If you're not aware of this bizarre exercise in religious delusion, this article in the NY Times does a good job of laying it out, and of identifying who benefits. It's pretty much what I've been writing about over the last month--how billionaires use culture war issues and credulous Christians to insure the entrenchment of their power and wealth.
While many outsiders continue to think of Christian nationalism as a social movement that arises from the ground up, it in fact a political movement that operates mostly from the top down. The rank-and-file of the movement is diverse and comes to its churches with an infinite variety of motivations and concerns, but the leaders are far more unified.
They collaborate in a densely interconnected network of think-tanks, policy groups, activist organizations, legal advocacy groups and conservative pastoral networks. What holds them together is not any centralized command structure, but a radical political ideology that is profoundly hostile to democracy and pluralism, and a certain political style that seeks to provoke moral panic, rewards the paranoid and views every partisan conflict as a conflagration, the end of the world. Partisan politics is the lifeblood of their movement.
If one considers the movement from the perspective of its leaders, it is easier to see why it is unlikely to change in the new political circumstances we find ourselves in. The power of the leadership is the function of at least three underlying structural realities in America’s political and economic life, and those realities are not going to change anytime soon.
The first is the growing economic inequality that has produced spectacular fortunes for the few, while too many ordinary families struggle to get by. Leaders of the movement get much of the support for their well-funded operations from a cadre of super-wealthy individuals and extended families who are as committed to free-market fundamentalism as they are to reactionary religion. The donors in turn need the so-called values voters in order to lock down their economic agenda of low taxation for the wealthy and minimal regulation. These donors include, among many others, the Prince-DeVos family, the fracking billionaire Wilks brothers, and members of the Green family, whose Hobby Lobby fortune helped build the Museum of the Bible. The movement gets another big chunk of its funding from the large mass of people who are often in the middle rungs of the economic spectrum and whose arduously cultivated resentments toward those below them have been turned into a fund-raising bonanza.
These are the crazy, cargo-cult Christians who give Christianity a bad name. They'd be harmless enough if they weren't providing the base for illiberal autocrats. Read the whole article by Katherine Stewart. It's very good.
This would also be the starting point for an argument that I'd like to have with David French, who is not a crazy theocratic nationalist, but who is clearly captured by elements of this ideology by combining his Christian faith with Libertarianism. The idea that traditional values and free-market capitalism work together is intellectually incoherent and proved false by the historical record. Other principled Conservatives like Patrick Deneen and Oren Cass understand this.
I should point out that Charles Koch has apparently had a come-to-Jesus moment--in a good way. He has recently admitted that his role in promoting the the insane partisanship since the Tea Party has gone too far. I'm not aware of Koch as having any strong religious affiliation. Perhaps that's what saved him.