Excerpts from Bradley Onishi, a former Christian nationalist who's now a professor of religion and the author of Preparing for War, a critique of the movement and its impact on American democracy.
The New Apostolic Reformation and the Seven Mountains Mandate have their goal as conquest and power, as we discussed earlier. And so if your goal is to colonize the earth for God and to dominate American politics and governance, then you want somebody who's willing to go along that road and down that road with you. If I think about previous iterations of presidential candidates who have been favored by the religious right, we can think of Ronald Reagan.
And Ronald Reagan was somebody who did everything he could to curry the favor of evangelicals and white Catholics and the Moral Majority in the election against Jimmy Carter. Ronald Reagan delivered on some of those promises, but he ended up frustrating some of his religious right supporters. He didn't go all the way. Well, we arrived a decade or so later to George W. Bush. George W. Bush was a self-identified evangelical who had been saved by his faith in Jesus Christ. And he certainly did a lot to promote the interests of evangelicals and other conservative Christians in the country.
But George W. Bush - despite what he did in Iraq and Afghanistan, when he left office, it felt like the itch had not been scratched, that there was still something wrong with the country because even though we'd had an evangelical president for eight years, the country continued to be less religious, less Christian. It continued to get more pluralistic, more diverse, racially and ethnically. And then all of a sudden, it was Barack Obama. And Barack Obama was, like, made in a lab to scare white Christian nationalists. So Barack Obama is president, and then we get Obergefell, and gay marriage is legalized.
By the time Donald Trump arrives, this group of Christian nationalist voters, whether they be evangelical, whether they be conservative Catholics or Latter Day Saints, are in the mood not for somebody who simply identifies with them and their politics, someone like Ted Cruz or Mike Huckabee, they're in the mood for somebody who will act as the brutalizing barbarian needed to take the country back. If you want to colonize the Earth for God, it's not enough to have a testimony that says, Jesus saved me from my sins or from my alcoholism. What you need is a bully, somebody who will put in line all those folks that you think are ruining your country and causing it to descend into the pits of hell.
You don't just need somebody who's going to go to church on Sunday and talk a good talk. You need somebody who will destroy in order to rebuild. So Donald Trump, yeah, doesn't go to church a lot. Donald Trump, been married a couple times. But you know what he promises in ways that no one in our lifetimes has? He promises to punish those who have caused this country to go the wrong way. And so eight years later, we have a base that is more rabid to make him their barbarian king than ever before.
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When it comes to government, I think we're seeing the strategy play out in real time. The goal is to institute people at every level of government who will either act as Christians carrying out God's mission on earth, this mission to colonize or take dominion of every part of human society, or to elect and work with those who are going to carry out that mission, whether or not they are doing so as conscious purveyors of God's plans themselves. So when we think about something like Project 2025, the forecasted ideal of the second Trump term, when we think of... The conservative Heritage Foundation. But if we look at the sponsors of Project 2025, we have others. We have Hillsdale College. We have Liberty University. We have the Claremont Institute. We have TP USA, many Christian nationalist universities or organizations. And so the goal when it comes to government is to institute people at every level, whether that be national politics, the White House, the United States Senate, the United States House or all the way down to the hyperlocal, the school boards, the mayor, the county supervisor.
