New Apostolic Reformation...

...what could be dangerous about that?

This month I’m sharing some bite-sized nuggets about a mammoth challenge in our country right now: Christian nationalism. This week I was originally going to talk about the documentary series “Shiny Happy People” on Amazon Prime, because a lot of people don’t realize that the dad in the tv show “19 and Counting” was using the show as a recruitment tool for the Institute for Basic Living Principles, a terrifying Christian nationalist cult that is actually providing paramilitary training to their young men, whose focus on the primacy of male leadership allowed awful things to happen to women and girls unchecked for decades. However, there’s so much Christian nationalism to choose from that I wanted to make sure you knew about a maybe more powerful and more insidious organization first: the New Apostolic Reformation, which only came on my radar in the last month or two, but which has been gaining power for years. And when I say power, I mean in the halls of Congress in particular. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls it “the biggest threat to democracy you’ve never heard of.”

Christian Nationalism today:

We’re talking this month about Christian Nationalism, the ideology that maintains that this has always been a Christian nation rather than a secular democracy and the government should declare it such and use Christian values to guide our laws. There’s an organization called the New Apostolic Reformation, which our two recent speakers of the House, Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson, are both connected with. The New Apostolic Reformation has supported Trump’s claims that the 2020 election results should have been overturned.

They also promote something called the Seven Mountain Mandate, that the following sectors should be led by Christians and reflect the will of God: government, family, religion, business, education, media, arts and entertainment. As former Christian nationalist and current professor at University of San Francisco Brad Onishi describes it, this is not about convincing people to become Christian but to functionalize colonize the world. Folks with this ideology are not in favor of democracy if it threatens their agenda…and their agenda is a threat to any of us who believe in equality, in peace, and in the basic protections we’ve been promised in this country. Keep an eye out for the New Apostolic Reformation.

Christian Nationalism in the days of segregation

You may have grown up thinking that the religious right was formed because of their concern about abortion. Actually, though, Evangelical Christians like Jerry Falwell didn’t get involved in protesting abortion rights until 9 years AFTER Roe was passed; in fact, the SBC endorsed the Roe decision at the time. The real reason for the emergence of the Religious Right? They were ticked off that they weren’t allowed to have tax exemptions for all-white private religious schools, sometimes called “segregation academies".” It turns out, what the religious right cared about was the right to keep Black people out of their schools and to keep their kids out of integrated public schools. But when conservative strategist Paul Weyrich saw what was going on, he told them abortion was a much more effective issue for building power, and it sure was. This is history I only learned in the last five years, and I know a lot about the religious right. But their talent at telling their own story meant that until recently, I really thought abortion was the crystallizing issue for the religious right in the 1970s! The more you know…

For an academic journal article tying the segregation schools of the late 1950s to the funding of church-based private schools today, check out this piece from the Northwestern University Law Review.

1960s-style resistance to Christian white nationalism

While we’re talking mostly about Christian nationalism, I want to share a story of some amazing forebears or ancestors who fought back against white states’ rights, the 1960s equivalent of Christian nationalism today, as we know from the “segregation academies” the religious right supported at the time. Did you know that in Virginia, the Prince Edward County public schools were shut down by the governor in 1959 so they wouldn’t be forced to integrate? An all-white private school was formed, and any parents who didn’t or couldn’t send their children there had to find other solutions.

The forebears I want to lift up are the Quakers who helped Black children find other schools and even foster families in other states so they could continue to get an education, and maybe even more so the Black educators who formed a local grassroots school to teach children math and English but also Black history and citizenship, and the students and lawyers who used the courtroom and school board meetings as the battleground for justice. The grassroots school did not seek certification, because the Black teachers and churches did not want to get into the business of private schools; they believed in public schools. And some of the parents who sent their kids to other states to go to school sometimes had to technically place their children into state custody simply so their children could learn, which is a cruelty of the system and a level of self-sacrifice I want to honor.

For a story on a community seeking to address the ongoing reality of segregation academies today, check out this piece from Propublica.

An only vaguely related rant: While last month we focused on Project 2025 and this month we’re focusing on Christian nationalism, I want to complain briefly about Agenda 47, which is Donald Trump’s campaign agenda. Specifically I want to complain about his goal to heavily tax private schools endowments and funnel them into an online university. BECAUSE HIS ONLINE UNIVERSITIES HAVE DONE SO WELL IN THE PAST. He wants to do this because “We spend more money on higher education than any other country and yet, they’re turning our students into communists and terrorists and sympathizers of many, many different dimensions.” I’m at one of those well-endowed private universities and anyone who thinks they’re churning out communists and terrorists should walk through the Wharton Business School at UPenn with me sometime. I mean, Trump and Elon Musk claim to have gone there, and it sure didn’t work on them. Also, Trump was ordered to pay $25 million to the people he defrauded with Trump University, so … I just can’t even.

This image is not related to the content. I just needed something fun and encouraging and thought you might, too. Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Keep an eye out for potential allies.

I mentioned last month that part of how Portugal resisted anti-democratic coups in the 1970s was the collaboration of the moderate left and radical left. That understandably felt like bad news rather than good news to some folks, and that makes sense: France, Germany, Spain, and Italy all ended up exposed to fascism because of the failure to maintain a functioning coalition across the left. So I wanted to share with you a group I came across recently: Evangelicals for Democracy. They’ve developed fact sheets on Christian nationalism, QAnon and more so people can talk with evangelical friends and family about the threats to democracy today. I think it’s worth thinking about who our potential allies are in the work to come.

Whimsical meme that gave my joy earlier this month:

There’s a fun little post making the rounds of the socials. It simply says, “We should come up with an abbreviation for Nationalist Christians to save time. Henceforth, they will be called Nat-C’s.” I thought you might love it as much as I did. I hope you have a great and democracy-saturated week.

with gratitude,

Sandhya