What would you do if you found out that a congressman’s wife had written a series of romance novels? Would you read them? And what would you do, hypothetically, if you read one of them, and found it not only creatively lacking but surprisingly racist? You can answer those questions for yourself; I discovered my own answers last week.
Around 3:30 a.m. on Saturday, June 14, a man dressed as a police officer knocked on the door of a home in New Hope, Minnesota. When the inhabitants, a married couple in their 50s, opened the door, he shot them to death. His target was the woman, Democratic Speaker Emerita of the state House of Representatives, Melissa Hortman. An hour earlier, the killer had shot another couple, that time targeting the man, Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman. In the killer’s car, police later found a target list including information on other Democratic lawmakers, abortion rights activists, and a Planned Parenthood clinic.
Andrew Wommack has not been shy about his desire to take over Woodland Park, the small Teller County town where his global ministry has its headquarters. Ever since the prosperity gospel minister exhorted his followers to conquer the town in 2021, they have been working to do so. First, they took control of the local school board. Then they came for the city council. Now, a year after the conquering ministry’s first attempt to control the council was beaten back, forces aligned with Andrew Wommack Ministries and Charis Bible College are once again working to reshape the town’s local government, this time through recall elections.
Schlepping my way across the campus of Colorado Christian University on Monday towards the lecture hall I had chosen as my destination, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. When the email landed in my inbox last week advertising the lecture “Christian Nationalism: Good or Bad?” hosted by the school’s think tank, the Centennial Institute, my interest was immediately piqued. I have taken a great interest in the conversations Christian communities are having amongst themselves in recent years about Christian nationalism, a force which threatens not just our shared democracy but also the particular faith which birthed it.
If you have read anything I have written over the last few years, you know that I believe that Christian nationalism is the most pressing threat to American democracy. I have been harping on this for years, since well before the Heritage Foundation crafted Project 2025, and well before Christian nationalism became the animating force behind Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Unfortunately, during the time I have been writing about the risks Christian nationalism poses to both democracy and Christianity, history has repeatedly proven my concerns to be justified. Now that Trump has returned to office and Project 2025 is well on its way to completion, there is not much utility in shouting from the rooftops that Christian nationalism is coming for us all. It has already arrived.
Researchers released a new dataset measuring the size, demographics, and beliefs of the Christian nationalist movement in America earlier this month, and the findings are grim. The Public Religion Research Institute’s 2025 “Christian Nationalism Across All 50 States” data found that support for Christian nationalist beliefs is strongly correlated with increased hostility towards migrants, adherence to sexist and patriarchal views, and an increased likelihood of belief in conspiracy theories and support for political violence.
I'm all for women being able to get abortion services, and I'm all for people being able to afford housing. But the law should say yes to an atheist's backyard, too.
Every now and then, I read a book which hits me with such a profound impact that, like Paul on the road to Damascus, I find my life divided into before and after, incapable of recovering from the revelation. More than a decade ago, legendary investigative journalist Katherine Stewart’s first book, The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, hit me with just such a haymaker. The Good News Club was not only revelatory, it was inspiring: ten years after I read it, the book was constantly on my mind as I investigated the happenings in the Woodland Park school district two years ago.
Flooding the zone with shit.” That’s the phrase that Steve Bannon, the right-wing Rasputin and former Trump strategist, coined years ago for the technique we have seen the Trump administration deploy in the last week. The idea, as Bannon conceived it, was to unleash a firehose of disinformation, scandal, and intrigue at such an astonishing rate that neither the public nor the media would be able to remain focused on a single topic or transgression for long. Unfortunately, the first week of the second Trump administration was a masterclass in it: the Nazi salute, the talk of annexing Greenland, the “Gulf of America.”
I have never met a book I didn’t like. Although, I suppose that’s not quite true; I’ve thoroughly disliked most self-help books I have ever encountered, and I think the entire body of Victorian fiction is criminally overrated. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that I have never encountered a book which didn’t impress me, which didn’t force me to think about the efforts involved in translating all of those thoughts into words, and putting all of those words onto the page. Even the worst novels – and I have read a few – leave me with the impression that the author has accomplished a Herculean task: externalizing what was once only internal.
