Onward, Christian Soldiers: The Triumph of Christian Nationalism

by David Austin Walsh

David Austin Walsh is a PhD candidate at Princeton University. His dissertation is about the relationship between the far right and the conservative movement in the United States in the twentieth century.

The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart. Bloomsbury, 352 pages.

DAVID BARTON, the Texas-based evangelical activist and founder of WallBuilders, LLC, has spent three decades on a crusade to prove that America was founded as a Christian nation, that Thomas Jefferson—who infamously edited a version of the Gospels with the supernatural components removed—was an evangelical Christian, and that the end of prayer in public schools is responsible for declining SAT scores. A bad joke among historians for well over a decade, Barton has been the subject of at least one full-length book treatment calling him, in essence, a liar. His 2012 book The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson was named by the readers of History News Network as “the least credible history book in print.” (Full disclosure: I was the editor who ran that feature.)

But on a fundamental level, it doesn’t matter that Barton is a transparent charlatan. He has time and time again exercised a level of political clout that most scholars can only dream of. Vice-chairman of the Texas Republican Party from 1997-2006, Barton has also worked as a political consultant for the Republican National Committee, sits on the board of numerous prominent evangelical organizations, and, in 2009, was brought in by far-right members of the Texas State Board of Education as an expert consultant in a largely successful effort to overhaul the state’s standardized history curriculum in a more explicitly right-wing direction. Suffice to say, David Barton does not give a damn what you think about him. He’s doing the Lord’s work, and he’s doing it well.

Barton is only one of literally dozens of leaders of the Christian Right cited by the journalist Katherine Stewart in her latest study of the movement, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. The book, in essence an expanded and updated version of 2012’s The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, is a timely and useful introduction to the single most organized force in American politics today. Through a simultaneously regimented yet diffuse political presence that binds together Big Money, tax-exempt religious leaders, and rank-and-file evangelicals spread across the country, the Christian Right wields wide-ranging political power in contemporary America. We live in the country that the movement has created.

Read entire article at The Baffler