Politico investigative reporter Heidi Przybyla said Thursday on MSNBC’s “All In” that Christian nationalists, not Christians, believe rights come from God.
Przybyla said, “The base of the Republican Party has shifted. Remember when Trump ran in 2016, a lot of the mainland Evangelicals wanted nothing to do with the divorced real estate mogul who cheated on his wife with a porn star, and all of that. So what happened was that he was surrounded by this more extremist element. We are going to hear words like Christian Nationalism, like the new re-formation. These are groups that you should get very schooled on because they have a lot of power in Trump’s circle, the one thing that unites all of them, because there’s many different groups orbiting Trump, but the thing that unites them as Christian nationalists — not Christians, by the way, because Christian nationalist is very different — is that they believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority. They don’t come from Congress. They don’t come to the Supreme Court, they come from God.”
She continued, “The problem with that is that they are determining men — it is men — are determining what God is telling them. And in the past, that so-called natural law is, you know, it’s a pillar of Catholicism for instance, it’s been used for good in social justice campaigns. Martin Luther King evoked it in talking about civil rights.”
Przybyla added, “But now, you have an extremist element of conservative Christians who say that this applies specifically to issues including abortion, gay marriage, and it’s going much further than that as you see, for instance, with the ruling in Alabama this week that judges connected to that Dominionist faction and talking about a lot of other issues, including surrogacy, IVF, you know, sex education in schools. There’s a lot in addition.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN