MAKE AMERICA CHRISTIAN AGAIN?

Russell Vought wants to make America Christian again. And he has put quite a bit of thought into what that might look like.

Across public speeches, little-noticed interviews, and secretly made recordings, Vought has spent several years enunciating his belief that America was founded as a Christian nation, and is intended to be governed as such.

Vought is most known for proposing aggressive actions aimed at remaking the government into something very different than it ha been and is now, such as deploying the military to quell protests, gutting the independent civil service, and the many horrible draconian policy ideas in Project 2025, for which he was a leader in creating.

But his public statements show his main emphasis is on imagining a specifically Fundamentalist Christian future for America. He’s spoken at length about his belief that America was founded as a Christian nation, and how that contention informs his approach to right-wing budgetary policy.

Of all Trump’s picks for senior staf, Vought may be the best example of how MAGA policy prescriptions have been merged with the hard-line ideas of the Fndamentalist Christian Right.

Now, he will reprise his role as one of the most powerful officials in the new administration as head of the Office of Management and Budget, the executive branch office that oversees budgeting and helps implement presidential actions. This will make him central to the execution of Trump’s promise to demolish the American state as we know it.

The OMB would have a hand in any White House refusal to seize the congressional powr of the purse by refusing to spend congressionally-appropriated funding; in replacing civil servants with political cronies; and in letting private businessmen like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have a role in reshaping the government.

Speaking on Rep. Tim Burchett’s podcast last year, Vought said that he and the Center for Renewing America - which he founded - had a priority: establishing that “we’re not a secular country. That we are a Christian Nation as founded and that should be shared by everyone even if they have religious liberty for another faith.”

He went on to say that If the United States fails to understand its Christian heritage, it is in for destruction. “To the extent that you don’t have that consensus, you have a culture and a nation that just disintegrates.”

Last February, he told Charlie Kirk in February that he isn’t so much a Christian nationalist as he is a nationalist who believes in a Christian America. “We are Christians who are nationalists. We are people who believe that we have a Christian nation. I mean, Christian nationism would probably be the most accurate aspect of what I believe.”

Vought’s idea is that America was founded as a Christian nation, and must be preserved through Christian supremacy within the country; that while people of other faiths can and do exist, Christians are the only group affiliated since the founding with American national identity.

In September 2023, he argued that the Bible demands drastic limitations on legal immigration and mass deportations. Where in biblical verse these instructions are found is a mystery.

If thisseems conveniently aligned with standard GOP priorities, then you may want to take a look at the incoming OMB chief’s career path. He ascended to OMB after a fairly traditional upward trajectory through Republican politics. He worked for years as a staffer on Capitol Hill, in part as executive director of the Republican Study Committee under Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) and as policy director for the House Republican Conference under then representative and former Vice President Mike Pence.

In terms of policy, Vought has set his ambitions high. He has advocated for creating a new rule that the executive branch can unilaterally refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress. Whether that initiative succeeds will most likely be left to the Roberts Court to decide.

At the Center for Renewing America, Vought pushed for legal justifications to deploy the military domestically, describing his plans in private speeches as working to ensure that military leaders do not stop the coming Trump administration from ordering troops to quell protests.

Vouht knows how unpopular his agenda is, stating in a podcast in March 2021 after Trump left office that, “We have lost the ability in our public square to hear from Judeo-Christian values. It is so foreign we don’t even know how to talk about it or how to reason from that perspective.”

When Trump ammpounced Vought would return as head of OMB, reactions focused on his role as one of the architects of Project 2025. But he is not merely a stand-in for the Heritage Foundation. Vought is convinced the constitutional order is no more, that the extreme Left has destroyed it, and that truly radical measures are needed to restore it.

In September 2022, Vought outlined his diagnosis of the problem and his vision of what needs to be done to save America in a piece titled: “Renewing American Purpose: Statesmanship in a Post-Constitutional Moment,” published in The American Mind, the online magazine of the Claremont Institute.

Accpording to Vouht, the moment America took the wrong turn was when the progressive movement under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson figured out how to “radically pervert” the constitution without having to officially amend it. The Left – Vought uses these terms indiscriminately: the Left, progressives, Marxists – started treating the constitution as a living document. Instead of defending and preserving the constitutional order, they wanted to modify it in order to “keep up with a modernizing nation.”

The founders of the Claremnt Institute believe that America is good because the Framers based the country on certain natural rights and timeless laws of nature, enshrining these eternal laws and morals in the country’s founding documents. Thus, progressivism is the key enemy as a relativistic project of adapting laws and morals over time, thereby alienating America from the timeless essence which it once embodied. That is what Vought invokes: When “the Left” started to “modernize” the constitutional order, they were in fact destroying all that was good and noble about America because they were deviating from the “natural order.”

To Vought that means that today, the constitutional order is no more. “We are in a post-constitutional moment in our country. We have entered a new arrangement – a new regime if you will –that pays only lip service to the old Constitution.” For Vought, that means that power now lies with the Executive, though not with the president - but with the agencies, unelected bureaucrats, civil servants, which are fully in the hands of a “permanent ruling class” of leftist elites. “It has been a slow-moving revolution for over a hundred years.” For Vought, the leftwing revolution has already happened and succeeded. For him, conservatives are categorically wrong when they try to preserve what has long been destroyed.

Vought’s solution is that Conservatives need to become “radical constitutionalists.” The Right must “throw off the precedents” and “be radical in discarding or rethinking the legal paradigms that have confined our ability to return to the original Constitution.” He says Republican governors should declare an “invasion” of “illegal aliens,” take control of the border themselves, and “apprehend and return illegal aliens to the border without the federal government.”

According to Russell Vought, the current “regime” simply has no legitimacy whatsoever.

Vought says the Left does not want an “energetic president with the power to bend the executive branch to the will of the American people,” but rather want “a monarch with massive historic grandeur and symbolism and no remaining authority,” while everything is controlled by “all-empowered career ‘experts’ like Tony Fauci to wield power behind the curtains.”

Vought implores his readers to fully grasp the severity of the situation: “the hour is late, and time is of the essence.” The “woke and weaponized” leftist regime “is now increasingly arrayed against the American people,” treating patriotic parents as “domestic terrorists” and “putting political opponents in jail.” But all is not lost yet. Because in Donald Trump, a savior has arrived, an “existential threat” to the leftist regime, one who can “break the political cartels.” But the only way to save America is to recognize “that we are living in a post-Constitutional time.” Winning elections and “meddling at the margins” will not be enough. Patriots on the Right must decide to “cast ourselves as dissidents of the current regime and to put on our shoulders the full weight of envisioning, articulating, and defending what a Radical Constitutionalism requires in the late hour that our country finds itself in.”

Where is the line?

Reacting to Trump’s Manhattan conviction in a Xitter rampage on May 31, Vought said: “Do not tell me that we are living under the Constitution. Do not tell me that these are mere political disagreements of Americans with different world views. This is only the most recent example of a post-Constitutional America furthered by a corrupt marxist vanguard pulling out all the stops to protect their own power. But this isn’t just about winning an election to shift the see saw toward our agenda. It’s about demanding that our leaders destroy this threat at every level with every tool.”

The sentiment that it is no longer enough to be “conservative,” that traditional conservatism needs to be replaced by a much more radical form of politics, is no mainstream across the Right. People at the center of conservative politics now reject the label “conservatism” outright. In October 2022, The Federalist published an article by John Daniel Davidson, senior editor at The Federalist, titled “We Need to Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives.” It claimed a “need to forge a new political identity that reflects our revolutionary moment.” No more restraint, no more “small government”: “The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life – and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.” It went on to say, “If all that sounds radical, fine. It need not, at this late hour, dissuade conservatives in the least. Radicalism is precisely the approach needed now because the necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary.”

Vought is not merely critical of civil servants who he regards as agents of the “deep state,” he wants to “put them in trauma.” He believes that the Insurrection Act should be invoked to oppress protests: “We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do.’” Vought has no patience for the conservative legal movement in general which he sees as hopelessly bound to an idea of preserving an order that, as he believes, has long collapsed. Instead of rightwing warriors committed to “radical constitutionalism, “we have the vaunted so-called Federalist Society and originalist judges acting as a Praetorian Guard for this post-constitutional structure.”

Vought is convinced that America is facing an existential threat – a situation he has likened to 1776 and 1860: (Counter-) Revolution and total war, that is what America must face if it is to survive. What gives Vought hope is his devotion to Donald Trump, “uniquely positioned to serve this role” as the leader of such a revolutionary counter-offensive against the evil forces of “unnatural” leftism. Literally, in Vought’s words, “a gift of God.”

Vought is merely the most articulate of the fascist revolutionaries Trump wants to put in power. This belief that “conservtives”must destroy the modern American state is why preposterous appointees like Kash Patel as FBI director are being made, of why the “doctors” named to head the agencies responsible for public health are committed to destroying those agencies, why Tu;lsi Gabbard is named Director of National Intelligence and Pete Hegseth as Seretary of Defense.

These people, this movement, are The Enemies of America and must be seen as such. They must be destroyed if America is to be saved. They are a greater threat to the future of the republic than were the Confederate Traitors of1860.

We are at the place where it is now Us or Them.

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