Traditional Media Never Took the Christian Right Seriously
In the early 2000s, when we were outraged by the excesses of authoritarian dilettantes George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, a friend suggested I start a blog. I had been a lawyer, but I was eager to change careers. Having studied the rise of the Christian right as a student in the 1980s, I was now observing their aspirations unfold in real time. I wanted to investigate, expose, weigh in on everything that others were missing. I used to write quickly. I was built to blog.
I never started my own blog, but I was the lucky beneficiary of a series of serendipitous events that allowed someone with no entry point or foothold in journalism to find their way into it. Another friend told me about the group blog The Gadflyer (since, sadly, defunct), which is making its mark in the burgeoning progressive blogging space. They took a chance on me, and I wrote persistently about the Christian right, its attacks on secular law and governance, and the politics of money and power that drive it to Washington.
The digital media revolution made my two decades of reporting on the Christian Right possible. Not only because it offered a vast space beyond the coveted, exclusive pages of print magazines, but because the best digital journalism – and here I’m talking about reported, edited and fact-checked journalism, although opinion writing is also an essential part of the equation – requires a long-term commitment. It depends on a journalist who constantly explores an important corner of the political world and continually exposes and contextualizes that world for readers. This type of journalism is fundamentally different from the other type of online journalism born alongside it in the 2000s. Both appear in digital form, more agile than print, but the other type, which still torments us today, is the inside-the-beltway media coverage, focused on gossip, guaranteeing anonymity, which thrives on access and adrenaline rather than illumination and insight.
At that time, some, but certainly not all, newspapers and magazines were still reluctant to publish investigative articles on the Christian Right. Reasons given included recently publishing an article about religion or assuming their readers had not heard of the religious leaders who were the subject of the story. The unspoken reasons were an allergy to covering religion critically, for fear of being accused of disrespecting people’s faith, especially evangelical Christians. These people, by this reasoning, say they simply want to protect babies and families and express their piety in public. Who are we to judge? Some editors thought the Religious Right was too fringe to be relevant, or that the Republican Party didn’t really care about them and only used them for votes every fourth November.
Naive disbelief that a religious movement could actually direct national policy has paralyzed necessary coverage of the Christian right. His death was frequently announced, always prematurely and inaccurately. Too much media coverage relied on interviews with media-savvy insiders, like Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention or, early in the Bush presidency, megachurch pastor and National Association of Evangelicals president Ted Haggard. Even putting aside the fact that both of these men fell from their powerful perches due to (very different) scandals, relying on them to clean up a religious movement that was undergoing serious theological and political radicalization was doing readers a disservice.
The rise of Donald Trump has proven all these journalistic myopias to be catastrophically wrong. The story of Christian nationalists and Trump, of their feverish devotion to an authoritarian figure believed to be anointed by God, of their refusal to question that authority even in the face of mountains of evidence of abuse or lies, was there all along. It is the history of American evangelicalism, which is also, at present, the history of America.
In 2014, TPM published a story of mine that no one else wanted to touch. I had been working there for several years, with my reporting taking me to the United States and even Israel, which plays a central role in the apocalyptic theology and domestic politics of many evangelicals. Former members of the International House of Prayer (IHOP) have accused the organization and its leader, Mike Bickle, of myriad abuses, rooted in its demands for total capitulation to its unconventional apocalyptic theology that required attendance at a 24-hour prayer room in a shopping mall in suburban Kansas City, Missouri. Submission to his program of prayer and fasting in this insular, totalizing environment, Bickle convinced his acolytes, was essential to joining an army of spiritual warriors who would bring about the militaristic, bloody, and life-altering second coming of Christ.
Presenting this story had been hopelessly futile. The editors doubted whether their readers had heard of Bickle or his organization, and worried that the story did not have a clear connection to electoral politics. But Bickle was a prominent figure in the sprawling world of charismatic Christianity, which includes the New Apostolic Reformation and related movements that claim modern-day prophets and apostles are divinely ordained to receive direct messages from God and reinterpret the Bible to predict and explain events. They encourage their followers to engage in spiritual warfare against satanic adversaries – who are also the enemies of Christian America that they claim was ordained by God.
Even without the benefit of hindsight that these interconnected Christian nationalist movements drove Trump’s first election and sustained his support today, it was still a story worth telling in 2014. Bickle, regardless of his minimal role in explicitly electoral politics, influenced the thinking and policy of thousands of evangelicals and was a key figure in shaping the contours of a religious movement at the heart of GOP politics. And it is not unimportant that 10 years after my story appeared, something that my sources alluded to but lacked concrete evidence was revealed by the Kansas City Star. (Thanks to local print media!) Bickle is now embroiled in a massive sexual abuse scandal at IHOP, including his alleged grooming of teenage girls. These revelations forced his ouster, although his remaining allies continue to attempt to rehabilitate him.
In 2014, Mike Bickle’s radical theology seemed perhaps to inhabit the far reaches of American evangelicalism. But only by reporting stories like this, and studying how a seemingly fringe figure built an authoritarian empire to train an army of spiritual warriors, can we understand the evolution of these movements and their relationship to politics.
My 2015 TPM report on evangelist Bill Gothard, including the Duggar family 19 Kids and Counting The celebrity enlisted to rehabilitate their son Josh after his sexual abuse of his sisters became public, similarly with the fringe pipeline to the mainstream. Reality TV had sanitized the radical theology the Duggars had learned from Gothard and his organization, the Institute for Basic Life Principles. The myth of sexual purity around the Duggars, and around Josh in particular (his supposedly chaste courtship with his future wife Anna was a central storyline on their show) led to his political rise to one of the leading Christian right organizations in Washington. Duggar is currently serving a 12-year prison sentence following his 2021 conviction for possession of child pornography.
Trump fully understands how his Christian nationalist base uses spiritual warfare to paint a picture of an America under siege by anti-Christian, anti-American and satanic forces that only an anointed strongman leader can defeat. Trump’s rise to power did not happen in a vacuum, or simply because many Americans thought he was a successful businessman, or because most of them supported his brutal deportation policies. (It’s not.) A radical religious movement that sees strong leaders, even abusive ones, as essential to realizing a divine plan for themselves and for America, helped propel him to power and keep him there.
It is not because Trump (again) occupies the White House that this movement is dominant. It is extremely possible that the country will be led by an authoritarian regime fundamentally at odds with the desires of the majority, due to the way in which this movement, fueled by deep-pocketed donors, has become the core of the Republican electorate. It’s a challenge to tell this story, to help people understand that they don’t have to accept the fringe as mainstream, or adhere to their mythical claims to represent the “real” America. Especially now, as Trump seeks to punitively control the media, maintaining this type of coverage is absolutely essential to the task before us as Americans.
