Political Extremism Reaches New Heights in TX GOP
Here in Texas where AVC is based, the state Republican Party is being overrun by political extremists.
Travis County Republican Chairman Matt Mackowiak, a moderate who lost his bid last month to become state chair, recently complained to Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty about his party's "five years of neglect, dishonesty, self-dealing, and blatant anti-Semitism."
One of the driving forces behind this move to the even more extreme right has been True Texas Project. A conference next month celebrating its 15th anniversary will feature panels on "Multiculturalism & the War on White America," "Great Replacement Theory," and "The Case for Christian Nationalism." The descriptions of the panels claim that people on the left "don't even hide their intent to rid the earth of the white race," "demographic replacement of American citizens is clearly not just a theory, but a reality," "Post War 'normie-conservatives' believe in a bottom-up, hearts-first transformation of culture through individual conversion via the Gospel; New Right sees the necessity of a norming-influence of law on the broader culture and the top-down approach to reforming norms and ethics," and "Authentic Conservatism rejects highly centralized, statist mass democracy and recognizes that in order to protect liberty, social hierarchy is essential."
Great Replacement Theory originated from white supremacists. It was cited by the 2019 Walmart shooter in El Paso who killed 23 people, mostly Hispanics, and the 2022 Buffalo, New York shooter who killed 10 Black people. After the El Paso shooting, True Texas Project founder Julie McCarty wrote, "I don’t condone the actions, but I certainly understand where they came from."
Last year, Texas Republican Chair Matt Rinaldi was seen at a meeting with avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes. In response, the Texas Republican's executive committee sought to impose a ban on associating with Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers, but the ban was stripped on a 32-29 vote. Opponents of the ban on neo-Nazi associations tried to cover their tracks, but a vote to prevent a record of the anti-Nazi vote failed.
The description for one of the True Texas Project's presentations implies an argument for working with white supremacists. It states,
This class includes No Enemies On The Right. In order to move the Overton Window further right, we must work together to fight the Left. It’s a simple statement, but much harder to carry out. When the Left is committed to total political war, No Enemies On The Right is a non-negotiable operating principle. Activists can expect to learn that there are alternatives to perpetual defeat. Winning the battle of the Overton Window is actually possible…and it’s already happening! (Emphasis in original.)
The Overton Window is a concept describing how extreme ideas, such as Great Replacement Theory, become acceptable over time. It's mostly used in a critical way, to explain why bad things happen, but True Texas Project presents it as a goal.
Funding for True Texas Project and other organizations leading this move to the far right has mostly come from two Texas megadonors, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. Dunn sometimes preaches at his church and cites his Christian faith as motivating his politics, but his politics aren't very Jesus-like. Dunn funded the PAC that hosted Fuentes. A profile of Dunn published this week by Rolling Stone notes,
“The Bible never calls us to be nice,” Dunn preaches. “You have to applaud evil if you want to be nice.” In Dunn’s view, Christians “aren’t called to merely cope with the evil of this world. We’re called to fight it and to overcome it.” As a result, Dunn views imposing the harsh constraints of his own faith on others as the very definition of Christian love: “We’re doing people a huge favor,” he says, “when we get in their face.” The negative reaction of those who are on a different path is, to Dunn, affirmation of his righteousness: “The more superhero-like things we do, the more the world is likely to … hate us,” he writes.
This belief shapes Dunn’s ideas about how Christians should engage in what he calls the “darkest of all arenas in this world, which is politics.” In a 2019 speech to a Convention of States Action summit titled “The Bible and Politics,” Dunn declared that Christians are “made to rule and reign,” and he described this terrestrial life as a proving ground — to see who will take on the mantle to govern alongside Jesus in the “kingdom to come.”
Dunn calls on believers to be the “fragrance” of Christ in the world. “When we live according to the way God has asked us to live,” he preaches, “people smell it. They sense it.” The scent of Dunn’s political operation, however, is hardly sweet. In fact, much of it stinks to high heaven.
“They are serious about their theocracy,” says Angle, “but they know that in order to impose it on others, they have to have some pretty bad actors — and some of those bad actors are sinners.” The incongruously scandal-plagued Dunn political machine relies on GOP operatives and enforcers who have behaved so atrociously that entire front groups have had to be shut down and rebranded. “They keep embarrassing themselves,” says Seliger, calling the behavior “just indecent.”
Dunn's view of political power is antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus never advised his followers to work with evildoers to achieve political power. In fact, Jesus was offered an alliance with Satan himself, which would've granted Jesus great political power, but he rejected Satan's offer. Responsible Christian citizenship doesn't require you to win and wield political power against your political adversaries. It only requires your obedience to God.
Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.
Matthew 4: 8-10 [NIV]
Podcast
I was recently on The Ministry Collaborative’s podcast, “Politics, Polarization, and Peacemaking: A Conversation with Napp Nazworth,” where I was able to talk about our upcoming pastors conference in Atlanta. You can listen to it on Spotify here.
What Else We’re Reading
Nature: “Misinformation poses a bigger threat to democracy than you might think”
Several mechanisms to protect the public against misinformation exist — from general educational interventions to specific attempts to counter misleading messages with evidence-based campaigns4. But the deployment of these mechanisms requires the resolution of three issues by scholars and practitioners: recognition of the seriousness of the problem; acceptance that classifying information as false or misleading is often warranted; and an assurance that interventions against misinformation uphold democratic principles, including freedom of expression.
As misinformation researchers, we have witnessed an undermining of all these pre-conditions over the past few years. With the rise of populist political movements, along with a general attitude of suspicion towards ‘experts’ in some communities, misinformation researchers — like climate scientists and public-health authorities before them — have at times been portrayed as unelected arbiters of truth and subjected to harsh criticism.
Christian Scholar’s Review: “Two Visions for an Evangelical Reformation”
The remedy to all this, Moore argues, is not a new political program but rather a new reverence for Jesus’s authority. “The antidote to authoritarianism is authority itself, rightly defined,” Moore declares (75). “Political movements— especially authoritarian and totalitarian ones—almost always want to co-opt religion” (109). But when we take our identity from Jesus rather than from our political party, and when we resist the temptation to make a god out of our nation and its symbols (as Christian nationalists have), we will have the freedom to critique the sins that we see in our political leaders, and we will not identify the gospel with any political platform. Moore doesn’t go so far as to encourage Christians to boycott the political system entirely, but he does suggest that political power and partisanship are temptations that have ensnared far too many evangelical Christians. When Christians engage in politics, they need to “pay attention to means, not just to ends,” he advises (189). Jesus’s command to “turn the other cheek” still applies to us today, even when we’re fighting abortion or any other culture war battle. But Moore’s deeper concern is not with politics per se, but with gospel witness, which he thinks evangelical Christians have compromised by their political behavior. The church needs to reform its own moral reformation: “Maybe what the church is most called to do in this moment is not, first to preach repentance but to embody what repentance looks like so that a culture seeking forgiveness will know what the words even mean. That’s a matter of our moral credibility and our gospel clarity too” (201). Moore doesn’t explain exactly how to do that. He doesn’t give a step-by-step guide to how churches can deal with sex abuse in their pastorates nor does he suggest what political choices Christians should make in an election in which Donald Trump is on the ballot. Instead, he calls Christians to believe again in the gospel, because he thinks that when Christians’ lives are shaped by a cycle of trust in Christ, repentance from sins, and the humility and gratitude that comes from accepting God’s grace and walking in obedience, they will be repulsed by the sins of power politics that are so appealing to those whose lives are shaped by cultural anxieties and Christian nationalism, but that are diametrically opposed to the principles of Jesus. In other words, the remedy for our current evangelical crisis is to repent and live out the gospel—because if that doesn’t work, nothing will.
But, as Karen Swallow Prior argues in The Evangelical Imagination, American evangelicals often find it difficult to discern the difference between gospel truth and the inherited assumptions of evangelical culture. We filter the message of the Bible through the lenses of our own cultural traditions and presuppositions, and as a result, what we think are the commands of God are often merely human traditions—which, if we’re white American evangelicals, are likely to be the assumptions of several generations of other people who were white, American, and evangelical. For example, she notes, “evangelicals today, especially those who grew up within the contemporary evangelical subculture, might find it difficult to imagine how conversion could not be central to the Christian faith” (59). But in fact, the idea of a “born again” experience of conversion as it is understood by contemporary American evangelicals originated in a particular set of historical circumstances—namely, the early modern Puritan reaction against the perceived “complacency” of the established state Church of England. Other groups of Christians whose tradition was not shaped by that particular set of historical experiences did not develop such a strong emphasis on personal conversion. “Conversion has not been emphasized everywhere in the church or throughout church history in the way that evangelicalism stresses it,” Prior writes (59). Once modern American evangelicals begin examining their theology in a larger historical and literary context, they may be shocked to discover how many ideas and metaphors that they assumed were a direct application of biblical ideas are in reality products of an evangelical imagination that most of the world’s Christians have not shared.
What We’re Watching
 | A guest post by
|