Imagine a massive sewage treatment plant that works in reverse. It takes fresh, sparkling water through a vast, convoluted Rube Goldberg mechanism that eats up vast amounts of energy. But finally, after painstaking effort and expense, the plant produces … infectious human waste reeking with toxins. Think of all the twists and turns, ducts and filters, vats and spillways involved. And the men with advanced degrees in white coats and safety goggles who make a cozy living overseeing this facility. It pumps its repulsive product into schools, churches, and homes, whether they want it or not. It just spews out of our showerheads and faucets.

Have you got that mental picture?

Now you understand our media and our culture. You’re welcome.

Sorry, there’s no other way to aptly express the process by which intelligent, educated people transform the most wholesome, innocent, worthy sentiments and ideas into the semblance of deadly poison. But that’s exactly what’s happening in the case of so-called ‘Christian Nationalism.’

“They’ll Hate You as They Hated Me.”

There’s a full-on propaganda campaign underway, with massive funding from hostile billionaires and malevolent “charities” that also fund Planned Parenthood, to portray Christians who want to save babies from killing and kids from castrating surgeries as quasi-Nazi bigots who don’t deserve to vote. The Stream already covered God & Country, the Rob Reiner film which tries to scare Christians into abandoning public witness on moral issues, as The Birth of a Nation helped the Ku Klux Klan scare black Americans away from the polls at elections. Here’s a short clip from God & Country, in case some Vichy Christian you know happens to mention it:

At least, I think that’s the right clip. One gets confused. In fact, scholar Mark David Hall has watched the Reiner film and reviewed it in detail here.

The indomitable Megan Basham has reported on

The After Party, a forthcoming program led by Duke Divinity consulting professor Curtis Chang and developed with New York Times columnist David French and Christianity Today editor in chief Russell Moore. The program offers pastors and small groups a curriculum “reframing Christian political identity from today’s divisive partisan options.”

Basham wondered who would be willing to fund such a pricey initiative, and after some sleuthing discovered the people paying for and shaping The After Party’s message. These sponsors include the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which also funds pro-abortion and gay activist groups; and the One America Movement, whose board includes

the leader of an LGBTQ-affirming synagogue, as well as a co-founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York who excuses rioting as self-defense and has called Jesus a ‘black radical revolutionary.’

Financial sponsors of One America itself include

the Tides Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Walton family’s Catena Foundation, and the John Pritzker Family Fund — all of which fund enterprises promoting abortion, LGBTQ issues, and other left-wing priorities.

But here’s the cherry on top of the Kool Whip that crowns this sewage cake. According to Basham’s research: “The Hewlett Foundation, which also directly funds The After Party, is the second largest private donor to Planned Parenthood.”

So if you were wondering what kind of Christians are warning everyone about the dangers of “Christian Nationalism,” now you have your answer: the kind that Planned Parenthood donors like to fund.

Politico Joins the Lynch Mob

The sewage aggregation plant keeps pumping, night and day. And its latest product arrives in the form of a scare story in the elite political gossip journal Politico, entitled “Trump allies prepare to infuse ‘Christian nationalism’ in second administration.” The story feverishly warns its readers that a president elected by pro-life, pro-family voters might actually seek to … buckle your seatbelts before you read this … promote pro-life and pro-family policies in office. (Given the track record of Swamp Republicans in past decades, this might well come as a shock to all of us, to be honest.)

The next appalling charge Politico makes is that “Christian Nationalists” believe in a terrifying concept called “Natural Law.” In a tone matching Orson Welles recounting a Martian attack on New Jersey in The War of the Worlds, the writer warns:

Natural law is the belief that there are universal rules derived from God that can’t be superseded by government or judges. While it is a core pillar of Catholicism, in recent decades it’s been used to oppose abortion, LGBTQ+ rights and contraception.

Every bit as shocking, the article cites a prominent “Christian Nationalist” linked to Trump who holds a

more extreme outlook of what a government led by Christian nationalists should propose. In a December post, he called for ending sex education in schools, surrogacy and no-fault divorce throughout the country, as well as forcing men “to provide for their children as soon as it’s determined the child is theirs” — a clear incursion by the government into Americans’ private lives.

Are you hiding under your bed yet? Are you ready to renounce “Christian Nationalism” and all its works and all its empty promises — as the condition for getting baptized in the stuff our media are spraying?

Snappy Answers to Foolish Questions

Now at last let’s answer the question this column’s title posed. If someone actually asks you whether you are a “Christian Nationalist,” there are several things you could say — depending on whether you thought the person sincerely confused or deluded, or instead was trying to trap you as the Pharisees tried to trap Jesus. Here are a few sample responses, for use in different contexts, to the question, “Are you a … Christian Nationalist?”

• “Are you a pagan globalist? Just wondering.”
• “That’s a hate-mongering dog-whistle, like Josef Goebbels’ made-up slur ‘Judeo-Bolshevik.’ Would you ask a Jewish person if he were one of those?”
• “I believe that Natural Law, revealed to everyone Christian or not, ought to undergird all our laws. I learned that from reading Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail.’ Do you think he was wrong? The Nazis did. They persecuted people for promoting Natural Law.”
• “I’m a patriotic Christian, like George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Billy Graham, and Pope John Paul II. What do you think I should be instead?”

Don’t go on the defensive. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Remember that the minds behind this hate campaign aren’t clever but wicked humans. They’re principalities and powers, testing you as they tested Our Lord out in the desert.

Have a blessed Lent.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His upcoming book is No Second Amendment, No First.