“Most people do not understand that this attempted coup was a religious event.” — Congressman Jared Huffman on January 6
We’ve featured many stark warnings about the threat of American Christian nationalism from journalists, activists, and religious scholars. Today, that warning comes from inside the government. In No Prophets, Californian congressman Jared Huffman warns that the threat of Christian nationalism could destroy American democracy. Borrowing from Sinclair Lewis, Huffman argues that when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.
For Huffman, it’s not an abstract threat. On January 6, 2021, he watched something chillingly close to that theological nightmare unfold from his office on Capitol Hill. The attempted coup was a religious event, he insists. The insurrectionists were radicalized by the New Apostolic Reformation. These fanatics had rooms at the Willard beside Giuliani’s war room, and they preached and prophesied as the riot unfolded.
His Republican colleague Adam Kinzinger tells him Christian nationalism “wasn’t just part of the insurrection. It was the whole story, the whole thing.” And yet the 845-page select committee report ignores this story because, Huffman charges, Liz Cheney personally intervened to erase it. “We are less safe today because of it,” he says.
Like so many critics of Christian nationalism, Huffman had a religious upbringing. He grew up devout in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and then was ordained into its priesthood before losing his faith at twenty after his father’s death. Today he is a self-described “humanist,” the co-founder of the Congressional Freethought Caucus, and the only member of Congress who admits to not believing in gods. It’s an American intellectual tradition, he insists, that he shares with fellow religious skeptics like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison.
Christian nationalism and the Republican Party, Jared Huffman insists, are now one and the same. Huffman might not believe in gods, but there’s a biblical quality to his apocalyptic warnings. The prophet of No Prophets is putting all that religious training to good secular use.
Five Takeaways
• January 6 Was a Religious Event. The book’s foundational claim, witnessed from Huffman’s Capitol Hill office: the insurrection was saturated with religious choreography — symbols, worship services, self-declared prophets exhorting the crowd. The mob was radicalized by groups like the New Apostolic Reformation, a virulent Christian supremacist movement committed to dominion by any means necessary; organizers held rooms at the Willard Hotel beside Giuliani’s war room, were tasked by the Trump campaign with mobilizing right-wing Christians, and preached and prophesied on-site as the riot unfolded. The Smithsonian’s Uncivil Religion exhibit documented it in real time, and Adam Kinzinger told Huffman that Christian nationalism “wasn’t just part of the insurrection. It was the whole story, the whole thing.” Yet the select committee’s 845-page report contains none of it — erased, Huffman charges, by Liz Cheney’s personal intervention. “We are less safe today because of it.”
• The Endgame Is Theocracy. Trump and the movement are codependent: he mainstreamed fringe prophets into White House VIPs; they supplied mobilization power nothing else in American politics can match, and wrapped him in the “Cyrus anointing” — the mythology of a flawed pagan king used by God to save his chosen people. The Washington operation is Huffman’s “shadow theocracy”: Ralph Drollinger’s Capitol Ministries runs Bible studies teaching officeholders that God opposes taxes and the regulatory state but is keenly interventionist about the bedroom; Speaker Mike Johnson — who preaches “biblically sanctioned government,” rejects church-state separation outright, joined pre-January 6 prayer calls, and architected the legal effort to overturn 2020 — sits second in line to the presidency. Kinzinger’s joke lands hard: the American Taliban. Are the Drollingers grifters or believers? Both, says Huffman — the two have never been mutually exclusive.
• Atwood Wasn’t Writing Fiction. Huffman found The Handmaid’s Tale chilling precisely because Atwood didn’t invent Gilead — she reverse-engineered it from America’s puritanical past and theocratic subcultures, and had it arrive gradually, through fake emergencies. The trad-wife future is already drafted: Pete Hegseth belongs to the TheoBros — the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, led by Idaho pastor Doug Wilson, who says the Nineteenth Amendment was a mistake and men should vote for the household — while radical traditionalist Catholics dream of a pre-Vatican II world of veils and submission. And don’t try joking with any of them, Huffman warns: in this absolutist theology, opponents aren’t adversaries but demons and antichrists, and destroying what stands in the way is a religious duty.
• A Born-Again Atheist from the Mormon Priesthood. The messenger’s unlikely arc: raised devout in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Independence, Missouri (now the progressive Community of Christ), ordained into its priesthood, then unmoored at twenty by his father’s death and the questions faith couldn’t answer. He settled on humanism — a moral framework without the supernatural — and calls himself a Christ-loving atheist, fully at peace with the Sermon on the Mount. His lineage, he argues, is the founding itself: Jefferson ridiculing “priestcraft,” Franklin’s lightning rod denounced by clerics who preferred sprinkling holy water from church towers, Paine and Madison beside them — and the Constitution’s secular firewall, Article VI and the First Amendment, as America’s original gift to the world. He’s politely skeptical of Jonathan Rauch’s suggestion that today’s LDS church models pluralism: “they’ve got a long way to go.”
• A Golden Opportunity — If Democrats Dare. Christian nationalism and the Republican Party “are now one and the same,” Huffman argues — which means religious liberty, pluralism, and the majority who want no theocracy have been surrendered to whichever Democrat dares claim them. Most don’t: the intersection of religion and politics strikes them as too dicey. Texas’s James Talarico is the breakthrough messenger — calling out Christian nationalism from inside the faith, addressing atheists and believers alike — while AOC, a great friend, conspicuously declines every Freethought Caucus invitation, and Newsom awaits his copy of the book. Huffman wants no constitutional amendments: the founders got it right, and the task is defending Article VI and the Establishment Clause from a Supreme Court reading them out of existence. His own ambitions? “Career-limited as a straight white male from Northern California. I’m good with that.”
About the Guest
Jared Huffman has represented California’s 2nd congressional district — from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border — since 2013. A seven-term Democrat, former environmental attorney, co-founder of the Congressional Freethought Caucus, and the only Humanist ever to serve in Congress, he watched the January 6 insurrection from...
