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Introduction: White Christian Nationalism and a Collapsing Civilization

America is experiencing a dangerous convergence of white Christian nationalism, authoritarian politics, and ecological disintegration that increasingly fits the contours of a soft fascism intertwined with late-stage industrial collapse. Far from standing outside this project, the Trump administration is deeply embedded in, and dependent on, white Christian nationalist networks: movement pastors, media ecosystems, and ideological think tanks that provide both its most reliable voters and its most disciplined institutional foot soldiers. Senior officials, judicial nominees, and agency heads have routinely been drawn from circles that preach a divinely mandated social order—patriarchal, heteronormative, and white—and that frame Trump himself as a providential instrument chosen to “restore” Christian America.

This essay should be read as Part Two of a broader analysis begun in “America’s Oligarchic Techno‑Feudal Elite Are Attempting to Build a Twenty‑First‑Century Fascist State,” which traced how oligarchs, Big Tech platforms, and security bureaucracies are constructing the material and institutional architecture of a new fascist order. Where that first essay mapped the class, technological, and carceral infrastructure of emergent techno‑feudal fascism, the present essay examines the complementary religious and cultural superstructure: how white Christian nationalism supplies the mythic narrative, moral cover, and mobilized base that allow this oligarchic system to consolidate power.

This fusion is not an aberration but an expression of deeper civilizational crisis: a political project to lock in racial-religious hierarchy and fossil-fueled growth precisely as the material basis of that order erodes. As industrial modernity runs up against ecological limits, and as decades of inequality hollow out democratic legitimacy, white Christian nationalism offers the regime a way to convert fear and precarity into loyalty—sanctifying extraction, demonizing pluralism, and recoding authoritarian measures as necessary acts of spiritual and national defense.

Defining white Christian nationalism and its fascist drift

White Christian nationalism is a political-religious ideology that claims the United States was founded as, and must remain, a Christian nation defined by whiteness, patriarchy, and a mythic past of cultural homogeneity. It is not simply “strong faith” or generic conservatism; it is a set of beliefs that link America’s identity and legitimacy to a particular white, conservative, Christian order, and that treat deviation from that order as existential threat.

Core features typically include:

  • The myth that America was uniquely chosen by God and must be “restored” to its supposed Christian roots.

  • Idealization of patriarchal families and rigid gender roles.

  • Hostility to pluralism, immigration, and religious diversity.

  • Preference for authoritarian “law and order” and acceptance of state violence.

  • Deep suspicion of science, education, and independent media.

When compared to standard descriptions of fascism—mythic past, cult of victimhood, strongman leader, glorification of violence, and anti-pluralist nationalism—the overlaps are stark. Christian nationalist ideology strongly predicts support for a demagogic leader, acceptance of political violence, and rejection of democratic constraints, leading theologians and scholars to argue that “Christian nationalism” in the United States increasingly functions as a form of Christian fascism or “Christofascism.”

Importantly, Lerone A. Martin’s The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism demonstrates that this fusion of militant nationalism and conservative Christianity is not new. Martin shows that, in the mid‑twentieth century, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover consciously fused anti‑communism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and biblical literalism into a civil religion he called “Americanism”—a white Christian nationalist vision in which the United States was “fundamentally a Christian nation” whose survival depended on preserving a racialized, gendered moral order. Hoover and the FBI, he argues, were “central to postwar religion and politics” and actively partnered with leading white evangelicals to make white Christian nationalism a legitimate and powerful force in American public life.

Seen through Hoover’s “stained glass window,” contemporary white Christian fascism appears not as a sudden deformation of an otherwise healthy evangelical tradition, but as the latest iteration of a much longer project in which state security power and white evangelical networks have marched together to defend a mythic Christian America.

Hoover’s gospel of Americanism: a prehistory of Trump’s Christian state

Martin’s archival work reveals that the FBI under Hoover functioned as an early prototype of a Christianized security state. Hoover considered the United States divinely chosen, treated the Declaration and Constitution as quasi‑scripture, and defined “Americanism” as a fusion of citizenship, law, and conservative Protestant morality. To obey dominant social customs was to serve God; to dissent was both heresy and sedition.

Hoover built the FBI in his own image: an all‑white, male force of “Christian soldiers and ministers” whose federal duty, he told them, was to defend and perpetuate the nation’s “Christian endowment.” Agents attended FBI retreats and worship services led by sympathetic clergy; internal culture presented the Bureau as a quasi‑church charged with defending America’s soul from subversives. Hoover’s white Christian nationalism rejected theological hair‑splitting in favor of a broad, unified white Christian order: conservative Protestants and Catholics alike were to be mobilized as guardians of a Christian nation.

Modern white evangelicalism, Martin argues, did not stand apart from this project; it was shaped by it. Institutions like Christianity Today, the National Association of Evangelicals, and major white evangelical broadcasters forged close partnerships with Hoover, who published essays in their outlets (often with taxpayer support), lent them the prestige of the security state, and helped funnel evangelical college graduates into federal posts. Pastors preached Hoover’s writings from the pulpit; laypeople used them in Bible studies. For many white evangelicals, Hoover functioned as “bishop” and “crusader,” adjudicating which clergy were legitimate and which were dangerous radicals, and policing the boundaries of acceptable Christian politics.

Hoover’s FBI also vigorously targeted civil-rights leaders and movements as subversive, equating demands for desegregation and voting rights with communist conspiracy. King, Fannie Lou Hamer, Dorothy Day, and others were framed not as prophets of justice but as enemies of Christian America. At the same time, Hoover and his allies promoted a supposedly “moderate” evangelical stance that rejected both “extremists on the right and the left,” while materially reinforcing segregation and opposing civil-rights legislation. The pattern is highly familiar: egalitarian demands are recoded as existential threats to a fragile, divinely favored nation, and state repression is sanctified as defense of order.

In this light, the Trump administration’s fusion of white evangelical networks, policing, and domestic intelligence looks less like a radical innovation and more like an intensification of a long‑standing structural arrangement: security agencies and white evangelicals acting as co‑custodians of a racialized Christian order.

The Trump administration and the Christian nationalist base

Within this historical frame, the present regime’s dependence on white Christian nationalism is easier to see. The contemporary Republican coalition has been hollowed out to its core base: white Christian nationalists, including large segments of white evangelicals and conservative Catholics, whose political identity is bound up with a vision of America as a white Christian nation under siege.

The Trump years have seen:

  • Judicial appointments drawn heavily from networks that view law as an instrument for restoring traditional Christian morality and dismantling reproductive, LGBTQ+, and civil‑rights gains.

  • Executive policies crafted in close consultation with Christian nationalist think tanks and legal advocacy groups, from attacks on church–state separation to efforts to redefine religious “liberty” as the power to discriminate.

  • Cabinet‑level officials openly framing their work as carrying out God’s will, and describing Trump as a Cyrus‑like figure raised up by God despite his flaws to rebuild Christian America.

This is the populist, religious face of what my first essay traces on the oligarchic and techno‑feudal side. Big donors, fossil‑fuel interests, and digital platform oligarchs provide the financial and technological skeleton; white Christian nationalism provides the flesh and spirit.

How white Christian fascism functions

White Christian fascism in America is best understood as a governing project that fuses racial hierarchy, authoritarian state power, and religious legitimation in the context of a declining industrial empire. It operates across at least four dimensions: myth, hierarchy, institutions, and theology.

Mythic past and sacred nation

Christian nationalists sacralize an imaginary past in which America was homogeneous, virtuous, and governed by godly white men. That myth erases Indigenous genocide, slavery, and the long struggle of Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities to force the republic to honor its stated ideals. It presents civil-rights, feminist, queer, and immigrant movements not as democratic corrections but as incursions against a once‑pure order.

Hoover’s Americanism was an early, powerful articulation of this myth: he explicitly described the Founders as divinely guided men who built a Christian republic, and warned that abandoning Christian foundations would mean national extinction. Today’s Christian nationalists echo that narrative almost verbatim, casting pluralism and secularism as death sentences for America’s God‑ordained role.

Strongman, hierarchy, and violence

White Christian nationalism strongly predicts support for strongman leaders, even when their personal lives starkly contradict basic Christian ethics. In both the Hoover and Trump eras, this has taken the form of “amoral pragmatism”: religious leaders publicly proclaiming the importance of virtue while blessing, and even sacralizing, leaders whose actual conduct is lawless, cruel, and corrupt, so long as they deliver policy wins that entrench the desired order.

Hoover’s admirers knew he ordered unlawful break‑ins, surveillance, and disinformation campaigns; court cases and leaks made this public. Yet white evangelicals dedicated stained‑glass windows to him, invoked him from their pulpits, and treated his word as near‑gospel. The same pattern holds today with a leader who boasts of sexual assault, incites political violence, and openly undermines the rule of law, yet is hailed as God’s chosen instrument. The underlying logic is fascist: law, morality, and truth are subordinated to the leader’s mission to protect the nation and its divine mandate.

Institutional capture and legal revolution

My first essay details how oligarchic networks, tech platforms, and security agencies are being retooled to serve an emergent techno‑feudal order. White Christian fascism intersects with that process by targeting key institutions—courts, civil service, education, media—and either capturing them outright or delegitimizing them in the eyes of the base.

Hoover’s FBI offers a mid‑century template. The Bureau became both arbiter and enforcer of acceptable religion and politics, channeling state resources to favored evangelical actors while surveilling and sabotaging those it deemed subversive. Evangelical elites, in turn, used federal power and Hoover’s blessing to elevate their own institutions and marginalize liberal mainline Protestantism and radical Black Christianity.

Today’s Project‑style blueprints generalize this approach: purge the civil service of non‑ideological professionals; stock agencies with loyalists; weaponize law enforcement and intelligence against perceived enemies; defund or undermine regulatory and rights‑enforcing bodies; and reshape education and culture in a Christian nationalist image. Elections and courts still formally exist, but real power increasingly resides in a single, interlocking bloc of Republican officials, state institutions, and white Christian nationalist organizations acting together as one ruling apparatus.

The theological pivot: salvation through domination

Martin emphasizes that white evangelicalism’s core problem is not that it was “corrupted” by politics in the 1970s, but that its postwar form was always deeply entangled with white Christian nationalism. Salvation, for many adherents, has long been linked to preserving a specific social order: white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity (the assumption that heterosexual, gender‑conforming relationships are the only normal standard), militarized anti‑communism, and capitalist property relations (laws and norms that treat private ownership by the wealthy as sacrosanct and organize society around protecting it).

Hoover’s theology made this explicit. Liberty, he argued, required virtue; virtue was defined as obedience to traditional Christian norms; and the state’s role was to cultivate virtuous souls and crush subversive tendencies. In that framework, civil-rights activism, feminist agitation, or radical economic demands become spiritual threats; suppressing them is not just political prudence but holy duty. Modern white Christian fascism inherits this political theology and extends it into every battleground: race, gender, sexuality, schooling, borders, and ecology.

Ecological crisis and the politics of denial

White Christian fascism does not merely coexist with ecological crisis; it feeds on it and deepens it. The same worldview that sacralizes human dominion and rigid hierarchy tends to deny ecological limits and delegitimize climate science.

Certain strands of evangelical and Christian nationalist belief—end‑times expectation, providential protection, and distrust of secular institutions—predict strong resistance to climate action. If God has a secret timetable for the world’s end, or has promised never again to destroy the earth, then secular warnings about anthropogenic collapse can be dismissed as arrogance or deception. In this view, calls for decarbonization, degrowth, or global cooperation appear not as necessary survival strategies but as plots against God’s people.

Moreover, white Christian nationalism is tightly intertwined with fossil capitalism. Christian nationalist politicians and donors routinely defend extractive industries as both economic necessity and divine gift, and denounce environmental regulation as an attack on prosperity and liberty. Fossil‑fueled abundance becomes part of the mythic past to which they promise to return, even as the ecological consequences of that abundance accelerate climate chaos, heat waves, fires, and resource conflicts.

This is where my two essays lock together: the oligarchic techno‑feudal elite seeks to preserve its power and lifestyle in a world of tightening ecological and economic constraints; white Christian fascism provides the moral narrative and mobilized base that makes this preservation project politically viable. Together, they generate sacrificial zones—regions, communities, and species written off as the cost of doing business—and cast the resulting suffering as either necessary discipline or regrettable but acceptable collateral damage.

Authoritarian drift as symptom of civilizational decline

Multiple analyses now frame America’s authoritarian slide as part of a wider pattern of civilizational stress: rising inequality, energy and resource limits, ecological overshoot, and institutional decay. In this view, white Christian fascism is both a political project and a psychosocial response to the crumbling of modern industrial civilization.

Modern industrial society relies on dense networks of energy, finance, logistics, governance, and ecological stability. As energy returns decline, supply chains fray, diseases spread, and climate shocks intensify, these systems become brittle. The post‑war promise—that each generation will be better off than the last, that growth will solve conflicts, that liberal democracy can mediate class struggle—no longer matches lived reality.

Under such conditions, democratic politics becomes dangerous to entrenched elites. Electorates might embrace redistributive, decolonizing, or eco‑socialist programs that would shift power downward and constrain profit. Faced with this prospect, segments of capital and aligned political actors invest in authoritarian solutions: border walls, camps, paramilitary policing, and the slow erasure of democratic constraints.

White Christian nationalism offers these actors a ready‑made story: the crisis is not caused by fossil capitalism, globalization, or oligarchic plunder, but by moral decay, demographic change, and rebellion against God’s order. The remedy is not redistribution and ecological repair, but repentance, purification, and strongman rule. In that sense, white Christian fascism is one plausible “endgame” ideology for a collapsing industrial empire: it justifies using the last surplus of energy and capacity not to build a just transition, but to fortify an unequal order through violence.

America as epicenter of intertwined collapse

Because of its military reach, carbon footprint, financial centrality, and cultural influence, the United States is a key node in the global system. When it embraces white Christian fascism at the very moment when cooperation, humility, and scientific literacy are most needed, it amplifies global risk.

Domestically, the movement undermines core pillars of the republic: free and fair elections, independent institutions, pluralism, and equal protection. It normalizes selective law enforcement, camps, and paramilitary policing. It teaches a large segment of the population to view fellow citizens—especially migrants, Muslims, Black activists, queer people, and environmentalists—as enemies of God who may legitimately be surveilled, dispossessed, or expelled.

Internationally, the same movement pulls the U.S. out of multilateral agreements, undermines climate diplomacy, and aligns it with illiberal regimes. This weakens collective responses to war, displacement, pandemics, and climate disruption, while emboldening reactionary forces elsewhere.

In ecological terms, a white Christian nationalist superpower committed to fossil extraction and hostile to climate science is a planetary hazard. In spiritual terms, it represents a tragic inversion of the best possibilities within the Christian tradition: instead of grounding humility, solidarity, and care for creation, the faith is harnessed to domination, denial, and cruelty.

Countercurrents and possibilities

The picture is bleak, but not static. The same Christian tradition being weaponized for fascism also contains strong counter‑traditions of prophetic dissent, liberation theology, ecological humility, and solidarity with the oppressed. Figures like James Talarico—an evangelical seminarian challenging Christian nationalism as idolatry and betrayal of Jesus’s teachings—stand in a lineage that includes Black freedom‑church preachers, peace‑church radicals, and feminist and queer theologians.

Martin’s work suggests that any serious attempt to confront white Christian fascism must be historically and institutionally literate. It is not enough to decry “politicized religion” in the abstract; the long alliance between security agencies and white evangelicalism must be named, interrogated, and unwound. Likewise, white evangelicals seeking to “exorcise the demons” of nationalism must grapple with the fact that their movement’s modern foundations were laid, in part, through partnership with Hoover’s FBI and its extralegal violence.

In tandem, my two essays sketch the contours of this challenge. The first maps the oligarchic techno‑feudal superstructure; the second exposes the white Christian nationalist super‑ideology that animates and stabilizes it. Together, they argue that resisting twenty‑first‑century fascism requires not only institutional reforms and economic restructuring, but also a profound struggle over myths, theologies, and moral imaginations at the end of an industrial empire.

References

Freedom From Religion Foundation. “Evangelical Climate Change Denial Is Killing Our Planet.” September 19, 2024. https://ffrf.org/news/releases/evangelical-climate-change-denial-is-killing-our-planet/.

Heather Cox Richardson. “This Week in Politics | Explainer.” February 18, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp6q6sT0HQQ&t=1768s

Heyward, Carter. “Christofascism Is Everyone’s Problem.” Texas Observer, November 2, 2022. https://www.texasobserver.org/carter-heyward-white-christian-nationalism-book/.

Jemar Tisby. “It Can Happen Here: The Links Between White Christian Nationalism and Fascism.” The Witness, April 26, 2023. https://jemartisby.substack.com/p/heres-how-white-christian-nationalism.

Martin, Lerone A. The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691175119/the-gospel-of-j-edgar-hoover.

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Pew Research Center. “Involvement by Religious Groups in Debates over Climate Change.” November 16, 2022. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/11/17/sidebar-involvement-by-religious-groups-in-debates-over-climate-change/.

Stanford Humanities and Sciences. “The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism – Lerone A. Martin.” March 27, 2023. https://humsci.stanford.edu/feature/gospel-j-edgar-hoover-how-fbi-aided-and-abetted-rise-white-christian-nationalism-lerone.

Talarico, James. “Transcript: Rep. James Talarico on Confronting Christian Nationalism.” Dan I. Smart (Substack), February 17, 2026. https://danismart.substack.com/p/transcript-rep-james-talarico-on.

Transnational Institute. “The Rise of Global Reactionary Authoritarianism.” February 2, 2026. https://www.tni.org/en/article/the-rise-of-global-reactionary-authoritarianism.

Transnational Institute. “Follow the Money: The Business Interests Behind the Far Right.” February 2, 2026. https://www.tni.org/en/article/follow-the-money-the-business-interests-behind-the-far-right.

Yale Center for Faith and Culture. “Violence, Fascism, and Christian Nationalism.” April 16, 2025. https://faith.yale.edu/media/violence-fascism-and-christian-nationalism.