The January 6 Insurrection Was Not Just Political. It Was Also Deeply Religious.

Last week when we marked the one year anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, not many people were willing to talk about this:

https://twitter.com/Shar19L/status/1479231214569590790?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1479231214569590790%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fimmasmartypants.blogspot.com%2F2022%2F01%2Fthe-january-6-insurrection-was-not-just.html

In case you think she’s exaggerating, a pastor by the name of Duke Kwon provided the evidence in response to someone on Twitter who said that the riot had nothing to do with Christianity.

As the young woman in the video above said, “You cannot combat far right extremism without understanding that it is inextricably linked to white evangelicalism in the United States.”

Katherine Stewart, author of the book “The Power Worshipers,” has been trying to warn us about the danger posed by Christian nationalism for a long time. Here’s what she wrote back in 2018:

The great thing about kings like Cyrus, as far as today’s Christian nationalists are concerned, is that they don’t have to follow rules. They are the law. This makes them ideal leaders in paranoid times…

I have attended dozens of Christian nationalist conferences and events over the past two years. And while I have heard plenty of comments casting doubt on the more questionable aspects of Mr. Trump’s character, the gist of the proceedings almost always comes down to the belief that he is a miracle sent straight from heaven to bring the nation back to the Lord. I have also learned that resistance to Mr. Trump is tantamount to resistance to God.

This isn’t the religious right we thought we knew. The Christian nationalist movement today is authoritarian, paranoid and patriarchal at its core. They aren’t fighting a culture war. They’re making a direct attack on democracy itself.

Of course, not all white evangelicals are Christian nationalists. For those who find the ties between Christianity and violent extremism to be reprehensible, this is not a time to get defensive, but to call it out. As an example, David French is doing yeoman’s work on that front. His latest piece is titled, “A Nation of Christians Is Not Necessarily a Christian Nation.” For the nationalists who are willing to destroy democracy in the name of returning to some mythical day in the past when this was a Christian nation, he says:

The Christianity of the United States of America, both as a matter of individual expression and institutional justice, is an enormously complex topic, but one thing I can say with confidence—there was no golden age of American Christianity. And we cannot look back at any moment and say, this is when America was a Christian nation.

What conservative Evangelicals are “losing” today isn’t so much liberty as power.

The fact that so many are unwilling to name the religious roots of the January 6 insurrection is an example of the power conservative evangelicals still wield in this country. But as the young woman says in the video above, “we can’t push back against something we’re not willing to talk about.”

Author: Nancy LeTourneau

I'm a pragmatic progressive who has been blogging about politics since 2007.

10 thoughts on “The January 6 Insurrection Was Not Just Political. It Was Also Deeply Religious.”

  1. Terrific post, thanks.

    Here’s a link to something I wrote just after the 2016 election. As bad as things seem (and are), they are not unprecedented. White Christian nationalists have been here for a long time, and they’ve exerted considerable power for a long time. They’ve also been, at times, defeated. They can be again.

  2. Just putting aside the tragic and disturbing politics, aren’t white Evangelicals just so embarrassing? I know I’m being horribly elitist and all, but for God’s sake, get some dignity.

  3. As one who spent a portion of my early adulthood steeped in fundmentalist Christianity, and also have had a long term interest in the psychology of those who immerse themselves in it, I have to say that none of this surprises me at all. This thread has run through the entire evangelical community for a very long time. Social media has amplified it exponentially, to the point that I can no longer stand to even glance at what people around me and in my family are posting there. And the symbology of this movement is ubiquitous in my community, to the point that I often feel I am under psychological seige by this radical cult.

  4. Christianity in this crowd is about as “deeply religious” as being white is. It’s an ethnographic marker, an ingroup thing. Us vs Them. And most of Us have never read the bible aside from some verses on the NT greatest hits list, nor practiced the teachings of Jesus to any extent that makes them noticeably more moral or ethical than anyone else–and in many cases, their avowed “faith” is just a chip on the shoulder or a tool of claiming victimhood while bullying everyone else.

    I grew up in it (rural Oklahoma), never missed a Sunday at church until college, and spent decades beyond that immersed in the culture, so I’m not just spouting off with uninformed opinions. I don’t now and never have had any bones with the core tenets of Christianity or those who consistently and conscientiously practice that (or any other) faith, but the widespread hypocrisy of this lot has been around from long before I was born, and it drove me to leave the church as soon as I was out of my parents’ house.

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