God and Power

Religious Nationalism Destroys Everything It Touches

Executive Summary:

Religious nationalism is not a new phenomenon, and it is not uniquely American. Across the 20th and 21st centuries, every major religious nationalist movement that achieved significant state-power fusion produced the same outcomes: persecution of religious and ethnic minorities, erosion of democratic accountability, organized political violence, and institutional self-corruption among the organizations that carried the ideology forward. Iran, BJP-governed India, Northern Ireland’s loyalist paramilitaries, and Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo all followed versions of the same arc.

In the United States, peer-reviewed research now documents that Christian Nationalism Adherents endorse political violence at nearly seven times the rate of those who reject the ideology. CN belief is the single strongest predictor, across party lines, of support for suspending elections and dismantling checks and balances. Approximately 21 million Americans believe the 2020 election was stolen and that force is justified to act on that belief. Domestic terrorism cases more than quadrupled between 2013 and 2021.

Meanwhile, secretive donor networks organized explicitly around theocratic governance goals are funding voter-roll purge operations, shaping Supreme Court appointments, and operating through charitable tax status that experts say violates campaign finance law. History offers no example of a religious nationalist movement that moderated once it achieved this level of institutional penetration. This article makes the case that the American record will not be the exception.

When a political movement wraps itself in the flag and the cross, the crescent, or the sacred text of your choice, it gains something ordinary politics cannot buy: the claim that its authority is divine. That claim is the most dangerous idea in modern governance. The historical record is not ambiguous about what happens next.

The Doctrine That Devours Democracies

Start with Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini’s doctrine of velayat-e faqih, clerical governance, fused religious authority with constitutional state power after the 1979 revolution. The result was not a theocracy that coexisted with democratic institutions. It replaced them. The Council of Guardians, composed of appointed clerics, now holds veto power over all legislation and over every candidate who runs for office. Democratic displacement is not a risk in this system. It is baked into the architecture.

The human costs are not abstract. Human Rights Watch concluded that Iran’s systematic persecution of the Baha’i religious minority, including executions, forced disappearances, property confiscation, and categorical denial of educational access, amounts to a “crime against humanity of persecution.” Iran’s economy has been gutted by the international isolation that follows from its theocratic foreign policy. The revolution did not make Iran stronger. It made Iran a state that survives by terrorizing its own people.

This is not an isolated case. It is a pattern.

From Gujarat to Tokyo: The Global Record

In India, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), founded in 1925, spent nearly a century building toward state-power fusion with the Bharatiya Janata Party. Today an estimated three of four BJP ministers are RSS members. The ideological roots of this movement are not subtle: the RSS’s second head, M.S. Golwalkar, explicitly praised Nazi Germany’s “purging of the Semitic races” as “a good lesson for us in Hindustan.”

The 2002 Gujarat violence killed between 850 and 2,000 Muslims. Human Rights Watch found the violence was “planned, well in advance” and “organized with extensive police participation” while the BJP state government, then led by Narendra Modi, stood aside. In 2020, RSS cadres were arrested and charged with murder and rioting following anti-Muslim violence in Delhi that killed at least 53 people. In BJP-governed India, this trajectory has not moderated with power. It has accelerated.

In Northern Ireland, Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party fused Protestant religious identity with political power so thoroughly that Paisley described the Pope as the Antichrist and, at a 1959 rally, read out Catholic home addresses that were subsequently attacked. The Ulster loyalist Shankill Butchers killed at least 23 Catholic civilians, people with no IRA connection whatsoever, selected purely on the basis of religious identity. ‘The Troubles’ consumed more than 3,000 lives across three decades.

In Japan, the religious movement Aum Shinrikyo, after failing in a 1990 parliamentary bid, embraced an intensely eschatological theology. The group stockpiled sarin and nerve agents. In 1995, members released sarin on the Tokyo subway, killing 13 people and injuring 5,500. The state destroyed the organization, but only after the bodies were counted.

In the United States, the Christian Identity movement, a white-supremacist theology claiming that white Anglo-Saxons are God’s true chosen people, produced domestic terrorism, assassination attempts on Martin Luther King Jr., church bombings, and the violent Order group. The movement became so toxic that mainstream white evangelicalism disowned it. But the disavowal came after the terrorism, not before, and the ideological DNA it injected into far-right movements remains detectable today.

The Organizations Destroy Themselves Too

Religious nationalist movements do not only harm the countries they operate in. They also corrode the institutions that carry them.

The Family Research Council obtained a special “network of churches” tax designation to shield donor identities from scrutiny, then became one of the most powerful political lobbying operations in Washington. That is a direct contradiction: a church tax exemption being used to run a lobbying apparatus. ProPublica and the Southern Poverty Law Center have documented this pattern in detail. The SPLC designated the FRC an anti-LGBTQ hate group in 2010.

Then there is the Ziklag network, exposed by ProPublica in 2024. Ziklag is a secret, invitation-only community of high-net-worth Christian families organized explicitly around the Seven Mountain Mandate, the doctrine that Christians must “reclaim” the seven spheres of societal influence: government, education, media, business, family, religion, and entertainment. The network raised nearly $12 million in 2022 alone. Its donors include the Uihlein family (Uline corporation), the Green family (Hobby Lobby), and the Waller family (Jockey).

What did that money fund? Voter-roll purge operations under the name Operation Checkmate. Pastor mobilization networks operating through Turning Point USA. Anti-transgender ballot initiatives in seven states. All of this ran through a 501(c)(3) charitable tax status. Six nonpartisan tax experts reviewed Ziklag’s activities and concluded they “tested or ran afoul of” campaign finance law. The network claims it played a “hugely significant role” in the selection and confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Churches that have chosen political alignment over spiritual authority are not merely compromising their integrity. They are watching it evaporate. Across every context where religious institutions fused with political power, from Northern Ireland to Gujarat to the American culture wars, the pews have emptied as the credibility drained out.

The American Numbers Are Not Reassuring

The research on Christian nationalism in the United States has moved beyond opinion polling into hard statistical analysis. The numbers should command serious attention.

A 2023 PRRI survey of more than 6,000 Americans found that 40% of Christian Nationalism Adherents (representing roughly 10 to 11% of the total American population) endorse the statement that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save our country.” Among CN Rejecters, that number is 6%.

A 2024 study by Perry and Grubbs in Politics and Religion found that Christian nationalism is “by far the strongest predictor” that Americans will support leaders who suspend elections, suppress opposing groups, and disregard checks and balances during declared “national emergencies.” This effect held across Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. It is not a partisan finding. It is a structural finding about how theocratic ideology erodes democratic culture.

The correlation between Christian nationalist belief and justification of the January 6 Capitol attack measured r=0.345 in research by Armaly, Buckley, and Enders (roughly as strong as the relationship between income and education level) published in Political Behavior in 2022. That is a strong effect for a political science finding.

A 2025 PRRI study, cited by Brookings, found that 67% of CN Adherents believe in “Great Replacement” theory. Among white CN Adherents, that number rises to 81%.

Dr. Robert Pape’s research at the University of Chicago’s CPOST project found that approximately 8% of American adults, roughly 21 million people, believe the 2020 election was stolen and believe that force is justified to restore Donald Trump to power.

The Armaly et al. research identified a joint risk profile: Americans who score high on CN beliefs, white identity, victimhood orientation, and QAnon support simultaneously. That combination multiplies violence endorsement dramatically; the effect “more than tripled” compared to CN belief alone. About 17.7% of white weekly churchgoers fall into this profile.

Meanwhile, the FBI and GAO data show domestic terrorism cases rose 4.5 times from 2013 to 2021. Far-right extremists were responsible for 73% of lethal violent extremist incidents in the United States since September 12, 2001.

These numbers aren’t a fringe. They describe a constituency.

American Institutions Under Attack

The damage is not only statistical. It is institutional and specific.

The federal judiciary is the clearest case. When the Ziklag network claims credit for the appointment of a sitting Supreme Court Justice, and when that network is organized around the explicit goal of imposing theocratic governance across seven spheres of American life, the court’s legitimacy as a neutral legal arbiter does not merely wobble. It requires a serious defense.

Louisiana became the first state to mandate Ten Commandments displays in every public school classroom. Project 2025’s education provisions aim to inject Christianity into public school curriculum nationally. When public schools become instruments of religious instruction, they stop serving all American children. They start serving one theological community at the expense of everyone else.

Elections are the most structurally dangerous target. Operation Checkmate, funded through the Ziklag network, deployed AI tools to purge voter rolls. The Perry and Grubbs study found CN is the strongest predictor of support for voter suppression measures and of the belief that the United States “makes it too easy to vote.” The goal, in this framework, is not competitive elections. It is elections structured to produce predetermined outcomes.

The tax system is being weaponized in plain sight. When religious organizations obtain church tax status while functioning as political lobbying entities, they gain political leverage while ordinary taxpayers subsidize the entire operation.

Why History Offers No Comfort Here

There is a reassuring theory that religious nationalist movements moderate once they gain institutional access. The theory holds that power breeds responsibility, that radicals become pragmatists, that governing tempters the ideology.

The historical record does not support this theory.

• Iran’s Islamic Republic has not liberalized in 47 years. It has perfected the mechanisms of repression.

• BJP-governed India has not moderated its exclusion of Muslims with each electoral cycle. It has intensified it.

• The Ulster Protestant political parties did not moderate the sectarian violence of the Troubles as they deepened political entrenchment. The violence continued until a peace agreement forced structural change from outside the system.

The Armaly et al. finding about the multiplicative risk structure is the statistical version of this same dynamic. CN belief combined with white identity, victimhood, and QAnon support does not add up to a sum of its parts. It multiplies. All of these factors are measurably increasing in CN-adjacent communities. This is not a system trending toward equilibrium: the system is accumulating pressure.

The self-reinforcing trap works like this: movements that achieve institutional penetration use those institutions to prevent the accountability mechanisms that would check them. That is not paranoia. It is the documented operating procedure of the Council of Guardians in Iran, the BJP’s use of state machinery in Gujarat, and the Ziklag network’s use of 501(c)(3) status to run what six tax experts describe as a campaign finance operation.

What Comes After the Alarm

The data above was gathered by researchers at the University of Chicago, Princeton, Baylor, and dozens of other institutions. The on-the-ground reporting came from ProPublica, Human Rights Watch, and the SPLC. The historical cases are uncontested. None of this is contested on the factual level by serious analysts.

What is contested is whether it matters enough to act on.

The historical record says the window for effective response narrows with each cycle of institutional capture. The organizations doing this work, the Ziklag donors, the Operation Checkmate operatives, the pastor mobilization networks, are not making arguments. They are building infrastructure. Arguments can be refuted. Infrastructure has to be dismantled.

That requires, at minimum:

1. rigorous enforcement of the campaign finance laws that govern political activity by tax-exempt organizations;

2. transparency requirements for dark-money donor networks that currently operate in secret;

3. a press and public that treats theocratic policy goals with the same scrutiny given to any other attempt to impose a single community’s values on an entire pluralist democracy; and

4. elected officials willing to say, plainly, that a judiciary shaped by a secretive donor network organized around the Seven Mountain Mandate is not a judiciary that belongs to all Americans.

The countries that did not take this seriously in time are not hypothetical. They are on the map. Their citizens are still living in the consequences.

The American experiment in self-governance is worth more than the deference that has so far been extended to movements that have stated plainly, in their own documents and their own words, that they do not believe in it.

Sources: Human Rights Watch; PRRI 2023 American Values Survey (n=6,000+); Perry & Grubbs, Politics and Religion (2024); Armaly, Buckley & Enders, Political Behavior (2022); PRRI 2025/Brookings; CPOST/Robert Pape, University of Chicago; GAO/FBI domestic terrorism data; ProPublica, “Inside the Ziklag Network” (2024); Southern Poverty Law Center.