Traditional Media Never Took the Christian Right Seriously

Back in the early 2000s, when we were outraged by the excesses of authoritarian dilettantes George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, a friend suggested I start a blog. I had been a lawyer, but was eager to change careers. Having studied the rise of the Christian right as a college student in the 1980s, I was now watching their aspirations unfold in real time. I wanted to investigate, expose, weigh in on all the things other people were missing. I was accustomed to writing fast. I was built to blog. 

I never ended up starting my own blog, but was the very fortunate beneficiary of a serendipitous series of events that made it possible for a person with no entry point or foothold in journalism to find her way into it. Another friend told me about the group blog The Gadflyer (since, sadly, defunct), making its mark in the burgeoning progressive blogging space. They took a chance on me, and I wrote persistently about the Christian right, its assaults on secular law and governance, and the D.C. money and power politics driving it. 

The revolution in digital media made my two decades of reporting on the Christian right possible. Not only because it offered expansive space beyond the coveted, exclusive pages of print magazines, but because the best digital journalism — and here I’m talking about reported, edited, fact-checked journalism, although opinion writing is also an essential part of the equation — demands a long-term commitment to the bit. It depends on a reporter consistently drilling down into an important corner of the political world, and continually exposing and contextualizing that world for readers. This type of journalism is fundamentally different from the other kind of online journalism that was born alongside it in the 2000s. Both appear in the digital form, more nimble than print, but that other kind, which still plagues us today, is the inside-the-Beltway, gossip-driven, anonymity-granting, driving-the-day coverage that thrives on access and adrenaline rather than illumination and insight. 

Back in those days, some, but certainly not all, newspapers and magazines were still reluctant to run investigative stories on the Christian right. Stated reasons included having recently published an article about religion, or an assumption that their readers would not have heard of the religious leaders who were the subject of the story. Tacit reasons were an allergy to covering religion critically at all, out of fear of being accused of disrespecting people’s faith,  particularly, evangelical Christians. Those people, this reasoning went, say they just want to protect babies and families and express their piety in public. Who are we to judge? Some editors thought the religious right was too fringe to be relevant, or that the Republican Party did not actually care about them, and only used them for their votes every fourth November. 

A naive incredulousness that a religious movement would actually drive national politics paralyzed necessary coverage of the Christian right. Its death was frequently announced, always prematurely and inaccurately. Too much coverage relied on interviews with media-savvy insiders, like the Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land, or, during the early days of Bush’s presidency, megachurch pastor and National Association of Evangelicals president Ted Haggard. Even setting aside that both these men fell from their mighty perches due to (very different) scandals, relying on them to sanitize a religious movement that was undergoing serious theological and political radicalization was a disservice to readers.

The ascent of Donald Trump proved all of these journalistic myopias catastrophically wrong. The story of Christian nationalists and Trump, of feverish devotion to an authoritarian figure thought to be anointed by God, of a refusal to question that authority even in the face of mountains of evidence of abuse or lies, was there all along. It is the story of American evangelicalism, which is also, right now, the story of America.

Back in 2014, TPM published one of my stories that no one else wanted to touch. I had been working on it for several years, my reporting taking me around the United States and even to Israel, which plays a central role in many evangelicals’ apocalyptic theology and domestic politics. Former members of the International House of Prayer (IHOP) accused the organization and its leader, Mike Bickle, of myriad abuses, rooted in his demands for total capitulation to his unconventional, apocalyptic theology that required participation in a round-the-clock prayer room in a strip mall in suburban Kansas City, Missouri. Submission to his program of prayer and fasting in this insular, totalizing environment, Bickle convinced his acolytes, was essential to join an army of spiritual warriors who would bring about the militaristic, bloody, and world-altering second coming of Christ. 

Pitching this story had been frustratingly futile. Editors doubted their readers would have heard of Bickle or his organization, and fretted the story lacked a clear connection to electoral politics. But Bickle was a prominent figure in the sprawling world of charismatic Christianity, which includes the New Apostolic Reformation and related movements that claim modern-day prophets and apostles are divinely ordained to receive direct messages from God and reinterpret the bible to foretell and explain events. They encourage their followers to engage in spiritual warfare against satanic adversaries — who are also the enemies of the Christian America they claim God ordained. 

Even without the benefit of the hindsight that these interconnected Christian nationalist movements drove Trump’s first election and undergird his support today, this was still a story worth telling in 2014. Bickle, regardless of his minimal role in explicitly electoral politics, influenced the thinking and politics of thousands of evangelicals, and was a key figure in shaping the contours of a religious movement at the heart of GOP politics. And it is not irrelevant that 10 years after my story appeared, something my sources hinted at but lacked the hard evidence for was exposed by the Kansas City Star. (Shout-out to local print journalism!) Bickle is now embroiled in a massive sex abuse scandal at IHOP, including his alleged grooming of teenage girls. The revelations forced his ouster, even though his remaining allies continue to attempt to rehabilitate him.

In 2014, perhaps Mike Bickle’s radical theology seemed to inhabit the outer reaches of American evangelicalism. But it is only by reporting stories like this, and investigating how a seemingly fringe character was building an authoritarian empire to train an army of spiritual warriors, that one can comprehend the evolution of these movements and their relationship to politics. 

My 2015 TPM reporting on evangelist Bill Gothard, who the Duggar family of 19 Kids and Counting fame enlisted to rehabilitate their son Josh after his sexual abuse of his sisters became public, similarly dealt with the fringe-to-mainstream pipeline. Reality television had sanitized the radical theology the Duggars learned from Gothard and his organization, the Institute in Basic Life Principles. The myth of sexual purity around the Duggars, and around Josh in particular (his supposedly chaste courtship of his future wife Anna was a central storyline on their show) led to his political ascent to one of the top Christian right organizations in Washington. Duggar is now serving a 12-year prison term following his 2021 conviction for possession of child pornography.

Trump fully understands how his Christian nationalist base uses spiritual warfare to paint a picture of an America under siege by anti-Christian, anti-American, satanic forces that only an anointed strongman leader can vanquish. Trump’s rise to power did not happen in a vacuum, or just because many Americans thought he was a successful businessman, or because most Americans support his brutal deportation policies. (They don’t.) A radical religious movement that views strongman leaders, even abusive ones, as essential to carrying out a divine plan for themselves and for America, helped propel him to power, and keep him there. 

Just because Trump now occupies the White House (again) doesn’t mean that this movement is mainstream. It is maddeningly possible for the country to be led by an authoritarian fundamentally at odds with the desires of the majority, owing to how this movement, fueled by deep-pocketed donors, has become the core of the Republican electorate. It’s a challenge to tell that story, to help people understand that they do not have to accept the fringe as mainstream, or to accede to their mythic claims to represent the “true” America. Especially now, as Trump seeks to punishingly control the media, maintaining this kind of coverage is absolutely essential to the task we have before us as Americans.