Katherine Stewart — The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism

227 published claims from this book.

• A Catholic hospice’s silence on aid-in-dying pushed a terminal patient to suicide
• A Christian nationalist group’s awards fused conservative elites with hard-right extremists.
• A Christian nationalist nonprofit held data on nearly every US voter.
• A Christian-right organizer drove 14,000 miles visiting 2,500 Ohio churches to mobilize voters
• A convicted felon became a top organizer of Trump-evangelical meetings.
• A named set of plutocratic families underwrites the Christian nationalist movement.
• A pastor can decline patriotic ritual on religious principle
• A pastor who would face election fraud allegations was hailed as godly leadership
• A policymaker Bible study teaches that male leadership is God’s revealed order
• A prominent American fundamentalist preached that God authored racial segregation
• A prominent evangelical Bible teacher holds state welfare programs have no scriptural basis
• A retired general linked Clinton’s marital vows to the legitimacy of his orders
• A secretary of state publicly identified as an evangelical in diplomacy
• A seminary’s gender hierarchy was enforced by economic control of households
• A single board overlaps Capitol Ministries and Focus on the Family’s policy arm
• A sports-evangelist now leads weekly White House Bible studies for cabinet officials
• A ten-percent cohort claiming biblical worldviews drives the movement
• A think tank allegedly used covert tactics to take over mainline Protestant churches
• A transnational religious right seeks to replace democracies with faith-based ethno-states
• Abortion opposition once spanned both parties and was not partisan
• Abortion restrictions enacted in four years exceeded the prior decade
• Abortion was adopted as a rallying issue because it could unite disparate cultural conservatives
• Aggressive gerrymandering gives North Carolina Republicans supermajority power in a purple state
• America has repeatedly overcome reactionary authoritarian movements before
• America was religiously plural from its beginning.
• America’s founders created the first secular republic.
• America’s founders wrote church-state separation into the Constitution
• American Christian nationalist ministries expand by exploiting former British colonies’ Protestant ties
• American conservative Christianity exalts a hypermasculine, militarized image of Jesus.
• American religious-right leaders testified before the Russian Duma during its anti-LGBT push
• An ex-gay leader’s public redemption legitimately authorizes his movement’s condemnation of others.
• Anti-abortion absolutism fused with Christian nationalism to anchor GOP loyalty by 2016
• Anti-abortion was chosen after other rallying issues were rejected
• Antiabortion activism increases rather than decreases abortion rates
• Antiabortion activists favor private charity but not structural antipoverty investment
• Barton’s SAT-prayer correlation ignores rising test-taker diversity.
• Believers inside the same denomination read Scripture into opposite politics
• Bible study members translated the studies into religious-liberty policy reversals
• Bible translators masculinized Junia to protect apostolic gender doctrine
• Bible translators masculinized the female apostle Junia to match doctrinal gender roles.
• Biblical justifications supplied governing rationale for EPA regulatory rollbacks
• Biblical literalism reflects fear of change more than theology
• Boykin cultivated Christian nationalist networks in the military and disaster-relief NGOs
• Cabinet-level Bible study is funded through million-dollar donor galas
• Capitol Ministries operates on a stated mission to win governing authorities for Christ.
• Capitol Ministries’ real product is network access, not scripture
• Catholic hospital abortion bans deny care even after fetal death is certain
• Catholic hospital contraception bans leave HIV patients on teratogenic drugs unprotected
• Charters became the privately regulated route to the same privatization vouchers promised
• Child Evangelism Fellowship deliberately exploits child psychological vulnerability to recruit converts
• Christian conservatives purged pro-choice Republicans only by the mid-1990s
• Christian ministries target entry-level government offices to seed future policymakers with Bible study.
• Christian nationalism is a political ideology, not a religious creed.
• Christian nationalism is a technologically modern movement, not a premodern relic
• Christian nationalism is radical, not conservative, and undermines democratic institutions
• Christian nationalism operates as a top-down elite project, not a grassroots uprising
• Christian nationalism originated in proslavery theology of the American slave republic.
• Christian nationalism persists because underlying inequality forces still produce it.
• Christian nationalism preconditioned voters to accept authoritarian rule before Trump.
• Christian nationalism seeks power, not pluralistic cultural influence
• Christian nationalist activists receive explicit training in political messaging and strategy
• Christian nationalist audiences experience disgraced political figures as uplifting entertainers
• Christian nationalist Bible-study groups aim to saturate every level of US government
• Christian nationalist groups promised massive get-out-the-vote operations for 2016.
• Christian nationalist history follows a golden-age-fall-redeem narrative structure.
• Christian nationalist leaders recruit nonwhite evangelicals to secure their demographic future.
• Christian nationalist ministry networks are expanding globally into foreign capitals
• Christian nationalist operatives publicly deny party loyalty while using parties instrumentally
• Christian nationalist political theory centers monarchy, not democracy
• Christian nationalist politics is shaped top-down by wealthy funders, not grassroots voters
• Christian nationalist power operates through elite inside channels, not just voters
• Christian nationalist power rests on skewed electoral representation
• Christian nationalist priorities transformed American democratic institutions
• Christian nationalist strategy targets political leaders as force-multipliers for national evangelization
• Christian nationalist training manuals claim scripture prescribes a specific right-wing political platform
• Christian nationalists are a militant minority, not a moral majority
• Christian nationalists bank on turnout over demographic share to stay decisive.
• Christian nationalists collaborate with Russia because they reject America’s pluralist founding ideal
• Christian nationalists openly avow a ten-percent minority can seize power
• Christian TV hosts invoke Iran-style persecution threats to drive voter turnout.
• Christian-right election briefings mask partisan aims as civic activism
• Christian-right get-out-the-vote buses coordinate with Republican swing-district targets.
• Christian-right leader rhetoric is calibrated for an energized congregation
• Christian-right organizers merge church membership databases with voter records to target turnout
• Church United’s pastor membership grew from six to about five hundred in four years.
• Church United’s pastor-cluster model aims at replication across all fifty states.
• Churches design culture-focused voter mobilization teams to evade IRS political-campaign rules
• Churches plant in public schools at industrial scale subsidized by residents
• Churches route political campaigning through lay teams to evade IRS limits
• Conservative Christians originally welcomed Roe v. Wade as advancing religious liberty
• Conservative churches function as the get-out-the-vote infrastructure of a shadow party
• Conservative Episcopalians engineered diocesan secessions to form a purer church
• Conservative strategists judged school segregation too unpopular a rallying issue
• Courts redefined establishment harm as legal coercion only, ignoring social pressure
• CRT is depicted as indoctrinating children into oppressor-oppressed revolutionary politics.
• Decentralized Christian nationalist networks act as effectively as centralized ones
• Democracy can be ended and restored with the same tools
• Deregulated Michigan charter laws left abuses and poor academics unchecked
• Drollinger founded Capitol Ministries to evangelize state legislators directly.
• Drollinger’s Capitol Ministries was funded early by agribusiness donors
• Early abortion politics pitted Catholic lobbyists against Protestant Republicans, not secular against religious
• Economic and religious school reformers formed a coalition in Michigan
• Eleven of fifteen Trump cabinet secretaries attended the White House Bible study
• English churches opposing women bishops grow while mainline congregations gray and shrink
• Evangelical clubs deliberately exploit public school space to borrow its authority for proselytizing children
• Evangelical ministries now operate Bible studies inside the UN and State Department
• Evangelical pastor-mobilization organizers openly admit their meetings are political.
• Evangelicals adopted anti-abortion politics six years after Roe for political gain
• Extreme bills are introduced as positioning, not lawmaking
• Faith-based voter machines operate tax-exempt and shielded from scrutiny.
• Falwell preached Christian non-involvement in politics only while defending segregation before it became costly
• Federal contractor guidelines permit antidiscrimination violations under sincere-belief claims
• Feigned persecution, not actual threat, drives religious voter turnout
• First-wave feminists opposed abortion while second-wave feminists defended it.
• Free travel and fellowship lure pastors into organized political lobbying.
• Friedman framed poor children’s education as a charity matter
• Gathering women under a wife box despite her being a journalist embeds gender hierarchy
• Grassroots mobilization coexists with direct elite capture in today’s Christian nationalism
• Gülen movement chartered two hundred US schools via lawmaker junkets
• Hard-right control of North Carolina Republicans translated into laws restricting reproductive care
• Hard-right Republican power runs on volunteer activists mobilized by rage transformed into political therapy
• Invented persecution narratives, not actual threats, mobilize the religious-nationalist voter base.
• Judicial infiltration may outlast all other Trump administration damage
• Justice White warned in 1981 that speech framing empties the Religion Clauses
• Key New Right strategist wanted low voter turnout to boost conservative power
• Key theoconservative thinkers began as 1960s radicals before their rightward conversion
• King James Version literalism stems from childhood familiarity and fear of change.
• Latino religious-nationalist organizers recruit by redrawing outsider lines to exclude LGBT people.
• Leading evangelical figures framed Trump’s presidency as divinely ordained kingship
• MacArthur punished seminary staff whose wives held jobs
• Minority religions exercising the same rights are routinely excluded from schools
• Movement followers provide strength but not its ideas.
• Movement foot soldiers provide strength while leaders supply ideas
• Movement participants genuinely believe their stance predates modern political history.
• Movement strategy is a bottom-up capture of every level of government
• New Right ideology framed American capitalism as imperiled by communist enemies
• New Right strategists openly sought lower voter turnout to increase their leverage
• North Carolina exemplifies plutocratic rule despite near-even party demographics
• One wealthy donor reshaped North Carolina politics toward privatization and tax cuts
• Opposing Christian nationalists read the Bible as a condemnation of wealth-tilted systems
• Organic food brands are owned by far-right political Christians
• Pastor networks recruit politically connected congregants to lead voter-turnout teams inside churches
• Pastor-mobilization meetings are timed and placed to swing contested elections.
• Phyllis Schlafly conceived the cross-denominational religious right decades before Falwell
• Political movements must rewrite history before they can mobilize people around a new cause
• Premature declarations of the religious right’s death confused progress narratives with institutional continuity
• Private religious schools served as a vehicle for evading desegregation orders
• Pro-life organizations train activists in standardized debate responses for campus encounters
• Progressive religious movements lack the political-organizing capacity of Christian nationalists
• Provoked local conflict itself is a deliberate strategy to discredit public education
• Religious establishment was legally redefined as private individual speech
• Religious freedom activism is driven partly by fear of losing tax subsidies
• Religious freedom rhetoric means privilege for one sanctioned creed
• Religious liberty bills favor one precise creed over all others
• Religious liberty doctrine now licenses minority-led establishment of the dominant religion
• Religious liberty is deployed as a temporary tactic toward theocracy.
• Religious right childrearing doctrine frames infants as rebels needing force
• Religious status gives Catholic hospitals structural advantages like underfunded pensions
• Religious-liberty jurisprudence asymmetrically weighs believers’ burden against outsiders’ harm
• Religious-right lawyers shifted strategy from Free Exercise to Free Speech arguments
• Religious-right leaders openly seek dominance over all American institutions
• Religious-right strategists target children aged four to fourteen for indoctrination
• Right-wing data firms hold detailed profiles on nearly all registered US voters.
• Right-wing takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention proceeded by top-level coup
• Rushdoony argued transatlantic slavery increased Black freedom.
• Rushdoony equated welfare-state programs with slavery of Black Americans.
• Rushdoony fused capitalism with Christianity to condemn socialism as theft.
• Russian oligarchs weaponize pro-family messaging to destabilize Western alliances
• Schlafly dated the modern pro-family movement to anti-ERA organizing, not to Roe
• Schlafly linked anti-communism with opposition to feminism in New Right ideology
• School vouchers originated as subsidies for segregated white religious academies
• Secularization and demography did not end Christian nationalism
• Segregationist preachers patronized Black audiences while demanding gratitude for past white charity
• Segregationist schools’ tax-exemption fight catalyzed the New Right movement
• Several countries adopted CEF materials as mandatory school religion curriculum
• Sincere intentions can worsen a movement’s disastrous political effects
• So-called nonpartisan religious voter guides carry an unambiguous partisan message.
• Some Capitol Ministries patrons seek business access rather than doctrinal conviction
• Some pro-life Christians reject abortion as pro-life’s sole defining issue
• Speech-based reasoning grants religion a unique super-category never excludable
• State courts banned school prayer decades before the 1960s.
• State legislators proposed nullifying federal church-state separation via state law
• Symbolic religious bills are deliberate steps toward discrimination laws
• Tax exemptions tied organized Christian resistance to IRS enforcement during desegregation
• Tax-code limits on political activity do not restrain religious advocacy groups
• Taxpayer-funded Arizona charter schools teach a biblical nationalist version of American history
• The Bible is inherently political because it opposes oppressive power
• The Christian nationalist movement is forward-looking activism, not nostalgia for tradition
• The Christian right supports Trump for autocratic power, not shared Christian values
• The civil rights movement’s Democratic adoption made southern whites available to Republican appeals.
• The claim that churches pay for abortions is a knowingly false mobilizing narrative.
• The Constitution’s own structure refutes treating religion as mere speech
• The global religious right weaponizes distrust of journalism as a defense shield
• The Johnson Amendment was designed to stop tax-deducted church money reaching politicians
• The March for Life consciously adjusted racial representation while keeping leadership white and male
• The Master’s Seminary cultivated Drollinger’s patriarchal theology
• The movement viewed Trump’s election and Gorsuch as steps to ending abortion
• The New Deal presented conservatives an existential crisis demanding new strategies.
• The new doctrine allows symbolic establishment while only banning legal coercion
• The New Right founders launched with grievances unrelated to abortion
• The New Right openly aimed to destroy rather than reform existing institutions
• The New Right was built by copying the left’s religious coalition-building.
• The Project Blitz playbook nearly quadrupled in length within three years
• The Religious Right’s abortion politics predate Roe and were chosen for strategic reasons
• The religious right’s founding coalition was initially indifferent to abortion.
• The Republican party now hosts a movement denying Democrats any legitimate claim to power.
• The right adopted religious mobilization in imitation of the left’s success
• The source of UiP’s massive voter database remains unexplained.
• The Trump administration stopped enforcing the Johnson Amendment barring church politicking
• The US Christian-nationalist blueprint is being translated and exported abroad
• Theocratic leaders justify state violence by analogy to corporal discipline of children
• Theological conviction bundles economic privilege with political favor
• Trump blurred the public purse with private commercial interest like a monarch
• Trump could fill nearly a fifth of the federal judiciary through vacancies
• Trump enacted the monarchical role his evangelical followers assigned him
• Trump reframed religious liberty as license to discriminate.
• Trump-administration officials were courted through religious transformation rhetoric aimed at policy change.
• Trump’s cabinet drew members from prior Capitol Ministries Bible study groups.
• UiP targeted unregistered high-faith-score voters to flip slim-margin states.
• Undisclosed movement strategists architect the grassroots religious right.
• Violent religious school conflicts drove secular public schools.
• Voter guides are partisan campaign tools disguised as neutral
• Voucher advocate Diane Ravitch reversed to oppose vouchers
• Wealth inequality feeds religious nationalism by making anxious publics seek authority and order
• Welfare-cut theology conveniently serves wealthy evangelical donors’ labor-cost interests
• Weyrich’s conservatism centered on anticommunism and economics, not religion
• White evangelical support alone would lose Trump the presidency