Even as some activists mobilize pastors and voters across the nation, others are walking the hallways of power, cultivating leaders and brokering deals between big money and big government. In the Trump administration, activists who in an earlier time would have been identified as extremists lead prayer and Bible study sessions with officials at the highest levels of the executive and legislative branches. At the same time, these same power-minded prophets network among some of America’s wealthiest individuals and families, many of whom fund the careers of the same right-wing politicians, to advance policies favorable to plutocratic fortunes and reinforce the political vision behind this upward distribution of resources.

The Bible of Christian nationalism answers to the requirements of the individuals who fund the movement and grant it power at the highest levels of government.

Outside observers tend to think that the political religion of the conservative movement emanates from the large population of right-wing Christian voters to whom it appeals. According to the conventional wisdom, the basic conservative religious agenda is simply to preserve so-called traditional values—and, perhaps more critically, to restore a sense of pride and privilege to a part of the American population that feels that its status is slipping. But a closer look at the substance of this political religion, in the context of the movement’s involvement with political elites, reveals a very different story. The core political vision of Christian nationalism is decided in the inside game. The Bible, after all, can be used to promote any number of political positions. Many would argue that it generally favors helping the poor. But the Bible of Christian nationalism answers to the requirements of the individuals who fund the movement and grant it power at the highest levels of government.

In the past two years, perhaps no religious leader has had better luck playing the inside game than Ralph Drollinger, head of a group called Capitol Ministries. A onetime NBA athlete and sports evangelist from California, Drollinger now leads weekly Bible study sessions in the White House for Cabinet secretaries and other officials—Mike Pence has reportedly attended—and his operation is rapidly expanding, spawning ministry affiliates in state capitols as well as among political leaders overseas.

“Scripture is replete with illustrations, examples, and commands that serve to underscore the importance of winning governmental authorities for Christ,” Drollinger has written. “A movement for Christ amongst governing authorities holds promise to change the direction of a whole country.” In hopes of learning more, I purchased a ticket to Capitol Ministries’ twentieth anniversary celebration, which took place at the World Ag Expo, an annual agricultural exposition in Tulare, a commercial capital in California’s San Joaquin Valley.

Clergyman and retired professi​onal basketball player Ralph D​rollinger at the Capitol Hill ​Club, in Washington, DC on Oct​ober, 2017. Stephen Voss/Redux

Under the VIP tent at the Ag Expo, Drollinger, who stands more than seven feet tall, took the stage in an exuberant mood, thanking state and regional directors and attributing his success to support from California’s Central Valley. “Capitol Ministries really grew up, I think, on carrots and milk,” he announced—a reference to Central Valley business leaders such as Rob Hilarides, a prosperous dairyman who chairs the board of Capitol Ministries, and charities like the Bolthouse Foundation, founded by the former owners of Bolthouse Farms, one of the largest carrot producers in the region. For at least five years, starting in 2001, the Bolthouse Foundation made donations to CapMin as high as $200,000 each year.

Onstage, Drollinger swiftly communicated how close to power he now is. “All of a sudden, Trump got elected, and Pence chose the best out of our House and our Senate Bible studies, to where we had 12, I think now, 12 of the Cabinet members are strong believers, and they said, come with us, we’d like to start a ministry in the White House Cabinet,” he proudly noted.

Drollinger was keen to assure the crowd that their donations would be put to good use. “Most of the money we raise here goes to the expansion of ministry overseas,” he said. “Our biggest limiting factor is really our ability to resource that.... So that’s what this partnership with you can be all about.”

What’s the difference, in this promiscuously cross-fertilized world of power and piety, between Bible study and policy advocacy?

What’s the difference, in this promiscuously cross-fertilized world of power and piety, between Bible study and policy advocacy? In the curriculum that Drollinger has offered to powerful officials through Capitol Ministries, the distinction is far from clear. He’s sought to lay it all out in his book Rebuilding America: The Biblical Blueprint, and he’s filled in many of the details in publicly available manuals for his weekly Bible study sessions. Copies of his book were available in Tulare, and Drollinger helpfully touched upon some of its main themes at his dinner speech.

The expansiveness of Drollinger’s positions on domestic, economic, and foreign policy underlines the unmistakable truth that today’s Christian nationalism is a political movement, not merely a stance assumed in the values-first traditionalist flank of the American culture wars. Like his fellow radicals at the movement’s forefront, Drollinger has consistently strived for an ever-widening domain of control. To take but one example, he’s preached that the Bible has a very clear message on U.S. fiscal policy. Just a few weeks prior to the Tulare event, Drollinger published a Bible study titled “Solomon’s Advice on How to Eliminate a $20.5 Trillion Debt.” The study guide stressed God’s unwavering devotion to deregulation. “Leaders must incentivize individuals and industries (which includes unencumbering them from the unnecessary burdens of governmental regulations),” Drollinger writes.

Drollinger has offered spiritually infused economic counsel for workers, as well. In a Bible study called “Toward a Better Biblical Understanding of Lawmaking,” he cites 1 Peter 2:18-21, which begins, “Servants, be submissive to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and gentle, but also to those who are unreasonable.” Drollinger offered this didactic bit of exegesis: “The economy of Rome at the time of Peter’s writing was one of slave and master. The principle however, of submitting to one’s boss carries over to today.”

Drollinger’s reading of the Bible as a blueprint for an economic program of unregulated markets and a compliant workforce has ample precedent—notably in the theological speculations of midcentury figures like the influential Southern California Congregational minister James W. Fifield Jr. With funding from oil and automotive tycoons, Fifield preached a militantly pro-capitalist, Christian libertarian response to what he saw as the rampant and idolatrous statism of the New Deal. America is a Christian nation, he asserted, and government must be kept from interfering with God’s will in market economics. Fifield’s ideas were later embraced by Rousas J. Rushdoony and other nationalist apostles of the Christian Reconstructionist movement. They have mobilized around the idea that the United States is a Redeemer Nation, chosen by God; that it is tasked with becoming an orthodox Christian republic in which women are subordinate to men, education is in the hands of conservative Christians, and no one pays taxes to support the poor. They further insisted that at some point in the past the nation deviated horribly from its mission and fell under the control of liberal elites—pioneering many of the central themes now fueling the activism of today’s Christian nationalist leaders.

This potent mélange of cultural decline and spiritual mobilization is all music to the ears of the agribusiness leaders at Drollinger’s anniversary event in Tulare. Many important issues confront managers of agricultural concerns these days, among them major policy shifts in matters of labor, foreign trade, water access, subsidies, and other regulatory spheres. It’s therefore not surprising that some industry leaders look to a certain kind of religion for answers—not in the sense of praying for rain (although another featured speaker in Tulare, Sonny Perdue, the U.S. secretary of agriculture, has done that, too), but in the sense of working with religious nationalists to elevate the policies and politicians that operate to their benefit.

Of course, those policies, which favor major rollbacks in regulation and worker protections, are bound to exacerbate existing wealth inequalities in the Central Valley. But that’s the way inequality works. On the one hand, it creates concentrations of wealth empowering those proficient in the inside game to hold on to and enhance their privileges. On the other hand, it generates a sense of instability and anxiety among broad sectors of the wider public, which is then ripe for conversion to a religion that promises authority and order.

As I strolled out of the dusty fairground, past the vast exhibition halls full of tractors and fertilizer displays, I realized that the evening’s theological vision was all but inseparable from a certain set of arrangements dictating the course of earthly life. It is the string that ties together a bundle of identities, assumptions, business dealings, and political favors. It is also the latest form of a certain political and social vision that entitles a select few to work the earth with other people’s hands.

By the 2000s, the late C. Peter Wagner, a writer and for-mer professor of “church growth” at Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of World Missions, began to speak of the “seven mountains,” an idea that was emerging in Pentecostal circles. The idea was that God has commanded true Christians to gain control of the “seven molders”—or “mountains”—of culture and influence, including government, business, education, the media, the arts and entertainment, family, and religion, in order prepare for the Second Coming of Jesus. Wagner laid it out in his 2008 book Dominion! How Kingdom Action Can Change the World. People he calls “apostles” have, he argues, a “responsibility for taking dominion” over “whatever molder of culture or subdivision God has placed them in.” This, he asserted, is a simple matter of taking “dominion” back from Satan. The collateral costs here are steep: an apocalyptic end for the earth, Rapture for the faithful, and eternal torment for everyone else.

When I first started hearing the term “seven mountains” in evangelical churches and religious circles, it was cloaked in whispers. Maybe it seemed too close to the broad caricature of religious conservatives as theocratic maniacs, even to leaders of the movement.

Sympathetic commentators attacked reporters for scaremongering, and went out of their way to assure the public that dominionism was, in the words of former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, “a movement that could fit in a telephone booth.” There is no longer any hint of shame in the vision of seven mountains or the theocratic dominionism it represents among a subsection of religious nationalists today.

At Unionville Baptist Church, winding down his speech, J.C. Church said, “If we can secure the judiciary side of things, from the Supreme Court on down, we can build a firewall for our children and grandchildren that they just might scale the seven mountains of influence.”

They really mean it. The seven mountains isn’t a whispered fantasy anymore. It is their declared aim, and they think they’re closing in on the peaks.





This essay is adapted from The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.