‘A Bible-sized blind spot’: congressman sounds alarm on rising Christian nationalism

Crosses, shofars and “Appeal to Heaven” flags. Rioters praying with their hands aloft as police officers are brutalised. January 6 2021 is widely remembered as a deadly insurrection by supporters of Donald Trump; but for Congressman Jared Huffman, who was locked down alone in his office that day, something else stands out.

It was a very Christian coup.

“This Christian nationalist movement that I had seen growing so much stronger and more militant during my time in Congress erupted in plain view,” Huffman, 62, says by phone from his home in Marin county, California. “I truly believed January 6 would be the wake-up call our country needed to confront this movement to understand it and to hold it to account.

“Unfortunately, the country went back to sleep and many of my own colleagues who the mob wanted to kill that day didn’t even seem to notice the religious elements of the group that was trying to kill them.”

That is a big part of why Huffman is now deciding to sound an alarm of his own with a new book, No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy from Christian Nationalism. Contending that the US has a “Bible-sized blind spot”, it argues that the theocratic insurgency has only grown more powerful after Trump’s return to power and is now the country’s most dangerous political movement – a greater threat to science, education and freedom than most people realise.

No one is better qualified to make this case than Huffman, the only current member of Congress to admit he does not believe in God. He grew up in Independence, Missouri – the home of former president Harry Truman and historic headquarters of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (now the Community of Christ), an offshoot of Mormonism. A devout Christian, Huffman was ordained into its priesthood.

The first crack in his faith occurred during his sophomore year of college at UC Santa Barbara. The sudden death of his father triggered some questioning. “The bottom line is the supernatural tenets of my faith, the God belief, the notion of heaven and hell and miracles and so forth, no longer worked for me. That’s a hard thing when you lose your faith.

“It took me years of reflecting and thinking about it to determine that the things I liked about my religious upbringing, the universal values that are very much part of the Christian gospel, are available in all sorts of faith perspectives, including non-belief. They’re things that good people often innately do and think.”

Huffman settled on the label humanist. “The reason I prefer that to atheist is because atheist is a negative statement about what you don’t believe. That feels like it reduces me. Humanism is a much more affirmative expression of what you do believe, and humanists believe we have a duty to lead moral and ethical lives based on science and facts and reason. You choose to be a good person not because of some sky god or some inducement of an afterlife or fear of hell.”

For decades, Huffman kept his secular worldview private. In 2013, on his first day in Congress, he stood sheepishly before House speaker John Boehner, who asked, “Alright, who’s going to hold the Bible?” for the swearing-in photo-op. Huffman’s devout mother was beaming in the background. Caught off guard, Huffman put his hand on a Bible, a moment that left him feeling “sullied and hypocritical”.

The turning point came in 2017. Huffman’s mother had died, removing the fear of breaking her heart, and Trump had entered the White House, opening the floodgates of religious extremism. But when Huffman decided to go public as a non-believer, his wife, brother, senior staff and political advisers warned him it was “a terrible, career-wrecking idea”.

He explains: “They were giving me good advice because the polling to this day shows that the worst label you could attach to a candidate for public office in the United States is ‘atheist’. I appreciated them trying to protect me, but I also knew that I felt increasingly uncomfortable hiding my moral framework and ducking these questions about religion. I felt increasingly drawn into the fight against all of these encroachments of religious extremism into our government. I was on a collision course with ‘coming out’, if you will, and I decided to do it against that advice.”

Huffman received support from individuals including House of Representatives minority leader Nancy Pelosi, congressman Jamie Raskin, with whom he founded the Congressional Freethought Caucus, and House chaplain Father Pat Conroy, a guitar-playing priest who jammed with Huffman after hours. Conroy told Huffman that he wished more members of Congress would be honest about what they believed.

Huffman says: “I’m very glad I did it, but have I encountered some harsh judgments and prejudices? Absolutely. I’ve been called every name in the book. I have Democratic colleagues who are devout Christians who seem to take some offence at my public existence as a non-believer.

“They seem to feel that threatens or insults them as Christians, which is baffling, of course, because I don’t have a quarrel with Christianity or Christians, but it does speak to the privileged status of Christians not just within the Republican party, where Christian nationalism has become a defining feature, but even among my fellow Democrats.”

He defines “Christian privilege” as a deeply ingrained cultural taboo that protects home-grown religious radicalism from the same state and media scrutiny instantly applied to minority or foreign faiths.

That Christian privilege was manifested in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, Huffman argues, when many fellow members of Congress did not even seem to notice the religious elements of the group trying to kill them. It was evident again, he asserts, in one of the most consequential political cover-ups in recent history: the deliberate erasure of Christian nationalism from the final report of the House January 6 select committee.

As the committee raced toward its deadline at the end of 2022, its staff split into colour-coded drafting teams. The “Purple Team” was tasked with investigating rightwing radicalism, and they meticulously documented the role of charismatic evangelical networks, particularly the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), in radicalising and mobilising the shock troops of the insurrection.

Chairman Bennie Thompson told Huffman: “We asked the Purple Team to look into the role of religion in what happened, and they came back with a report that shows those people, rightwing Christian extremists, actually had a lot to do with it.”

But then came a veto. Liz Cheney, the committee’s formidable vice-chair, demanded the entire section be excised. She argued that focusing on Christian nationalism would “distract” from Trump’s personal culpability and alienate conservative Christian voters. Cheney’s argument prevailed.

Huffman says: “I give her huge credit for standing up to Trump at a time when almost no other Republicans would do it. That courage was very real, but she also did the country a huge disservice with her Christian privilege.”

If the attackers had worn hijabs or carried Qurans, he contends, the select committee report would have dissected their religious connections with “surgical precision”.

Against this backdrop, Huffman argues that modern Christian nationalism is not a monolith but a temporary coalition of three distinct, volatile and historically hostile religious subcultures, held together by the glue of Trump.

The biggest and politically most potent is NAR, a decentralised network of self-declared “apostles” and “prophets” who reject traditional denominational authority in favour of direct revelation. NAR prophets such as Paula White-Cain and Lance Wallnau cast Trump as a modern King Cyrus – a flawed, pagan ruler anointed by God to save his chosen people – to provide a divine permission structure for millions of evangelicals to overlook Trump’s moral failings.

On the Catholic flank are the “Rad Trads”, a small but highly influential subculture that resent the liberalising Vatican II reforms of the 1960s and believes that Catholic moral authority should govern the state. Sympathisers include vice-president JD Vance and political strategist Steve Bannon. Neo-nazi agitator Nick Fuentes openly calls for a “Catholic monarchy” to replace the US constitution.

Perhaps the most sophisticated and economically formidable faction is the “Theobros”, a network of Protestant Reconstructionists led by Pastor Doug Wilson of Moscow, Idaho. Wilson advocates for “Mere Christendom”, a system where the Apostle’s Creed is codified into the US constitution, women and non-Christians are stripped of voting rights. The Theobros have forged a powerful “Theo-tech bromance” with Silicon Valley venture capitalists such as Peter Thiel.

The ultimate Theobro is Pete Hegseth, Trump’s self-styled “secretary of war”, whose body is adorned with Crusader tattoos – including “Deus vult” (God wills it) and the Jerusalem cross – and who hosts a workday “Secretary of Defense Christian Prayer & Worship Service” in the Pentagon auditorium, broadcast live on internal networks.

Huffman comments: “The nicest thing I can say about Pete Hegseth is to thank him for his lack of subtlety. He is so cartoonish in his Christian nationalism that he provides a great case study.

“If anybody wants to know what Christian nationalism looks like in its most strident militant form, he embodies it literally in the tattoos on his own body but certainly in the rampant proselytising that he does and these overt power plays to institutionalise his version of Christianity in Pentagon prayer services once a month with radical hate preachers brought in as honoured guests.”

Nowhere is the advance of Christian nationalism more striking than inside the Capitol itself, which Huffman describes as a “shadow theocracy”. Visitors on official tours see statuary hall and hear speeches on the separation of powers; they do not see the sprawling, tax-subsidised “ministry-industrial complex” operating under the dome.

Pastors lurk like lobbyists the Capitol hallways, Huffman writes. The most influential is Ralph Drollinger’s Capitol Ministries, which hosts weekly Bible studies for members of the House, Senate and White House cabinet. Drollinger, a 7’2” former basketball player, teaches a “free-market gospel” that frames environmentalism as a sin against God’s dominion mandate and instructs cabinet members on how to inject biblical literalism into federal policy.

More than a hundred years have passed since Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was debated in the “Scopes monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee. But ideas long taken for granted are once again under attack. Huffman warns that Christian nationalism’s ultimate target is Enlightenment values that date back to Thomas Jefferson and the founding of the US in 1776.

In a chapter entitled “The Dumbing of America”, he quotes Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” He also profiles Mary Miller of Illinois, who began her congressional career in 2021 by quoting Adolf Hitler to a Moms for America rally: “Hitler was right, whoever has the youth has the future.”

In June last year, Miller had a moral panic when a Sikh cleric, Giani Surinder Singh, delivered a guest prayer in the House chamber. Assuming Singh was a Muslim, Miller tweeted: “America was founded as a Christian nation, and I believe our government should reflect that truth ... May God have mercy!” On climate science, Miller is equally blunt, dismissing solar panels because God “controls the sun, and the sun controls the weather”.

Huffman reflects: “This is potentially the unravelling of a 250-year truce between fundamentalist Christians and the Enlightenment. The stakes are much higher now than even in Jefferson’s time because then it was just about the form of government and individual liberty and protecting us against religious tyranny. But today, it’s about whether we cure the next disease or pandemic and whether we can survive the climate crisis. We look to these institutions of research and science and knowledge to allow us to keep living on this planet at a time when we’ve created some terrible threats to our own existence.”

Huffman insists the fight is still winnable but will require a broad coalition that includes moderate Christians, non-Christians and secular Americans. “We need to reckon with our Christian privilege problem, our Bible-sized blind spot when it comes to just speaking without fear or favour about this movement that poses as Christian. We’ve got to get more comfortable working across different faith perspectives in a pro-democracy coalition.”

But he also offers a warning from history: “I am thinking a lot these days about the final unraveling of the Weimar Republic in the early 1930s. From what I have read and studied about that, Hitler and his National Socialist party were a small minority that could easily have been stopped right up to the end had the centrist parties and the left been able to overcome their differences and work together.

“They couldn’t do it, and so they left the lane wide open for Hitler to become chancellor, and the rest is a very grim part of our history. That’s absolutely how the United States could unravel and evolve into fascism – and Christo-fascism in our case.”