and dominate everyone in the United States and around the world. He writes:

“We are called to be soldiers in God's army - and we are supposed to win. Jesus has given us the authority and commissioned us to ‘...make disciples of all the nations’… We are called to boldly proclaim Christian values, not only in our churches, but also in the public square and make disciples of all the nations. We are called to prepare the way for the King and His appearing, at which time every knee will bow and the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord.”

At the end of last week, Donald Trump told a crowd at the Christian Nationalist Turning Point Action Believers Summit:

"Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won't have to do it anymore for more years. You know what? It'll be fixed. It'll be fine. You won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you, Christians. I'm a Christian. I love you. Get out. You've got to get out and vote. In four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good, you're not going to have to vote."

Speaker 1: Donald Trump is depicting voting as a terrible burden, as something that people don't want to do and that they shouldn't have to do. If the government is run right, and he's promising that he's gonna run the government in such a way that Americans will not want to vote again, and they will not vote in another election because things are going to be fixed.

When we were young, we were taught that voting was a civic duty, that voting a way for us to be empowered. It was a chance for us to be heard. It's not a burden. It's not a terrible thing. It's not a pain in the neck to have a voice in our own government. It's a privilege. It's something we should be proud of. But Donald Trump doesn't see it that way. He sees voting and having a country in which Americans turn out to vote as a burden, as an obstacle, as something that we would all be better off if it was just done away.

Donald Trump wants to fix it so that Christians never have to have another vote, never have to turn out on Election Day ever again, because their way of doing things, the Christian nationalist way of doing things, is going to become permanent. And that's another indication in this speech that Donald Trump intends to effectively end democracy in the United States.

Donald Trump and his supporters at organizations like Turning Point Action's Believers Summit believe in Christian Nationalism. Christian Nationalism is their core moral and political ethical foundation. They don't believe in the values of the Constitution of the United States of America. They don't believe in the worth of democracy.

New Apostolic Reformation leader Lance Wallnau claims that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is possessed by a demon. On Fox News, Megyn Kelly claims the Christian god planned the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

Instead of addressing the real challenges Americans face today, Christian Nationalists are trying to make the election of 2024 a referendum on ancient mythologies from thousands of years ago.

This spring, Tennessee passed a resolution calling on all the citizens of the state to make July 2024 a month dedicated to prayer and fasting, declaring the Christian god to be the king of Tennessee, in order to stop violent crime there.

We’re halfway through the month of July now. So, let’s look at the facts to see whether Tennessee’s month of prayer and fasting is working.

Crime reports from across Tennessee show that the state's high rate of violent crime is continuing. In the most recent violent crime in the state, a a 12 year-old girl was arrested in Humboldt, Tennessee and charged with first degree murder after she suffocated her 8 year-old cousin to death after an argument about an iPhone. If praying to stop violence has any effect, why couldn’t it at the very least have kept Tennessee’s children from killing each other?

They’ve got serious problems to deal with in Tennessee. Once again this year, the annual survey by CNBC ranked TN as one of the least livable states in the USA, with a score of F+.

Instead of taking concrete action to deal with Tennessee’s problems, state legislators are spending the month of July praying, and encouraging citizens not to eat.

Tennesse’s month of prayer and fasting shows that Christian Nationalism isn’t just a betrayal of the American way of life. Christian Nationalism is also a thoroughly ineffective form of government.

What Christian Nationalists did in Tennessee they want to do to the entire country. They want to replace good government with magical incantations.

America is in no condition to fool around with this kind of nonsense.

It’s time to put the fantasies of faith-based government aside and deal with reality.

The government of Tennessee can pray all it wants, but it isn’t helping. If the Christian god exists, he isn’t listening.

The facts show that Christian Nationalism is an ineffective form of government.

The Ziklag Elite is the first coordinated effort to unite wealthy donors to create a Christian Nationalist ruling class. The Ziklag Elite pushes for the Seven Mountains Mandate of the New Apostolic Reformation… and for special tax breaks and economic loopholes for America’s most powerful financial dynasties. The Ziklag Elite would create an American aristocracy in the name of Jesus.

Along the way, members of the Ziklag Elite want to create a Christian Nationalist big government system of centralized control over American culture. Members of Ziklag say that they intend to “take down the education system”, and to bring Hollywood under Christian Nationalist control.

Under the Ziklag Plan, 80% of American movies and television shows would be required to spread the message of Christian Nationalism. Ziklag also wants the federal government to require that all executives in movie and television studios are Christian Nationalists.

According to documents and video recordings obtained by ProPublica, in order to achieve its seizure of power, the Ziklag Elite plans to use its massive wealth to mobilize pro-Republican voters. Going even further, members of Ziklag have developed plans to prevent large numbers of other Americans from exercising their right to vote.

Ziklag’s Steeplechase project will encourage Christian churches across the country to break the law by making their congregations part of the Republican Party’s political machinery. A preacher working for the Ziklag Elite says that the group will “coordinate extensive pastor and church outreach through pastor summits, church-focused messaging and events and the creation of pastor resources …We need a church that’s willing to do anything and everything to get to the point where we reclaim that which was stolen from us.”

The Ziklaq Elite is also funded by other Christian Nationalist organizations. One of these is the extremist organization WaterStone, which is in turn funded by Fidelity Investments, which sends checks to the Christian Nationalist organization for six million dollars each. Fidelity Investments is heavily invested in other projects of Christian Nationalism extremism as well, having given at least $100,000 to the racist white nationalist magazine American Renaissance between 2015 and 2019.

Thank you to ProPublica for their research into the dangerous Christian Nationalism of Ziklag.

From Chuck Wichgers, Wisconsin State Legislator at the Republican National Convention, to David Brooks at The New York Times, everyone is preaching at you that America needs unity.

Unity is not what democracy is for.

Christian Nationalists and other conservatives crave for there to be just one answer and one source of power and authority for everything and everybody, but that’s just not how people work.

We disagree about things, and in a democracy, that’s how things are supposed to be!

David Brooks writes in the New York Time that a treasured cultural consensus has been lost, and that “science and reason failed to produce a substitute moral order that could hold the nation together.” What he never explains, however, is what makes cultural consensus matter. Why do we need one moral order to hold the nation together.

Democracy is about protecting difference, not about enforcing unity. Yet, David Brooks longs for a new religious power to bring Americans back in line, writing that, “this work of cultural repair will be done by religious progressives, by a new generation of leaders who will build a modern social gospel… the work of building that culture will take decades. Until then, we, as a democracy, are on thin ice.”

Christian Nationalists are never going to agree to a progressive religion modern social gospel. Progressive secular Americans will reject it too.

We shouldn’t be afraid of diversity. A pledge of allegiance to unity is antithetical to American democracy. Unity is an oppressive problem, not a solution.

There has been an assassination attempt against Donald Trump. You know all about this, of course. You’ve heard all the details, and much of the generic analysis of the situation.

I’m not going to bother repeating that. Instead, I’m going to speak specifically to the impact of this assassination attempt on the movement to resist Christian Nationalism. I’m going to talk about how this event changes the outlook for our resistance, and what it means for the form our resistance can take. I’ll also discuss how top Republican Party insiders are using the assassination attempt as an excuse to amplify their elevation of Christian Nationalism.

Republican former US Attorney General Bill Barr says, “Democrats have to stop their grossly irresponsible talk about Trump being an existential threat to democracy.” Yet, in the past few months, Barr has said the same thing about Joe Biden several times. Less than two weeks ago, for example, Barr said that “I think the threat to democracy and the threat to the United States and the most damage would be done by four more years of Biden.”

Republican and potential Trump vice presidential running mate JD Vance says that warnings about Trump being a potential dictator are what sent the bullets flying through the air: “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

According to JD Vance, guns don’t kill people. Liberals warning that Donald Trump wants to become an authoritarian dictator somehow send bullets flying through the air. Has anyone said that Donald Trump must be stopped at all costs? Well, there have been some…

A couple of weeks ago, when the US Supreme Court ruled that as a former President of the United States, Donald Trump has immunity for pretty much any crime he committed while President, a listener wrote a comment in response to something I wrote. He said that he was sick and tired of hearing people talk about the need for activism.

“People are always saying we need to get politically active, and it never comes to anything. It’s time we start throwing punches. We need to fight for our freedom, to take up arms to defend our democracy. I’m imagining a Civil War. I’ll take as many of them with me as I can.”

These were anonymous comments, left under a pseudonym. For all I know, they could have been left by Matthew Crooks, the 20 year-old who had been trained to use a rifle to shoot at people from a distance.

When I read these comments, I thought of a podcast episode created by my cousin, Anise Cook, as part of our project to provide Iowa voters information about a Christian Nationalist network that was helping Donald Trump win the Iowa caucuses and seize the Republican presidential nomination.

The following is a shortened version of what she said:

It's looking very dark. We're talking about a Republican presidential nominee proposing massive prison camps, and deportations, and the execution of his enemy, and the suspension of the Constitution, and using the military against peaceful protestors, about rooting out Americans like vermin, treating people like they're rats and cockroaches.

A person came to me and said, “I think we may have to prepare to fight back. We may have to prepare to defend ourselves.” The one thought that I had when I heard him say that is, if it comes to that, I don't want to fight back. If Donald Trump gains power and he actually does the things that he is threatening to do, if he enacts the retribution and punishment and judgment that his preachers are encouraging him to, I don't want to fight back.

I say, let them come and let them kill me, and that will be a fine death. Just don't make it slow, but fighting back is the one thing we must not do.

Here's why: Fighting back justifies their extremism. I knew back in the 1990s some anarchists who would go to places like Seattle, and they would infiltrate good, peaceful protests on good social issues, and then they would start to break glass and smash things, and the protests would lose all of their credibility. They would become street battles against the police, and it didn't bring any good end for the causes that people were protesting about. It only made it more difficult to go work on those issues. They were discredited.

They are looking for an excuse, and we cannot give it to them.

We're not going to defeat Donald Trump by fighting him militarily or through some kind of crazy guerrilla movement to try to rise up against him violently with guns if he becomes president.

If we actually believe in democracy and freedom, which means respect for all points of view and true diversity, we have to show what it means to get along in a nation with people with whom we desperately, desperately disagree, and that includes Donald Trump. And that includes people like the preachers of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition, even as they talk about punishment and vengeance and going to war against other Americans. We cannot meet them where they are.

We have to contest them democratically by defeating them at the polls in November 2024. It can be tempting to think that we're going to get angry and we're going to fight them. But when we do that, we are in danger of becoming them, of becoming a shadow of them.

When the Nazis rose to power, they did so based upon the excuse that communists were on the verge of taking over Germany, and that communist gangs of thugs were going through the streets of Germany and were endangering the people. The Nazis promised they were going to keep everybody safe. They were going to restore the peace. They were going to restore order. Donald Trump is using some of that same language now. He talks about criminal gangs of immigrants. He talks about Marxist thugs.

We need to demonstrate the values of democracy that we seek to preserve. And that doesn't mean that we're weak, and it doesn't mean that we're inactive.

It means that we show restraint. It means that we show discretion. It means that we get organized and we get active.

It means that we speak the truth instead of speaking with our fists. It means that we have to be dedicated to nonviolence no matter what. I hope that we can do that.

I am afraid that there are some people who do not desire such a thing. In the coming months, we shall see which vision holds.

In contradiction of the Christian Bible's claims that an all-powerful god will soon give all the political power on Earth to Christians, Christianity is on the decline in America. In order to avoid the cognitive dissonance inherent in Christian decline, the Republican Party has enshrined bizarre religious conspiracy theories in the 2024 GOP Platform, addressing a supposed international conspiracy to send a wave of anti-Christian migrants to invade the United States. The GOP platform also pledges to enable Christian students to pray and read the Christian Bible in public schools, although individual students are already free to do so, as long as they don't coerce other students.

In another weird plank in the GOP platform, Republicans would create a federal task force to protect Christian Americans from bias and persecution by the government. The only case of supposed discrimination against Christians by the federal government that the Trump campaign has cited, however, is the conviction of a woman named Paula Harlow.

Christian Nationalists claim that Paula Harlow was sentenced to two years in prison as punishment for engaging in peaceful prayer. That's a lie.

Actually, Paula Harlow was sentenced for forcefully entering a reproductive health clinic, chaining the doors shut, and injuring and intimidating medical workers and patients. Christianity and prayer had nothing to do with her conviction. Paula Harlow violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, plain and simple.