As fighter jets screeched through the sky above Caracas on the third night of the year, raining munitions on residential buildings, the clouds of destruction took on the shape of a Rorschach test for American audiences. In my eyes, those clouds resolved into the image of a bloody history, an image of the dozens of other times the United States has wrought chaos in Latin America for national resources. In the eyes of many, the rubble-made Rorschach blot took on a complex character, one strongman chaotically removing another. The nation’s growing cohort of Christian nationalists saw something else, though; something no one with a passing knowledge of politics, international relations, or Venezuela is capable of seeing: revival.
“The situation in Venezuela will open the way for the biggest revival that Latin America has ever experienced,” megachurch pastor and January 6th participant Greg Locke declared.
“The church is legal again in Venezuela,” Christian nationalist pastor and influence Troy Brewer posted. “Get ready for the biggest revival that Latin America has ever seen.”
“Christians were tortured and churches were shut down under Maduro’s reign,” fabricated conservative Christian commentator Todd Starnes, who managed to get himself fired from Fox News for claiming that Democrats worship the ancient near-eastern deity Moloch. “Today, we rejoice with our fellow brothers and sisters in Venezuela.”
Outside the fevered sanctums of Christian nationalism, the broader Christian church’s response to the attack ranged from tepid approval to outright condemnation. Pope Leo expressed a “soul full of concern” for the “beloved Venezuelan people,” while the World Council of Churches released a statement characterizing the U.S. incursion as a “stunningly flagrant violation of international law.” To America’s cohort of white Christian nationalists, though, the attacks were a clear sign of coming revival.
The problems with this revivalist reasoning are myriad. Venezuela is one of the most heavily Christian nations on earth, with between 80 and 90% of the population identifying as believers. And Nicolas Maduro, despite his many sins, and despite a right-wing media apparatus working overtime to insist otherwise, is not particularly known for persecuting Christians. The corrupt, faux-leftist strongman was raised in the Catholic Church, and has publicly stated his belief that Jesus Christ is “the only real and true God” and the “lord and master” of the nation – declarations which American Christian nationalists would salivate to hear emanating from an American president.
Despite its detachment from reality, the revelry with which Christian nationalist leaders greeted an illegal act of war which killed dozens of likely Christian civilians on the ground is an illuminating glimpse into the foreign policy ideals of a movement which has risen to power and prominence within the Trump administration based largely on its domestic policy agenda.
Trump’s imperialist incursion into Venezuela was not the first time the administration’s Christian nationalists have seen their influence converted into the kinetic blasts of five-ton bombs. That was last month in Nigeria, when Trump launched a series of strikes on the basis of a conspiracy theory about a “Christian genocide” in the rapidly developing West African nation. The same advisors cheered as the president dropped bombs on Muslim populations in the other typical targets last year: Syria, Iraq, Yemen.
The Christian nationalists who have the president’s ear have already embraced the idea of revival at the tip of a spear; they have already demonstrated the centrality of violence to their ideas of redemption and renewal. What their response to the Venezuela strike shows, though – in a way that the strikes on majority-Muslim nations do not – is the centrality of whiteness to that same crusade.
The link between whiteness and Christian nationalism is well-documented. You do not have to take my word for it: years’ worth of polling, studies, and analyses have documented that Christian nationalism, unlike mainstream Christianity, is effectively a white racial movement. Discussing that evidence, Dr. Sam Perry and Dr. Andrew Whitehead wrote that Christian nationalism is “as ethnic and political as it is religious.” Sarah Posner, an investigative journalist who has chronicled the relationship between Donald Trump and the Christian nationalist movement, noted that the movement is “deeply rooted in the white supremacy many evangelicals and fundamentalists were taught to find in their Bibles.”
There’s a reason their Jesus is white.
In the attacks on Nigeria, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, whiteness was not at issue. From a Christian nationalist perspective, those strikes — those civilian deaths — were justifiable as part of what many Christian nationalists see as an existential war between Christianity and Islam which dates back to the First Crusade. Raining violent revival down on the innocent civilians of Muslim nations is a well-worn habit by now.
Attacking an overwhelmingly Christian nation like Venezuela, though, steps outside of the well-worn habit and overstretched rationale which conservative Christians have used to justify the killing of Muslims since sometime between 1096 and 2001. It requires a different internal justification by those whose faith and jingoism have merged; those who wouldn’t want to think of themselves as killing fellow Christians, but who intend, for various reasons, to do so anyway.
To be clear, most Christian nationalists are not walking around consciously thinking of themselves as white supremacists, or examining their usually unacknowledged conviction that whiteness is the default setting for both Americanness and Christianness. But news like the strikes on Venezuela brings those convictions to the surface. In that sort of mental landscape, it’s no mystery how Christian nationalists can look at an overwhelmingly Christian nation like Venezuela and still conclude that it needs a Christian revival: in their minds, Venezuela is not nearly white enough to be as Christian as the actual statistics show.
Though the emergence of influential Christian nationalists into the top echelons of the national security space is an alarming and relatively recent trend, it’s also reflective of something much older. The Christian nationalist foreign policy being put forth by the Trump administration resembles nothing so much as the 19th century belief in manifest destiny, which was best summarized by Chicana organizer and activist Elizabeth Martinez as an “assertion of racial superiority sustained by military power.” In this way, the current era is not so different from the rest of our history as a nation – but the boldness bestowed by an absolute conviction of divine favor combined with the might of the modern American military makes it more dangerous, and less predictable, than in eras when that conviction was less prominent. In effect, we are seeing 19th century foreign policy conducted with 21st century capabilities.
So far, the revival touted by Locke, Brewer, and other Christian nationalist leaders consists of one thing: Venezuela is now under the control of white Americans, and appears set to remain so for the foreseeable future. There is no wave of church openings. There are no persecuted Venezuelan Christians peeking out from their shutters and wondering if they’re finally allowed to practice their faith in a country where 90% of the population also shares and practices that faith. There is no flourishing of the spirit.
There is rubble. There are corpses – Christian corpses, statistically. There is uncertainty, a power vacuum, an economy in freefall, and a promise by their conqueror to extract and export the Venezuelan people’s most valuable natural resources.
What can they mean by revival in this context other than whiteness?
There is also the fact that the United States’ past incursions into Latin America – the more than 40 other regional regime changes we have participated in since 1898 – did not lead to Christian revivals. Like this one, they mostly led to rubble and corpses. In too many cases, they also led to military dictatorships.
To Locke and Brewer and the others, none of that matters. Not the rubble, not the bodies of believers lying in the streets, not the history of bloodshed and instability which has cost the church in Latin America more than it has ever given it. They are not concerned with the actual Christians of Venezuela, or where the church goes from here. Their only concern, it seems, is spreading the empire of the White American Jesus to every corner of the world where people do not worship, or look, enough like them, and using the might of the U.S. military to do it.
The next steps in Venezuela are no more clear than the location of the next target our bombs will fall on for the crime of being either not Christian enough or not white enough (or, at least, for whom those excuses or justifications will be employed), but we can be certain that it’s not over. We can be certain that the crusaders on Pennsylvania Avenue are just gearing up, preparing to bring revival to whoever might stand in their way.
