This summer, sprinkled in amongst interviews with candidates for state and local office here in Indiana, HoosLeft has taken time to closely examine Christian nationalism, one of the major ideological trends driving the Republican party’s descent into authoritarian Trumpism and a motivating factor for some of the most extreme policies implemented by our state government in Indianapolis.
First, we used the selection1 of Micah Beckwith - a charismatic Noblesville pastor and avowed Christian nationalist, as Mike Braun’s gubernatorial running mate - to jump into the topic with IU-Indianapolis sociology professor Dr. Andrew Whitehead. He gave us a fantastic intro back in Episode 412.
Then, in Episode 463, Dr. Matthew Taylor from the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies introduced us to the New Apostolic Reformation - a dangerous network of Christian dominionists committed to conquering every sphere of cultural influence and building the Kingdom of God on earth through spiritual warfare - who had a direct line to the Trump White House and a prominent role in organizing the attempted insurrection of January 6, 2021.
One of the recurring characters in my conversation with Dr. Taylor was a guy named Dutch Sheets, one of the more influential “apostles” in the movement. In addition to the influential daily “Give Him 154” prayer videos Beckwith parrots, Sheets is also responsible for the introduction of the “Appeal to Heaven5” flag as a symbol of religious zealot solidarity.
The flag - which depicts a green pine tree on a white background, originally dates to the American Revolution, but has been coopted by Sheets, the NAR, and the larger Christian nationalist movement in recent years - had been flown prominently at the Capitol on January 6 and further came into the public consciousness earlier this year when it was revealed6 Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had flown the flag outside his Jersey Shore beach home last summer.
But Alito is not an evangelical Protestant or a charismatic Pentecostal. He is famously, extremely Catholic7. As is fellow conservative justice Clarence Thomas. As is Thomas’ close friend Leonard Leo, the longtime Executive Vice President of The Federalist Society. Leo, who according to his biography8 at the Catholic Information Center, has “assisted two presidential administrations on judicial selection as an outside advisor, and participated in the Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett Supreme Court selection and confirmation process as well as the outside coalition efforts in support of the Roberts and Alito U.S. Supreme Court confirmations,” was also caught flying9 the “Appeal to Heaven” flag outside his home in Maine.
A far cry from “No Irish Need Apply10” signs in the mid-to-late 1800’s and discrimination11 against eastern and southern European immigrants in the early 1900’s, Catholicism has long since become an integral part of the American cultural fabric. Currently12, 20-25% of the US population identifies as Catholic - a significant minority certainly, but one day you wake up and realize the highest court in the land has been stacked13 with Roman Catholic justices - six or seven out of the nine, depending on how you count the Catholic-raised, Episcopalian convert Neil Gorsuch.
And for many of us, that day was June 24, 2022 - when this deeply unrepresentative court handed down the Alito-written decision in Dobbs14 v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning nearly 50 years of precedent and marking the first time in history that the Supreme Court has taken away a fundamental right.
And this quiet coup is not limited to the federal government. By overturning Roe v. Wade and sending the matter back to the states, Leo’s handpicked court put women’s intimate reproductive healthcare decisions in the hands of a different subset of religious extremists - like the aforementioned Beckwith, his running mate and conservative Roman Catholic Mike Braun, and current Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, another far-right Catholic fundamentalist who has spent the last four years implementing the Christian nationalist playbook here in the Hoosier State. Unlike most trends, which get to Indiana after the rest of the country, Project 2025 is already here.
The foreman on that project - Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, the guy who threatened political violence recently by saying, “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be” - another radical Catholic with ties15 to the secretive Opus Dei organization.
Roberts upcoming book16, Dawn's Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, originally subtitled “Burning Down Washington to Save America,” includes a foreword written by yet another ultra-Catholic fanatic, vice presidential nominee JD Vance.
So, given all this, I had to stop and ask, “are Catholics doing Christian nationalism, too?” I thought that was just a Protestant thing. But just look at the court! And these other guys! How did we come from a place 100 years ago where Catholics in America were an oppressed minority, targets of anti-immigrant legislation17 and harassment18 by the KKK, to now - where a network of Catholic hardliners sit at the height of political power? Are they working hand in hand with evangelical Protestant and apostolic Pentecostal Christian nationalists? And what does that mean for the future of religious freedom in America?
As I ended my conversation with Matthew Taylor, I asked him who I should talk to about the fundamentalist Catholic movement in the US, and he pointed me to today’s guest:
Dr. Karen Park is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at St. Norbert College, in De Pere, Wisconsin. She has written widely on Marian devotion and shrines and American religion and popular culture, with work appearing in Religion Dispatches19 and Sojourners20. She holds a PhD from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago and co-edited the book21 American Patroness: Marian Shrines and the Making of US Catholicism, a collection of twelve essays that examine the historical and contemporary roles of Marian shrines in US Catholicism released in early 2024 by Fordham University Press.
Interview Citations:
First Vatican Council: https://www.britannica.com/event/First-Vatican-Council
Salacious Convent Exposes of the 1800’s: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/19th-century-covent-exposes-protestants-catholics-nuns-sin
Our Lady of Fatima and the Cold War: https://aleteia.org/2024/05/10/what-is-the-blue-army-and-how-is-it-connected-to-fatima
JFK and Anti-Catholic bias: https://www.history.com/news/jfk-catholic-president
Vatican II: https://www.npr.org/2012/10/10/162573716/why-is-vatican-ii-so-important
Francis and the Ongoing Backlash to Vatican II: https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/opposition-pope-francis-rooted-rejection-vatican-ii
Papal Schism and Antipopes: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Benedict-XIII-antipope
Most Catholics Now Live in the Global South: https://cruxnow.com/global-church/2017/10/latest-numbers-confirm-global-south-new-catholic-center-gravity
Texas Bishop Joseph Strickland: https://www.texastribune.org/2023/11/11/new-article-Tyler-Bishop-Joseph-Strickland-removed/
French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marcel-Francois-Lefebvre
Paul Weyrich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Weyrich
Consistent Life Ethic: https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/where-does-the-case-for-the-consistent-life-ethic-stand/
Manufacturing the Abortion Debate: https://www.npr.org/2022/06/22/1106863232/evangelicals-didnt-always-play-such-a-big-role-in-the-fight-to-limit-abortion-ac
Leonard Leo: https://www.propublica.org/article/we-dont-talk-about-leonard-leo-supreme-court-supermajority
Catholic Information Center and post-liberalism: https://cicdc.org/video/why-liberalism-failed/
Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/256187/5-things-to-know-about-cardinal-burke
Knights of Malta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Military_Order_of_Malta
ACB and People of Praise: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/us/people-of-praise-amy-coney-barrett.html
And here’s the one big thing I’ll take away from that conversation: As much as we might imagine the Roman Catholic Church as a purely hierarchical, top-down organization speaking with a unified voice - dissent, faction, and infighting abound. No such large institution is a monolith. The same church both did the Crusades and invented hospitals22; the Spanish Inquisition and the Sistine Chapel; they imprisoned Galileo yet gave us Gregor Mendel; arch-conservative Pope Benedict followed by the progressive (as Popes go) Francis. And in the current political moment, liberal Democrats like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Sonia Sotomayor - as well as far-right reactionaries like Mike Flynn and Steve Bannon, Leonard Leo and JD Vance.
That’s a huuuuge rift, but I think that’s normal. We have to be able to hold both things in our head at the same time. That internal battle, the push-and-pull, the struggle of ideas takes place whenever groups of people come together. It even takes place within individuals; but generally, the bigger the group, the more struggle; it’s a part of the human condition. Greed vs. generosity; certainty vs. curiosity; autocracy vs. democracy; love vs. fear.
Now, many of us on the left have rightly been fearful of Christian nationalism. We saw how close we came to losing American democracy itself on January 6, 2021. We’ve seen state legislatures undermine public schools and persecute the LGBTQ community, we’ve seen women lose the fundamental right to control their own reproductive health decisions. With evangelical Protestants, charismatic Pentecostals, and Catholic integralists23 combining forces, the Christian nationalist behemoth has seemed unstoppable.
But the cracks are starting to show. Months of left and liberal commentators, myself included24, screaming about the Project 2025 finally caught on, pinning the incredibly unpopular, extremist, regressive agenda on Donald Trump. His selection of Kevin Roberts fanboy, JD Vance, as his running mate, only further tied Trump to the project. As more and more Americans become aware of the things some Christian nationalists believe in - faith healing, literal angels and demons, territorial spiritual warfare, fertilized eggs are full people with human rights, the superiority of Latin Mass - they’re beginning to realize that, yeah, these guys are scary, but they’re also just incredibly weird.
As Kamala Harris has overtaken Trump in the polls, you can see the wheels starting to come off this Christian fundamentalist runaway train. MAGA racists attack25 Vance’s Indian-American wife, Trump tries to moderate26 on abortion because he knows it’s an election loser and throws Vance under the bus as “the weird one27.”
This alliance is temporary. Protestants and Catholics didn’t spend centuries killing each other in Europe over nothing. They have profound disagreements and, even if they were to succeed in winning elections and undoing democracy, would struggle to build the “Kingdom of God” because they don’t see eye to eye on what that means.
These disparate elements of the religious right - Evangelicals, Pentecostals, Catholics - are all nominally Christian, but in the end they truly only share a belief in one thing - power. Without achieving it, I am hopeful this coalition will descend into schism and irrelevance. Let’s give them the push they need this fall.
HoosLeft on social media:
https://www.facebook.com/hoosleft
https://hoosleft.bsky.social
https://www.youtube.com/@hoosleft
https://www.tiktok.com/@hoosleft
https://www.instagram.com/scottrog78/
https://www.threads.net/@scottrog78
https://hoosier.social/@scottrog78
And once again, subscribe at
https://scottaaronrogers.substack.com/subscribe
https://religiondispatches.org/author/karenpark/
Episode 48: The Catholic Strain of Christian Nationalism