The Energy Worshippers: Contained in the Harmful Rise of Spiritual Nationalism

For too lengthy the Spiritual Proper has masqueraded as a social motion preoccupied with various cultural points, resembling abortion and same-sex marriage. In her deeply reported investigation, Katherine Stewart reveals a disturbing fact: this can be a political motion that seeks to achieve energy and to impose its imaginative and prescient on all of society. America’s non secular nationalists aren’t simply preventing a tradition battle, they’re waging a political battle on the norms and establishments of American democracy.

Stewart pulls again the curtain on the internal workings and main personalities of a motion that has turned faith right into a software for domination. She exposes a dense community of assume tanks, advocacy teams, and pastoral organizations embedded in a quickly increasing neighborhood of worldwide alliances and united not by any central command however by a shared, anti-democratic imaginative and prescient and a standard will to energy. She follows the cash that fuels this motion, tracing a lot of it to a cadre of super-wealthy, ultraconservative donors and household foundations. She reveals that as we speak’s Christian nationalism is the fruit of a longstanding antidemocratic, reactionary pressure of American thought that pulls on a few of the most troubling episodes in America’s previous. It varieties frequent trigger with a globe-spanning motion that seeks to destroy liberal democracy and substitute it with nationalist, theocratic and autocratic types of authorities all over the world. Spiritual nationalism is way extra organized and higher funded than most individuals understand. It seeks to regulate all facets of presidency and society. Its successes have been beautiful, and its affect now extends to each facet of American life, from the White Home to state capitols, from our colleges to our hospitals.

The Energy Worshippers is a brilliantly reported e-book of warning and a wake-up name. Stewart’s probing examination calls for that Christian nationalism be taken significantly as a major risk to the American republic and our democratic freedoms.