CNN reports:

There’s an image that captures the threat posed by the White Christian nationalist movement — and how it could become even more dangerous over the next four years.

Taken during the Jan. 6 insurrection, the photo shows a solitary White man, his head pressed in prayer against a massive wooden cross, facing the domed US Capitol building. An American flag stands like a sentinel on a flagpole beside the Capitol under an ominously gray sky.

The photograph depicts a foot soldier in an insurgent religious movement trying to storm the halls of American power. What’s unsettling about the photo four years later is that much of the religious zeal that fed the insurrection is no longer outside the gates of power. Many of that movement’s followers are now on the inside, because their Chosen One, Donald Trump, returns this month to the Oval Office.

This is the scenario Americans could face in Trump’s second term. Under Trump, Christian nationalists will have unprecedented access to the power of the federal government. Trump’s GOP has unified control of Congress. And a conservative supermajority, which has already blurred the line between separation of church and state in a series of decisions favoring Christian interests, controls the US Supreme Court.

Trump has not been shy about what comes next. He ran a presidential campaign that was infused with White Christian Nationalist imagery and rhetoric. He vowed in an October campaign speech to set up a task force to root out “anti-Christian bias” and restore preachers’ power in America while giving access to a group he calls “my beautiful Christians.”

“If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before,” Trump told an annual gathering of National Religious Broadcasters in Tennessee during a campaign stop earlier this year.

Trump won the support of about 8 in 10 White evangelical voters in November’s presidential election. Nearly two-thirds of White evangelical Protestants in the US described themselves as sympathizers or adherents to Christian nationalism in a February 2023 survey.

Scholars have called White Christian nationalism an “Imposter Christianity” whose adherents use religious language to cloak sexism and hostility to Black people and non-White immigrants in a quest to create a White Christian America.

So what might life look like over the next four years for Americans who don’t subscribe to this movement?

CNN asked that question of Kristin Kobes Du Mez, one of the nation’s foremost authorities on Christian nationalism. Du Mez is a historian and the author of the New York Times bestseller, “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.” Her book has become a go-to source for understanding Christian nationalism. It explains how the movement’s tentacles reach deep into American history and pop culture.

To many people, declaring America a Christian nation may seem harmless. And it’s important to distinguish Christian nationalists from patriotic Christians who have a more inclusive view of what America should be. But Du Mez says Christian nationalism is ultimately incompatible with American democracy. [Continue reading…]