Is America Already in a Civil War?

Tim Dickinson
·13 min read
23
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

The indictment of Donald Trump revealed that the far-right passions that spilled over into violence on Jan. 6 have not cooled, so much as remained at a simmer. And that a big news event can stoke them immediately back to a boil.

Brad Onishi is an expert on what’s fueling extremism from the religious right, which is acting increasingly as though it’s ready for combat. He’s the author of Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism — and What Comes Next. An audio version of the book, published in print earlier this year, will be released June 20.

For fans of Onishi’s work, audio is a familiar format. He’s also the co-host of Straight White American Jesus, a hit indie podcast in which he and a fellow professor of religion, Dan Miller, offer listeners an irreverent breakdown of news at the intersection of politics and religion.

Onishi, who is half-Japanese, was raised in Southern California and spent much of his young adulthood in a predominately white evangelical mega church, where he even served as a pastor. But his academic exploration of religion, and years abroad at Oxford University, drew him away from that congregation, and deepened a drive to decode and deconstruct evangelical culture for secular audiences.

Now a professor at the University of San Francisco, Onishi describes the religious underpinnings of Jan. 6 in his book and the harrowing realization that — had his life followed its previous path — he could easily have found himself on the ground in Washington, D.C., along with other members of his former church.

This past week, Onishi watched with alarm as the drama over Trump’s second arraignment unfolded. The fact that the grounds of the courthouse in Miami didn’t see a replay of the violence of Jan. 6 is cold comfort to Onishi. “We now live in a country where this type of political violence is something we have to prepare for,” he tells Rolling Stone. “All that resentment, all that rage is still there, and it’s not going anywhere, anytime soon.”

In an extended interview, Onishi discussed the dark implications of America’s political and religious unrest, and the warning signs that the nation is already in a low-level civil war.

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. 

There was plenty of loose talk about political violence following Trump’s federal indictment. What sticks with you from the past several days?
We may not have seen a huge, violent confrontation in Miami. But there are little fires everywhere that are pointing us toward deep civil unrest and deep mistrust in our public square.

I have a sheet in front of me with more than a dozen instances of people — elected officials, right-wing media figures, mega pastors — and some of them said, we’re in “a war phase,” or it’s time for “an eye for an eye.” There’s one mega pastor, Kent Christmas, who said the reason that Muslims have been successful in taking control is they’re willing to die for their faith, and asking Christians, “Are you willing to do that too?”

I’m struck that you’re describing overlaps between extreme statements by far-right politicians and far-right religious figures, without a clear division.
It’s another instance of how Christian nationalism is pervasive in right-wing American politics at the moment. Looking at these quotes alone, it’s hard to tell who’s speaking. Is it a Republican official? Is it a Fox News host? Is it a pastor? They sound eerily similar — even if some of the buzzwords are different.

How do you define Christian nationalism, and why is race so central to this ideology?
Christian nationalists want Christian people in the United States to be privileged. That ideology [at the extreme] says that only Christians should be citizens, or that the church should have a veto on American law and policy. But if you want to privilege Christians, that means secular people, Muslims, Buddhists, etc., have to accept a second-class position in the country.

Their justification is an “appeal to history” that says this is a Christian nation, founded for Christians, by Christians. There’s a lot of complexity when we talk about the faith of Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. But all of that is done away with in favor of a simple story that says America was founded on Judeo-Christian values, and therefore it should continue that way without any challenge.

White Christian nationalism is a reactionary movement. What are they seeking to restore?
There is a nostalgia for a time, supposedly, when the United States was following its “covenant with God” as an exceptional nation on Earth.

When you ask a lot of Christian nationalists — and this is where the white part comes in — when is the modern period when they would say things were good? They’ll say the 1950s. And you’ll ask, “The time before the Civil Rights Movement? Before the Civil Rights Act? Before the Voting Rights Act? Before immigration reform? Before the legalization of no-fault divorce all over the land? Before the Loving case protected interracial marriage in all 50 states?” I could go on and on, but their answer is, “Yes.”

So making America “great again” is a dark agenda at its core?
Their nostalgia is for a time when America was the “city on a hill.” The narrative now is that that city on the hill has been overrun by interlopers, and those for whom the country was never intended. So maybe we need to “build a wall” around the city, because it needs protection — too many folks have gotten in and ruined it and eroded the order that we need in the country.

When I hear these folks talk about “freedom,” it is not at all a freedom as secular Americans mean it — to follow your bliss. It’s freedom to live by God’s order.
Totally. “Freedom” is living out your role in God’s hierarchy. And so when other people don’t do that, just by existing, they’re making you less free. They may see the trans person, for example, as not living according to their God-given gender. So just by being on the subway, or being in their kids’ school, they’re making them less free, because the order is all out of whack. And therefore they need to do something about it. They need to go tear down displays at Target or put forth anti-trans legislation.

I think it’s helpful for people to understand this idea of the “covenant with God.” It’s as though the United States were another chosen nation, in the manner of Israel?
Very much so. The Christian nationalist nostalgia is based in the idea of American exceptionalism. But many Christian nationalists see the United States as exceptional, not only in its Constitution, but as literally chosen by God to play a unique role in human history — as a kind of New Israel that the world has never seen before.

And they see that special status as threatened?
The fear is that we’re on the precipice of an apocalypse, but that seems to be much more focused on the end of the United States, rather than the end of the world. And they feel as if they’re fighting the tides of history, and therefore extreme action is justified.

Many of the Christian nationalists we’ve reported on see themselves as fighting demonic forces, and they blame Satan for disrupting the order that they believe they’re entitled to.
Yes. It is sense of a cosmic war between good and evil. Many Christians believe that they are characters in an epic, and that the ending hasn’t been written yet in terms happens to the United States.

One of the dangers is that, when you talk about a cosmic war between good and evil, your political opponents are not opponents. They’re not people who have different ideas about policies. They become agents of the devil; they become demons. And it’s really hard to have a democracy where one side sees their political opponent in a mayoral race or in a congressional race as literally sent from Satan — as a demon who hates the country and is trying to destroy it.

You’ve described white Christian nationalism as a will-to-power, and that the endgame is to achieve their goals … by any means necessary.
If you’re a person who is convinced that the United States is under threat by a Luciferian regime, comprised of Marxist globalist secularists, feminists, the LGBTQ community, and so on, democracy is not your sacred value. The goal is for you to be the extension of God on Earth. And therefore the goal is for power, or “dominion” — to have the ability to shape the country and its social and political order in the ways you think God wants.

If democratic processes get in the way of that, they may be a problem, not a solution. There has been an impulse in white Christian nationalist circles for a generation that says, “We may not have the majority and democracy may not be on our side. So we’re gonna have to find ways around it, and ways through it. Because the goal is for us is to be in charge. We founded the nation, and we should be in control of the nation.”

Does that help us understand the comfort that the religious right has with Trump, where they see his authoritarian impulses as papering over a personal lack of godliness or goodness?
Donald Trump’s authoritarianism is a welcome aspect of his persona, because it signifies that he is someone who will brutalize the people that need to be brutalized. They don’t need somebody who shares their faith as much as they need somebody who will destroy the people that they see as destroying America. Mike Pence? George W. Bush? Mike Huckabee? Did these guys ever have the stones to do that? Donald Trump, from Day One, promised that he did. And in many ways, during his administration, he delivered.

There seems to have been a sea change in evangelical culture. It has gone from, the Rapture is coming, so you secularists can have your sinful world — to wanting to seize control of the government and mainstream culture and remake it in God’s name.
This is a shift worth noticing. It’s no longer that we expect Christ to return and therefore we have to prepare. It’s In order for Christ to return, we need to prepare by taking power and dominion. We’re in a place now with Sean Feucht, and Lance Wallnau and, and Rob McCoy where you almost don’t want the world to end tomorrow, because you really want to win the battle on Earth first. You want power. Matthew 28, to this crowd, is not about converting souls. It’s about controlling nations.

You write about Jan. 6 as the “first violent battle” in what a lot of Christian nationalists are seeing as a coming civil war. What does this rising tide of Christian nationalism mean for people who are accustomed to American politics working through the normal democratic means?
There is plenty of evidence that Jan. 6 is seen as an “Alamo moment,” something to be remembered and something that should inspire further action. But I think if we wait to see a new Civil War in terms of North versus South, then we’re going to miss a lot — because there are little fires everywhere all around us.

What do you mean by “little fires”?
There are extra-judicial acts of violence that are menacing our public square. During the 2022 midterm elections, we had men with AR-15s sitting outside of ballot drop boxes in Arizona. We have people who are disabling, through terrorist acts, power grids in order to stop a drag queen story or to stop a gay brunch. Figures such as Kyle Rittenhouse or Daniel Perry are seen as heroes of those who are willing to do everything they can to put the social order back in place.

Last year at Pride in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, dozens of Patriot Front members were arrested seconds before they were able to descend upon the Pride event. I interviewed people who were there and believed they were seconds away from unspeakable violence. In Glendale, California, there was a violent eruption between parents who were protesting and counter-protesting LGBTQ curriculum, books and materials in L.A. schools.

There are little fires everywhere that portend the kind of American conflict that we’re discussing.

Rhetorically, I’m noticing overlap between Christian nationalists and the “western chauvinism” that militant groups like the Proud Boys use to justify violence. It’s disturbing.
There are natural points of resonance between them. White Christian nationalists tend to be very patriarchal. There are many Christian nationalist pastors today that would say, God has put everything on men: the church, the country, and the family, and it is up to men to answer that call through authoritative, assertive, unabashed, unashamed leadership and aggression.

When we look at the kinds of “men’s conferences” happening through churches, we see men are going on retreats, and not only praying together and studying the Bible, but they are engaging in war games, where they’re simulating a war that they themselves will have to fight in, where they’re training their teenagers to be holy warriors.

So that kind of masculinity in a white Christian nationalist space is going to find natural resonances with the alt-right, and misogynists, and in many cases openly racist figures. I don’t think that’s a mistake. I don’t think that’s an accident. I don’t think it’s a one-off.

They certainly share the same bigotry against LGBTQ Americans.
I went to a protest at a Calvary Chapel Church here in the Bay Area. There was a speaker, Tony Perkins from the Family Research Council, who’s vehemently anti-LGBTQ. There were 45 or 50 people outside protesting.

Across the street, there were Proud Boys, and some folks wearing Nazi paraphernalia, who were there to make sure the protesters didn’t get “out of line.” There’s a scenario where the folks from church could have walked out of their service, and seen the Proud Boys, and have said: “Hey, guys, we love you, we want you to be Christian, but we don’t want you here to protect us. Please don’t come here with your Nazi paraphernalia and your Proud Boy vest.” But the opposite happened. They were waving to the Proud Boys, inviting them to lunch and thanking them for being there. To me, that is a good example of how these groups are often finding themselves on the same side. They are co-belligerents fighting in the same war. And they’re finding that they have a lot of the same values. So why not work together?

Play this forward for me. Where do you see this going?
I’m really scared because I feel like they have their enemy, they have their “other” that they’re gonna demonize. Trump said it the night after he was indicted; he said it in his speech in Georgia, when he talked about trans issues.

For those who didn’t catch it, Trump mused about how his fans barely respond to promises to cut taxes anymore, but when he talks about restricting trans rights, they hoot and holler and go wild.
The KKK put up flyers in Kentucky — talking not about Black people, not about Jewish people, not Catholic people. The flyers are now about trans kids.

To me that’s a really clear indication of where we’re headed. And by next summer, when we’re back in the meat grinder of election season, it’s going to be worse than it’s ever been.

More from Rolling Stone

Best of Rolling Stone

Click here to read the full article.