(MAGA hat on a Caesar statue. Image source: Boston Globe Staff Illustration)

The gymnasium smelled of teenage body odor and sweat. Earnest adults were busy shooshing chatter and shepherding everyone inside. We sat on the wood floor, facing a makeshift stage under one of the basketball hoops. It was a Sunday night, sometime in the late summer of 1996. After a dinner of pizza and soda, and a game of dodgeball, it was time for the devotional part of our youth group’s gathering.

“Now, I’m going to bring up Brad Onishi to share what’s on his heart for the new school year,” Rick said. As I made my way to the stage, I could feel the surprise in the room. Rick, our youth pastor at Rose Drive Friends Church—a mini-evangelical-megachurch of 2,000 people in North Orange County, CA—hadn’t told anyone that I would be speaking. I hadn’t either.

This was my first sermon, given a week or so into my sophomore year of high school and about eighteen months after my conversion to evangelical Christianity. Standing in front of the eighty or so teenagers in our youth group, I wasn’t nervous. God had given me a message—it was time to deliver it.

“One of the things I learned recently,” I began, one hand on the cordless mic, another in the pocket of my corduroy surfer shorts, “was that salmon swim upstream in order to spawn. Many of them die in the process, losing their lives in order to reproduce themselves. For them, it’s worth the sacrifice in order to make more of themselves—and ensure life for future generations.”

Though caught off guard by the metaphor, my audience quickly caught on. As we swung into the new school year, it was our duty to make more Christians; to evangelize to the increasingly godless world around us; to sacrifice our vanity and insecurity to ensure future generations had eternal life.

Without knowing it, my sermon fit into an emerging movement in evangelical circles—a missional understanding of the church in the world. Spreading the Gospel wasn’t new. American born-again Christians have been that doing for centuries. What was new was the understanding that we Christians were doing so in a culture no longer accurately described as Christian. If America was no longer a godly nation, then we were missionaries to a secular culture, not the proponents of our society’s dominant ethos. And, two years later, in 1998, the movement found its central text in Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America, an edited volume that called on Christians to see Western culture—the world that many of them still assumed to be predominantly Christian—as a post-Christian society in which they were not the dominant cultural group, but missionaries sent to evangelize in the same way as those in India, China, or Kenya might do. The missional paradigm spread to Southern Baptist churches, Reformed circles, and nondenominational churches across the country. In this framework, Christians would have to embrace their roles as countercultural disciples of Jesus swimming upstream in a current no longer moving toward or with Christianity.

The missional church model fit within larger trends in religion and politics from that era. Throughout the late 1990s, evangelical men attended Promise Keepers rallies in stadiums across the nation, where speakers emphasized racial reconciliation and responsibilities facing Christian men. Promise Keepers wasn’t as much about converting souls as transforming how evangelical men viewed their place in society. Speakers asked attendees to take stock of men’s roles in home and in the country. The movement remained patriarchal—and in my view deeply problematic— but nonetheless it was based on multiculturalism (at least in name) and vulnerability (men were often seen weeping at these rallies). By the early 2000s, George W. Bush was arguing for a compassionate conservatism that would enlarge the conservative base by recognizing the need to make room for Americans of different ethnic and racial backgrounds.

To be clear, I have no interest in paying homage to these religious or political trends. My goal is neither to reminisce upon, nor restore the legacies of the missional church movement, Promise Keepers, or George W. Bush’s presidency. Rather, these touchstones from my evangelical youth serve to draw a sharp distinction from where we were a quarter-century ago and where many in evangelical and other conservative Christian spaces have arrived today. Currently, there is little room in the evangelical world for seeing the church as swimming upstream in an increasingly secular society. There is even less appetite for compassion and reconciliation—whether in racial, gender, or any other terms.

Instead of calling for a missional church made up of countercultural, self-sacrificial disciples, now the call—or at least one influential call—is for restoring Christendom through the eradication of diversity, the cultivation of ethno-nationalism, and the use of imperial force. This call is coming from pastors and theologians who support Trump as an instrument for moving the country toward the Christian nation they envision. But what they really want is a Christian leader—a prince or Caesar—who will go even further than the 46th President ever imagined.

***

The Nation Conservatism Conference is a right-wing organization dedicated to fostering Christian political conservatism in the United States and beyond. According to its statement of principles, NatCon (as it is colloquially known) maintains that “public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision.” Backed by the Edmund Burke Foundation, NatCon conferences have become the vanguard in recent years for Christian nationalists, right-wing speakers, and elected officials to articulate their visions “to recover and reconsolidate the rich tradition of national conservative thought.” In July 2024, NatCon 4 took place in Washington, DC. At the close of the session, the moderator, Yoram Hazony, asked these questions: “When you think of this coming state where the Christian commitments are maximized, is there room for Jews or fellow Bible Believers? Is there room for Muslims, Hindus?”

Hazony was addressing the two panelists—a duo once thought unlikely to appear on stage together but whose political commitments now seemed resonant: Albert Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Doug Wilson, the pastor, publisher, and podcaster headquartered in Moscow, Idaho. For those attentive to Protestant politics, this was a watershed moment—the figurehead of the largest Protestant denomination in the country sharing a stage with the firebrand provocateur who once praised slavery and has labeled himself the spokesperson of American Christian nationalism. Mohler holds sway over millions of Southern Baptists as the leader of their most important institution; Wilson reaches his millions through sermons, his publishing house, his media empire, and his network of churches.

(Mohler (L), Wilson (R). Image source: Zach D. Roberts/Bucks County Beacon)

By the time Hazony asked the question, the two men had been discussing their political-theological visions for the United States for nearly an hour. Mohler responded: “I want to maximize the Christian commitments of the state. I call that ‘acknowledgment.’ I’m not claiming that every citizen will be a confessing Christian. But that does not mean they are not obligated to the acknowledgment of the Christian structure of this civilization.” In other words, one does not have to be a Christian to be part of the United States, but for Mohler they should have to acknowledge that the country is a Christian one. He continued, “I don’t think a nation can survive without theological commitments. That does not mean it cannot allow others to be a part of the community and even invite others in a certain sense into the community, but it does mean that there has to be the explicit acknowledgment that this is a nation with specific theological accountability and theological commitments.”

Wilson: “I agree with everything he said.”

According to Wilson and Mohler, for Hindus, Muslims, and presumably anyone who doesn’t hold to the Christian faith, within the ideal Christian nationalist scenario is a de jure second-class existence under a state theologically committed to the Christian God.

The panel ended with neither Wilson nor Mohler explaining how non-Christians would be part of their ideal Christian society. Would they be allowed citizenship? Would they be eligible for political office? To teach in public schools, volunteer in electioneering, or coaching athletics?

***

A few weeks later, Wilson clarified this point at a conference at New St. Andrews College, a classical Christian college he founded in connection with his church, Christ Church:

“In the republic I envision, Hindus would not be able to hold political office . . . So in the Christian nationalist project, we don’t want this smudge or hodgepodge. We want it to be explicitly Christian. We would want prayers at the political convention to be to God the Father, in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.”

This aligned with what Wilson said in an interview from earlier this year: “This is a Christian republic, and … you’re not singing off the same sheet of music that we are,” he told Religion News Service. “So, no, you can’t be the mayor.”

Wilson has been a controversial figure for decades, but he has seen a mainstream resurgence over the last few years. He did a sit down interview with Tucker Carlson, was praised by Charlie Kirk, then appeared on stage at NatCon with Al Mohler. But his influence goes well beyond his own popularity as an author and speaker.

Joel Webbon is one of Wilson’s protégés. As the founder of Right Response Ministries and the Covenant Bible Church in Austin, Texas, Webbon often holds conferences and conducts interviews with Wilson.

When asked recently what a revival in the United States would look like, Webbon answered that “it would look like millions of people being deported. It would look like mothers getting death row for murdering their children.”

When asked about the presence of non-Christian and non-White people in the United States, Webbon argued that their presence is a sign of judgment on America.

“Throughout scripture, the idea of full-blown invasions from foreign peoples who worship foreign gods, it is never, in scripture, spoken of as a blessing of liberty. It is always spoken of as a judgment. I believe that America is under God’s judgment. And I don’t think that the forms or the expressions of God’s judgment merely lie with Drag Queen Story Hour, but that they also include the fact that my neighborhood is 30 percent Hindu.”

And when asked about what should be done to revive America and relieve it of God’s judgment, Webbon declared the need for a Caesar who would take the reins: “We’re degenerates. The constitution, it’s not suited for governing degenerates…But, I think for our population that is degraded morally and culturally, religiously, as far as we have, you need power. Men must be governed. You need a Caesar type…I don’t think constitutioning even harder is going to get us out of our current mess.”

How would Christians rule if they gained power – whether through a Caesar or by other means? In addition to ensuring women can’t vote, an extreme position even among American evangelicals, Webbon outlines his vision thusly: “I want Christians to have power, and with that power, I want it to be wielded righteously. What does that mean? It means crushing our enemies and rewarding our friends.”

Webbon’s Christian nationalism aligns closely with Stephen Wolfe’s, another Reformed figure aligned with Wilson. Wilson’s Canon Press published Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism, a popular book among extremist Christian nationalists that once reached the top 100 on the Amazon book charts.

As I’ve written elsewhere, Wolfe’s book draws on the concepts of volk, a German term describing ties within an ethnic group, and homeland in order to justify the idea that Christians should love those who are more like them, more. It’s not, according to Wolfe, that Christians shouldn’t love all people. It is just that societies can only be built by people who share the same ethnicity and religion—and thus love each other more than outsiders and foreigners. Wolfe’s Christian nationalism is an express ethno-nationalism based on blood and soil rhetoric.

Speaking of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, Wolfe said at a conference recently that “There’s no distant place that we call home. We have nowhere else to go. But this is our home. This is our native land. We are Native Americans, born of those who didn’t immigrate, but who settled here.” And, conversely, speaking about those who are not WASPs, Wolfe recently said in a podcast interview that it should be “permissible for Christians to deem certain groups to have positions that are detrimental to the fundamental features of society and to rescind their political equality.” While there has been a deep and effective alliance between conservative Catholics and evangelicals since the rise of the Moral Majority, Webbon and Wolfe envision a “distinctly Protestant” Christian nation.

In September of 2023, Wolfe tweeted: “And thus while intermarriage is not itself wrong (as an individual matter), groups have a collective duty to be separate and marry among themselves.”

These are only a few examples of the pastors and theologians outlining a Christian nationalism based on Christian supremacy. While there have always been racist and ethno-nationalists on the American Right, the current generation has become mainstream by dint of its Christianity. When Al Mohler shook hands with Doug Wilson at Natcon in July, 2024, it was a symbol of the embrace that legacy denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention are willing to make with extremists in order to build a coalition that will force the acknowledgment of Christian authority on all Americans in one way or another.

***

From the time I gave my first sermon in 1996 to Natcon 4 in 2024, the trendy buzzwords among evangelicals and other conservative Protestants transformed from “missional” to “nationalist.” One could point to a number of causes for the shift. One clear one came in the 2010s, when White Christians officially became less than half of the American population. For the first time in the nation’s history, they were the minority. This coincided with the second-term of the first Black president, the building momentum for legalizing same-sex marriage, and the continual decline in religiosity across the United States. It might have been one thing to view the church as a countercultural force in American society back before White Christians lost their demographic majority and executive exclusivity. Since then, figures like Wilson, Webbon, and Wolfe have emerged to give voice to a White Christian nationalism bent on regaining power through non-democratic means, fortifying White identity by demoting the political equality of those not like them, and calling for the political denigration—and in some cases, excision—of non-Christian people. It seems that they were never going to settle for the title of “missionary” in their own country, never going to let what Caesar’s be his, never going to accept the reality of American multiculturalism. Instead, they declared themselves settlers and demonized immigrants, started calling for a Caesar to replace the Constitution, and proclaimed other cultures a dangerous hodgepodge and a judgment on the United States.

Bradley Onishi is a social commentator, scholar, and co-host of the Straight White American Jesus (SWAJ) podcast. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Politico, Rolling Stone, and he is the author of Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism – And What Comes Next.