It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when Tucker’s radicalization began, but Fortman said she first started noticing politics creeping into his sermons around the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency. Initially, she said, it was easy to shrug off. Tucker was a trusted pastor and had been a consistent voice in her life for years. Plus, she and her mom weren’t that involved in the church community itself. They came for the Bible stories and the concert-quality music performances. “He’d start his sermons with this rambling 30- to 40-minute rant that sounded like it was taken straight from, like, Fox News,” she said. “One time we went there, he referred to the COVID vaccine as the ‘mark of the beast’ that we needed to fight against. And I was like, ‘yo, this is crazy.’”“This is not cruise-ship Christianity right now. We are a battleship.”
People associated with the far-right group America First attend an anti-vaccine protest in front of Pfizer world headquarters on November 13, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
Although many Americans might be just waking up to the threat of Christian nationalism, the radicalization happening in pews and pulpits has been happening for years. And faith leaders have been sounding the alarm. In 2019, the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, an 86-year-old, Washington, D.C.-based group of ministers, lawyers, and political activists formed a new initiative: Christians Against Christian Nationalism. Thousands of Christian leaders from around the country have since signed onto their mission statement, acknowledging Christian nationalism—described as a “damaging political ideology”—poses a “persistent threat to both our religious communities and our democracy.” The statement also points out that Christian nationalism “often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation.” “At the time, we felt a real need to provide this resource, because of escalating violence around Christian nationalism,” Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty executive director Amanda Tyler said. The catalyzing event was the mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. Though there was no indication that the shooter explicitly identified as a Christian nationalist, the combination of references to religious violence, Trumpism, and conspiracy theories in his social media ramblings troubled Tyler.“It feels to me that the churches in this area are no longer true Christian churches. They’ve morphed into something that’s completely unrecognizable.”
Joey Gibson, 35, founder of 'Patriot Prayer,” stands as hundreds of members of the extreme right, including Proud Boys, Three-Percenters, and Patriot Prayer, rally in Portland, Oregon on August 17, 2019. (Photo by JOHN RUDOFF/AFP via Getty Images)