Josh Hawley declared, 'Without the Bible, there is no America.' Another speaker titled his talk, 'How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Christian Nationalism.'įrom the Pilgrims to QAnon: Christian nationalism is the 'asteroid coming for democracy' Daily Wire talk show host Michael Knowles used his speech to argue that 'the traditional political order of the United States is Christian nationalism.' Missouri Sen. At the National Conservatism conference in September, numerous speakers embraced the term overtly. None of this seemed especially likely just weeks ago, given the increasingly explicit embrace of Christian nationalism by many leading Republican politicians and religious leaders. 'This really should have been a wave election,' said Bachmann, 'and now it doesn't even look like we're dog-paddling.' Lauren Boebert, who just this summer declared she was 'tired of this separation of church and state junk,' narrowly trails her Democratic opponent (in one of this election's biggest surprises) and ended Tuesday night with the sour-grapes prayer, 'Jesus, it doesn't matter who is in office because you are king.'įormer congresswoman Michele Bachmann, an early advocate of Christian nationalist policies, called the election results 'crashingly disappointing' after two years of pastors mobilizing their congregants to vote for 'biblical values.'

In Pennsylvania, Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano - who rejects the label 'Christian nationalist' but perhaps best exemplifies it, with his campaign full of prophets, shofars and spiritual warfare - was trounced at the polls by Democratic Attorney General Josh Shapiro. Amid conservatives' disappointed hopes for a 'red wave' in the midterm elections, one of the biggest losses appeared, at first, to be the ideological movement of Christian nationalism.

American Prophets by Jack Jenkins