In response to rising concern among liberals and others about the spread of Christian nationalism, conservative voices have been pressing a counterattack, claiming all this fretting is just lefty hysteria from secularists who are not willing to acknowledge the role of Christianity in American society and who want to brand all politically active Christians as extremists. Last year, the far-right Heritage Foundation published an article declaring that Christian nationalism is a term “mostly used as a smear against conservative Christians who defend the role of religion in American public life” and that the “lack of standard definition allows critics to bundle evils like white supremacy and racism with standard conservative views on marriage, family, and politics.” More recently, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, addressing liberal unease, wrote, “Today’s religious conservatives are mostly just normal American Christians doing normal American Christian politics, not foot soldiers of incipient theocracy.” He added, “It’s not clear to me that secular liberals should really fear Christian nationalism more today than in 2000 or 1980.”

Really?

By now, you’ve heard of Project 2025, the enterprise established by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing outfits to both set a radical-right agenda for a possible second Trump term and recruit Dear Leader loyalists for government posts in that administration. As I’ve noted, this venture has cooked up plans and measures with an authoritarian bent. It also has been preparing to inject Christian nationalist ideas into a Trump 2.0 presidency. One example from the Project 2025 handbook: “maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.” That does sounds a bit Gilead-ish.

The anti-anti-Christian nationalists’ effort to cast libs as the-sky-is-falling worrywarts is either naive or a purposeful effort to deflect attention from this threat to civil society. And though it usually is best to avoid dependence on one data point, allow me to zero in on a single tweet that appeared recently to highlight the danger.

Following President Joe Biden’s recent State of the Union speech, William E. Wolfe, a midlevel official at the Pentagon and the State Department during the Trump administration and a Christian nationalism advocate, tweeted out his response. Here it is in full:

My response to the #SOTU:

We need to see the deeper spiritual realities at play. This ain’t just a political fight, it’s a spiritual war. Heaven and Hell are real. Demons exist.

And there are two main demons being worshipped in America right now:

1) Molech, who demands child sacrifice (abortion)

2) Baphomet, whose demonic goat-like representation is gender-bending (LGBTQIA+) The “Equality Act” and “Reproductive Rights” aren’t just “policies” that the radical Left/Democrats support

 They are sacraments, acts of worship to their demon gods

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” Ephesians 6:12  

It’s time for Christians to call on America to repent of our idol worship of demons and return to the One True Living God and His Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ

Maybe God raise up more idol smashers for our days yet.

This tweet illustrates a basic component of Christian nationalism: spiritual warfare. That’s the notion that all that transpires in our world is a manifestation of the mammoth and eternal clash between God and Satan. The tussle over abortion is not an argument between fellow citizens with conflicting views on bodily autonomy or the question of when life begins; it is a battle between Jesus and Lucifer. Consequently, those who support reproductive freedom are demons or, at the least, in league with or controlled by demons.

Wolfe contends that Americans who champion reproductive rights are doing so as a ritual sacrifice to Molech, who in the Bible appears to be a Canaanite god (though there’s disagreement among scholars over who or what Molech is). And he insists that passing LGBTQ protections is a form of praying to Baphomet, a deity that the Knights Templar, a Catholic military order active early in the second millennium, were accused of worshipping that later became associated with the occult. (You might recall the Knights Templar from The Da Vinci Code and the Indiana Jones movies.)

This is esoteric stuff and a bizarre and troubling political analysis. Yet it’s telling. Wolfe sees the political opposition to Trump, Christian fundamentalism, and conservatism as literally a satanic force. How then can he and his comrades expect to have civil discourse with it? You certainly cannot work with or strike legislative compromises with actual demons. And why should you accord them or their allies any civil rights or protections? These servants of the devil must be crushed by any means necessary to make way for a nation that is ruled according to the precepts of Christian fundamentalism, right? This is the core of Christian nationalism.

Now why should we care about the radical view of this one fellow? Wolfe is a close associate of Russell Vought, who was budget director for the Trump White House and now is president of the Center for Renewing America, one of the right-wing organizations behind Project 2025. As Politico recently reported, “Vought’s beliefs over time have been informed by his relationship with Wolfe. The two spent time together at Heritage Action, a conservative policy advocacy group. And Vought has praised their yearslong partnership. ‘I’m proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism,’ he posted on X, then Twitter, in January 2023.”

Wolfe, who is now the executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership (which battles liberalism within the Southern Baptist Convention) and who has advocated ending sex education in schools, surrogacy, and no-fault divorce, is far from a rando. He’s intimately tied to the fellow who is the architect of the next possible Trump administration and who has been mentioned as a potential White House chief of staff for Trump.

There are many carnival barkers within Christian nationalism. For instance, disgraced former Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn, who has embraced the banner of white Christian nationalism and proclaimed, “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God.”

Or Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers, who called on men to “fight for Jesus” so the world will be “dominionized” and “conquered” for Jesus.

Yet the most devilish ones are those like Wolfe who are scheming to burrow into the government to advance their radical religious agenda.

Like Douthat and the Heritage Foundation, Wolfe dismisses liberal critics of Christian nationalism. “Apparently, any Christian who wants to see just laws grounded in biblical principles and Christian morality enacted in America these days is now a scary ‘Christian nationalist,’ according to secularists,” he wrote last month. What these detractors want, he added, “is nothing less than to silence politically engaged conservative Christians.”

Yet Wolfe himself goes far beyond the Christian conservatism that underlies the right’s opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage, and much else. He is promoting a Manichean worldview that holds that only the Christians he deems true Christians deserve to serve in government. Dismissing criticism of Christian nationalism as a sneaky liberal ploy to attack all right-of-center Christians is profoundly disingenuous. But I suppose when you’re combatting Beelzebub in the name of Jesus, the Ninth Commandment is not operative.

Back to Douthat. In his column, he concluded that “religious conservatism” would “influence a second Trump administration,” but “it would be the influence of an important but weakening faction in a de-Christianizing country, not a movement poised to overthrow a secular liberalism.” He should spend some time with Wolfe.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

A reminder: We’re hosting another Our Land Zoom get-together on March 20 at 8:00 p.m. ET. We’ll be discussing whatever is on the minds of readers and myself. (Anyone else obsessing over Premier League football—that’s soccer—these days?) As always, this online gathering is open only to premium subscribers to this newsletter. On Wednesday, we will zap out a Zoom link to premium subscribers only. All you have to do is hit the link at the start time. So please join me and your fellow Our Land readers for an evening of good chat and camaraderie. Hint, hint: If you sign up today as a premium subscriber, you will receive the invitation.

Constellation. What is it about Apple TV+? It keeps serving up this creepy, alt-reality, languorously paced series. I’m thinking Invasion, Severance, The Big Door Prize. (Severance is scintillating; Invasion, not so much.) And now comes Constellation. This German- and Finnish-financed series starts with an global crew of astronauts on the International Space Station, including Jo Ericsson (Noomi Rapace), a Swede. As NASA spaceman Paul Lancaster (William Catlett) starts up an experiment designed by former-astronaut-turned-quantum-physicist Henry Caldera (Jonathan Banks) to discover a new type of matter, an object slams into the station, wreaking havoc. Lancaster dies; the station’s oxygen supply is threatened. The rest of the crew, sans Ericsson, manage to pilot a capsule back to Earth. She stays behind to rig another one for a perilous return trip that she ends up surviving.

Yet back on Earth, things seem a bit off for Ericsson. She has trouble connecting with daughter Alice and husband Magnus. Is she experiencing PTSD or some form of space psychosis? Has she returned to a reality slightly different than the one she left? (The color of the family car isn’t the same as it was. There’s a piano in the house that wasn’t there before.) Right before the accident, it seems, Caldera’s experiment isolated a particle that existed in two places at the same time. Is this relevant? (You betcha.) It's all a bit confusing—for Ericsson and us—yet fascinating. As she strives to sort all this out—which puts her at odds with her family and colleagues—she encounters what appears to be a conspiracy to keep her drugged up and quiet. And the story is even more complicated than this thumbnail description.

The astronaut-comes-back-from-space-and-goes-nuts plot has been done before. But add in quantum physics and space-agency politics, and Constellation feels fresh. Each episode, at least through the first six, tends to present more questions than it answers. But it’s sufficiently engaging to keep us on the hook. (Banks, who played fixer Mike Ehrmantraut in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, is reason alone to watch.) Ericsson made it back from space. But can she find a way home?

Karl Wallinger. Welsch musician Karl Wallinger, one of the best pop rockers in the business, died last week at the age of 66. He was primarily known as the front man in the mid-1980s for the Waterboys, which had a monster hit with “The Whole of the Moon.” But Wallinger was a personal favorite for the post-Waterboys work he did with a solo project called World Party that produced five studio albums. Across these discs, Wallinger, a multi-instrumentalist, showed himself to be a musical polyglot well-steeped in the genre of rock—mainly the British version but also beyond. His songs, chockful of engaging hooks and powerful melody lines, channeled the essences of the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Prince, and David Bowie without being derivative. He paid homage to the greats in the best way possible—building upon their genius with his own. I never met the fellow, but I always imagined him to be a walking rock music encyclopedia. The Guardian’s obit hailed him as a “pick’n’mix songwriter with a total, titanic love of music.”

Perhaps the most prominent song that emerged from Wallinger’s World Party musical laboratory was “Ship of Fools,” a tune of majestic sweep that rails against the “avarice and greed” of the day. But his World Party records yielded a host of songs that sounded like instant classics, including “Put the Message in the Box,” “Way Down Now,” and “She’s the One.” A cover version of that last one by British singer Robbie Williams became a No. 1 hit in the UK. If you’re not familiar with Wallinger’s wonderful work, you’re in for the treat. Start with these tracks. I wouldn’t be surprised if you swear you’ve heard them before—a testament to his brilliance.

March 16, 2024: Time to unleash Kamala Harris to trigger Trump; Our Land needs you; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Dwight D. Opperman Foundation); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

March 12, 2024: Jared Kushner and the award that’s not good for the Jews; old cops versus new cops in Criminal Record; James Grady delivers a different mystery with The Smoke in Your Eyes; and more.

March 9, 2024: Trump’s back on top, and this is not fine; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Mark Robinson); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

March 5, 2024: The threat to democracy from white rural rage; the common flaw of Maestro and Napoleon; Tierney Sutton’s jazzy take on the racial wealth gap; and more.

March 2, 2024: Barbara McQuade on disinformation in 2024; Richard Lewis, RIP; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Sen. Tommy Tuberville); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

February 27, 2024: The new “It Can Happen Here” project; the darkness of True Detective: Night Country; and more.

February 24, 2024: The racism is the point; the Smirnov affair; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

February 21, 2024: The great forgotten betrayal of the Trump years; the fifth season of Fargo gets political; the Black Keys get funky; and more.

February 17, 2024: A refresher on Trump’s porn-star/hush-money case; a farewell message from Alexei Navalny; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Jared Kushner); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

February 13, 2024: Joe Biden’s age and how the media covers it; The Greatest Night in Pop lives up to its title; Slow Horses and For All Mankind and the challenge of producing high-quality television; and more. 

February 10, 2024: Biden or Trump and the memory hole; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Marjorie Taylor Greene); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.