Preparing for War

November 7, 2022
The January 6 Capitol riot should make evangelical Christians take a hard look in the mirror, according to this anguished history of the movement’s entanglement with political extremism. University of San Francisco religion scholar Onishi (The Birth of the World), who left evangelicalism after studying philosophy and theology at Oxford University, traces the roots of the problem to the founding of the John Birch Society in 1958 and details how vehement opposition to abortion, the “gay agenda,” the women’s rights movement, and other social justice movements—driven by belief that “the Bible is the errorless Word of God”—helped push that organization and others into “the dangerous territory of conspiracy theories.” Conservative politicians including Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan leveraged evangelicals’ religious fervor into electoral power, paving the way for white Christian nationalism to become “an integrating force for Trump’s coup attempt.” Onishi provides plenty of evidence that “Christian extremists” have long been willing to “sacrifice the republic in order to save the America they wanted—a nation where White, straight Christians maintain power,” but his assertion that January 6 was the next “logical step” for the movement underplays many other factors in that event. Still, this is a rigorous and earnest grappling with the intersection between religion and politics.