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Christian nationalism

DAVIS: Christian Nationalists Are Trying to Gaslight You

·May 2, 2024

Taken from the title of the 1944 film Gaslight, the term “gaslighting” has firmly entered the American lexicon over the past several years. The film, an early entrant in the psychological thriller genre, features a husband who works to slowly convince his wife that she is experiencing delusions, convincing her not to trust what she is seeing with her own eyes. It’s from this origin that we arrived at the modern use of the term to describe a form of psychological manipulation in which someone is made to doubt their own senses and sanity. It is a technique most often employed by conmen and abusers. Now, it is being adopted en masse by the Christian nationalist movement in America to defend their political project from hard-earned criticism.

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DAVIS: City Council Races Could Complete Andrew Wommack’s “Takeover” of Woodland Park

·March 21, 2024

Campaign signs are packed in tight clusters on the roadside as Highway 24 emerges from the mountain pass and levels-out into Woodland Park. It’s a familiar scene by now in the small town which has spent the past three years fighting for its own future. The conflict has well-defined lines by this point, and the campaign signs – which have sprung like Columbines from the snow over the past month as the town’s April 2nd municipal election draws near – are clustered to reflect them.

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Bad Faith: The Narrowgate Cult

·March 11, 2024

None of them realized they were in a cult until it was too late. It started in late 1993 as a Bible study group composed of students from Messiah College in Pennsylvania. By the time it shattered in February of 1997, most of the group’s members had lost their individual identities and many of their worldly possessions. Some had lost their marriages. The leader, the man who they say slowly wove a web of control around their minds and around their lives, had lost his wife and child: they fled in the night, afraid that he might kill them.

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DAVIS: Christian Nationalism is Turning Into Something Even Worse

·January 31, 2024

I was raised to take over the world for God. My teachers have been sorely disappointed on that front. It is not something I spend much time talking about because it’s not something I spend much time thinking about. It was the milieu of my childhood, and I had no say in the matter. As a pastor’s kid from Nashville, Tennessee, I was steeped in religious conservatism from birth. The impetus towards a highly political, far-right version of Christianity which seeks to conquer the world for Christ, though, didn’t come from my family so much as it came from my classical Christian school. We were taught that we were special, that the world was fallen and we could redeem it. We were taught that America was a Christian nation which had drifted off course, but that a faithful generation could restore it. 

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DAVIS: Onward Christian Soldiers – A Woodland Park Investigation

·August 24, 2023

If a germ touches me, it dies,” the faith healer proclaimed at the height of the pandemic. Not everyone was so lucky: though he personally claimed to be protected by faith-based immunity, Andrew Wommack’s constant flouting of local health ordinances, his desire to pack the sanctuary at Charis Bible College with hundreds of people at a time, led to multiple fatal outbreaks of the virus in Teller County. Now, three years later, Wommack’s ministry empire has infected Woodland Park with a new strain of contagion, this time through the ballot box.

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