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christian nationalism
As a Cease-Fire Brings Some Relief to Gaza, We Must Make Sure It Lasts
Now that we are about a year and a half into a genocide of the Gaza Strip with a pause for six weeks, concerned Americans must remain vigorously attentive to Trump potentially deteriorating a fragile peace.
Jan 21, 2025
Last week, mediators announced an agreement between Israel and Hamas to a cease-fire in the devastating Israel-Gaza War of 2023-2025, which went into effect on Sunday, January 19—the day before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Donald Trump’s inauguration as 47th President of the United States. This agreement will stop warfare for six weeks, lead to the release of dozens of Israeli hostages in Gaza and hundreds of Palestinian political prisoners held in Israel, allow Gazans to return to the remnants of their homes, and let humanitarian aid into Gaza. Importantly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently warned that the cease-fire is temporary and that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would remain in parts of the occupied Gaza Strip. Moreover, after the cease-fire announcement on Wednesday, January 15, the IDF intensified its airstrikes against Gaza, killing at least 120 Palestinians.
Assuming it is adhered to by all parties, a temporary cease-fire will bring some relief to a Gaza Strip devastated by unprecedented levels of Israeli military bombardment, as well as Israeli hostages and Palestinian political prisoners. For the last 15 months since Hamas’ attack of Israel on October 7, 2023 that killed over 1,000 Israelis and took hundreds hostage, Netanyahu’s IDF dropped the equivalent of several Hiroshima-level nuclear bombs on the densely populated Gaza Strip. Around 68% of the IDF’s weaponry came from the U.S. during this time under the Biden-Harris administration, who spent an unprecedented $22.76 billion in arms transfers to Israel during the first year of the war and blocked multiple cease-fire efforts in the United Nations, prolonging what leading human rights organizations have described as a genocidal attack on Gaza.
The American-armed IDF wiped out entire multigenerational lineages of families, orphaned children, bombed hospitals and universities, destroyed ancient mosques and churches, and permanently ended almost 50,000 lives. As an occupying military, the IDF cut off food, water, and electricity to Gaza during this time—creating conditions to bring about population elimination through mass starvation, one of the United Nations’ criteria of genocide.
In the face of the potential dangers associated with Trump’s second presidency, how can concerned Americans advocate for a permanent cease-fire, accountability, and repair in Israel-Palestine?
Therefore, while President Joe Biden ended the very last breaths of his presidency with the beginnings of a temporary cease-fire in Israel-Palestine, his principal legacy in Gaza is one of arming an unchecked genocide for almost a year and a half that wrought mass destruction, death, and irreversible damage upon a vulnerable refugee population mass incarcerated within a 140-square mile strip of land. In the face of Biden’s ineffectiveness in achieving a lasting cease-fire earlier, some are attributing this cease-fire to President Trump’s team, who recently placed pressure on Netanyahu to come to a deal with Hamas. Author and social activist Naomi Klein, however, warns that Netanyahu, who leads a far-right coalition in Israel with religious fundamentalist elements, agreed to a cease-fire as “a kind of welcome gift” for Trump’s inauguration. Trump’s track record and the apocalyptic ideology of his white Christian nationalist base show that we should remain vigilant about the prospects of a second Trump presidency aggravating prospects for permanent peace, justice, and equality in Israel-Palestine.
Indeed, 80% of white American Evangelicals voted for Trump, forming a significant part of his overall coalition. According to religion scholar Bradley Onishi in his 2023 book Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—and What Comes Next, 80% of white American Evangelicals can be classified as white Christian nationalists, or those who believe in a Christian identity of a United States chosen to play an exceptional role in world affairs and that white people deserve to remain at the top of economic, political, and social hierarchies. Owing to their apocalyptic view of the future, white Christian nationalists have been leading voices in the U.S. since World War II in favor of Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians—including during the Israel-Gaza War of 2023-2025.
An October 2024 poll found that 57% of white Evangelicals had confidence in Netanyahu to handle world affairs—even in light of his genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip. The recent sermons of John Hagee—Texas-based white Evangelical pastor, Trump supporter, and founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the leading Christian pro-Israel organization in the U.S. with 10 million members—reveal that Christian fundamentalists perceive the Israel-Gaza War of 2023-2025 as part of a totalizing Battle of Armageddon. According to this worldview, following attacks on Israel during the end of times, a vengeful Judeo-Christian God would wage unrestricted warfare on Israel’s enemies to eliminate them through brute force, secure “the Jewish right to the promised land—all of it,” and permanently foreclose possibilities for a two-state solution. In Hagee’s words, “Jesus Christ, the King of Kings, Lord of Lords, leads his army the church triumphant to annihilate those who have desired to attack Israel.” This warfare would eventually engulf the world, leading to mass violence and suffering—but prior, Christians would be transported to Heaven.
Given his white Christian nationalist base, it should come as no surprise that Trump during his first presidency actively damaged prospects for a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Now that we are about a year and a half into a genocide of the Gaza Strip with a pause for six weeks, concerned Americans must remain vigorously attentive to Trump potentially deteriorating a fragile peace. Animated by his white Christian nationalist base’s call for enabling Netanyahu to finish his ethnic cleansing campaign of the Gaza Strip, Trump might further entrench a Jewish supremacist status quo in Israel-Palestine.
In the face of the potential dangers associated with Trump’s second presidency, how can concerned Americans advocate for a permanent cease-fire, accountability, and repair in Israel-Palestine? We can start by following the lead of Palestinians themselves. Founded in 2005 by over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations, the global, nonviolent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement calls on institutions and individuals around the world to boycott and withdraw investments from companies that profit from the violation of Palestinian human rights. The BDS Movement aims to pressure Israel into adhering to its obligations to Palestinians under international law: ending its military occupation of Palestinian lands, enshrining equality of Palestinian citizens of Israel into Israeli law, and allowing Palestinians in exile in the diaspora the right to return to their ancestral communities. It is modeled after the global anti-Apartheid movement that, through economic pressure, helped lead South Africa into multiracial democracy.
Healing in Israel-Palestine is realistically going to take a lot of work in the face of Netanyahu’s Biden-enabled genocidal assault on Gaza and a second Trump presidency energized by white Christian nationalism. Even still, we must not allow ourselves to become paralyzed with fear of the daunting tasks ahead. We must play our roles to organize for permanent peace, justice, and equality. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. suggested regarding the Vietnam War, “Even when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict,” we must not be “mesmerized by uncertainty”; “we must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.”
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Progressives Slam 'Extremist' Plans of Project 2025 Architect Tapped for Key Trump Post
Russell Vought, Trump's pick to head the White House Office of Management and Budget, was questioned by members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee during a Wednesday confirmation hearing.
Jan 15, 2025
As a U.S. Senate committee held a confirmation hearing for Russell Vought—Republican President-elect Donald Trump's pick to head the White House Office of Management and Budget—progressive critics underscored what they called the extremism of the controversial nominee, who played a key role in crafting a proposed initiative to expand executive power and purge the federal civil service.
Vought—who was questioned Wednesday by members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee—served as both acting director and director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during Trump's first term. He currently leads the think tank Center for Renewing America, whose motto is "For God. For Country. For Community."
The defender of Christian nationalism recently co-authored the policy portion of Project 2025, which includes dramatic cuts to critical public programs, abolishing or gutting essential government agencies, a national abortion ban, and a litany of additional far-right wish list items. While Trump has tried to distance himself from the deeply unpopular proposal, at least 140 people who worked in his first administration—including six former Cabinet secretaries—have been involved with Project 2025.
Tapped to oversee an agency that plays a key role in managing civil servants, Vought was secretly recorded saying he wants government officials to be "traumatically affected" by his reforms "because they are increasingly viewed as the villains."
Debra Perlin, policy director at the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility in Washington, submitted written testimony to the Senate committee in which she warned that "should he be confirmed, it is abundantly clear that Mr. Vought intends to misuse his authority as director of OMB to harm civil servants, and as a result, endanger the American public."
Perlin continued:
During his tenure as OMB acting director and then director from January 2019 to January 2021, Mr. Vought was a central figure in attempting to implement Schedule F, President Trump's executive order that would have upended the merit-based civil service system by stripping employment protections away from thousands of career civil servants had President [Joe] Biden not rescinded it. Mr. Vought has called for reinstating Schedule F and was a key architect of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's sweeping—and wildly unpopular—conservative policy plan that advocates for dismantling the civil service. If Schedule F is reinstated, it would not only harm federal employees but would also cause catastrophic harm to government services, as well as causing deep economic impacts in places with significant populations of government workers including California, Texas, Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., among others.
In addition to Mr. Vought's intention to dismantle the civil service, he has pushed extreme strategies to consolidate presidential power under the banner of "radical constitutionalism." He supports the president withholding congressionally appropriated funds in violation of the Impoundment Control Act, bypassing the advice and consent of the Senate to push recess appointments, invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military on the American public, and abusing emergency powers. These plans to expand presidential power are even more troubling taken with Mr. Vought's stated desire to reduce the independence of federal agencies such as the Department of Justice, in part by purging agencies of career civil servants that are seen as standing in the way of the president's agenda. Mr. Vought has called for "an army of investigators" to prosecute current and former government officials who sought to hold President Trump accountable.
"These are just some of the ways Mr. Vought intends to misuse his own authority and craft plans for the president to subvert the law and, in the process, American democracy," Perlin added.
In a statement coinciding with Wednesday's hearing, Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said: "Vought has no business going back to OMB. His extreme ideological opposition to regulations that protect consumers, workers, our environment, and public health and safety will lead to more deregulatory disasters that harm all of us."
"He wants to slash funding for critical government agencies and services, interfere with agencies that are supposed to be politically independent, exclude the benefits of regulation from cost-benefit analysis, and fire vast numbers of civil service employees simply for doing their jobs," Gilbert added. "In addition, he abused his power during his last tenure at OMB to override agency experts, repeatedly endangering public health and safety. The Senate should reject this dangerous and extreme nomination."
Congressman Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), founder of the Stop Project 2025 Task Force, said Wednesday that "we don't have to guess if Russ Vought will enact the radical vision laid out in Project 2025 if he is confirmed, because he literally wrote the playbook and his record shows that he will stop at nothing to enact it."
"He is a self-avowed Christian nationalist who plans to dismantle the civil service—replacing thousands of qualified, nonpartisan federal employees such as scientists and engineers with political lackeys who will be selected to follow partisan orders above the law or the Constitution," the lawmaker continued. "He has vowed to ignore the Constitution by seizing unlawful power for Trump to unilaterally withhold or redirect funds for entire agencies or programs that Congress appropriated."
"His aggressive plan to gut checks and balances clears the way for Trump to enact his entire Project 2025 agenda to sell out the middle class, threaten personal rights and freedoms, and impose biblical morality codes on all of us," Huffman added. "We cannot take that risk and let this authoritarian architect of Project 2025 anywhere near the federal budget or the Oval Office."
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Christian Nationalism Marches on With 'Bible-Infused' Texas Curriculum
"What we're seeing here in Texas with these lessons is a larger national push to promote the idea that American identity and Christian identity are woven together, are one in the same," said one professor.
Nov 22, 2024
Parents, teachers, and other critics of Christian nationalism were outraged by a Texas board's Friday vote to approve a "Bible-infused" curriculum for elementary school students—part of a broader right-wing push to force Christianity into public education.
"They chose politics over what's best for students, promoting an evangelical Christian religious perspective and undermining the freedom of families to direct the religious education of their own children," declared the Texas Freedom Network, accusing the State Board of Education (SBOE) of ignoring warnings from religious studies experts, national media attention, and overwhelming negative feedback from the people they're elected to serve."
Like a preliminary vote Tuesday, eight of the SBOE's 15 members voted to approve Bluebonnet Learning, instructional materials proposed by the Texas Education Agency. Three Republicans joined all four Democrats in opposing the curriculum. The deciding vote in favor of it was cast by Leslie Recine, a Republican recently appointed by GOP Gov. Greg Abbott to temporarily fill a vacant seat.
"In a state as diverse as Texas, home to millions of people from countless faiths and beliefs, the Texas Republicans on the State Board of Education voted to incorporate Biblical teachings into the state curriculum—completely undermining religious freedom," said Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa in a statement after the final vote.
"This move has ultimately violated parents' rights to guide their children's faith while presenting teachers with additional needless challenges," Hinojosa argued. "Our public schools should be focused on equipping students with the education and skills they need to succeed beyond grade school whether it's pursuing a higher education or entering the workforce. The teaching of religious doctrine should stay in our places of worship where it belongs."
Although the curriculum isn't required, The Texas Tribunereported, "the state will offer an incentive of $60 per student to districts that adopt the lessons, which could appeal to some as schools struggle financially after several years without a significant raise in state funding."
"Christian nationalists have bought their way into every governing body of the state, including the SBOE. And they will not stop with inserting Biblical content in English textbooks."
Bluebonnet Learning features lessons from Christianity in reading and language arts materials for kindergarten through fifth grade.
"This curriculum is not age-appropriate or subject matter appropriate in the way that it presents these Bible stories," Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, toldThe Associated Press. Children who would read the material, she said, "are simply too young to tell the difference between what is a faith claim and what is a matter of fact."
Zeph Capo, president of the Texas arm of the American Federation of Teachers, urged districts "to resist the dollars dangled before them and refuse to use Bluebonnet Learning materials," arguing that they violate the code of ethics for the state's educators and "the separation of church and state by infusing lessons with Bible-based references more appropriate for Sunday Schools than public schools."
"Moreover, they are assaults on the academic freedom of our classrooms and the sanctity of the teaching profession," he said in a Friday statement. "We have a duty as teachers to make our teaching and learning materials accessible and inclusive of all students in our classrooms. These prescriptive materials cannot meet all learners in all contexts; in fact, they make no effort to do so."
"Perhaps what's most insulting about today's vote is that these materials are not just inappropriate—they're bad at what they proclaim to do. Instructional experts have expressed deep concerns about the age-appropriateness of the materials and whether they will be effective reading instruction," Capo continued. "In short, this is a push coming from idealogues, rather than anyone with expertise in educational best practices."
Noting the current "moment of profound political division," the union leader added that the vote "is the latest evidence that Christian nationalists have bought their way into every governing body of the state, including the SBOE. And they will not stop with inserting Biblical content in English textbooks. We can anticipate what will come next, whether that's the erasure of contributions of marginalized populations in social studies or the minimalization of climate change in science."
The curriculum push coincides with an SBOE effort to restrict library materials. The ACLU of Texas said on social media that "the same politicians censoring what students can read now want to impose state-sponsored religion onto our public schools."
The Tribunereported Thursday that "10 members on the board responsible for determining what Texas' 5.5 million public schoolchildren learn in the classroom voted to call on the Texas Legislature, which convenes in January, to pass a state law granting them authority to determine what books are appropriate for school-age children."
Earlier this week, Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University, toldFox 4 that he supports teaching religion in public schools, but in a fair and unbiased way, and he doesn't agree with the state proposal.
"I think it would be unfortunate to approve these lessons in their current form," he said. "Public schools should reflect the religious diversity of our state. And when teaching about religion, not privilege one religious tradition over others."
"What we're seeing here in Texas with these lessons is a larger national push to promote the idea that American identity and Christian identity are woven together, are one in the same," Chancey pointed out.
For example, in Oklahoma, Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters has set out to put Bibles—specifically, a pricey one peddled by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump—in every classroom in the state. In a recent appearance on CNN, Walters said that "President Trump has a clear mandate. He wants prayer back in school. He wants radical leftism out of the classroom, wants our kids to be patriotic, wants parents back in charge with school choice."
Meanwhile, in Louisiana, state lawmakers passed legislation requiring every public school classroom to display, in large font, a Protestant version of the Ten Commandments. Earlier this month, a judge prohibited enforcement of that requirement, which was on track to take effect in January.
At the federal level, Trump—who is set to return to the White House in January—has advocated for dismantling the U.S. Department of Education. For now, he has named Linda McMahon, a former wrestling executive accused of enabling sexual abuse of children, as his pick for education secretary.
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