Conservative Christians must impose their will and interpretation of Scripture on all other Americans, a Southern Baptist and former Trump administration official said.
“We should not blink, we should not hesitate to tell people” God’s order for the world and how government and society should be ordered according to the Bible, said William Wolfe, executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership, when he preached at Bethel Church in Petersburg, W.V., last month.
“And frankly, yes, we are going to impose it upon you. If you don’t like it, I’m sorry, but this is good and right and just if it lines up with God’s standards. And I am going to enforce my morality on you, inasmuch as our morality is God’s morality,” he announced.
“And frankly, yes, we are going to impose it upon you.”
Wolfe declared as long as Christians confirm they believe what God believes, they “should have the courage to say, ‘This is how we’re going to run our town, this is how we’re going to run our county, this is how we’re going to run our state, and this is how we should run the United States of America — by legislating the morality that we can find in the Bible.’”
The constitutional principle of church-state separation “is a lie” and a “totally modern invention that is not rooted in American history and not rooted in a Christian understanding of what government is,” Wolfe added.
He does not believe the majority of historians who find church-state separation rooted in the Constitution itself and especially in the Bill of Rights.
The truth is that the U.S. was founded by Christians, and for them “the idea that separation of church and state meant that somehow the American government was secular or even neutral in regard to religious issues is patently false,” Wolfe said. “They weren’t secularists at all. They were Bible-believing Christians.”
Right Wing Watch identified Wolfe as an “unabashed Christian nationalist” who has urged Americans to consider using religiously motivated violence against political opponents.
“If we have ever lived in a point in time in American history since then that we could argue that now is the time to arms again, I think we are getting close,” Wolfe said during a “Jesus and Politics” conference in 2023. “Even though as Christians we seek peace, when the enemy is pressed upon us, if we fail to heed the call to arms, then we are acting as cowards. To be ruled by cowards in a time of war is a curse because God hates cowards.”
While Wolfe’s warlike theology may be considered extreme by most Americans, it is nevertheless a worldview embraced by many ardent Christian nationalists, according to polling by Public Religion Research Institute.
“Christian nationalists are more likely than other Americans to support political violence.”
“Christian nationalists are more likely than other Americans to support political violence and score high on PRRI’s Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale,” the research group reported earlier this year. “Three in 10 Christian nationalism Adherents (30%) and one-quarter of Sympathizers (23%) agree that ‘because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country,’ compared with only 14% of Skeptics and 11% of Rejecters.”
PRRI research also found nearly three-quarters of Christian nationalists attribute the responsibility for political violence to the liberals who would be targeted with that violence.
“Since early 2021, support for political violence has varied across religious groups. Support among white Christians has declined since the 2024 election, though white evangelical Protestants continue to show higher support than white Christians overall,” the firm reported.
In addition, PRRI found strong support for authoritarian rule among two-thirds of Republicans and 57% of white evangelicals. Almost half (46%) of Americans who attend religious services at least weekly were more likely to embrace authoritarian beliefs than those who occasionally or never attend services.
James Howard Kunstler
Right-wing author and deep-state conspiracy theorist James Howard Kunstler’s recent interview on “The Eric Metaxas Show” illustrated the PRRI findings. Kunstler said President Trump may have to begin a new civil war and eliminate all political opposition to prevent Democrats from winning the mid-term elections.
“He’s going to have to declare some kind of a national emergency,” Kunstler said. “He may have to declare the Democratic Party as a seditious outlaw organization and do something about it.”
Metaxas, a Trump loyalist and Christian nationalist author and commentator, agreed and cited President Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War as a precedent for such a move.
“I think Mr. Trump is going to have to go Abe Lincoln on the Democratic Party,” Kunstler replied. “It seems to me that circumstances may require — may require — Mr. Trump to go to a place where he has to declare certain emergency executive powers to deal with an organization that wants to destroy the country, and that means probably taking some people off the game board in a very demonstrative way.”
Christian nationalists have been “hoping for the longest time” for such a scenario to unfold and remain frustrated that former President Barack Obama, former director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA director John Brennan have yet to be prosecuted, Metaxas said.
Kunstler said the president may also have to go after the federal court system if or when he declares a state of emergency and suspends constitutional freedoms.
“Can he do that before the midterms? What’s that going to look like?” Metaxas said.
“I think it would probably look something like a civil war,” Kunstler said. “We’ve been there before and somebody had to rescue the Republic. And it looks like we may be entering a period where the Republic needs to be rescued again. It’s going to be pretty unappetizing to see that happen, but necessity may call.”
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