Mini-Episode: How Christian Nationalists Will Interpret the Attempted Assassination of Trump
Brad delivers a mini episode analyzing how Christian nationalists are likely to interpret the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. He emphasizes his condemnation of political violence and its anti-democratic nature. Brad references Lauren Kirby's book 'Saving History,' explaining that white Christian nationalists see themselves either as founders or victims. Trump's assassination attempt reinforces their view of him as a victim under attack, legitimizing their call for retribution. He also cites Gorski and Perry's 'The Flag and the Cross,' discussing the idea that white Christian nationalists feel entitled to use violence to impose their vision of America. Brad warns of potential dangerous outcomes and highlights the media's response to normalize Trumpian rhetoric post-attack.
00:00 Introduction and Condemnation of Violence
01:24 Christian Nationalists' Perspective on Trump's Assassination Attempt
01:39 The Founder or Victim Narrative
02:52 Trump as a Victim and Founder
04:10 White Christian Nationalists' Claim to Authority
06:20 Implications of the Assassination Attempt
07:32 Broader Reactions and Media Response
10:17 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
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Just wanted to do a mini episode to talk about the ways that I think Christian nationalists are going to be interpreting Trump's assassination attempt.
I want to say what I said on X the other night, which is that I condemn violence against any human being.
I condemn all political violence.
And in nature, political violence is anti-democratic.
Democracy is a power-sharing agreement in which we protect ourselves from Violence and brutality by agreeing to share power and to elect our leadership through voting and abiding by the majority and the processes that are attached to all of that.
So any attempt to solve a political crises or to gain power in the public square by way of violence is by nature anti-democratic now.
I'm not naive.
I know all the histories of violence in the United States, assassination attempts, the ways the U.S.
state has been an arm of violence and is currently part of violent conflicts across the world, namely in Gaza.
With that said, I want to talk about the ways that Christian nationalists have already begun to understand the Trump assassination attempt, and it's pretty intuitive and pretty expected.
Lauren Kirby in the book Saving History has a great frame about the ways that Christian nationalists, especially white ones, understand their place in the country.
Kirby talks about white Christian nationalists and others as understanding themselves as either in the role of founder of the country or victim in the country.
And they really only have those two roles to play.
A lot of us have various characters that we might embody in the American narrative, depending on where you're from, your identity, your immigration story, your way of embodiment, your sexual or gender Identity, your immigration story, your family story.
For the Christian nationalist, especially the white one, it's really only one of two roles.
Either you treat me as the founder of the country that I am, the person with the legitimate authority to inherit the American founding and what the writers of the Constitution wanted.
And if you don't let me have that role, then I am a victim of persecution and I am being unjustly attacked by you.
Unfortunately, the Trump assassination attempt plays perfectly into those two roles, and it will only bolster the ways that they see Trump as embodying both of those roles at once.
For a long time, Trump has been seen as a victim.
He's attacked by the establishment.
He's attacked by The Deep State.
He's attacked by Jack Smith and Alvin Bragg and anyone else who brings a case against him.
He's attacked by the media.
And, of course, Trump being attacked is a stand-in for all those people who support him, especially the white Christian nationalists, of themselves being attacked.
That they are the victims of unjust persecution, whether it's because they're white or because they're Christian, because they believe in the God of the Bible or they're proud to have European heritage.
This is the kind of complex that they have surrounding their understanding of their role in the United States.
Of course, someone attempted to assassinate the former president, which I said at the top here, just to be clear, is condemnable and just outright perilous for our society.
And that's something that I want.
Nonetheless, It's a fantastic frame for the white Christian nationalists to understand Trump as a victim, as under attack, and themselves through him in that vein.
The other is as founder of the country.
Now I want to connect this to something that Gorski and Perry say in their book The Flag and the Cross.
White Christian nationalists understand themselves to be founders of the country and they're always articulating this very Narrow, reductive, and just plain wrong understanding of American history.
Whether it's Andrew Seidel or anyone else, debunking this, they talk about the founding of the United States as a Christian nation.
David Barton, of course, is always talking about this history of the United States and its Christianity and the ways that the founders were all Christians and all visioned an American society.
We talked on the Weekly Roundup last week about the ways that Al Mohler and Doug Wilson and others want to impose and acknowledge or force everyone to acknowledge the Christian structure of American society.
And so there's this sense of we are the founders of the country and we've done our history, which is, for the record, misguided and wrong.
But we've done our history and that history says that we are inheriting the Christian nation that was meant to be.
And thus we have authority.
Now, Now, what Gorski and Perry say in The Flag and the Cross, and which I think is brilliant and everyone should read, is that there's an understanding of the white Christian nationalists as having the exclusive authority to use violence in order to impose the social order that is right for the United is that there's an understanding of the white Christian nationalists as In other words, if they are the founders and they're not treated as the founders, if they're not treated as those with authority and legitimacy, if they're not allowed to be in charge, if
If their vision of society as a Christian nation, according to, once again, a misguided and narrow history, is not abided by, then they have the right for violence.
It's them.
Now, if anyone else does it, the Black Panthers, or farm workers marching for rights, or LGBTQ folks trying to carve out a place in the American public square, anyone else does it, they're seen as a threat.
They're seen as dangerous.
Groomers.
Perverts.
Radicals.
It only works one way.
So when Trump is shot, when the attempted assassination attempt takes place, it's seen as not only him being a victim, but also him being a founder, him being a man who now has the legitimacy for retribution, that there is a chance now
To authorize revenge, retribution, a chance to say, this is why we have to go on the offensive.
This is why we can and should use every means possible to impose the kind of order in the United States that God wanted when he founded this country.
When you think of yourself as the founder, you think of yourself as the one who has the exclusive ability to use violence and force to make sure the country is how it's supposed to be.
Anyone else who tries it is an insurgent, but you are a patriot.
That's how many Christian nationalists interpreted their role at January 6th, and I fear that is what will happen now in the wake of this assassination attempt.
We'll surely have more on this soon in the coming weeks and days and months and just as we continue to roll through here the summer up to the election.
But I wanted to check in and just provide this very short reflection on I think the frames you're going to see pastors using.
We already saw someone like Jack Hibbs down in Southern California talk about painting blood on one's ear in ways that are a kind of solidarity with Trump.
It was a weird sermon I'm not going to totally get into.
Right now, I've seen others who are full-blown white supremacists who have been posting memes with a sort of message that says, finally, and it's a chance now for Trump to say, OK, all bets are off.
Burn the Constitution and let's just go on the attack.
I just want to say one more thing today, and that is that there are folks who are adjacent to white Christian nationalism that may use this founder-victim frame and only really identify with one side of it, but nonetheless it can be helpful.
So, if you think about the white nationalist, the white person might say, this is my country, and the black person, the person of color, the immigrant, the Jewish person, they don't rightfully belong here, or they need to know their place.
So I'm the founder.
Now, they may not see themselves as victims.
They may not.
We could talk about great white replacement theory and all that stuff.
Nonetheless, they're going to see retribution and revenge here as a kind of option.
Another one, though, is this kind of idea of Trump as a victim.
And I just, I think we saw this play out already.
CNN and other outlets seem to have felt as if in the wake of the assassination attempt, they needed to normalize Trumpian rhetoric and Trumpian people and play a kind of game of showing everybody who was watching That they were not going to somehow demonize Trump or attack him or accuse him or analyze him because he was just a victim of an assassination attempt.
And we've already seen the kind of victim frame start to play that, hey, even the Democrats, whether it's Joe Biden or anyone else, or if we come out too hard on Trump right now, is it going to look like we're piling on someone who is just Attacked we don't really know what to do.
So the victim frame is actually helping Trump quite a lot.
I think the Democrats are on the defensive.
They don't know what to do.
They don't know how to message and Trump and JD Vance and everyone else are heading to the RNC convention and it's just got going and they're ready to rev the engines.
They're having people chant in unison fight and raise their fists in the air in ways that to many observers recall past movements that had their Supporters shout in unison and move their fists or arms in the air all at once.
