The ‘Christian Nation-ist’ Set To Take Control Of The Federal Government

Russ Vought wants to make America Christian again. And he has put quite a bit of thought into what that might look like.

Across public speeches, little-noticed interviews, and secretly made recordings, the Trump functionary-turned-MAGA policy influencer has spent several years enunciating his belief: America was founded as a Christian nation, and is intended to be governed that way.

Vought is most known for proposing aggressive actions aimed at remaking the government into something very different than it is now — actions like deploying the military to quell protests, gutting the independent civil service, and the many draconian policy ideas contained in Project 2025, which he helped bring into being. But his public statements show that he puts great emphasis on imagining a specifically Christian future for America. He’s spoken at length about his view that America is fundamentally a Christian nation, and about how that contention informs his approach to right-wing budgetary policy. Out of all of Trump’s picks for senior staff to date, Vought may be the best example of how MAGA policy prescriptions have merged with the hard-line ideas of the Christian right.

Now, he’s set to reprise his role as one of the most powerful officials in the new administration. Vought will run the White House Office of Management and Budget, the executive branch office that oversees budgeting and helps implement presidential actions. It’s an enormous amount of power, and will make him central to the execution of Trump’s promised efforts to demolish the American state as we know it: The OMB could have a hand in any White House refusal to spend congressionally-appropriated funding, in attempts to replace swathes of civil servants with political cronies, and in letting private businessmen like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have a role in reshaping the government.

In a podcast with Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) last year, Vought said that he and his organization, the Center for Renewing America, had a priority: establishing that “we’re not a secular country. That we are a Christian Nation as founded and that should be shared by everyone even if they have religious liberty for another faith.”

If the United States fails to understand its Christian heritage, Vought said, it is in for destruction.

“To the extent that you don’t have that consensus, you have a culture and a nation that just disintegrates,” he said.

For Vought, these remarks have been a consistent refrain over the past few years.

He told Charlie Kirk in February that he isn’t so much of a Christian nationalist as he is a nationalist that believes in a Christian America.

“We are Christians who are nationalists. We are people who believe that we have a Christian nation,” Vought said. “I mean, Christian nationism would probably be the most accurate aspect of what I believe.”

Vought’s big-picture idea is that America was founded as a Christian nation, and must be preserved in that form. It suggests a form of Christian supremacy within the country: yes, people of other faiths can and do exist, but Christians are the only group affiliated since the founding with American national identity.

He’s brought this to general descriptions of the state of the country, and to specific policy recommendations. He told one podcaster in 2021 that it informs the need for budget cuts; in September 2023, he argued that the Bible demands drastic limitations on legal immigration and mass deportations.

If this all seems conveniently aligned with standard GOP priorities, then you may want to take a look at the incoming OMB chief’s career path. He ascended to OMB after a fairly traditional upward trajectory through Republican politics. He worked for years as a staffer on Capitol Hill, in part as executive director of the Republican Study Committee under Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) and as policy director for the House Republican Conference under then representative and former Vice President Mike Pence.

His move to the executive branch in 2017, after Trump nominated him to be deputy director of OMB, thrust Vought into an early spotlight. During his confirmation hearing, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) asked Vought about comments he had written saying that Muslims “do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned” over a controversy at his alma mater, Wheaton College, involving a professor’s theological views, which Vought critiqued. Vought denied to Sanders that the sentiment was Islamophobic.

In terms of policy, Vought has set his ambitions high.

He’s advocated for Trump trying to create a new rule that the executive branch can unilaterally refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress. It would upend the separation of powers as we know it; whether that initiative succeeds will likely be left to the Supreme Court to decide. Vought, during Trump’s first term, tried to gut the federal bureaucracy and replace longtime staffers with political appointees via a legal change called Schedule F; he’s expected to revive that.

More extreme examples show that Vought, at Center for Renewing America, has pushed for legal justifications to deploy the military domestically. Per a report from ProPublica, Vought described his plans in private speeches as efforts to ensure that military leaders do not stop a future Trump administration from ordering protests quelled.

It’s in part a reflection of how unpopular Vought anticipates his agenda to be. He alluded to that in a podcast shortly after Trump left office in 2021.

“We have lost the ability in our public square to hear from Judeo-Christian values,” he said on a March 2021 podcast. “It is so foreign we don’t even know how to talk about it or how to reason from that perspective.”