As the aggressive Christian nationalism that infuses the MAGA movement and Republican Party intensifies, journalists and filmmakers are paying closer attention to the threat this political ideology and its adherents pose to freedom in America. A must-watch new documentary, “Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy,” will be available for streaming on AppleTV, Amazon Prime, and Google Play beginning Friday, April 26.
Directed by Stephen Ujlaki and Christopher Jacob Jones and narrated by Peter Coyote, “Bad Faith” makes masterful use of archival and current footage of Christian nationalist religious and political figures, infographics, and interviews with scholars, religious leaders, political analysts, and even a former Trump administration official.
The film draws a compelling through line from the scheming power-building of Paul Weyrich, the right-wing operative who recruited Jerry Falwell and other evangelical preachers to create the religious-right as a political movement in the late 1970s, to the institution-destroying antidemocratic ambitions of MAGA insiders like Steve Bannon, as well as Donald Trump’s dominionist “prophets” and “apostles” and the Jan. 6 insurrectionists they inspired.
As Owen Gleiberman noted in a review for Variety, “what sounded like crackpot raving” from Weyrich’s tear-it-all-down manifesto 15 years ago is “now the cutting edge of the mainstream Republican Party.”
“Bad Faith” explains how that transformation happened, documenting the role played by the Council for National Policy, a partnership between anti-regulation, economically libertarian oil barons and the religious-right leaders who intended to remake the Republican Party, take over the Supreme Court, and use their political power to enforce “traditional” views of family, sexuality, and gender on the rest of the nation.
The Koch brothers poured tens of millions of dollars into “a state-of-the-art political data platform” that Council for National Policy groups use to collect personal information—including personal mental health, behavioral health, and treatment data—and use that information to micro-target individuals. (In “God & Country,” another documentary released earlier this year, Ralph Reed is shown bragging that his organization tracked “147 different data points” on the conservative Christians they targeted for turnout operations.)
“Bad Faith” also connects the modern Christian nationalist movement to a longer history. As the Rev. William Barber points out in the film, the use of religion to justify “all kinds of evils” is not a new phenomenon. At its peak in 1924, the KKK claimed 8 million members, mostly white evangelicals. Linda Gordon, author of “The Second Coming of the KKK,” describes that movement’s belief that new immigrants were subverting the destiny of America to be a white Protestant country. Sound familiar?
Sociologist Samuel Perry notes in the film that Christian Nationalism emerges at times of cultural conflict when those in power—mostly White Christian men—think their power is threatened. Randall Balmer, author of a 2021 book that shares the “Bad Faith” title, describes how court rulings challenging the tax-exempt status of racially segregationist schools, not abortion, motivated evangelical leaders to seek political power in the 1970s. They settled on abortion as a more politically palatable motivator than the defense of racial segregation. As “Freedom Road” author Lisa Sharon Harper notes, religious-right activists targeting the Supreme Court waved the banner of abortion in order to advance white supremacy.
As “Bad Faith” makes clear, religious-right leaders viewed Trump as a powerful blunt weapon in a long-term political and spiritual war against the federal government and institutions dominated by progressive forces. “The Council’s gambit had paid off,” the film notes about Trump’s time in office. “Christian nationalists were firmly embedded at the highest levels of government. The Supreme Court had an absolute majority of justices poised to overturn landmark civil and women's rights decisions. Paul Weyrich’s vision of a Christian nation was becoming a reality.”
That explains why Christian nationalist leaders were willing to dismantle democracy to keep Trump in power. Members of the Council for National Policy and its political action arm went into “full combat mode” to promote Trump’s big lie, and, as Right Wing Watch documented, they supported his efforts to keep power after the 2020 election, portraying it as a holy war between the forces of good and evil. As Samuel Perry notes in the film, viewing politics as spiritual warfare between the forces of God and Satan makes it easy for those who see themselves on God’s side to “justify just about anything.”
While Rev. William Barber offers “Bad Faith” viewers hope that a nationwide justice-seeking movement can reach some of the people who have embraced the Christian nationalist movement, the documentary also argues that our democracy is more fragile that most Americans understand. The Republican Party, says strategist Steve Schmidt, is “more extreme, more dangerous, more committed to the autocratic project of gaining power than it was on Jan. 6, 2021. And this has to be confronted. And there is no issue that supersedes it.”
The Christian nationalist movement is going all-out to put Trump back in power, and its Project 2025 is preparing to “take the reins of government” if he wins. But the political infrastructure built by the Christian right and its allies is far bigger than Trump himself. “Regardless of what happens to Donald Trump, it’s the machinery of the Council for National Policy that has the staying power,” says Anne Nelson, author of “Shadow Network.” "And it’s that machinery that presents the lasting threat to our democracy.”
“Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy” is a Panarea Production. Directed, Produced and Written by Stephen Ujlaki. Co-Director/Co-Producer: Chris Jones. Executive Producers: Peter D. Graves, John Ptak, Todd Stiefel, Mike Steed. Co-Producer: Doug Blush.
