This week, Christian Nationalist Dalton Clodfelter announced a plan to smash American democracy and replace it with an unforgiving Christian dictatorship. He said:

As we hear Dalton Clodfelter say that “there should be no secular teaching in the schools,” we should clearly understand what the word “secular” means. There is no such thing as a secular ideology. Christian Nationalists talk about “secularism” as if it’s their enemy, but there is no such thing as secularism.

To be secular is to simply stand apart from religion in certain realms of life. Being secular doesn’t mean to abandon religion or to oppose religion. The word “secular” simply refers to things that are not connected with religion.

Religious people can be secular. To them, being secular just means that they recognize that there are parts of life where their religious beliefs and religious identity do not define and control what’s going on.

It’s like if a person is a college professor. Being a college professor is great, but most people can understand that being a college professor isn’t all there is to life. There are nonacademic parts of life, like being a member of a kayaking club. A kayaking club isn’t anti-academic. Kayakers don’t seek to outlaw academics. However, if a college professor joins and participates in a kayaking club, that professor acknowledges that the kayaking club is not under the control of his college, and isn’t about his field of study. It’s a separate thing. He doesn’t insist that all the other kayakers enroll in his courses or listen to him lecture.

Being secular is like that. Being secular simply means not cramming religion into every single part of life.

Dalton Clodfelter wants American children to grow up in ignorance of anything outside of Christianity. Why would he want to do that? Christian Nationalism seeks the complete elimination of all rivals, religious and secular, to their particular form of Christianity. It’s about gaining totalitarian control of society through the use of violence. Dalton Clodfelter himself says so. He says:

As Dalton Clodfelter says, he doesn’t seek to merely escort people out of their offices, or remove them from their homes through the due process of law. No, Christian Nationalists like Dalton Clodfelter want to rip. They want to tear. They want to physically attack, humiliate, and disempower every person who dares to disagree with their Christian ideology.

Dehumanized Demons

How could any person wish to do this kind of thing to another human being? Well, Christian Nationalists don’t believe that non-Christians are human beings. One of the religious beliefs of Christian Nationalism is that any person who disagrees Christian Nationalist dogma or refuses to obey the commands of Christian leaders is not truly a human being, but has been possessed by a demonic spirit that controls everything they say and do.

In Christian Nationalism, demons are not a metaphor. Demons don’t just represent unhelpful thought and urges. No, Christian Nationalists believe that demons are actual magical beings who have been created for no other purpose than to be evil.

Who created these demons? Ultimately, the Christian god created the evil demons, but Christian Nationalists don’t like to think about the moral implications of that.

This week, Christian Nationalist Lance Wallnau sent a message to his followers declaring that a demon’s dark magical influence explains all the troubles that the Republican Party is having recently. He said:

Think about what Lance Wallnau just said, and you’ll see that it doesn’t make any sense. Marxism, woke culture, progressivism, and being a demon are not conceptually compatible with each other. They’re all things that Lance Wallnau doesn’t like, but that doesn’t mean that they go together.

Marxism is a materialist political philosophy. It rejects all supernatural beliefs. Marxists don’t cooperate with demons, because they don’t believe that demons exist. The phrase “Communist demon” is a contradiction in terms.

I don’t like anchovies, and I don’t like vodka. That doesn’t mean that anchovies are a kind of vodka, or that anchovies are possessed by and controlled by the spirit of vodka.  You understand this, but such logical distinctions are foreign to Christian Nationalists.

The problem isn’t just that Christian Nationalists are cruel and want to destroy freedom in order to obtain power for themselves. Christian Nationalists also have problems with basic competence. They can’t think clearly.

Anger and an inability to think clearly are a dangerous combination. They lead people to accept outrageous ideas, and to become so stubbornly attached to those ideas that they seek to warp the reality around them in order to fit their outrage.

So it is that Christian Nationalist and NewsMax personality Grant Stinchfield, instead of pursuing a rational analysis of political issues, declares that an ancient Middle Eastern desert spirit named Satan has traveled to the United States and gained supernatural control over the Democratic Party.

How did Grant Stinchfield decide that a magical evil spirit has possessed the leaders of the Democratic Party? If scientists suspect that a person has contracted a disease, they have precisely-designed and empirically-tested methods for finding a pathogen. Religious people have no time-tested methods for knowing if a demon is at work? The signs of devilry are vague, like feeling upset about something, or seeing someone who fails to conform to the harsh and narrow frame of Christianity.

Satan and demons are perceived by Christian Nationalists whenever they encounter ideas that don’t fit within Christian dogma. It’s an intuitive judgment. Instead of trying to understand what they’re unfamiliar with, Christian Nationalists label it as demonic, categorizing it as evil. Whenever there’s something their religious dogma can’t explain, they declare it to be the product of supernatural evil beings, and double down on their faith.

This week, Christian Nationalist Kent Christmas gave a sermon in which he said that everyone who refuses to join in with Donald Trump is on the side of the devil. This Christian Nationalist frame demands absolute obedience, without ambiguity, so that when the time for action takes place, Christian Nationalists will obey whatever commands they are given, with no hesitation. Kent Christmas declared,

Let’s remember what Christian Nationalists really mean when they talk about people being forced to bow “at the name of Jesus Christ”. There’s no direct evidence that anyone named Jesus Christ ever existed. There are no writings from the time when Jesus is supposed to have lived that refer to him, and the details of the supposed life of Jesus are similar to older stories of the lives of other mythological heroes and gods of the Mediterranean region. Certainly, nobody has seen Jesus walking around. Jesus has never showed up on the evening news to explain his ideas about contemporary politics.

So, when Christian Nationalists preachers talk about forcing people to bow to Jesus, they’re really talking about forcing people to bow to the human leaders of Christian Nationalism. These preachers will happily take the place of Jesus, and enjoy watching political leaders forced to bend the knee in obedience to them.

Such a naked hunger for power seems detestable in most circumstances, but Christian Nationalist preachers place their demagoguery in the frame of a righteous war against pure evil, against magical demons. As Kent Christmas himself says, once you convince people that their human enemies are in fact demons, “there is no more grey area”.

This rhetoric is designed to cultivate absolute obedience through the dehumanization of all who refuse to obey.

Think about it. What would you do if you came upon a human being walking in the woods? You would probably wave your hand and you might say hello. You would be inclined to be friendly.

What would you do if you came upon a demon walking in the woods? You would either run, or you would fight. You would feel terror. You would feel justified in doing anything to that demon in order to escape it. You would feel justified in physical violence against that demon, even to the point of killing it. It’s not murder, after all, if the thing you’re killing is a demon and not a human being.

Now think about what it means when Christian Nationalist leaders like Kent Christmas and Grant Stinchfield tell their followers that Democrats are demons, and not human beings.

The purpose of the Christian Nationalist language that describes human beings as demons is to get Christian Nationalist believers into the mindset of combat, to perceive other Americans as inhuman, evil enemies who must be destroyed.

Christian Nationalists leaders are preparing their followers to commit violence against non-Christians, against Democrats, against LGBTQ Americans, against anybody who stands in their way.

Using language like this is one step in the planning of a genocide.

The excommunication that Lance Wallnau is calling for would be a bloodbath.