Transcript of the podcast:

Welcome to Stop Christian Nationalism, a podcast that’s warning you about a massive tsunami of sinister magical thinking that’s surging toward the shores of the United States, due to make landfall less than ten months from now in early November.

We have time to prepare. We can dissipate the wave of Christian Nationalism before it has the chance to strike on Election Day, but current efforts won’t be sufficient.

Maybe the metaphor of a tsunami isn’t the best for the growing movement of Christian Nationalism that’s become embedded in the politics of the Republican Party from top to bottom, culminating in but not limited to the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Another popular metaphor warns that the United States is sleepwalking into a dictatorship.

What people are trying to communicate is that we are getting closer and closer to a political revolution that is threatening to end democracy in the United States and replace it with a Christian totalitarian regime with Donald Trump at its peak.

The 2024 presidential election is not about the economy, or the age of the President. It’s not even really about Donald Trump. The 2024 presidential election has become a referendum on the power of religion in American government. Should the United States remain a democracy in which people are free to make individual decisions about religion, or should the USA become a Christian Nationalist dictatorship, in which federal, state, and local governments have the power to coerce and even outright force Americans to submit to the power of Christian churches?

The Republican Party is not subtle in what they’re proposing to do. Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation promises to end freedom in the United States, replacing it with an obligation of citizens to do what they’re told to do by church leaders.

Earlier this week, on the night before the Iowa caucuses, the Trump for President campaign explicitly involved itself with a “Night of Prayer for the Trump Family and the Nation” organized by Christian Nationalist Amanda Grace. During this event, Eric Trump declared that his father’s presidential campaign has been granted special magical powers by the Christian god.

“I really do believe that there’s divine intervention there. I think somebody was guiding him. He’s a remarkable father. He did a remarkable job for the United States of America, and I truly pray to the Lord that he wins again, he sorts out this country.”

Sorting out this country includes, according to Donald Trump himself, putting millions of people into prison camps, suspending the Constitution, instituting a dictatorship, using the military against political protesters, and making Christianity the official religion of the United States.

The Trump campaign is already acting as if the power of the American people has been usurped by the Christian god. Eric Trump said:

“I really do believe that someone, something is looking down and guiding him every single day because there’s no way in the world he could have been where he is today without the intervention of God.”

Think about this for a moment. Are we really supposed to believe that there’s no way that someone who inherited hundreds of millions of dollars from his father to have used the leverage of that wealth to gain political power for himself, other than for a supernatural spirit to have intervened with magic?

According to the Trump for President campaign, the 2024 election is actually a magical battleground in which the supernatural powers of the Christian god and its undead messiah are facing off against the infernal spellwork of an army of demons. They mean this literally, not as a metaphorical sort of spiritual warfare.

This storyline of American politics being directly controlled through magical battles between the returning spirit of Jesus and demons from hell came from a source we would ordinarily expect to be rooted in the real-world practicalities of politics in American law. Alina Habba, who is the attorney representing Eric Trump as a member of the Trump for President campaign, declared that the 91 felony criminal charges that Donald Trump faces in federal and state courtrooms were created magically by demons.

Habba stated:

“I think that there is a plan. There’s God’s plan, and then there’s a demonic plan, and the demonic plan is very easily confused with real life, what, there is an orchestrated plan going on here. Don’t get it twisted… Their demonic plan is so obvious.”

This Trump campaign narrative claiming that demons, and not state and federal attorneys-general, have created the legal cases against Donald Trump, has emerged from a grassroots Christian Nationalist conspiracy theory. It was the Trump campaign’s purposeful manipulation of this conspiracy theory that enabled Donald Trump to win the Iowa caucuses this week.

In 2023, the Trump campaign hired Christian Nationalist Jackson Lane to recruit Christian Nationalists from across Iowa into a new part of the Trump political machine called the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition. The Iowa Faith Leader Coalition included many Christian Nationalists who have been telling their followers that there is a supernatural war taking place across America, with Donald Trump at the head of the armies of the Christian god.

One such member of Donald Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition, Katherine Watsey of Fire on the Altar Ministries out of Fairfield, Iowa, has been traveling across the Midwest, visiting churches as a guest preacher, telling audiences that the United States has been infested by an army of demonic sorcerers who have used dark spellwork to create a network of secret underground magical altars hidden across the country. These magical altars, Watsey says, are giving supernatural powers to worshippers of the ancient Babylonian god Baal, who is at war with the Christian god. Baal, she says, is really just a demon pretending to be a god.

This battle between the Christian god and evil American wizards working for the demon Baal, Watsey says, is what explains current political conflicts. Watsey has endorsed Donald Trump, and joined the Trump for President campaign’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition, as a means of battling demons.

Donald Trump has, in turn, officially recognized the support of Katherine Watsey, and tacitly endorsed her battle against demons. Trump has welcomed Katherine Watsey as a Christian Nationalist leader into his campaign organization. It was through the centrally-organized political campaign work of hundreds of Christian Nationalists like Katherine Watsey, many of them declaring themselves to be at war against armies of demons who want Joe Biden to remain in the White House, that Donald Trump won the Iowa caucuses.

Now, in the wake of the Iowa caucuses, Donald Trump is bringing this story of his campaign being anointed by the Christian god in a magical war against demons to the rest of the nation. That’s where the extreme declarations by Eric Trump and his attorney Alina Habba come from. They weren’t spontaneous declarations inspired by a swelling of religious faith in the moment. They were part of a consistent plan by the Trump for President campaign to sustain the Christian Nationalist conspiracy theory that demons, evil sorcerers, and other dark magical powers are in control of Joe Biden, the Democratic Party, federal prosecutors and judges, and anyone else who dares to stand in the way of Donald Trump.

In ordinary times, Republican Party politicians will cite economic models and legal theories to support their campaigns. Now, under the leadership of Donald Trump, the Republican Party has embraced the Christian conspiracy theory that the entire presidential election of 2024 is being controlled through supernatural creatures and their magical spells.

The Trump plan for America is to wage war against evil sorcerers and demons using magical anointing powers granted by the Christian god.

These are the kind of archaic political theories that were used by medieval European kings to justify their unlimited power as monarchs. That kind of Christian political theory of power was, you may remember, what American revolutionaries fought against in 1776. It’s what they had in mind when they wrote the Constitution of the United States of America, with its ban on religious tests for public office and prohibition of government establishment of religion.

Now, in the year 2024, Donald Trump is bringing back Medieval political theories that rely on divine anointments to ward off demons and evil sorcerers. The Trump campaign is claiming the same divine right to rule that was used by kings in Europe to justify their tyranny.

The Trump campaign is not just seeking to unseat Joe Biden in the 2024 election. Donald Trump is seeking to undo American democracy itself, and along with it, the political philosophy of the Englightenment and the scientific Renaissance upon which it was founded. Donald Trump wants to take the USA back to the dark days of Salem, Massachusetts.

Keep this in mind when Donald Trump complains about “witch hunts” against him in the many criminal and civil cases being pursued in courtrooms across America. The Trump campaign has accepted a Christian Nationalist theory of politics that believes that Donald Trump is being hunted by literal witches with demonic powers. The Trump for President campaign is arguing that Donald Trump should be President because he has been given supernatural powers by the Christian god to go hunting after witches and their demon familiars.

The Trump for President campaign is seeking to turn all of America into a re-enactment of the Salem Witch Trials, in which strange, warped arguments about gods and demons and magic spells replace rational arguments about public policy.

It’s in this context that Donald Trump directed his social media accounts to promote a sketch of himself sitting in a courtroom with Jesus Christ by his side. Yes, Donald Trump is saying that Jesus Christ himself is with Trump, defending Donald Trump from being held to account for rape, defamation, stealing classified documents of America’s nuclear secrets, and plotting to overthrow American democracy. Yes, the Trump campaign is claiming that America’s judges and courtrooms are being controlled by demons.

In an age where our leaders ought to be confronting the social disruptions caused by new technologies such as artificial intelligence and digital surveillance, Donald Trump wants you to join him in starting a Christian Nationalist civil war against demons and witches. 

What is at stake in the presidential election of 2024 is nothing less than every piece of social and scientific progress America has made since the 1600s.

What’s terrifying is that about half of the American people seem to be inclined to support Donald Trump’s campaign to consume the entire nation in a tyrannical re-enactment of the Salem Witch Trials.

It’s a terrible thing that we need even need to be making the case, in the year 2024, that American politics are not being controlled by evil magical creatures and the supernatural armies of an ancient Asian tribal war god.

Unfortunately, this is the struggle that 2024 has placed in our hands. We cannot take for granted the idea that we can live in a peaceful democracy governed through an informed electorate. The survival of American liberty depends upon us speaking out in favor of the basic scientific view of reality.