The first days of Trump’s second presidency have passed with a flurry of tariff standoffs and literal turf wars with Greenland, Canada, Panama, the Gulf of Mexico and now Gaza. We’ve seen restrictions on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s LGBTQA+ specific resourcing, and a revisionist rewriting of Stonewall’s history.
Unsurprisingly, gender identity has landed itself front and centre in the culture wars. Now, we have an announcement that he is creating a taskforce to eradicate anti-Christian bias.
Any one of these topics might elicit a visceral response from a sociopolitical moderate or progressive, but reframing ethnic cleansing as a real-estate deal perhaps takes the cake. Who knows how Trump will top that!
Watching Trump capture the alt-right vote and morph himself from a felon, a rapist, and a dodgy businessman into an alt-right ‘anointed one’ spearheading what seems like a theocratic-come-dystopian nightmare is perplexing. But this is Christian nationalism, and it’s here in Australia, too.
What is Christian nationalism? It’s a religious, cultural and political movement that erroneously claims that a nation’s ‘Christian origins’ are core to its integrity, success, cohesion and function as a nation. It brings together toxic patriotism, opposition to LGBTQA+ rights and legitimacy, idealising traditional marriage and gender roles, and grandstands on what it calls ‘Judeo-Christian values’. Too often, it includes white supremacist adherents.
To look around Christian nationalism in America, it is common to see overlaps with the New Apostolic Reformation, the Seven Mountain Mandate (dominionism), and highly politicised churches as well as ‘tradwife’ movements, and groups promoting anti-vax and anti-authority conspiracy theories.
In Australia and New Zealand, a trained eye is also likely to see Christian nationalist language in the freedom movement, which commonly rallies behind a battle cry of freedom of speech and religion. However, this movement often sprinkles Islamophobia and homophobia/transphobia in there, making it clear these self-identified Braveheart types are about “freedom for me but not for thee”.
In America, Christian nationalism is inherently built on American exceptionalism, but what American writers and those looking in from the outside of these movements fail to recognise is this: Australian evangelical churches have been baking in a gospel that includes their own version of that for decades.
Prophecies that Australia is “the Great Southland of the Holy Spirit“ and will play a central role in the last great move of the Spirit before the return of Christ have been spoken and sung for years. Iconic Hillsong alumnus Geoff Bullock penned an anthem, Great Southland of the Holy Spirit, that effectively captured the early sentiments of a crowd that was eager to establish their own significance in the spiritual and cultural landscape of the world.
This may not have been a Christian nationalist anthem in the beginning. But it is now.
A short wade through social media will reveal many players in the Australian Christian nationalist movement celebrating aspects of Trump’s first hundred days, and his cutting back on immigration, erasing of trans athletes and trans passports, and establishment of a taskforce to eradicate anti-Christian bias, and more.
Watching this happen from across the sea leaves many of us wondering how this is happening in the “land of the free”. But from those exiting or closely watching the Christian nationalist movement, it’s a victory that’s decades in the making.
More shocking is this: rage-bait politicians like Ralph Babet and now Peter Dutton seem to be looking to America less as inspiration and more as an opportunity to copy and paste policy as if what is done there can ever be “the answer” here.
That alone is a babushka doll of problems. It emboldens the far and extreme right, as we see plainly on the social media platform formerly called Twitter, where MAGA trolls and white supremacists now come out shamelessly. It also leverages disadvantage and lack of education into social fractures that divide the left and right, and ironically, divide the right from itself.
How so? Here’s an example. Just weeks ago, I tweeted something about a man on a train in a MAGA hat and his treatment of a girl in a burka. I was advised by a Twitter gent that I should take her head covering and “un-alive” myself with it, such is the aggression of Trump’s followers.
The irony is that a MAGA voter who erroneously thinks his politics belong in Australia is the same as the Muslim beside him in one way: they’re both likely conservative voters with religious freedom in their top political interests. Yet, the cult of MAGA sets them against each other. But, as a white male, he is both the apex predator in this scenario and the one most likely to identify as persecuted.
Dutton appears to be looking to exploit the same multi-layered social divides. If you can embolden those who feel progress has robbed them of privilege, you can create a culture war that mobilises the political fringe, no matter the cost to social cohesion and progress.
What, then, can we expect if Dutton gains power? Individual seat-by-seat swings might not be enough to give Dutton anything more than a minority government. But it is very likely to put settled issues back on the table, and that is something with a very real social and economic cost. For example, Australia’s gun laws have long been settled. Yet, just recently, Bob Katter ranted about the need to turn schools into armouries and to train teenage boys how to wield a gun.
Dutton’s own commitment to the issues that Trump and the Christian nationalists have put back on the table may only be skin deep, though. As long as it captures a niche market that breaks the Labor lucky streak, he’ll follow suit.
Like “Scotty from Marketing” Morrison, Dutton is about the numbers. The right-wing factions vying for influence in his party, however, expect him to deliver.
At present, Dutton seems to be trying to capitalise on culture wars to ride into power. This will likely embolden people who feel disenfranchised. Where will we see this? Social media and in the vastly increasing amount of extremist language used on Twitter.
But we are also seeing it in places like Elwood beach, where members of the Nation Socialist Network, a neo-Nazi cell, have been increasingly public with their workouts and their propaganda.
Across the ditch in New Zealand last weekend, a fundamentalist church sent its Man Up recruits to protest a LGBTQA+ Pride Parade. The church in question was Destiny Church, which has attracted significant criticism for cult-like behavior. But the first thing obvious to me, when I glanced across the web presence, was Christian nationalist undertones. The church is highly political, vocally anti-LGBTQA+, calls for New Zealand to return to its Christian roots, and doesn’t seem to see the problem in appropriating the otherwise beautiful cultural display, the haka, to protest gay rights. Does Destiny Church and its Man Up program have networks in Australia? Why, yes. Yes, it does.
Christian nationalism intersects with far and extreme right hate groups in obvious ways but has also infiltrated ‘mainstream’ faith to the point where God is a political conservative and Trump is his prophet and enforcer. This means that the religious and political right are likely to view America as the pattern – the blueprint for their return to privilege; er, power.
In Australia and New Zealand, a trained eye is also likely to see Christian nationalist language in the freedom movement, which commonly rallies behind a battle cry of “freedom” of speech and religion.
The same system of thinking has been adapted in other Western nations to create a quasi-contagion spread through the medium of social media, right-wing news (often poorly fact-checked), and in-person networks of churches, pastors, prophets and apostles.
What is not present in this movement? Critical thinking. In its place, misinformation, disinformation, and cognitive dissonance thrive.
Christian nationalism sends its white missionaries to BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of colour) communities to ‘save’ them with the gospel of Christ, but rejects these same communities when the help they seek comes in the form of immigration.
It rallies behind battle cries of ‘freedom’ but rejects the rights of others to also live free. It pickets abortion clinics and cheers the overturning of Roe v Wade because it claims to be ‘pro-life’, while ignoring the needs of the mother (which may be life-saving or life-ending), ignoring the needs of vulnerable women and children after the child is born, and rolling back gun control that makes school shootings such a regular occurrence in American schools.
This way of thinking is, of course, linked to the New Apostolic Reformation and dominionist theology that holds Christians up as ‘destined’ or ‘mandated’ to take dominion in the seven domains of society. Politics and economics are two such mountains, which may go some way to explaining how democracy and oligarchy are in bed with each other – both in Trump and Musk’s America and in Dutton and Rinehart’s dream for Australia.
How could these two possibly link when Jesus fed the hungry (welfare), healed the sick (Medicare) and turned over the tables in the temple (anti-capitalism)?
I believe the answer lies in the decades of doctrinal scaffolding built in churches. This is incredibly effective when it comes to altering a person’s belief system and their sense of persecution or need for action. Think about it this way:
- The prosperity gospel ties economic success with the favour of God.
- The Seven Mountain Mandate tells Christians they need to take dominion in the seven domains of society. Of course, two of those mountains are business/economics and politics. The latter can be won in appearance if not in actuality, as Christians swarm political leaders or political parties and equate prayer or listening with agreement.
- The New Apostolic Reformation links these two doctrines together but also introduces “apostles and prophets” as the leaders and doomsayers of the last days.
- The war in Gaza flares up apocalyptic anxiety as Israel features heavily in end-times prophecy.
- COVID-19 and vaccine mandates are still front of mind as the world recovers from what Christians may view, even if only subconsciously, as a pre-tribulation rapture warning, as well as being the ‘mark of the beast’ prophesied in the Book of Revelation.
- Societal unrest creates a Petri dish of ideal conditions for radicalisation, and fringe groups like churches and, yes, even Neo-Nazi cells, swoop down on this. Disenfranchised people are particularly at risk.
- Christian nationalist rhetoric then swoops all of this up together, with toxic patriotism, and a belief that the Christian foundations of a nation are: a) present; and, b) something to which we should return to restore social order. The radicalised and disenfranchised march forward under this banner, at the behest of those who are organised and savvy enough to convert the angst into political momentum.
It might sound bizarre to some, but this is the world I grew up in, and it is not yet a distant memory. Now that I’m witnessing it from the other side of the religio-political divide, it is jarring to see how the playbook has not changed.
This is a movement that will not respond to bad polling or poor electoral results. It will view opposition as a test of the enemy, and it will view success as the favour of God and a sign to press on. It is built on the competing ideals of Christian exceptionalism and persecution. The latter is not factual, with Australia nowhere to be seen on the top 50 countries when it comes to religious persecution.
But when this is baked into the psyche and the world is viewed through this lens, correcting that misconception only grows the problem.
Now, more than ever, good Australian apathy is the enemy. Our laissez-faire attitude of “she’ll be right” might land us in a position of shock as the religio-political right organises, strategises and targets politics in a more effective way than those of us who assume progress is a given.
Now is a time where progressives and moderates are needed in political movements more than ever.
My hope for the Trump presidency is that America fights back against its own infection. My hope is that Australia learns by observation and prevents it here. The best outcome we can hope for is that we look back in time on articles like this and question their validity because the worst-case scenario never eventuated.
Apathy will not gain us this result. Prevention is far, far better than cure.
Published 25 February 2025.
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Images: Gage Skidmore on Flickr (CC); UK Government on Flickr (CC); Cdoncel on Unsplash.
