The American Taliban: How Christian Nationalism Took Over the Right

I. A Republic at a Crossroads

Across the country, faith and freedom are again spoken of as twin pillars of civic life, yet the balance between them is shifting. Inside state capitols, on campaign stages, and from prominent pulpits, scriptural language is being enlisted as governing doctrine. Pastors bless rifles and candidates, governors sign laws beneath wooden crosses, and consultants discuss “spiritual warfare” as if it were standard campaign craft. On the surface this looks like ordinary policy work, complete with white papers and staffing memos. Beneath that surface lies a bid to reorder public power around a narrow religious vision. Heritage’s Project 2025 is presented as a “Mandate for Leadership,” a thousand-page transition guide that reads like administrative planning. Critics argue it seeks something more consequential than efficiency, because it translates sectarian aims into the daily machinery of the state. ^[1]Heritage Foundation, 2023: “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.” For years, American conservatives warned about foreign ideologies that would use religion to smother individual liberty. The challenge today is recognizing the same risk when it arrives dressed in familiar colors, wrapped in patriotic rhetoric, and aimed at a pluralistic republic that was designed to protect belief by keeping government neutral.

II. The Theology of Power

At the center of this project is Christian dominionism, a doctrine that teaches believers should govern every major sphere of society, including government, education, media, business, and the family. ^[2]Religion News Service, 2021: “The Seven Mountains Mandate and the Rise of Christian Dominionism.” What once moved on the margins has entered the main arena through conferences, donor networks, and media ministries that speak confidently about national renewal. The language no longer treats faith as private conscience that guides personal conduct. It is framed as public mandate that should set the terms of civic life. At a ReAwaken America rally, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn captured the posture in a single line: “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion under God.” ^[3]CNN, 2021: “Michael Flynn calls for ‘one religion under God’ in U.S.” Representative Lauren Boebert pushed the same idea from the pulpit and the podium, dismissing the separation of church and state as “junk” and asserting that the church should direct the government. ^[4]WRAL, 2022: Fact check on Boebert’s remarks. That is not the conservative understanding of religious liberty, which protects the right to worship and to refrain from worship, and which guards every citizen’s conscience regardless of creed. Dominionism replaces freedom from coercion with permission to coerce in God’s name, a swap that undermines equal citizenship and invites the state to bless only one path to virtue.

III. Project 2025 — Blueprint for a Managed Theocracy

Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership spans more than nine hundred pages and organizes its vision around four pillars that sound familiar to conservatives: restore the family, dismantle administrative excess, defend national sovereignty, and secure God-given rights. ^[5]Heritage Foundation, 2023: Project 2025 press release. The details matter. In the Health and Human Services chapter, the document calls for a biblically based definition of the family and steers funding toward faith-aligned providers. In the education section, it seeks a full restoration of prayer and faith practices in public classrooms. In the Department of Justice chapter, it proposes staffing civil-rights offices with attorneys whose first charge is to defend religious liberty above all other rights. Read in sequence, these chapters do not merely trim bureaucracy. They reset the moral compass of federal power toward sectarian preference. ^[6]Heritage, 2023: Full Mandate for Leadership PDF (selected chapters). Personnel policy would do the rest. By reviving the defunct Schedule F classification, a future president could reclassify thousands of career civil servants as policy roles and remove them, then refill those seats through a Presidential Personnel Database and a training academy that pre-screens applicants for ideological alignment. ^[7]U.S. House Task Force on Project 2025, 2024: Subject-by-Subject Breakdown. Even federal statistics would be pulled into line, with proposals to recode national data around the “natural family” and “biological sex.” When theology becomes the yardstick, public administration becomes ministry. The framers protected faith by keeping it free, and they protected government by keeping it secular. Administrative reform that installs a single creed is not stewardship. It is capture disguised as process.

IV. Holy War at Home

In the American tradition, faith is meant to steady power, not to stoke it. That tradition is being tested by the spread of “spiritual warfare” framing into the daily language of politics. Candidates cast rivals as agents of evil rather than opponents in a constitutional contest. Pastors open rallies with prayer and close them with calls to fight, and the vocabulary of scripture is used as a tactic rather than a reminder of humility. On January 6, 2021, this outlook crossed the most visible red line in our civic life. In the Senate chamber, rioters prayed aloud in thanksgiving for what they thought God had allowed them to accomplish against “communists and globalists.” The moment, captured and reported in real time, shows how a sacred register can be misapplied to justify lawlessness. ^[8]The New Yorker, 2021: “A Rioter’s Prayer Inside the Capitol.” In the years since, pastors and influencers associated with the ReAwaken America orbit have spoken about politics as spiritual combat and about opponents as enemies of God, a frame that travels quickly through livestreams, podcasts, and revival tours. ^[9]Religion Dispatches, 2023: “The ReAwaken America Tour and the Danger of Christian Nationalism.” Public opinion reflects the risk. Surveys from PRRI and Brookings estimate that roughly a third of Americans fall into the adherent or sympathizer categories of Christian nationalism, and within that bloc a significant share agrees that true patriots may need to resort to violence to save the country. ^[10]PRRI / Brookings, 2024: “A Country at Cross Purposes.” A conservative defense of liberty cannot be squared with a politics that blesses force against fellow citizens. The more campaigns speak in terms of crusade, the less room is left for persuasion, compromise, and the peaceful transfer of power.

V. Women, Families, and the New Orthodoxy

Societies that mistake morality for governance usually begin with the body and the home. That pattern is visible in the recent waves of lawmaking that deputize citizens to police intimate decisions and that expand state oversight into classrooms and clinics. In Texas, SB 8 empowers private parties to sue those who aid an abortion, creating a bounty system that chills medical care and encourages surveillance among neighbors rather than stewardship by government. ^[11]Texas Legislature, 2021: SB 8 text. Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law invites litigation over classroom discussions of identity and has produced widespread self-censorship among teachers and administrators who must guess at the line between allowed and forbidden instruction. ^[12]Florida Senate, 2022: HB 1557 text. Missouri, once a bellwether, now criminalizes nearly all abortions through its trigger statute and restricts gender-affirming care for minors until at least 2027, exposing physicians to penalties for following standards endorsed by major medical bodies. ^[13]Missouri Statutes §188.017 (Trigger Law).^[14]Missouri Senate, 2023: SAFE Act (SB 49). The cultural perimeter narrows further in libraries and school districts, where thousands of book removals, concentrated in Texas and Florida, have targeted materials about gender, sexuality, and race. ^[15]PEN America, 2024: “Banned in the USA.” Defenders describe these measures as protections for families and children. The effect is to hand the state new leverage over private conscience and to swap individual responsibility for government inspection of belief.

VI. From Moral Majority to Moral Monopoly

American conservatism has worn many faces over the past half-century, from the Moral Majority’s call to virtue, to the Christian Coalition’s emphasis on family, to the Tea Party’s defense of limited government. The current phase emphasizes dominion, and it moves with unusual institutional discipline. Project 2025 represents the maturation of a strategy that began in pulpits and now operates through spreadsheets and staffing charts. ^[16]MandateForLeadership.org, 2024: Heritage Project site. Journalist Katherine Stewart describes the surrounding ecosystem as a parallel government in waiting, built from think tanks, law firms, and dark-money nonprofits ready to replace career professionals with ideologically vetted loyalists when the chance arises. ^[17]Stewart, 2020: The Power Worshippers. None of this looks like a coup. It looks like continuity, in which each wave inherits the last wave’s infrastructure and updates the vocabulary while aiming at the same target. The promise is influence. The trajectory is monopoly over the institutions that shape law and public life.

VII. Missouri: A Case Study in Managed Morality

Missouri shows how this program operates once it moves from proposal to statute. Within hours of the Dobbs decision, the state’s trigger ban took effect and made abortion a Class B felony for providers, with only narrow medical exceptions. ^[18]Missouri Statutes § 188.017. The 2023 SAFE Act prohibited gender-affirming care for minors, pushing families to seek treatment out of state and placing clinicians under threat of discipline. ^[19]Missouri Senate, SB 49 (SAFE Act). The legislature also moved against libraries after litigation over new rules on “sexually explicit” materials, voting to strip statewide funding until the challenge disappeared. ^[20]AP News, 2023: Missouri House votes to strip library funding. These are not isolated incidents. In 2017, state lawmakers overturned a St. Louis minimum-wage increase approved locally, asserting statewide control over a municipal decision. ^[21]EY TaxNews, 2017: Missouri overturns St. Louis wage increase. In 2025, they repealed or gutted parts of Proposition A, a voter-approved measure that raised the minimum wage and established earned sick leave, using procedural muscle to remove the inflation adjustment and the leave mandate. ^[22]KCUR/St. Louis Public Radio, 2025: Repeals of parts of Prop A.^[23]St. Louis Public Radio, 2025: Senate vote reversing voter-approved sick leave. Scholars of democracy now list Missouri among the states showing measurable backsliding, where supermajorities entrench power through maps, nullify ballot initiatives, and apply the budget to discipline dissent. ^[24]V-Dem Project, 2024: State-level democracy indices. The pattern reduces self-government to ceremony while decisions concentrate in a single faction’s hands.

VIII. Why This Is Un-American

Conservatism at its best defends ordered liberty. The Constitution secures the free exercise of religion and also forbids its establishment. Those two protections live side by side because the framers had seen what happens when thrones and altars merge. The First Amendment prevents Congress from favoring a faith. Article VI bars religious tests for office. Together, they shield the church from state capture and keep the state from becoming a church. Replacing civic consent with biblical decree does not restore the nation’s character. It repeals the settlement that made a nation of many faiths workable in the first place. The American inheritance is evidence, debate, and consent, not anointing and obedience. When lawmakers invoke God’s law to overrule the people’s law, they are not conserving the republic. They are crowning it, and they are narrowing citizenship to those who worship the way the majority in power prefers.

The empirical record underscores the danger. PRRI and Brookings find that Americans who embrace Christian nationalist ideas are much more likely than other citizens to justify political violence, to distrust elections, and to favor a strong leader willing to bend the rules when their values are at stake. ^[25]PRRI / Brookings, 2024: “A Country at Cross Purposes.” Calling out that trend is not hostility to faith. It is fidelity to the Constitution. Patriotism in a republic means loyalty to promises, not to the supremacy of one creed over all others.

IX. Conclusion — Theocracy in Slow Motion

Republics almost never fail in a single dramatic moment. They thin out across years, inside committees where policy is presented as prayer, inside agency budgets where dogma is relabeled as reform, and inside statutes that read like revival sermons in legal prose. The architects of this program warned for decades about zealots abroad who would erase liberty. The irony is that a domestic version now advances through paperwork, appointments, and appropriations. The same Constitution that some now cite selectively still provides the tools to resist: a secular state that protects the free exercise of religion, a free press that tests claims against evidence, and citizens who remember that self-government is a duty as well as a right. Faith belongs in public life as testimony and as motive for service. It does not belong on the throne of the state. The line between those roles is the line between liberty and dominion, and it is our responsibility to hold it.