The New Faces of Christian Nationalism
On a Sunday morning in February, about a thousand people filled the high-ceilinged sanctuary at Mercy Culture, a nondenominational evangelical megachurch in Fort Worth, Texas. The senior lead pastor, Landon Schott, gave a sermon that was mostly about the virtues of generosity, although he occasionally veered into political territory. “I do not believe with any part of me that the vaccine was the mark of the beast, but it sure was conditioning for it,” he said, at one point. Then the worship band kicked in, and the young, diverse congregation lifted up their hands.
A few hours later, the church hosted a more explicitly ideological gathering put on by For Liberty & Justice, the church’s political arm. The organization was founded in 2021 to promote candidates who may not attend the church but who are committed to a shared vision of religiously infused far-right politics; it has since helped usher more than a hundred candidates into office. Nate Schatzline, the founder of For Liberty & Justice, is a living embodiment of the nonprofit’s goal of Christianizing government: he has served both as a pastor at Mercy Culture and as one of the most conservative members of the Texas legislature.
That evening, a crowd had gathered to hear from a handful of people running for office, including Ken Paxton, a U.S. Senate hopeful and the current Texas attorney general. Volunteers served coffee and soft supermarket cookies while a man running for agriculture commissioner handed out packets of wildflower seeds and flyers promising to “combat Chinese AgroTerrorism.” A bald man who hoped to win a seat in the state legislature pitched me in quick succession on his hemp business, his cryptocurrency, and his ministry. Schatzline, a stubbled, sleepy-eyed man in his early thirties, gave an opening prayer. “God, tonight is not just about taking ground in government. Tonight is about taking ground for your kingdom,” he said to a room of bowed heads. “God, I pray right now that you are sending a wave of your spirit throughout our country, and that, God, it doesn’t matter how bad polls look. Father, you are going to bring awakening and spiritual revival to America this year.”
People not attuned to the evangelical world may have missed the growing prominence of hyper-politicized churches such as Mercy Culture, which have become a key wing of the MAGA coalition. Compared with the religious right of previous generations, this cohort of pastors, influencers, and self-described prophets offers up a version of worship that’s at once more mystical, with an emphasis on supernatural powers, and more militaristic, with heightened political rhetoric. Many adopt a Christian-nationalist framework, arguing that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and should be governed as such.
The Johnson Amendment, a long-standing provision in the U.S. tax code, prohibits nonprofits, including churches, from endorsing or opposing political candidates. Houses of worship aligned with both political parties have long flirted with defying the rule, but, after Trump was first elected, that defiance became more overt. Mercy Culture’s pastors hung a candidate’s banner behind the pulpit, endorsed politicians during Sunday services, said that people who vote for Democrats weren’t truly Christian, and described Kamala Harris as a demonic Jezebel taking the form of a snake encircling the White House. “Big whoop,” Schott said, responding to an investigation by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune that questioned whether his statements from the pulpit might undermine the church’s tax-exempt status. After the 2016 election, Trump told leaders at the National Prayer Breakfast that he would “totally destroy” the Johnson Amendment; last July, the I.R.S. announced that it was weakening the enforcement criteria. (Joshua Moore, the chapter coördinator at For Liberty & Justice, told me that, though the organization has to his knowledge only ever supported Republicans, it is nonpartisan: “If you find me a Democrat that shares our values, we’ll happily put them on our list.”) The move was interpreted by many, including Schatzline, as permission for churches to endorse candidates to their congregations. “What’s your excuse now?” he said on his podcast. “Why will you not get loud now?”
The undermining of the Johnson Amendment was a boon for Mercy Culture. For Liberty & Justice announced plans to expand to a dozen states, partnering with like-minded churches. But the mood at the event that February evening was notably sombre. The previous day, North Texas had been rocked by an upset in a special election for a state Senate seat. In a solidly red district, an underfunded Democrat defeated the Republican candidate, a Mercy Culture ally, by nearly fifteen points. That marked a more than thirty-point swing from 2024, when Trump won the district handily. Although the election was largely symbolic—the Texas legislature is currently not in session, and the candidates will run again in November—it was widely seen as evidence that voters were repudiating the current Republican agenda. (Last week, James Talarico, a state legislator who rose to prominence with his public criticism of Texas’s Christian-nationalist faction, won the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate. Paxton did worse than expected, and will face a runoff election against Senator John Cornyn in May.)
Even before the primary election, the alarm was palpable in North Texas, arguably the heart of the state’s Christian-nationalist movement. “Last night, we got our butts kicked,” Tim O’Hare, a judge in Tarrant County, told the room at Mercy Culture, speaking about the February special election. “We got whipped.” If Tarrant County “falls into Democrat hands” in November, he went on, “what do you think will happen to all of North Texas? Five years before the whole thing is blue? And if North Texas in five years, ten years, is bright blue, how does Texas stay red?”
As Schott relates the story, God told him that, before he opened his own church, he needed to consult with a Dallas megachurch pastor named Robert Morris. That consultation turned into a yearlong internship at Morris’s Gateway Church, which has one of the largest congregations in the country. Schott came to think of himself as Morris’s “spiritual son.” In 2019, he founded Mercy Culture with his wife, Heather. Following in the footsteps of social-media-savvy churches such as Hillsong, in Los Angeles, Mercy Culture had a worship band that played earnest, anthemic rock, and its pastors wore skinny jeans. The church’s minimalist bumper stickers, reading “✝ = MERCY,” became so ubiquitous around the Dallas-Fort Worth area that parody stickers began to circulate: “NO MERCY”; “MERCY = CULT.”
Last year, Morris pleaded guilty to five counts of lewd and indecent acts with a child, and Schott’s pastoral lineage became something of a liability. But Schott—who visited Morris in prison in February and said that God has forgiven him—tends to lean into controversy. Last year, he posted a video of himself at a school-board meeting for M.C. Prep, a private school affiliated with the church, beaming at the camera as balloons bobbed behind him. “I just found out we are the No. 1 school in Texas for least vaccinations!” he enthused, holding up a custom-made T-shirt proclaiming the dubious honor. (The school reportedly has a fourteen-per-cent vaccination rate.)
In January, 2025, Schott led a worship service at the Texas state capitol, and he arrived sporting a look that would not be out of place at South by Southwest: flat-brimmed fedora, long silver chain. In a meeting room, he paced the stage, spitting out incantations meant to protect lawmakers from malignant spiritual forces. Men in suits placed their hands on the walls to bless the building. The scene alarmed Matthew D. Taylor, a religious-studies scholar and the author of “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.” Taylor grew up evangelical and got a master’s from Fuller Theological Seminary, at the time one of the country’s most prominent evangelical seminaries. Since Trump’s rise, Taylor had been tracking what he has called a “tectonic shift in the culture of American evangelicalism,” a move toward more militant, authoritarian, and politicized expressions of faith. Schott’s ceremony struck him as an escalation, not so much for what was said—the language of spiritual warfare, though perhaps startling to outsiders, was nothing new—but rather for the position from which he said it. The self-identified spiritual warriors were no longer relegated to the fringe but invited into the inner sanctum of government.
When Trump first announced his Presidential run, evangelical élites, like other institutionalists, were slow to embrace the crude, multiply divorced New Yorker who struggled to name his favorite Bible verse. Much of Trump’s initial support came from the nondenominational charismatic world. (Charismatic Christianity is centered on worshippers’ direct, personal encounters with the Holy Spirit, and maintains that the prophetic revelations and demonic attacks of the Church’s early era are still active forces today.) These churches, which largely existed outside established hierarchies, were quicker to tap into their congregants’ interest in Trump. Many key figures were associated with a movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, which aims to establish Christian dominion over American society and government.
In the decade since, Trump’s early admirers have been elevated alongside him, and right-wing politics have acquired a charismatic flavor. Trump rallies and worship services increasingly resemble each other, with shared aesthetics, language, issues, and celebrities. The influence is apparent even among non-evangelicals. Tucker Carlson, who is Episcopalian—traditionally among the most buttoned-up of Protestant sects—claimed in 2024 that he was “physically mauled” by a demon while asleep in bed next to his wife and four dogs. Trump used to treat his charismatic acolytes with a kind of affectionate bemusement; since the failed assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, he has increasingly adopted their prophetic framing, claiming that he was “saved by God to make America great again.” According to one study, forty per cent of evangelical Christians who did not believe in prophecies thought that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump; among prophecy-believing evangelicals, the figure was more than eighty per cent.
Mercy Culture’s pastors have come to play an increasingly prominent role in the MAGA universe. “I don’t think anybody’s star has risen higher in the last few years than Landon and Heather Schott,” Taylor said. Last year, Schatzline decided not to run for reëlection, instead taking a leadership role on the National Faith Advisory Board, Trump’s de-facto religious Cabinet; Landon Schott also serves in the N.F.A.B.’s leadership. Mercy Culture recently purchased a building in Washington, D.C., across from the Supreme Court, where it hosts Bible-study groups made up of congressional staffers. “Kingdom leaders are using that house on kingdom business,” Schott said in his sermon in February. “Massive, massive movements are happening because we are hosting the presence of God and hosting leaders in that house.”
Taylor believes that the spread of what he calls MAGA Christianity is serving as cover for the authoritarian turn in right-wing politics: if your enemies are controlled by demonic forces, why would you respect how they voted? “When you think back to the nineteen-eighties and the rise of the religious right, the James Dobson, Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell moment, they were naming their organizations things like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition. I’m not a fan of those guys—I think many of them were scoundrels—but they were still assuming the rules of liberal democracy as the frame,” he said. Much like the earlier religious right, For Liberty & Justice hopes to “invade and reform” the Republican Party, Schatzline has said. But rather than claiming a popular mandate its authority comes from prophetic revelation.
Carlos Turcios, the Tarrant County director of For Liberty & Justice, was born in 2001 and grew up in Fort Worth, in a politically divided household. In high school, he was entranced by Bernie Sanders, though he soon switched his allegiance to Trump, whom he saw as the most authentically anti-establishment candidate. Along the way, he came to believe that Christian values should be more thoroughly reflected in the country’s laws. These days, Turcios’s politics encompass economic populism, America First nationalism, and religious authoritarianism. This constellation of beliefs can sometimes put Turcios at odds with older conservatives. “Forty, fifty years ago, we probably would have been called liberal for supporting big government,” he told me. “But, you know, it’s a different time.” On the phone, Turcios and I had a pleasant and wide-ranging conversation about housing affordability, war, and the perils of smartphone distraction. At the For Liberty & Justice event, I was startled—but probably should not have been—when he gave an apocalyptic speech invoking blood, enemies, evil, Satan, and urgent spiritual warfare.
Christian nationalism is arguably the dominant political force in Texas today, thanks, in part, to multimillion-dollar donations from two West Texas billionaires, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. It has become routine to hear Republican leaders proclaim that the principle of separation of church and state is not aligned with the Founding Fathers’ true wishes. In the past few years, Texas has mandated posting the Ten Commandments in public-school classrooms, approved an optional “Bible-infused” curriculum for public elementary schools, and forced school boards to vote on instituting a daily prayer program. The Christian-nationalist wing of the state’s Republican Party has pushed the legislature’s recent crackdown on L.G.B.T.Q. rights and its passage of a multibillion-dollar school-voucher program, the largest of its kind. (The voucher program was widely considered a boon to Christian schools; so far, no Islamic schools have been approved for funding.) For Liberty & Justice’s chapter coördinator, Joshua Moore, told me that, though some people consider “Christian nationalist” to be a derogatory term, it’s an accurate descriptor of the organization’s philosophy. I asked him whether non-Christians should hold positions of power in the U.S. “As a general rule, I would say no,” he said.
The Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs, Mercy Culture’s back yard, have been a key incubator for this combative version of Christianity. It is where the school-board wars of the early twenty-twenties kicked off, and where an architect of the state’s abortion ban was primaried for not being conservative enough. But it’s possible to discern signs of a backlash. In 2022, school-board candidates supported by a far-right Christian PAC won every race they entered. Last year, the conservative school boards in Tarrant County and elsewhere suffered significant losses. “I just never dreamed that every single one of those school-board incumbents would not be reëlected,” a former school-board member told the Fort Worth Report. “It’s the first time I can remember that happening.”
The February special-election results were a further blow. Leigh Wambsganss, the Republican candidate and a Mercy Culture ally, had become a minor MAGA celebrity, owing to her role in facilitating a far-right takeover of the area’s school boards. At a Turning Point USA women’s conference in 2022, she strode out onstage wearing a pink sheath dress. “My name is Leigh Wambsganss,” she said, “and my pronouns are Bible believer, Jesus lover, gun carrier, and mama bear.” But the aggressive mode of politics practiced by Wambsganss and her cohort eventually alienated many of their fellow-conservatives. A former office-holder and conservative Republican told me, sighing, that the MAGA Christians were “fiscal dummies.” (It’s also likely that local issues played a role: Wambsganss was a proponent of a controversial move to divide a school district.) According to the Republican pollster and strategist Ross Hunt, Wambsganss’s loss, which was a blowout, was due less to mobilized Democrats than to independent and Republican voters turning against her. In his analysis, between a quarter and a third of Republicans voted for the Democratic candidate, Taylor Rehmet.
When I asked the young men of For Liberty & Justice whether the results implied that voters were growing tired of their brand of politics, they said no. “Conservative candidates simply need to run on a Christian conservative populist message,” Turcios told me. Moore rejected the idea of moderation, even if it meant losing elections. “We’re not compromising our principles. We’re not compromising our values. We’re certainly not going to compromise the Word of God,” he said. “Scripture tells us that the blessings rain down on the just and the unjust. And I say that to say, when Christians lead, when Christians are involved in leadership positions, especially in politics, everybody benefits.” ♦
