How to Challenge MAGA’s Biblical Authoritarianism
Below is a guest essay from Dr. Drew J. Strait, an associate professor of New Testament and Christian origins at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Indiana and author of Strange Worship: Six Steps for Challenging Christian Nationalism. Strait previously appeared on Dangerous Dogma to talk about his book and Christian Nationalism.
This piece is drawn from his keynote remarks at the Catholic Social Tradition Conference led by the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Social Concerns and cosponsored this year by Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary. The conference this year, held at Notre Dame, focused on “interdisciplinary responses to religious nationalism.”
A recent report shows that President Donald Trump has made $1.3 million selling “God Bless the USA” Bibles. The grift is unprecedented in U.S. presidential history — a thrice-married sitting president who doubles as a 34-time felon and a Bible salesman. You can’t make this stuff up. The Bible remains a major prop in MAGA world, a convenient bludgeoning tool and magic-like book for prophesying about current events, lording power over immigrants, and legitimating some of fascism’s worst impulses. As a pastor and a Bible scholar, this fraught political moment has nurtured a growing conviction in me: biblical interpretation is a human security issue.
If the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection is any indication, the Bible was a source of inspiration for violent extremism as insurrectionists sang worship songs to Jesus, read Scripture publicly, blew shofars, waved Bibles over their heads, made apostolic decrees, marched with appeal to heaven flags, performed exorcisms, and held large placards of “White Jesus with a MAGA hat on” as they sought to violently overturn a democratic election.
These images from Jan. 6 are so colorful and communicate so forcefully — it wouldn’t be hard to catalogue myriad ways the Bible has been wielded by contemporary U.S. Christians for authoritarian purposes.
Donald Rumsfeld placarded classified intelligence briefings during the Iraq war with dominionist Bible verses. A U.S. defense contractor inscribed 800,000 rifle scopes with 2 Corinthians 4:6 because God, apparently, was on America’s side of the gun during the Iraq War. Jeff Sessions quoted Romans 13 to legitimize Trump’s draconian child separation policy. President Trump boasted, “Nobody reads the Bible more than me,” and grifted “God Bless the USA Bibles” during Holy Week on Truth Social for $59.99.
We could talk about viral biblical memes that portray Trump as King Cyrus, King David, and King Jehu and Trump’s female political enemies as Jezebel. Christians who interpreted Trump’s assassination attempt at 6:11 p.m. as an allusion to Ephesians 6:11, whereby Trump was interpreted as protected by the “full armor of God.” Ron DeSantis called on Floridians to “put on the full armor of God and take a stand against the left’s schemes.” And we could talk about Elon Musk’s current quest for a “viper’s nest” in the federal government.
Pundits often blame Christian Nationalists’ radicalization on evangelicalism, the Republican Party, Fox News, and Trump. No question, these are all legitimate vectors for radicalization. However, an equally if not more influential and overlooked medium for radicalization is biblical authoritarianism since the Bible, broadly speaking, is the foundation narrative for many loyalists across these platforms. Put simply, any time the Bible is used to lord power over others, it functions not as an authoritative text, but as an authoritarian text. I call these uses and abuses of the Bible for political propaganda, theologies of oppression, and megalomaniacal purposes “biblical authoritarianism.”
The use and reception of the Bible for authoritarian purposes raises underexplored questions about how particular ways of reading and using the Bible are radicalizing Americans. It also raises difficult questions for clergy and seminary professors who are imagining how to “interrupt” processes of radicalization and “disengage” adherents of White Christian Nationalism through more responsible and life-giving ways of reading the Bible for the common good.
But I’ve found that this work of disengagement is delicate, especially during these times of hyper-partisanship and polarization. Too often, those intending to interrupt slip into inflammatory and dehumanizing language, caricature, and essentializing religious extremists as stupid or crazy. We have little evidence that all far-right extremists are stupid, socially isolated, or crazy. And, perhaps more importantly, Paulo Freire reminds us that “dehumanizing the dehumanizer has the obverse effect of dehumanizing oneself.”
As I’ve worked with faith leaders around the U.S., pastors often ask: How can my 20-minute sermon and Sunday School classes keep up with the dozens of hours my congregants spend listening to right-wing radio, Fox News, YouTube influencers, and broligarchy podcasts? The answer is that sermons can’t keep up. The moment we are living in calls for us to scale up realistic, creative, and carefully crafted strategies of resistance — even if our primary audience is “to the choir.” Immunity from Christian Nationalism cannot be assumed; it must be nurtured.
Because the Bible is shared sacred Scripture between Christian Nationalists and Christians challenging Christian Nationalism, theologians, pastors, and biblical scholars are uniquely positioned to theorize and implement preemptive interventions that disrupt biblical authoritarianism within a distinctively Christian vernacular. This work will take devoted communities of practice and, inevitably, lots of trial and error. Toward this work, I have four proposals for intervention.
First, we need more public-facing biblical interpretation.
Christian Nationalists expertly market their reading of the Bible in public. The entrepreneurial self is a high virtue in Christian Nationalist circles, with some leaders calling themselves “digital missionaries” as they interpret the Bible publicly through viral biblical memes, TikToks, podcasts, live-streamed Bible study, improv preaching in public, and they claim to oversee conversions internationally through Instagram DMs. This vast online infrastructure has operationalized and even commodified biblical authoritarianism for lucrative ends.
A recent interview with historian David Hollinger brings the importance of public biblical interpretation into focus. Hollinger argues that progressive ecumenical Christians have “kept up a sophisticated conversation in the seminaries about biblical hermeneutics … but have been relatively silent in public about how deficient they find evangelical views of the Bible.”
Meanwhile, according to Hollinger, the public thinks that the progressive and evangelical divide is about racism, sexism, and homophobia — when it’s equally about biblical interpretation. Progressives’ reticence to argue about the Bible in public has “yielded to evangelicals much of the symbolic capital of Christianity.” To reclaim the Bible, Hollinger argues, “You have to actually make arguments, and in public.” Let the reader understand.
Second, we must work with organizers and faith leaders to build counternarratives and attitudinal inoculation.
“I got caught up in the moment.” These are the words of Capitol insurrectionist Josiah Colt, who was memorably photographed swinging from the Senate balcony onto the floor in full tactical gear ready for a “Boogaloo” (a right-wing code word for a civil war). When idolaters of power are “caught up in the moment,” there’s no turning back. This is a reminder that the events leading up to getting “caught up in the moment” are what matter the most for the work of peacebuilding. No one becomes an idolater of power in their sleep.
According to the PIRUS database, radicalization among domestic extremists in the U.S. is a slow process that, on average, takes five or more years from exposure to acts of crime (disturbingly, these numbers accelerate to a year or less among adherents of QAnon). As disturbing as this is, I choose to see this as good news: it means we have one to five years to “get in the way” of extremists’ recruitment narratives that nurture radicalization.
Recent scholarship has shown that extremists’ recruitment narratives can be challenged through counternarratives, or attitudinal inoculative messaging. We even have empirical evidence that counternarratives work to curtail psychological reactance to extremist propaganda. In 2018, Kurt Braddock exposed 357 participants to inoculative messaging before reading left- or right-wing propaganda. Braddock found that inoculation negatively predicted perceptions of an extremist group’s credibility.
But before we can effectively vaccinate against hate, we first need to understand extremists’ propaganda and recruitment narratives. This means creating intentional spaces for scholars, faith leaders, and students to step out of the comfort of our own theological silos to listen to and analyze the theological propaganda and ideology that fuels Christian Nationalism and its sibling — Christin dominionism. After analyzing and identifying key themes in this material, we can build counter themes in narratives that target radicalizing motifs.
Third, we must offer biblical alternatives to dominionist eschatologies of coercion.
When I was in seminary, I remember learning about the difference between premillennialism and postmillennialism at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and then at The University of Chicago Divinity School. Surprisingly, neither of these institutions that represent two opposite ends of the theological spectrum taught me to associate postmillennialism with Christian dominionism’s “victorious eschatology” (which is the idea that Christians have a divine mandate to rule the nations on Christ’s behalf now). I think that’s a mistake, especially since 60% of Evangelicals today believe that “the church is supposed to build the kingdom of God on earth before Jesus comes back.”
The American religious right’s evolution from a predominantly “Left Behind Rapture eschatology” to a “Trumpian anti-rapture victorious eschatology” is underreported by pastors and biblical scholars. To put this in perspective, I taught the Book of Revelation this year and I can’t find a single introductory text that brings students into conversation with the postmillennial victorious eschatology that undergirds the NAR and NeoReformed Christian Nationalists.
To challenge victorious eschatology, we must do the hard work of disentangling Christian Nationalism from superficial forms of eschatological superstition and political biblicism that are unmoored from the teachings of Jesus, especially as it relates to unfettered support for Christian Zionism. Here, the Protestant notion of sola scriptura and the “plain sense of Scripture” deserve thoughtful scrutiny since they have contributed to a context where everyone is a Bible expert, and pastors and Bible scholars are the least trusted where it matters the most.
Fourth, we must correct dominionist readings of Genesis 1 and Matthew 28.
Christian dominionism’s theology of power is largely built on Genesis 1:27–28, the Great Commission in Matthew 28:18–21, and, when convenient, an excerpt from the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:10 (“your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”). Together, these passages are treated as a canon within the canon for Christian Nationalists’ vision of taking dominion of governments and other cultural spheres of influence.
Notably absent in these authoritarian readings is (1) any emphasis on humans bearing the image of God in Genesis 1:27; (2) humans serving as stewards of God’s creation in Genesis 1:28; and (3) in Matthew, Jesus’s command to not only make disciples, but also to “teach them to obey everything I have commanded you” in verse 20. This includes Jesus’s teachings on neighborly love, enemy love, power, money, and inclusive table fellowship, along with Jesus’s example of mobilizing an unarmed mission that lacks a military and emphasizes servanthood rather than domination (Matt 10; 20:25–28).
It is also worth observing that Matthew 28 did not become the “Great Commission” until the “Doctrine of Discovery” emerged to transform the text into an imperial vision of Christianizing distant lands through colonization and genocide. It might seem like low-hanging fruit to point some of this out, but stating publicly that no early Christian ever thought about the seven-mountain mandate through Genesis 1 or Matthew 28 can animate anachronism where it hurts by appealing to the Bible and the Christian tradition itself.
By ourselves we are not very powerful, but together we have power. We urgently need ecumenical and interfaith spaces to convene scholars and faith leaders to talk with one another, to offer support to one another, and to test and share pedagogies of resistance as we imagine and disseminate more responsible and life-giving ways of leveraging the biblical narrative for the common good.
As a public witness,
Drew Strait
