The MAGA agenda marks Make America Great Again as a classic restorationist movement, sharing its most basic assumption with restorationist movements that have appeared over the course of Christian history — the 16th-century Anabaptists, for example, or in America, Baptists, Pentecostals, Holiness groups, Mormons and Churches of Christ. Not only that, but apart from support from many restorationist Christians, MAGA would collapse.
I grew up in one of those restorationist movements, a radically exclusive and diversity-rejecting denomination whose birth, ironically enough, was inspired by the American founding. Having taken the name “the Church of Christ” in the early 19th century, it has much to teach us about the crisis of totalitarian rule now engulfing our country.
With roots that reach deeply into the soil of both Pennsylvania and Kentucky, the Churches of Christ eventually found their greatest strength in four states of the American South—Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. There they absorbed the biases common to Southern culture, especially white supremacy which, although antithetical to the gospel it claimed to preach, was embraced by virtually everyone I knew.
“I grew up in one of those restorationist movements, a radically exclusive and diversity-rejecting denomination whose birth was inspired by the American founding.’
And yet, through it all, the Churches of Christ persisted in their claim that they had not been shaped by the American South or even by the larger American nation, but only by the values of the primitive church, established on the Day of Pentecost by Jesus’ apostles.
Ignoring the Civil Rights Movement
That conviction surrounded the Churches of Christ in a protective cloak of innocence that, during the years leading up to the Civil Rights Movement, rendered it impervious to any sense of guilt over the region’s racism in which it was a full participant.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Churches of Christ ignored the Freedom Movement entirely. One could read its church papers from 1955 when Emmett Till was murdered through 1968 when MLK was assassinated and never know a Freedom Movement had transpired.
The fact that our country had marginalized, brutalized and impoverished an entire race of people was irrelevant to our concerns since our one and only focus was preserving and maintaining the rites, rituals and practices of the one true church, now restored, we believed, in the United States of America.
So committed were Churches of Christ to that peculiar self-understanding that many urban congregations in the 1940s and 1950s — those that could afford brick buildings — placed cornerstones in those buildings inscribed with these words:
Church of Christ
Established in Jerusalem
A.D. 33
And rural congregations that couldn’t afford a marble cornerstone set in the wall of a fine brick building painted those words across the front of the church like the one shown abover that still exists in rural middle Tennessee.
Implicit in this vision was a complete erasure of history. In the eyes of my church, Luther was irrelevant. So was Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin and Zwingli. The Churches of Christ even refused, typically, to recognize their own American founders, Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone, claiming they had no founders apart from Jesus and the apostles.
In all these ways, my church was an ideological microcosm of the larger American nation.
The restoration vision
To say that my church was an ideological microcosm of the larger nation is a bold and audacious statement and requires a bit of explaining.
First, remember the Churches of Christ was a child of the American founding, born in the heady days of the new American republic. In fact, apart from the birth of the nation, the denomination that bore the name might never have emerged at all.
Second, while the American nation historically has committed itself to freedom, democracy and the rule of law, it also carries within itself the seeds of totalitarian control, rooted deeply in the soil of the American founding, so deeply, in fact, that most privileged Americans are blissfully unaware those seeds even exist.
What defines those seeds is the conviction, common in its founding years, that this new nation would recover and restore to earth the world as it came from the hand of God at the time of creation, the world as it was meant to be, the world embedded in the natural order of things, but a world corrupted by kings, queens, popes and priests for centuries on end.
We will denote that conviction with a single phrase — the restoration vision.
Taking their cue from the larger nation, numerous utopian communes and upstart Christian sects in the early 19th century embraced that vision and applied it to the Christian faith. The most enduring of all those movements were the Latter-day Saints and the Churches of Christ.
In the context of the public square, the restoration vision stood at the heart of the nation’s founding as a near-universal assumption. John Adams, for example, wrote that “the United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature.”
And Jefferson’s friend and confidant, Thomas Paine, proclaimed that “the case and circumstance of America present themselves as in the beginning of the world.” Indeed, he wrote, “We are brought at once to the point of seeing government begin, as if we had lived in the beginning of time. The real volume, not of history, but of facts, is directly before us, unmutilated by contrivance, or the errors of tradition.”
“Instead of rooted in history, this project would be rooted in ‘the beginning of time.’”
Paine’s two phrases — “as if we had lived in the beginning of time” and “unmutilated by contrivance, or the errors of tradition” — reflect with precision the restoration vision that defined the American nation in its founding years. Instead of rooted in history, this project would be rooted in “the beginning of time.” And instead of embracing the traditions of the European nations from which these white Americans had come, the American project, rooted in the natural order of things, would reject tradition as little more than corruption.
The notion that the work of the United States was to restore the golden age of pure beginnings, embedded in nature itself, stands as a central theme in the Declaration of Independence where Jefferson wrote that “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are “unalienable rights,” unalienable precisely because they are rooted not in human wisdom, but in “Nature and Nature’s God.” The Continental Congress embraced and formally adopted that claim on July 4, 1776.
It also stands as a central theme in the Great Seal of the United States, which depicts human history as a barren desert from which a massive pyramid — representing the United States — reaches into the sky. Under the phrase, annuit coeptis —”He has smiled on our beginnings” — the eye of God looks approvingly on this new venture, while standing beneath the pyramid is that evocative phrase, novus ordo seclorum — “a new order of the ages.” That phrase proclaims the new American nation is radically new, but its radical newness derives from the fact that it is also radically ancient, rooted in nature and the time of pure beginnings.
In effect, the new American nation, as it explained its reason for being, turned its back on history, and in that rejection of history, only two times really mattered — the time of pure beginnings and its own time, the time of the restoration. And therein lay the seeds of totalitarian control, buried deep in the heart of the American founding.
Restorationist projects like this can work quite well, so long as those who embrace them envision those projects as process, as long as they are searching, always striving for the perfection that is somehow, always, out of reach. This is the meaning of the persistent American search for “a more perfect union.”
But when those who embrace a restorationist project both imagine and claim they have realized their goals and achieved perfection and now must defend that achievement from assault from dissenters and others who stand outside the circle of restored perfection, that is precisely when they turn on others as hopelessly corrupt, reject alternative ways of thinking and acting as imperfect and impure, and, in effect, consign those others to the pit of hell. That is the kind of thinking that stands at the heart of totalitarian rule and control.
Today, in the United States, the restoration vision as aspiration and journey has fallen on hard times, replaced by an absolutized vision that seeks to restore what many view as the perfections of the 1950s. In this reading, the decade of the 1950s — fully in sync, its proponents believe, with the natural order that informed the American founding — was the last golden age of white Christian dominance, corrupted by the 1960s with its embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion.
The death of freedom
My church was a microcosm of the larger nation in another way as well, for the American zeal for freedom from tyrants inspired in my church a rejection of any creed, priest or preacher who might constrain the God-given freedom to search for truth. Indeed, many of the earliest preachers in my church grounded that freedom not in the gospel but in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.
Typical was the Church of Christ preacher who, in 1826, employed Jefferson’s phrase, “certain inalienable rights,” but focused those rights on “free investigation, sober and diligent inquiry after truth.”
As early as 1830, however — only 30 years into the history of that movement — some began to claim that Churches of Christ had achieved their goal, had fully restored the primitive church in every significant detail, and must now defend their achievement against skeptics, critics and detractors, condemning all other Christians to eternal perdition.
A preacher named John R. Howard, for example, warned Christians who belonged to other Christian traditions “to cast away all your unscriptural names, forms and practices; and return back to the true faith — the pure, original gospel. … The coming of the Lord in vengeance to destroy his enemies, cannot … be very far off. … And should you not be found among his true people — his genuine disciples — but arrayed in opposition against them, he will ‘destroy’ you ‘with the breath of his mouth and with the brightness of his coming.’”
“The intolerance of my people was rooted in their conviction that they and they alone had restored the one true church.”
This statement reflects an incredible level of intolerance, to be sure, but what is crucial to grasp is the restorationist vision from which this intolerance grew. The intolerance of my people was rooted in their conviction that they and they alone had restored the one true church, founded by Jesus and his apostles in the time of pure beginnings.
Totalitarian rule in the United States
The point we now must grasp is this: As totalitarian rule increasingly triumphs over these United States, it grows from restorationist roots buried deeply in the soil of the American founding, watered and nurtured by actors who exploit its erasure of history, actors who believe — or at least feign belief — that a white Christian “American way of life” is rooted in the natural order of things and that other ways of thinking, living and believing would “poison the blood of our country,” as Donald Trump famously said of immigrants in 2023.
The problem with any appeal to the natural order or the primitive church or any other time of pure beginnings is that all these concepts are essentially vacuous, waiting to be filled with content specific to our own time and place. This is the point the eminent historian Carl Becker made almost 100 years ago when he wrote that those who embrace nature as the standard for civilization — including the American Founders — “do not know that the ‘man in general’ they are looking for is just their own image, that the principles they are bound to find are the very ones they start out with.” Put another way, when the Founders peered into the well of nature, what they saw at the bottom of that well was just their own reflection.
And the specific content with which the Founders — and most other Americans of the founding years — filled their vision of nature and the time of pure beginnings was quite specific, quite narrow and not universal at all. For them, nature was white and at least generically Christian. Indeed, it was not only Christian, it also was Protestant.
The time of pure beginnings, then, was a mythic time when the values of whiteness and Christianized culture reigned supreme. These Americans, then, finally embraced the cultural traditions of Europe, lock, stock and barrel, even though they imagined they had no traditions at all, “as if … (they) had lived in the beginning of time.”
“The time of pure beginnings, then, was a mythic time when the values of whiteness and Christianized culture reigned supreme.”
By valorizing whiteness and the Christian faith with appeals to nature and the time of pure beginnings, then, these Americans did something immensely consequential for the American nation.
First, they absolutized whiteness as the only legitimate way of being in the world, precisely because whiteness, they believed, was rooted in the natural order of things. Other ways of being — Blackness, for example, or the cultures of American indigenous people — they viewed as fundamentally at odds with the design of creation.
But what of the Christian religion? Long before there was a United States of America, Europeans had absolutized the Christian faith, using the Christian religion as a cudgel against both Muslims and Jews.
For one brief, shining moment, however, the American Founders relativized religion, at least from a legal perspective, placing each sect on an equal footing before the law. That is the meaning of the religion clause of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
And so, in the face of a Constitution whose First Amendment made the Christian faith irrelevant to the American legal system, white Christians who could not bear to see the Christian religion lose its absolute control and who imagined there could be no stable, enduring America apart from a semi-established religion — those white Christians launched the Second Great Awakening through which they sought to absolutize the Christian faith once again, making the Christian religion, in effect, a handmaiden to the nation’s predominant whiteness.
An increasingly Republican church
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Churches of Christ found themselves in a deep identity crisis. The disconnect between the pluralistic world of the 1960s that challenged their exclusivism, racism and true-church assumptions — that disconnect seemed too much to bear, at least for many in that tradition. As it searched for a new way to frame its identity, it found itself caught in the magnetic pull of American evangelicalism. And so, the Churches of Christ began an almost-inevitable march into the evangelical world.
As it marched into that world, it also marched into the Republican world, a fact made clear by a mid-1980s survey of political attitudes of Church of Christ ministers. Seventy-six percent of those ministers described themselves as political conservatives, 74% identified with the Republican Party, 95% supported Ronald Reagan over Walter Mondale in the 1980 presidential election, and 82% agreed with the statement, “It would be hard to be both a true Christian and a political liberal.”
Even as it embraced the Republican principles of that time — Nixon’s racist “Southern Strategy,” support for the war in Vietnam and rejection of MLK and the Freedom Movement — the Churches of Christ continued to claim that they had restored the one true church established by Jesus’ apostles in the first Christian age. The clear implication of that position was that the primitive church was a Republican church, or at least compatible with Republican principles, and that perhaps even Jesus was at heart a Republican, too.
“The clear implication of that position was that the primitive church was a Republican church, or at least compatible with Republican principles.”
By the mid-2020s, the Churches of Christ had become a minor although important player in the evangelical/Republican alliance. Two of its longtime members — Tommy Tuberville (Alabama) and John Cornyn (Texas) — serve as MAGA Republicans in the United States Senate. And four of its members serve as MAGA Republicans in the United States House of Representatives: Brett Guthrie (Kentucky), John Rose (Tennessee), Lance Gooden (Texas), and Ronnie Jackson (Texas). Prior to serving in Congress, Jackson served as the official physician to President Donald Trump.
In a list showing the religious affiliation of members of Congress published by Pew Research Center, it is telling that none of these members identify themselves as members of a denomination called the Churches of Christ. Instead, four of them honor the myth that the Church of Christ is not a denomination at all since it has no history in ordinary time but descends instead from the Christian time of pure beginnings. Accordingly, Tuberville, Guthrie, Gooden and Jackson identify themselves as “restorationist.” Only John W. Rose identifies himself as a Protestant, but he, like the others, conceals the denominational label Church of Christ. Instead, he lists himself as “Protestant unspecified.”
The problem would be just as acute had Churches of Christ been captured by Democratic as opposed to Republican interests since both parties — indeed, all political parties — are wed to the right-side-up interests of power, wealth and control. Disciples of Jesus, however, pledge allegiance to the upside-down kingdom of God where they serve the least of these, place the interests of others above their own, and stand in solidarity with oppressed and marginalized people.
A world of massive forgetting
Based on today’s allegiance of most members of the Church of Christ to the evangelical/Republican world, however, one might never guess that, at one time, Jesus’ vision of the upside-down kingdom of God defined a very large segment of this tradition. Indeed, one of its two principal leaders in the early 19th century, Barton W. Stone, understood the restoration ideal less in terms of erasing history in order to recover the ancient church and more in terms of serving as Jesus’ disciple — loving one’s enemies, refusing to take up arms, sharing one’s goods with the poor and, above all, rejecting the empire’s demands for ultimate loyalty and allegiance.
Stone’s vision shaped a vast segment of the Churches of Christ, especially in Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama, from the early 19th century through 1917-18. But when the United States entered World War I, the federal government, with threats and intimidation, brought immense pressure to bear on pacifist denominations like the Churches of Christ to support the war effort. Under that pressure, the Churches of Christ buckled and continued to buckle under the pressure of World War II in the 1940s and the Communist threat of the 1950s.
By the middle of the 20th century, the Churches of Christ had essentially abandoned Jesus’ vision of the upside-down kingdom of God and, for most in this tradition, restoration had only one meaning — the recovery of certain practices of the ancient church that led to the claim that they had fully recovered the one true church of the apostolic age.
This was the world into which, in the 1940s, I was born. It was a world of massive forgetting since, by then, very few could even recall a time when loyalty to Jesus’ radical vision had ever defined the Church of Christ. And it was a totalitarian world in which we erased every aspect of Christian history between our own time and the first Christian age, and in which we denied legitimacy to the rest of the Christian world, not to mention Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews and members of other historic religions.
“They imagine they descend not from the messy reality of human history but from the fantasyland of pure beginnings.”
It goes without saying it was a world defined by an overweening sense of innocence.
And now, in 2025, I live in another world of massive forgetting, but the forgetting that defined my church amounts to little when compared with the forgetting that today defines my nation.
No one I have read has spoken to the American habit of forgetting more powerfully than Ta-Nehisi Coates, who writes that most white Americans “have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world.”
Those white Americans have forgotten, because, from their perspective, there is nothing to remember. Like my church, they imagine they descend not from the messy reality of human history but from the fantasyland of pure beginnings where innocence can obscure the most horrid crimes and guilt becomes an intruder.
And so, we conclude where we began. The MAGA agenda — “Make America Great Again” — marks MAGA as a classic restorationist movement. But it is far from Christian and stands fundamentally opposed to Jesus, who consistently stood with the poor, the marginalized and the dispossessed.
Granted, the decade of the 1950s, when whiteness dominated the United States, provides the model for this MAGA restoration. But whatever else the MAGA restoration may be, it has become a totalitarian project that erases the history of minorities, rejects diversity in the interest of white control, oppresses the poor to enlarge the pockets of the rich, and marginalizes people the world over. Perversely, however, it does all this by exploiting the American assumption, as old as the American founding, that this whitened “Christian” nation is a thoroughly innocent nation, rooted in the golden age of pure beginnings when the world first came from the hand of God.
Richard T. Hughes
Richard T. Hughes is co-author with James L. Gorman of Reviving the Ancient Faith: The Story of Churches of Christ in America and co-author with Christina Littlefield of Christian America and the Kingdom of God: White Christian Nationalism from the Puritans to January 6, 2021.