Learning about and from the people who led the Jan. 6 Capitol riot

Dr. Matthew D. Taylor, author of ‘The Violent Take It by Force,’ is a recent guest on ‘A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast’

by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service

Photo by Alejandro Barba via Unsplash

LOUISVILLE — Dr. Matthew D. Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore and the author of “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That is Threatening Our Democracy,” was the guest last week on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast,” the weekly broadcast hosted by the Rev. Lee Catoe and Simon Doong. Listen to their 50-minute conversation here.

“We have seen an increase in conservative, evangelical movements in the U.S. over the last 10 years. Most recently, we saw the movement’s presence in the January 6th riots,” the hosts asked Taylor. “What is the reason for this rise? And what is the relationship between evangelicalism, the ‘far right,’ and Christian supremacy in American culture and politics?

“Those are some huge questions,” Taylor told the hosts, launching into a discussion of Christian nationalism, a phrase used more and more in the past four years, he said. But it’s a phrase that tries to describe something that goes back to the founding of the nation, or even before that, according to Taylor.

That’s how long the debate has gone on over “how the government of the United States should interface or not interface with churches and with religion,” he said. “There have been strong voices throughout American history that have pressed for a closer relationship between the government and religion.”

As children of the Enlightenment, many of the nation’s founders weren’t particularly religious, he said. But a few years after the Constitution was ratified, the Second Great Awakening swept across the nation, and “a surge of piety” fed into the Civil War, Taylor said, “which in many ways was a battle between two different forms of Christian nationalism — a Southern version which was very much expansionist and pro-slavery using the Bible, and a Northern version of Christian nationalism.”

“Listen to the lyrics of the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic,’” Taylor suggested. “It’s envisioning the Union Army as the conquering army of God that is building the kingdom of God by defeating the South.”

That level of fervor ebbed until the Cold War, “and then surged again when people were saying, ‘We’re the godly nation against the godless communists,’” he said. “What we’re experiencing today is another of those waves of Christian nationalism sentiment. This time it’s fueled by demographic and cultural changes the U.S. has undergone.”

For the last 30 years or so, the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian has plummeted, Taylor noted. “I think that’s created a profound anxiety for a lot of Christians, particularly conservative and evangelical Christians who feel like they are losing cultural sway and losing power,” he said. Donald Trump declared as a presidential candidate in June 2015, just a few days before the U.S. Supreme Court declared bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional. “There was a feeling of vulnerability and loss of power,” Taylor said.

Armed with the “cultural confidence” that came from being the vast majority, mainline Protestants were at the forefront of the wave of Christian nationalism that emerged during the Cold War. “Today, the fact that we are a Christian nation is a much more contestable question,” Taylor said. “There is anxiety fueling the current rise that wasn’t so present then.”

Dr. Matthew D. Taylor

In his book, Taylor tells the story of New Apostolic Reformation, whom he calls “the principal architects” of the Jan. 6 riots. The NAR got its start in the 1990s “around aggressive ideas of spiritual warfare,” he said. “That’s the idea there are angels and demons battling all around us in this invisible spiritual realm. Those battles affect us, and we as Christians can participate.”

NAR leaders “believe that they are a new, renewed form of leadership. They are reorganizing and reconstituting the offices of apostle and prophet that were present in the life of the early church,” Taylor said. “Many of them are celebrities today in the independent charismatic world. They’ve also become increasingly political.”

The rhetoric of violence “feeds directly into the action we see on Jan. 6,” he said. They’re “forms of spiritual warfare, especially charismatic spiritual warfare — people blowing into shofars, people singing worship songs just outside a riot, people speaking in tongues — all these things are participating in these ideas of spiritual warfare. For many Christians there on Jan. 6, this rhetoric of spiritual violence tips over into literal violence before our eyes. You see Christian symbols and Christian ideas implicated directly in driving that violence.”

For Christians who have not grown up in these charismatic spaces, “it feels foreign,” Taylor said. “It’s easy to disdain that or say, ‘That’s not Christianity’ or ‘Those people don’t have a grounding in theology.’”

But “the people I am talking about are real Christians. They say the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed,” while adding “some things on top of that about modern prophets and new apostles and different prophecies and spiritual warfare ideas,” he told Doong and Catoe. But “we all add stuff on top of that. Every Christian tradition is taking a certain foundation and grounding in Christian creeds and then adding different layers of tradition and concepts on top of that.”

“I want us to always treat these people as Christians and not just say, ‘Oh, this is heresy, this is a false form of Christianity. They’re identifying as Christians and speaking in Christian terminology. They’re speaking in the name of Christianity. I think those of us who are Christians have a certain responsibility to take this seriously, to learn about it and maybe confront it, to say, ‘This is where I think this is not bearing a faithful witness to the character of Jesus.’”

Today, “you have different forms and different coalitions of Christianity in the United States that can’t even speak to each other and often view each other as heretical,” Taylor said. “I don’t know that American Christianity has been this politically and culturally divided at any point in our history other than right on the eve of the Civil War, when you had these really diverging visions of what Christianity means in the American context. That’s akin to what we’re experiencing now.”

The best way to close the divide is “to be able to speak to our fellow Christians,” he said. “I work at an interreligious dialogue institute. I know how hard it is to speak and have dialogues and debates across these theological lines. Part of what’s causing this mass polarization in our culture right now is polarization within Christianity. I think it’s the responsibility of Christians to try to heal that rift, or at least try to find ways to bridge it.”

Taylor makes a distinction between Christian nationalists and Christian supremacists, “people who are antithetical to the separation of church and state,” that it’s “a demand of God that Christians and Christianity should be privileged in American culture.” Many of the people who were there and organizing the Jan. 6 insurrection came from that perspective, he said.

“More and more people are embracing these more Christian supremacist ideas,” he said, “and nothing comes of that in our democratic future.”

New editions of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous episodes here.


Creative_Commons-BYNCNDYou may freely reuse and distribute this article in its entirety for non-commercial purposes in any medium. Please include author attribution, photography credits, and a link to the original article. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDeratives 4.0 International License.