Christian Nationalism can be terrifying. It’s easy to recognize when the ideology appears in its most extreme form. Christian Nationalists like Nick Fuentes and Bill Grady are explicit about the ideological consequences of the belief that the United States is a Christian nation. They proudly share their hatred of queer folks, non-Europeans, and non-Christians. They celebrate violence and deplore democracy. They sound like what they are: Proteges of Adolf Hitler.

More commonly, Christian Nationalism is manifested in a form that’s more subtle, so that at first it appears to be moderate and mild.

So it is with Pastor Zack Randles of the Waterfront Church in Washington DC. Zack Randles is politically connected, so he’s often invited by the official Chaplain of the US House to give prayers before the House of Representatives.

Pastor Zack Randles performed the following prayer last week to provide an official religious opening for the day of work in Congress:  

Why should the U.S. representatives listening to Zack Randles be grateful to the Christian god for their positions in Congress? What did the Christian god do to place Americans under the leadership of members of Congress? It was the American people who chose their congressional representatives.

The language from Zack Randles about shepherds is particularly strange, if you think about it. Christians might be used to hearing about being treated like sheep, but the rest of us don’t think of ourselves as herd animals.

There are no sheep in Congress, but Zack Randles is calling for members of Congress to be handled and controlled as if they are sheep. He doesn’t mean, of course, that members of Congress should be put out in a pasture and be forced to eat grass. This is a metaphor, and a profoundly insulting one. With his language of shepherds, Zack Randles is calling for members of Congress to submit to being herded about like animals, to being controlled by the Christian god as if they have no more intelligence than a farm animals.

Making matters worse, Zack Randles then calls upon members of Congress to treat the American people in this demeaning way.

Zack Randles calls himself a pastor. A pastor is a person who herds animals. Zack Randles doesn’t actually herd animals, of course. He doesn’t work in a pasture. He herds people. He herds people in his church, and as a Guest Chaplain in the US House, he feels that he’s entitled to herd the elected officials of the US Congress. His farm animal metaphor continues:

With this prayer, Zack Randles abandons all pretense of a non-sectarian prayer that only embodies a bland, neutral Ceremonial Deism. Zack Randles specifically calls for members of the United States Congress to be controlled like farm animals by the divinity of Christianity.

No member of any other religion has ever been granted the authority to get up before Congress and demand that the United States government become transformed into a collection of animals under the control of a non-Abrahamic spirit. Christians only are allowed the power to display such arrogance in the US federal government.

Christian Nationalists like to pretend that they’re persecuted, that they’re marginalized, that they’re shoved aside and disempowered. Official government prayers like this one prove that’s not the case. Christian Nationalists like Zack Randles are given an official government platform every week to stand before members of Congress, conduct rituals of Christian Nationalism, and lecture members of Congress to remember that they are the property of the Christian god, rather than representatives of the American people.

No other religion is given that kind of privilege in American government. Leaders of non-religious Americans are positively excluded from this kind of power.

In both content and form the prayer of Zack Randles promotes Christian Nationalism in the US House of Representatives.