The theocratic idea that Christians are called by God to exercise political and cultural dominion over society. Learn more is the theocratic idea that Christians are called by God to exercise dominion over society by taking control of its political and cultural institutions. This belief unites “an array of fellow travelers” into a movement of “fierce Christian nationalists” who craft a biblical narrative of U.S. history.[Footnote 1] In her new book, American Dominion, scholar Keri Ladner shows how Confederate and Neo-Confederate ideals, including British Israelism, have informed the Dominionist movement shaping today’s A movement that emerged in the 1970s encompassing a wide swath of conservative Catholicism and Protestant evangelicalism. Learn more and its authoritarian approach to government.
British Israelism—a pseudohistorical belief that White people are the descendants of Old Testament Israel—is foundational to the A White supremacist and antisemitic form of Christianity that believes White Europeans are descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Learn more theology underlying many White-supremacist groups, including the A U.S.-based White supremacist, Christian paramilitary group formed during the Reconstruction era. Learn more and former Aryan Nations, and A strand of Christian thought which holds that the State of Israel is crucial to the fulfillment of end times prophecies. Learn more . The following excerpts show the durability of this belief and its ability to shape religious goals and antidemocratic political agendas, even among leaders and groups that do not specifically adhere to British Israelism.
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Today’s NAR apostles and prophets are not British Israelists, but they are heirs to British-Israelist ideas, including the belief that biblical history is still unfolding. And it is unfolding not only in Israel but also in America. The Bible tells a story of the ancient Israelites going to enter the Promised Land but encountering the fortified city of Jericho. The ensuing battle was their first military engagement, and it was not a typical means of warfare. In fact, when read along with the theology of leaders like C. Peter Wagner, the story comes across as spiritual warfare—or at least a way to justify spiritual warfare as the NAR promoted it. For six days, the people marched around the fortified city, its impregnable walls defying them to enter […]. The walls of Jericho fell down, and the people were able to conquer.
Apostles and prophets decided to do the same thing as they waged spiritual warfare against the impregnable walls of what they saw as a corrupt election process. They participated in a movement called Jericho March, a network of Trump supporters who would enact the biblical march around Jericho in their state capitols and ultimately in Washington, DC. Jericho March was not an exclusively NAR activity; one of its founders, Arina Grossu, is Catholic. But during her time serving in the White House during Trump’s first term, she undoubtedly would have come into contact with Paula White and Trump’s retinue of prophets and apostles. Their participation was crucial to turning Jericho March into a national program that, they believed, would cause states to certify their election results in favor of Trump, not Biden.
The largest Jericho March, held in DC on December 12, 2020, was hosted by the conservative pundit Eric Metaxas and featured Michael Flynn. Trump did a flyover of the event in Air Force One. The white supremacist Stewart Rhodes, the founder of Oath Keepers, was part of this Jericho March. He gave a speech that called on Trump to use the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that allows the president to call on the National Guard to suppress rebellion against the government. “Show the world who the traitors are,” he demanded. “If he does not do it now”—if Trump does not use the Insurrection Act—“we’re going to have to do it ourselves later in a much more desperate, much more bloody war.”[Footnote 2]
Rhodes’ speech was not seen as A generic category for anyone who holds beliefs outside of those approved by mainstream or broadly centrist preferences. Learn more , at least not extremist in the sense that he had gone too far, and this was not what the NAR leaders were actually calling for. In fact, Three-Percenter flags waved in the crowd, indicating the presence of the anti-government militia group. Followers of QAnon were also there, waving giant cardboard cutouts of the letter “Q.” The poised, well-spoken Metaxas came back on stage after Rhodes finished speaking and said, “God bless you! This guy’s keeping it real.” Metaxas is not necessarily part of the NAR, but his work has certainly been embraced by the prophets and apostles, and he was hosting a NAR-organized event.
Nearby, something close to a riot was already raging as members of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters expressed their fury that Biden might actually take the White House. The NAR leaders and other dominionists did not attempt to distance themselves from this white-supremacist violence. Instead, they continued to do what they had been doing ever since Trump first announced his candidacy the day before the Mother Emmanuel massacre:
They partnered with it.
“NAR leaders and other dominionists did not attempt to distance themselves from this white-supremacist violence. Instead, they continued to do what they had been doing ever since Trump first announced his candidacy…They partnered with it.”
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On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly tried to distance himself from the media-maligned Project 2025. Even after choosing as his running mate J.D. Vance, the senator who wrote the foreword to Roberts’s book, Trump insisted that he had not even read Project 2025. But he did not need to, as he has long surrounded himself with dominionists and, for his second term, also entwined himself with a cadre of politically minded integralists. The evidence bore itself out during his first hundred days, when he vastly overhauled the federal government along the lines of Project 2025.
Against the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Liberation, and the Gay Rights Movement, on day one, President Trump issued a total ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion—what Project 2025 called the “DEI apparatus”—in the federal government. Dominionism began with British Israelism and the Ku Klux Klan; the ending of DEI resounded as a coup de grâce to liberal democracy.
In keeping with Rushdoony’s thought and Falwell’s original organizing aimed at overthrowing Brown v. Board of Education, Project 2025 called for abolishing the Department of Education. Within two months of resuming office, Trump issued an executive order that began exactly that process.
Project 2025 insists on devolving federal responsibilities, including disaster relief, to states and localities. Trump began efforts at dismantling the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) by March 2025, claiming that states should take over the duties previously overseen by FEMA. Those duties have included emergency relief for people impacted by hurricanes, wildfires, and floods—risks that will continue to compound with rising exposure to climate change.
With regard to climate change, Trump removed America from the Paris Climate Agreement the day that he returned to the Oval Office. He promised oil companies that if they donated to his campaign, he would remove regulations; upon retaking office, he made good on this promise. He went on to boost the fossil fuel industry while gutting environmental protections and freezing money for green initiatives. These anti-environmental programs are also in keeping with Project 2025, which set out to dismantle all environmental protections and green-energy projects. After all, the oil industry has long been funding the dominionist movement, especially David Barton’s work in educating legislators and schoolchildren across the country into his understanding of American history.
“The oil industry has long been funding the dominionist movement.”
Trump appointed Brendan Carr to lead the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Station (PBS), both of which are funded through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Carr had written parts of Project 2025 regarding the FCC and urged Congress to cease all funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
He appointed Russell Vought, who likewise wrote parts of Project 2025, as head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Not long after Trump’s 2025 inauguration, the OMB ordered a freeze on federal loans, grants, and assistance programs until the administration could review the use of all funds to ensure that they are being used according to his priorities.
Project 2025 was an unabashedly nativist document that sought to restore the power of a white A system of social control characterized by rigid enforcement of binary sex and gender roles. Learn more in America. To this end, it set out the policy goals of ending asylum claims for refugees fleeing their home countries and carrying out mass deportations, including for people who had immigrated to the United States legally. When Trump empowered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to carry out this plan, legal immigrants with court protections, university students on lawful visas, and even American citizens were deported, many of them to a megaprison in El Salvador. When courts ordered a halt to the deportations and that people who had been wrongfully detained and/or deported be returned home, Trump did more than ignore these orders. He asked the president of El Salvador to build more megaprisons so that he could begin deporting citizens.
Perhaps most infamously, Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to, as Roberts put it in the original title of his book, burn down Washington. With the president’s blessing, tech billionaire Elon Musk shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which has long funded and implemented humanitarian programs around the world. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk boasted on social media. “Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”[Footnote 3] Consistent with the origins of dominionism and its long-standing ties to hard A form of oppression targeting Jews and those perceived to be Jewish, including bigoted speech, violent acts, and discriminatory policy. Learn more , at Trump’s second inauguration, Musk had made a Sieg Heil salute. DOGE went on to slash the federal workforce, also a goal of Project 2025, whose overarching aim was to dismantle what Roberts referred to as the administrative state.
These moves represent only a handful of the changes Trump made in the first hundred days of his second term. Project 2025 was not about violently overthrowing the government. It was about subverting it from within so that the 7MM could be fulfilled, not just on the mountain of government but in every area of society: education, media, religion, the arts and entertainment, family life, and business.
“Project 2025 was not about violently overthrowing the government. It was about subverting it from within.”
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By the time Trump ran for reelection in 2024 and then reassumed office, dominionism had left the confines of its white-supremacist origins. NAR prophets and apostles had used promises of faith-healing and divine intervention in all areas of life to build a multiracial, diverse coalition of voters. These dominionist leaders had turned marginal dilemmas, such as whether trans athletes should be allowed to compete in school sports, into national hot-button issues while partnering with Turning Point USA to stoke the anger and terror of voters. They had used conspiracy theories that serve a political agenda, especially QAnon and the stolen election, to ignite fears of what might happen if Trump is not reelected. They continued to reach out to like-minded dominionists who might have different, even contradictory ideas about theology, to expand their base. By the time Trump was reelected, the big surprise was not how many white evangelicals had voted for him but rather how many minorities had. African American and Latino voters in particular turned out in large numbers to vote for Trump.
NAR messaging about divine intervention and doing politics God’s way has worked. Dominionism is no longer confined to the boundaries of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who felt left behind by the political establishment and found in NAR churches something that appealed to them. One can visit a NAR church today and see immigrants worshipping alongside white evangelicals and listening to a pastor talk about The contemporary idea that America was founded as—and was intended by God to be—a Christian nation. Learn more using the language of spiritual warfare. What would have been unthinkable to the white supremacist Charles Fox Parham is now the norm.
The goal of the 7MM was to place a king on the mountains of culture. On February 19, 2025, Trump shared on Musk’s platform X a picture of himself wearing a crown. The caption read, “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”[Footnote 4] He unofficially crowned himself king, surrounded by a movement that wanted to see exactly that. However the rest of his second term plays out, how he responds to the courts, whether his voters will continue supporting him, and how much cultural capital dominionist churches can continue to gain, what seems abundantly clear is that Trump will not relinquish power easily.
And neither will the dominionists.