Peter Wehner writes:

Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, has become an evangelist of a certain sort. During her tenure, her department has on multiple occasions released slick social-media recruitment videos in which scripture verses feature prominently.

One video quotes from Isaiah 6:8 (“Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, ‘Whom shall I send and who will go for us?’ I said, ‘Here I am. Send me.’”); another quotes from Proverbs 28:1 (“The wicked flee when no man pursueth; but the righteous are as bold as a lion.”). The most recent DHS video quotes from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”

What’s striking is less that the federal government is using Bible verses in its promotional videos than that the agency doing the recruiting is Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The videos, set to music, include militaristic images. They show heavily armed agents in tactical gear, weapons drawn, donning masks, looking through night-vision goggles, zip-lining from helicopters, breaking down doors, and conducting nighttime raids.

The message the Trump administration is sending is not subtle: ICE is doing the work of God. The brutal and sometimes lethal tactics being used by a growing number of ICE agents are divinely sanctioned. Come join this holy campaign.

Leni Riefenstahl would have approved.

The killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, has thrust the Department of Homeland Security into the red-hot center of American politics.

A horrifying video of Good being shot—one recent poll found that 82 percent of voters have watched it—provoked nationwide protests and vigils.

Noem, for her part, claimed that Good “committed an act of domestic terrorism” before she was shot four times at point-blank range. After Ross shot Good, a voice on one video could be heard calling her a “fucking bitch.” The Justice Department, meanwhile, is now investigating Good’s widow, prompting six federal prosecutors in Minnesota to resign.

The shooting in Minneapolis wasn’t surprising; under Donald Trump, and especially his immensely powerful aide Stephen Miller, ICE has become militarized, much larger, more aggressive, and less accountable. One former high-ranking Trump-administration official described ICE to me as a “paramilitary police force” under the control of Trump and Miller. (This person requested anonymity for fear of death threats.)

Miller has declared that agents possess “federal immunity,” while Vice President J. D. Vance has said they have “absolute immunity.” Trump, perhaps hoping for a confrontation, wrote on social media on Tuesday, “FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!” Defense Department officials told The Washington Post that the Pentagon has ordered about 1,500 active-duty soldiers to prepare for a possible deployment to Minneapolis, after Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, despite opposition from state and local officials.

Federal agents have already flooded the streets of Minneapolis. It is a city under siege; residents there say it “feels like an invasion” and compare it to a “military occupation.” Which is precisely what Trump wants. This has been the game plan all along.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”

The Bible-quoting videos that ICE is using to recruit agents have a certain logic behind them. DHS says it is looking to hire “brave and heroic Americans,” but it obviously has a special focus on recruiting young men who identify as Christians and whose attitudes and moral instincts align with Trump’s, especially on immigration. Majorities of white evangelicals favor deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons in El Salvador, Rwanda, or Libya without allowing them to challenge their deportation in court (57 percent), and approve of placing immigrants who have entered the country illegally in internment camps (53 percent).

“It has become virtually impossible to write a survey question about immigration policy that is too harsh for white evangelicals to support,” Robert P. Jones, the president of the Public Religion Research Institute, recently wrote.

Tobias Cremer is a member of the European Parliament. His book The Godless Crusade argues that the rise of right-wing populism in the West and its references to religion are driven less by a resurgence of religious fervor than by the emergence of a new secular identity politics. Right-wing populists don’t view Christianity as a faith; rather, Cremer suggests, they use Christianity as a cultural identity marker of the “pure people” against external “others,” while in many cases remaining disconnected from Christian values, beliefs, and institutions.

Many right-wing populists, despite being secular, are successfully recruiting Christians to their cause. And rather than Christians leavening the secular right-wing movements, those movements are prying Christianity further and further away from the ethic and teachings of Jesus. [Continue reading…]