Now, just two weeks before the Iowa caucuses of 2024, a podcast is investigating the people on Donald Trump’s list of religious leaders. The podcast is a project of IowaFaithLeaderCoalition.com, and is named simply On the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.

The list is not what it at first appears to be, the podcast reports.

The following is from the first episode of the podcast, out today, Empty Chairs in the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.

“Back in the day when Twitter was still Twitter, and Twitter still mattered, Donald Trump claimed to have a huge number of Twitter followers. An investigation discovered, however, that at least half of Donald Trump’s supposed followers on Twitter were nothing more than fake accounts that had been purchased from scammers who make money by helping pretenders to make a social media footprint look bigger than it actually is. With so many untraceable names on Donald Trump’s list of supposed faith leaders, it looks as if Trump may be pulling the same dishonest scheme with his Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.”

Actual history shows that’s not what happened.

Christianity spread around the world first at the point of a sword and then at the end of the barrel of a gun.

Starting with the Roman Empire and continuing through European colonization, Christians used military power and brutal oppression at the hands of authoritarian governments to force people around the world to adopt Christianity. Those who refused to worship Jesus were tortured and killed.

Violent Christian Nationalism is nothing new.

They call this a religion of love, but love doesn’t threaten to throw people into a fire if they don’t obey. Love doesn’t long for punishment. Love doesn’t seek to control people through fear.

Christianity is a religion of punishment and fear.

"Here's the deal: You worship me as a god king or I will throw you in the fire. It's about love."

– Jesus

Why do Christians want to punish sorcerers by throwing them into a lake of fire, when its own prophet Jesus is described in the bible as practicing magic?

Why would anyone want to join a religion that seeks to burn people for having sex and independent minds?

The Christian bible is the world’s most influential source of violence, cruelty, and hatred of freedom.

Wait a minute. Have you ever actually thought about how sick and twisted this is?

I’ll thank the people around me for their kind help.

The Christian god can stuff it.

Then, we turn on the TV set and watch Christian Nationalist preachers shout the very same ideology as Hitler. American Christian Nationalists promote white supremacy, antisemitism, hatred against LGBTQ people, militarism, totalitarianism, disdain for democracy, and brutal violence against anyone who stands in their way.

We might ask ourselves another naive question: How could American Christians get to be so hateful? How could American Christianity align itself with a new manifestation of Nazi ideology?

Look no further than Baptist preacher Bill Grady.

Bill Grady is an acolyte of the racist Baptist preacher Peter Ruckman, who supported racial segregation and taught his Christian followers that Africans need to be mastered by Europeans, or else they will naturally practice cannibalism. Now, Bill Grady promotes the same nasty ideology, but even worse. Bill Grady teaches his followers that the time is nearly upon us when Christian Americans will be able to fill a billion body bags with the corpses of non-Christians they have slaughtered.

At the Fellowship Baptist Church in Maryville, Tennessee, Bill Grady declared:

“When you attack white people for white privilege and white power and white this and white that, listen, that’s an attack on god. He said the Europeans were going to be the folks that were going to run the world!” 

– Baptist Bill Grady

What did the members of the Fellowship Baptist Church in Maryville, Tennessee do when they heard Bill Grady calling for “white power”?

They clapped their hands in applause.

At the Clover Hill Baptist Church in Chesterfield, Virginia, Bob Grady was at it again, calling for “white supremacy”.

“All these charges of white supremacy and white privilege, if you’ve got a problem with that, go talk to god. He put that in the bible a long time ago!”

– Baptist Bill Grady

How did the members of the Clover Hill Baptist Church in Chesterfield, Virginia react when they heard Bill Grady’s call for white supremacy?

The members of that Baptist church decided that they liked Bill Grady’s white supremacist sermon so much, they posted it up onto YouTube so that the world could see it.

When Bill Grady’s tour of Christian Nationalist Nazi propaganda stopped at the Victory Baptist Church in Clarkston, Michigan, he told the church members there that any Christians who are too afraid to accept the doctrine of white supremacy are “wimps.” He said:

“God said he was going to take the white man, duh, and do something special with him. That’s the idea!”

– Baptist Bill Grady

The members of the Victory Baptist Church in Clarkston, Michigan laughed and cheered when Bill Grady told them that Christianity gives them permission to be racist. Bill Grady continued:

“Do you think all the races, all the races are the same? Are you on drugs?” 

– Baptist Bill Grady

At the Gospel Light Baptist Church of Mechanicsville, Maryland, Bill Grady expressed his fury at Donald Trump’s loss of the 2020 presidential election, and told the congregants there that god had chosen Trump as the winner, so the democratic vote by the people of the United States was illegal.

Grady was so angry, he told the church, that as revenge against Joe Biden, he would refuse to acknowledge the “garbage” of civil rights.

“Let me tell you, neighbor: I’m not interested in hearing anything about Martin Luther King or comments on racism or bad old white people three days before the greatest president of my lifetime is being evicted from the White House illegally. I’m not interested in hearing that garbage!”

– Baptist Bill Grady

You may have noticed that these are not messages of peace and love.

As Bill Grady travels from church to church, promoting racist Nazi ideology, he cites bible verses to support his ideas.

The sad truth is that Bill Grady isn’t making it up. There is a connection between the Christian bible and Nazi ideology. He cites chapter 9 of Genesis, in combination with an old Christian conspiracy known as the Curse of Ham, as proof that the Christian god wants people of European ancestry to have power over everyone else on Earth.

This same ideology was used to justify the genocide of Native Americans and Africans by European colonists. Now, Bill Grady, and other Christian Nationalist preachers like him, are busy whipping up churches into a fury of American Nazi rage, determined to perpetrate a new genocide against non-Europeans, non-Christians, and anybody else who stands in their way.

Don’t wonder how the German people were convinced to support Adolf Hitler. The same dark ideology is now surging in the USA.

They call it Christian Nationalism.

I sincerely appreciate that progressive Christians are willing to take a step forward and recognize that there’s a lot going on in the name of Christianity that’s cruel and stupid. I thank them for trying to take a stand against cruelty and stupidity.

That said, I have to wonder where these people get their ideas about what Christianity is.

Have they not paid attention to history? Centuries of horrors have been inflicted on the world by Christians, both as individual and through Christian organizations.

Have these progressive Christians not read the Christian bible? Both the Old Testament and New Testament teach people to be brutal to each other.

Yes, there are nice bits of Christian history, and restfully kind passages in the Christian bible, but all around those parts are

Christians might ask themselves: How can we reconcile the loving, peaceful Jesus with the wrathful, narcissistic, violent, toxic Jesus? They’re presuming that there is one true, authentic Christianity, and somehow, all of the contradictory parts from Christian history can be put together into a coherent union that’s beautiful and sensible and just the best story ever told.

Realistic Christians are going to have to give that ambition up, if they’re going to be honest. It’s as clear as day that Christianity is not one single thing. It isn’t one great story, written by a god who knew what he was doing all along.

Christianity is a mish mash hodge podge train wreck of a narrative that was written by committee.

Actually, that’s not fair. Christianity is a mish mash hodge podge train wreck of a narrative that was written by many committees over thousands of years.

If ever there truly did exist a person named Jesus, anything that person actually said was rewritten and redacted by Christians over the centuries before it became “The Bible” to the point that nothing of the original material remains.

Christianity promotes both violence and non-violence. Christianity promotes both tolerance and intolerance. Christianity promotes both obedience and rebellion. That’s because Christianity is a collection of dogmas created over a long period of time by a whole bunch of different people who had very different agendas.

So, yes, Jesus is written in the Christian bible as saying to turn the other cheek. However, the same Christian bible also says that Jesus made death threats against his enemies.

But the same Christian bible also represents Jesus as saying “I have not come to bring peace, but the sword.”

Update that to present-day weaponry technology, and the Christian bible has Jesus saying: “I have not come to bring peace. I have come to bring guns.”

I’m not pointing this out because I love the idea of guns. Guns are nasty machines designed to kill. People who love guns have hateful hearts.

I’m saying this because I’m sick and tired of Christians pretending that Christian Nationalism is not Christian. I’m sick of seeing Christians using Jesus as a cudgel to batter non-Christians with, and then pretending that Jesus was the Prince of Peace, a perfect embodiment of non-violence.

The truth is that there is a great deal of ugliness, hate, and violence within Christianity. That’s why Christian Nationalists are so ugly, hateful, and violent. Christian Nationalists get inspiration for their cruelty and intolerance from Christianity, and often from the purported words of Jesus.

If progressive Christians really want to confront Christian Nationalism, that’s great. I suggest they begin by acknowledging that the problem begins with their religion.

Will they have the courage to reform their religion, or will they just keep pretending that the problem of Toxic Christianity does not exist?

Since the terrorist attack against the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, an earnest but ill-informed trope has insisted that, although the terrorist mob carried crucifixes, bibles, Christian flags, rosary beads, and signs declaring that “Jesus Saves” and “Jesus or Hellfire”, although they said the Christian Lord’s Prayer together before storming Capitol Hill, and although they were heard continuing to pray to the Christian god for the destruction of the US House and Senate within the halls of Congress, the terrorists were somehow not true Christians.

The Dean of the Yale Divinity School, for example, complained that the Capitol Hill terrorists were “a mob hijacking an entire faith”, and declared that ,”Those Christians who continue to be Trump supporters are models of cognitive dissonance.”

Christianity is riddled with cognitive dissonance, of course. The religion is based on a text that, as any text written by various committees over the course of hundreds of years would, routinely contradicts itself. To believe in the message of the Christian Bible is to ignore that the Christian Bible doesn’t have a single message.

The cognitive dissonance of Christianity is manifested by the religion’s liberal subculture as much as by its right wing majority. The Christian text, after all, both promotes peace and genocide, the ownership of slaves and holy poverty. It elevates marriage, polygamy, and unwed motherhood. It teaches the wisdom of both love and divine torture. When progressive Christians declare that the genuine message of their religion happens to support their political value, they’re willfully ignoring what their own holy book teaches, and what the majority of Christian churches preach.

One of the January 6 terrorists was Jenna Ryan, a realtor from Dallas, Texas who screamed, “Here we are, in the name of Jesus, in the name above all names!” before she joined the crowd that violently broke into the US Capitol, killed a police officer and physically assaulted dozens more.

How can anyone seriously claim that Jenna Ryan is not a true Christian? Christianity was obviously at the core of the motivation for her violence, and she’s

In both 2016 and 2020 the majority of Trump voters were Christians, and the majority of Christian voters voted for Trump. Polls taken since the terrorist attack of January 6 show that support for Trump among his right wing Christian base remains strong.

To claim that these tens of millions of people are somehow all fake Christians is the epitome of cognitive dissonance. Instead of continuing the absurd denial of the problem of violent radicalization among American Christians, we ought to be considering the origins of ideological violence within Christianity.

The Violent Jesus

It’s popular among liberal Christians to pretend that the Jesus described in the Bible was a pacifist, but an honest reading of the Gospels reveals something much more Trumpian. Jesus reads like a narcissist, a self-obsessed self-promoter who insisted upon unquestioning obedience by his followers, who went on frequent tirades against his political opponents, and who could not tolerate dissent.

Just as Donald Trump sometimes gives speeches celebrating “peace” and “love”, but at other times threatens bloody death to anyone who crosses him, Jesus had a nasty streak to go along with his softer side. Sometimes, Jesus gave speeches seeming to promote nonviolence, but at other times screamed insults at his own supporters, declared that he had come with a sword, not for peace. Jesus was fixated on arranging elaborate and cruel tortures for people who refused to join his followers, such as burning people in a lake of fire.

Then there was the time he stormed the Temple in Jerusalem. The parallels between the storming of the US Capitol by Christian terrorists and the storming of the temple by Jesus and his followers are to strong for any honest observer to ignore.

The story is told with pride in multiple gospels. When Jesus saw people in the temple doing things that didn’t match his ideology, he didn’t try to reason with them. He didn’t respect their right to practice religion in their own way. He didn’t peacefully petition the temple leaders for a change of policy. Instead, Jesus led a violent assault on the temple, attacking people and their property while carrying a whip.

Does this comparison seem unfair? Consider the long Christian tradition of proudly violent artwork depicting the story of Jesus viciously storming the temple. The story, and these pieces of Christian art, have inspired the violent Christian ideology used to depict the violent attempted coup d’etat of January 6, 2021 as a Christian act of holy war.

Look at the fear and pain that Jesus inflicted upon the people in the temple. Violent Christian ideology views this as a good thing. The Christian artist takes glee in the suffering of the opponents of Jesus. The story and the artwork are a celebration of cruelty, enshrining violence as a sacred Christian ritual.

Jesus believed that he had the right to inflict pain and fear on anyone who disagreed with him. The Republican insurrectionists followed his example. The theological lesson to them was clear: Christians have the right to impose their will on others. To these Christians, self-determination is unholy, and democracy is a tool of Satan.

Christians never question what gave Jesus the right to impose his will on the money changers and their customers in the temple. They ignore the fact that what was happening in the temple was standard practice in the culture at the time, something that money changers, their customers, and the temple custodians all felt was a helpful practice. Jesus didn’t care what other people thought. He simply decided what he wanted, and decided that he would seize power by beating everyone else into submission.

“On reaching Jerusalem, he entered the Temple courts and began driving out those who were carrying on business there, both the merchants and their customers. He also knocked over the desks of the money-changers, upset the benches of the pigeon-dealers.”

When Joshua Black, who carried a weapon into the US Capitol building, declared that “I wanted to get inside the building so I could plead the blood of Jesus over it,” he wasn’t defying the teachings of Jesus. He was following the example of the violent Jesus. If Jesus was justified in violently attacking people in the temple, why would Black believe that his Christianity didn’t justify his own violent attack?

Put your Christian cognitive dissonance aside, and you’ll see that the story of Jesus storming the temple is not a metaphor for social justice. It’s not a tale of theological reform. It’s a blueprint for Christian terrorism.

To make this plain, consider this painting of the storming of the temple of Jesus, in which Jesus is beating an old woman for nothing other than engaging in a legal activity that didn’t obey the tyrannical theological demands of Jesus. Christians teach that this beating was a good thing. “His wrath is quickly kindled,” the Christian Bible says of Jesus, with approval.

Thanks to systematic programs of violent radicalization in American Christian churches, terrorists are now able to, without any sense of irony, combine symbols of death and Christianity as they engage acts of mass violence. American Christianity is becoming a death cult, part of a fascist nationalism dedicated to the replacement of democracy with Christian theocracy. Christian nationalism threatens the very foundations of American liberty.

The violent attempted overthrow of the US government by an overwhelmingly Christian mob carrying Christian religious symbols and shouting Christian religious mottos as they beat police officers was not an aberration from the traditions of American Christianity. It was an expression of the tradition of righteous Christian brutality and the long-standing opposition of Christianity to American democracy.

So, who do we have to thank for ending the sadistic insanity of the Trump years? Look to non-religious Americans, a large voting bloc that overwhelmingly supported the Democratic ballot.

According to the Associated Press VoteCast survey, non-Christian Americans now make up 32% of the electorate. That number has been increasing rapidly, and is forecast to rise even more, because most Christians are above the age of 50. Christian churches aren’t replacing their members as their senior citizens die, because decades of toxic behavior by Christian leaders and organizations have driven young Americans away from Christianity.

Two-thirds of non-Christian Americans are non-religious – 21% of the electorate. Witnessing the hateful hypocrisy of Christianity hasn’t led people to choose another religion, for the most part, but to reject religion altogether.

The VoteCast survey shows that non-religious Americans voted against Donald Trump, for Joe Biden, more strongly than any religious group. 72% of non-religious Americans voted to kick Trump out of the White House.

The majority of voters from every single Christian group voted to keep the bitter fury, the violence, the racism, the sexism, the disregard for the law, the corruption, and the rampant dishonesty of Donald Trump.

That’s what toxic Christianity looks like. American Christianity is not a force for social cohesion and moral values. To the contrary, Christianity has been the leading force for division and hatred in the United States.

The lesson for Democratic leaders should be clear: If you’re looking for strong support for progressive values, don’t turn to Christians. Instead, you’ll find the most reliable progressive support among non-religious Americans.

We’ll name it here: Church

The Associated Press VoteCast survey interviewed over 110,000 people about various aspects of their lives, and about how they voted in the 2020 presidential election. The survey found a strong correlation between church attendance and support for the dangerous, radical agenda of Donald Trump.

Only 35% of voters who never attend a Christian church chose to vote for Trump. By contrast, 61% of voters who attend church at least once a week voted for Trump. The relationship was clear and progressive: The more often a voter attends church, the more likely they are to support the abuses, lawbreaking, bigotry, violence, animosity to science, and crude behavior of Donald Trump.

There are two plausible causal interpretations of this data. First, it’s possible that churches are especially attractive to people who enjoy crude behavior, racism and sexism, xenophobia, proud ignorance, disdain for the law, cruelty, and conspicuous corruption. If this is the case, Christian worship services aren’t the cause of dangerous radicalization, but are places that nasty bigots like to go.

A second possibility is that churches actively radicalize Americans, leading people who might otherwise be nice neighbors to become crude, rude, violent extremists.

It’s likely that both interpretations are correct to some extent. Christian churches have become stages upon which performances of defiant rejection of social norms take place, as preachers scream loud condemnations and passionate opinions that are disconnected from empirical evidence, in displays of raw emotional fury. These performances both attract misanthropes who seek the company of other hateful people, and normalize hateful attitudes and behaviors among other churchgoers.

Christian ideology also consistently teaches churchgoers that there is no need to have a factual basis for one’s opinions, even advising that dependence upon evidence and careful, rational thinking are sinful. Churches thus have become radicalizing training grounds for voters who are willing, and even eager, to believe whatever Christian politicians tell them to believe, without regard to the factual accuracy of any proclamation.

So it is that, even though the facts of Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in 2020 are rationally undeniable, Donald Trump’s Christian supporters are quite willing to accept Trump’s absurd assertions that he is the victor. A new verse of the old Sunday school tune for children could easily be sung:

Trump’s the winner, this I know, for my leaders tell me so…

Churches remain centers of political power in America, and have in recent years abandoned previous restrictions on explicit campaigning for political candidates, commonly hosting pro-Trump rallies and fundraising events.

The good news is that church membership is on the decline, along with Christian identity. In most Christian churches, the vast majority of congregants have grey hair and wrinkled skin, as young families with children are frightened away by the right wing radicalization of church culture. Younger generations of Americans are turning their back on church life and Christianity, constructing their political identities around critical reasoning skills and a more compassionate, secular vision of citizenship.