I apologize in advance for the length of this post. Various people have asked me to share the text of a talk I delivered last night at the Harvard Divinity School. Here it is.
CHRISTIAN NATION: THE DYSTOPIAN NOVEL THAT CAME TRUE
A public talk by Frederic C. Rich
Harvard Divinity School, November 4, 2025
I want to thank Professor Johnson for the invitation and say how delighted I am to be here at Harvard Divinity School. I understand that the Master of Divinity degree is designed to prepare its graduates for a career centered around ethical leadership, and as you’ll hear, I think ethical leadership is exactly what is required in the current moment.
My novel Christian Nation was published in 2013. It takes the form of a fictional memoir, written by a dissident in an America that has become a totalitarian state. It’s called Christian Nation because at the time I saw Christian Nationalism as the primary force driving us in the direction of intolerance and authoritarianism. At the time I made clear that the book was intended as a warning, not a prediction. Here we are 12 years later, the warning was ignored, and it is well on its way to coming true.
What I am going to do tonight is in four parts, reflecting what I am most often asked, both by those you have read and not read the book:
· First, how did I see it coming so early and why did I give the warning in the form of a novel?
· Second, what were the main lessons that I hoped the reader would take away from reading the book, lessons that would motivate them to work to prevent the coming authoritarian wave. Professor Johnson asked that I illustrate these by reading a few passages from the book.
· Third, how did what has actually happened differ from what I foresaw, and does it matter for the ultimate outcome?
· And finally, the most difficult question – what do we do now?
Let’s dive into the first question – how did I see it coming and why do it as a novel?
It all started August 29, 2008, the day Senator McCain announced Sarah Palin as his running mate. Very few people outside of Alaska knew who she was, and even fewer knew anything about her. I happened to know quite a lot about her, from having worked on a project in Alaska. When the announcement came across my screen, I was shocked. Quite simply because she was well known within Alaska for being unable to perform the most basic tasks required as Mayor of Wasila or Governor of Alaksa, spectacularly ignorant about history and almost everything else, and completely provincial. Her world view was rooted in one of the strangest religious enthusiasms in a country where there were plenty. I felt like I had stepped into an episode of the twilight zone, completely mystified as to how this could have happened. It seemed to me that if one of the two major parties was proposing to put such a person within a heartbeat of the presidency, then something fundamental had shifted in both American culture and American politics.
I set out to discover what it was, and my research took me deep into the hidden world of Christian nationalism, with its twin doctrines of dominionism and reconstructionism, each of which requires that democratic constitutionalism and rule of law must be demolished if they stand in its way. And they do.
Let me read you an excerpt where the memoirist describes first learning about the pre-millenarian doctrines of dominionism and reconstructionism:
It was 2009, I think, after President McCain’s sudden death, that my best friend Sanjay first explained to me that behind the public face of the Christian right was a strange mix of fundamentalist theologies, all different and often at odds with one another, but aligned in supporting the election of politicians who believe they speak to and for God, aligned in seeking to have their religiously based morals adopted into law, and aligned in rejecting the traditional notion of a “wall of separation” between church and state. Of these fundamentalist theologies, the most extreme, and in many ways most influential, were dominionism and reconstructionism.
“Dominionism,” Sanjay explained, “holds that Christians need to establish a Christian reign on earth before Jesus returns for the second coming. Dominionists also believe that Christians in general have a God-given right to rule, but more particularly, in preparation for the second coming of Christ, that Christians have the responsibility to take over every aspect of political and civil society. And dominionism is often associated with a fringe theology called ‘reconstructionism,’ which emphasizes that this reconstructed Christian - lead society should be governed strictly according to Biblical law.”
How bored we were at first with Sanjay’s preoccupation with this dark strain of
American belief. I didn’t know, and Sanjay only later discovered, that this
“dominionist” outlook had influenced not only The Wasilla Assembly of God, the
Pentecostal church attended by Sarah Palin in Alaska, but many thousands of others around the country. What had once been a fringe of exotic beliefs and schismatic sects had entered the religious mainstream in America.
Before the start of the Holy War, I delivered dozens of speeches warning of the political ambitions of the fundamentalists. Most of the time, I illustrated the meaning of dominionism with a single quote from a prominent evangelical “educator” from Tennessee, George Grant. I still remember it:
Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to
reclaim the land for Jesus Christ – to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and Godliness. But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice. It is dominion we are after. Not just influence. It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time. It is dominion we are after. . . . Thus, Christian
politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land – of men, families,
institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ.
At the time I was writing Christian Nation, we generally referred to the great divide in America as the “culture war” – but I noticed that very few on the liberal side of that split took seriously the possibility that the other side might win. After Sarah Palin, I became fixated on the possibility that the other side might actually win, and obsessed by the question of what that might look like.
And this led to the novel. Why a novel? I wanted to make it personal. The narrator in this fictional memoir recounts how it happened and the effect it had on his own life. This was in deliberate contrast to the approach taken by others writing dystopian fiction, such as Margaret Atwood. Think about Handmaid’s Tale, where the story starts in the strange dystopian future with no indication of how you got there. Since my ambition was to make the reader believe that the dystopian future was a real possibility – the fictional memoir form takes you there step by step – with the result that at each step the reader thinks, yes, I agree that could happen. In a sense I was reverse engineering the work of Hannah Arendt. When looking back at the rise of fascism in the 1930’s she asked three questions: What happened? Why did it happen? How could it have happened? These are the questions my fictional memoirist asks from the dystopian future, now to a significant extent our present, where we find ourselves asking the same questions.
My choice of a novel was also influenced by a belief in the power of art, music, and literature to change hearts and minds in a way that journalism and scholarship cannot. I was thrilled when one of the early reviewers of the book said that reading Christian Nation was like getting punched repeatedly in the stomach. This was exactly the effect I was going for.
While on the subject of the potential power of fiction, I’ll can’t resist mentioning here that I have just finished another novel, the doppelganger to Christian Nation, the utopia to its dystopia - about the next Buddha called Maitreya, and what a Buddhist Dharma refreshed for the 21st century might mean to the world.
Let’s move on to the second part – what truths I hoped my readers would take away from the book, the things that I hoped would arm them against what I feared was to follow.
First, I needed to educate the reader about how much of the Christian nationalist revolution had already happened.
Let me read another excerpt:
After the 2004 election, not only were the President of the United States, the Speaker of the House, numerous cabinet members and other senior federal officials born-again Christians, but 42 out of 100 U.S. Senators were entirely supportive of the Christian right agenda, holding ratings of 100% from the Christian Coalition. The Federal Government was channeling billions in taxpayer funds to “faith based” organizations – nearly all evangelical. Much later, when working for the Governor, I read a lot about revolutions. Revolutions are rarely if ever majoritarian, but instead are usually propelled by a small group that is disciplined and fanatical, to which a passive majority then acquiesces. Incredibly, by 2005 the first phase of the Christian revolution was already over, yet few people other than its proponents understood at the time that this had happened. The small band of fanatics, headed by men like James Dobson, Tony Perkins and Doug Coe, inspired by
Rushdoony, funded by Howard Ahmanson, Jr., had succeed in bringing their brand of fundamentalist Christianity from the fringes of American life to the very heart of political power. A theology that had been intolerable to mainstream Christianity before, had achieved legitimacy. In 1981 Gary North had written that “to smooth the transition to Christian political leadership . . . Christians must begin to organize politically within the present party structure, and they must begin to infiltrate the existing institutional order.”
This was, they were clear, to be a revolution from within. 25 years later, evangelicals, through carefully incremental political work at the precinct, county and state level, had seized control of the Republican Party. It was a movement that was at once cultural and political, and it was the largest such movement in the country by far. All that by 2005. Very few people at the time noticed what had happened.
My second intention was to give the reader an even a deeper historical perspective, in which we see that religious intolerance is actually the norm in human history. It’s ironic – and useful – that we’re having this conversation here in the heart of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded by the persecuted Pilgrims seeking religious freedom and tolerance. Consider what happened next. Having secured religious freedom for themselves, they proceeded to create a theocratic polity dedicated to total intolerance of the slightest deviation from the state religion. When the far-right claims that America’s roots are as an authoritarian Christian theocracy and that liberal democracy is a deviation from our founding values, this is in part what they are thinking of.
But at the time I wrote the book, the idea that prevailed in places like Harvard, and among my friends and acquittances, was that liberal values would inevitably triumph – how often we all quoted Dr. King about how the arc of the moral universes bends toward justice. That may be – but to think we were living at a time well along that arc was and is a misreading of history.
Let me read you another excerpt:
By 2005, Christian fundamentalism, self-identified by various types of congregations
referring to themselves as “Bible-believing churches,” had migrated from the deep south to northern suburbia, where loss of community and empty consumerism left a void that the evangelicals were all too ready to fill. They filled the void not with a traditional Protestantism, but with a dumbed-down Christianity where “faith” was not a private embrace of the mysteries inherent in the human condition, but a requirement for complete dogmatic credulity; where the ultimate measure of devotion and religiosity was the willingness to dismiss empirical reality and profess absolute belief in bold and improbable lies (such as the coexistence of man and dinosaurs); and where the primary values were not the dignity and integrity of the individual and realization by that individual of the whole and spiritual self, but total submission by the individual to Biblical law and Godly authority. And perhaps most tragically, what had migrated north was a redefined Christianity in which the singular voice of Christ called the faithful not to modesty, charity, meekness, love and social justice, but to a theological imperative for the accumulation of wealth and political power in order to establish Christian dominion over the country.
The evangelical Christianity that spread from the south to the rest of the country was, in effect, an ideological system demanding complete obedience to the word of God as revealed by the Bible. The Bible was no longer a book of instructive parables, whose teachings were limited to the sacred and the moral. Instead, the Bible had become what he evangelical faithful called a “guide to everything:” facts, history, science, politics and civil life. The non-evangelical majority was bemused by the evangelical preoccupation with Biblical literalism as manifested most prominently by “creationism,” but in retrospect, these specific beliefs were trivial distractions; what so few people saw at the time was that this mind-set of credulity was a form of brain-washing that completely undermined role of rational argument that lies at the heart of democracy. This, more than anything else, laid the groundwork for the totalitarianism that would follow.
Now of course these beliefs weren’t then and aren’t now held by a majority of Americans, but they were and are embraced by somewhere between 32% and 34% of the American population. Year after year, that same percentage responds to polls saying that they believe, among many other things, in the literal truth of every word in the bible, and that hell is an actual place where every person not born again in Christ spends eternity in conscious torment.
Back in 2013 these numbers terrified me – because time and again history has shown that a passionate minority in low 30% range can be expected break out from the fringes and take power. How? Because passion trumps popularity. The voting turnout rate among these committed evangelicals is around 85%. The voting rate among the population as a whole? Usually somewhere in the mid 50s. And the percent of the German population voting for the Nazis in the Reichstag election that brought Hitler to power? 32%.
There was another lesson – highly relevant today – that I hoped readers would take from Christian Nation. Human brains are wired for mass delusion, which in America has found repeated expression in religious revivalism and populism. This is a through line in human history. And already, when I wrote the book, it was obvious that this innate tendency was being exacerbated by trends in modern media. Even before the rise of Fox and social media, the Christian Broadcasting Network grew explosively, was highjacked by the Christian nationalists, and became a powerful tool in promoting the flight from main stream protestant churches to the suburban mega church. And then came the internet and social media where, in a flash, the like-minded found each other, and the relentless algorithms imprisoned them in an information bubble where they were fed nothing other than that which they already believed or which reinforced their views.
Two final things that you would have learned had you read Christian Nation in 2013.
This first was that Christian nationalism was already deploying the powerful canard of victimhood. Let me read another excerpt:
In a strategy common to fundamentalists the
world over, evangelical preachers successfully tapped into the meme of the “persecuted church.” The growth of a modern, secular and tolerant society, they argued, really is about the tyrannical suppression of Christianity, because the idea of a secular and tolerant society is inconsistent with Christian claims to dominion over civil society. In the ultimate Orwellian perversion, the core “secular” value of religious tolerance becomes intolerant and tyrannical. Extension of basic civil liberties to those who engage in a sexual practice that is taboo to fundamentalists becomes an attack on the Christian church in which Christians, and not the historically persecuted homosexuals, are the true victims. Permitting gays to marry becomes an attack on marriage, in which married people are somehow victimized, threatened and undermined. Abortion is seen as an attack on life itself. Even ordinary non-evangelical Christians started to look at modern secular
society differently. Perhaps the big city atheist intellectuals really do not mean “live and let live.” Perhaps, they began thinking, the patina of tolerance really is part of a program to abolish my religion and prevent me from believing and worshiping as I see fit. Fear is contagious, and when accompanied by economic distress and social alienation, turns easily into the comforting cloak of victimhood, providing absolution to the wearer for his misfortune, solidarity with his fellow victims and an enemy on whom to project his anger and resentment.
I found in Adam’s file a clipping on Pat Robertson, the strange Christian media mogul with reconstructionist tendencies who ran for President of the United States in 1988. It was Robertson who first introduced the idea of Christian fundamentalists as a persecuted minority. In a 1993 interview he said, "Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different . . . More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history." Reading that now, I can’t help wondering what the journalists first hearing these words thought. . . . Because such an assertion was manifestly untrue as an empirical matter, did they not see that it must have been uttered for a purpose? . . .
After all, what do such victims do? What are they entitled to do? What would we expect them to do? There is no moral or legal code under which a minority so terribly victimized would not be entitled to rise up and vanquish their persecutors, and claim the mantle of history – and the mantle of righteousness – in doing so. But neither Sanjay nor I saw it at the time, or could even have imagined how quickly the self-described victims would become the victors.
My final intended takeaway from Christian Nation was perhaps the most important: Proto- fascists and authoritarians of every ideology almost always signal in advance what they will do if they obtain power, but no one believes them. So many of the secular-minded don’t really understand belief – they cannot bring themselves to accept that those in grip of religious enthusiasm actually believe what they say. Let me read you the end of the first chapter:
This was not the first time that the world didn’t listen. In college, I read Hitler’s Mein Kampf. 14 years before the first shot was fired, he announced his plan to destroy the Parliamentary system in Germany, to attack France and Eastern Europe, and to eliminate the Jews. Why, I asked the professor, did neither ordinary Germans voting in the Reichstag elections in July 1932, nor foreign leaders reacting to the rise of Nazism, believe him? Why was anyone surprised when he simply did what he said he would do? She had no answer.
The fall of my senior year at Princeton, 20 perfectly sane, well educated, middle class and deeply religious young men flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. During the decade before 9/11, Osama Bin Laden had shouted out his warnings of mass murder using all the means of modern communication. And still, we were surprised when he did what he said he would.
So I suppose what happened here is that they said what they would do, and we did not listen. Then they did what they said they would do.
So if you want to know what comes next, just listen. Don’t dismiss Project 2025 or the absurdities that emerge from the mouths of MAGA and its leaders – because they will do – or at least try to do – exactly what they say.
Let’s move on to the question of how what has actually transpired differs from what I foresaw. In Christian Nation, a demagogic populist defeats Hillary Clinton in 2016, so I had that part spot on. The main differences in what happened next result from the fact that the demagogue turned out to be Donald Trump. A man motivated by neither religion nor ideology, but simply by one of the most epic cases of megalomania in human history. For those of you who don’t know, what the Greeks called megalomania, modern psychiatry now rather more dryly refers to as “narcissistic personality disorder” – a pathological condition characterized by obsessive pursuit of power, delusions of grandeur and omnipotence, an obsessive desire for control or dominance, and hostility to any truth that stands in the way.
To truly understand what we face now we must focus on the distinction between root and proximate causes. The proximate cause of what is happening today is mostly Trump – his narcissistic and vindictive impulses are translated into action by the Federal government without the screening of staff that occurred in the first term or oversight or restraint from Congress. The institutional norms so greatly damaged in Trump’s first term are now a smoldering ruin. They’re gone. So this is the proximate causes of what’s happening now – and this I did not foresee.
But the root causes remain. We have a deeply degraded popular and political culture. But without Christian nationalism, Trump would still be perched in his golden penthouse on Fifth Avenue. Without the support of the evangelical vote, Trump could not have been elected and the GOP could not maintain control of Congress. As a result, Christian nationalists have complete leverage over Trump and the Republican Party. The Christian right has the power to dictate compliance with their agenda – and also to stop Trumps’ worse abuses if they choose to. And yet the same folks who view the Bible as the definitive guide to everything, have instead chosen to empower a man who glorifies wealth and vilifies the poor, who says you must hate your enemies, not love them, who reviles humility, who would never turn the other cheek, who completely lacks empathy or compassion.
And how is this possible? Because Christian morality has been turned upside down, now embracing the view that the ends do justify the means, thus overturning the foundation for any moral system, Christian or other. Lie, cheat and steal? Hate your enemy? Don’t forgive but seek revenge? Jail and murder the innocent? Starve the poor? Turn away the persecuted? All good with us, as long as we get abortion outlawed, gays put back in the closet, and realize our Christian nationalist dream of complete dominion. The ends justify the means. This is why Trump had to correct Charlie Kirk’s widow at the memorial service – a sincere Christian, she said the example of Christ required her to forgive her husband’s killer – she was immediately corrected by Trump, who lectured his Christian supporters that they must instead hate those who oppose him.
Never confuse the tool with the agenda. Trump is the tool that I did not foresee, but the Christian nationalist agenda remains the same, and now a whole panoply of ugly far right causes has come along for the ride. They are so close to winning the culture war they can taste it. They will let nothing stand in their way, not the 2026 elections, not the law, not the constitution.
Last year I went on a pilgrimage to Dachau. Hitler opened Dachau only months after his 1933 ascension to the chancellorship and filled it not with Jews, but with those political opponents who had opposed his rise to power. And now Trump stands on stage and simply orders – publicly orders - those sworn to uphold the constitution to instead prosecute those who opposed him, or – the ultimate sin, those who betrayed what he regards as an absolute duty of personal loyalty.
Let me remind you of one other lesson of history. Human beings are adaptable, always wishing for the best, and much prone to willful blindness. The previously unimaginable happens, and after an initial shock, psychology takes over and, both individually and collectively, we convince ourselves that actually it’s not really so bad and somehow everything will be alright.
Here is what Greg, the memoirist says in the book, especially relevant, I think, to those of you closer to the beginning of your lives than the end:
Of all the things I held certain at the beginning of my adult life, which was most mistaken? . . . At the start of my career, I knew that the exact path of my career would not be clear or certain. But I did think that the ground over which that path would lead would be more or less stable. I believed that the stage on which my life would play out -- this country and its institutions – would be essentially static and unchanging. I see now that this was a spectacular failure of perspective. I should have known from history that the ground on which we take the walk of our lives is shifting and unstable, and that change is unpredictable and spasmodic. Nothing seems to us – in human time – to be more solid than the ground. And yet in reality the earth’s crust jerks across the globe in devastating spasms. Centuries or millennia of rock solid calm, punctuated by a few minutes of heaving and rolling readjustment. This is the perspective of geological time.
But after the cataclysms of the twentieth century, it seemed to me in 2005 that the ground was stable. Indeed, the framework within which I thought my life and career would unfold seemed so settled as to be invisible. I never thought of a stable Federal union, open society, democracy, personal freedom or indeed basic civil order as characteristics of the present time. The status quo was so expected, so much a given, that not once did even a flicker of appreciation for these things cross my consciousness. What I gave no thought to then, has for the last fifteen years never been far from the center of my mind.
Finally, in closing, I will try to address the question I am most frequently asked: What can we do now?
First, history teaches that the greatest ally of authoritarian projects is complacency. So the first and perhaps most important lesson is to reject any impulse you have that tends toward complacency.
I often think of one of the epigrams that begins a chapter in my book. It’s a quote from one of your own – Dr. James Luther Adams, a friend and counselor to dissidents in Germany in the mid 1930s and later a professor here at Harvard Divinity School who retired in 1968 and lived a few blocks from here until he died in 1994. Looking back, Professor Adams said “If only 1,000 of us in the late ‘twenties had combined in heroic resistance, we could have stopped Hitler.”
I have always found this thought chilling, no more so than in the present moment. One thousand people with foresight and courage could have prevented the death of 12 million jews and non-jews in the holocaust, and the deaths of 20-25 million soldiers, not to mention the enormous suffering in Germany and around the globe. One thousand. I wonder what that number is today?
Historians have observed that successful resistance requires two things: a physical locus – that is, an area in which resistance sentiment represents an overwhelming majority of the population and which has the wealth and power to provide a secure base for the resistance movement. In my book that place was Manhattan, where democracy makes its last stand against the theocrats in a civil war. The second requirement is a leader or leaders. At the moment we are missing both.
I have travelled extensively during the past year in South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. Everywhere people are terrified – they all seem to understand the implications of what is happening better than we do here at home. It seems to them that the good America that they know and love is asleep or in some kind of trance. What are you doing about it, they ask me again and again.
The first step in organizing an effective resistance is to come to grips with what we have already lost; the list is long: an independent Department of Justice, a non-partisan career civil service, ethical standards that are enforced against those holding public office, a nonpartisan supreme court, a non-politicized military, a widely accepted law and norm prohibiting domestic use of the military, a widely shared intolerance for outright deceit by our political leaders, Congress functioning as a check on the executive, indeed a Congress that can be said to be reasonably representative of the American people – all already lost. All of these can potentially be recovered – some following a single Congressional election, but others will take decades to restore. For people in their 20s, this is a hard truth to swallow.
The world has not written off America. They cannot. They know what totalitarian kleptocracy brought to the people of Russia, they see what Erdogan has wrought in Turkey, Modi in India, Milei in Argentina. They know what the stakes are. Even with all its flaws and imperfections, all its broken promises and irrational spasms, America has served as a beacon giving the world confidence that pluralistic democracy is possible. America is the dream that has made billions of desperate and persecuted lives around the world endurable. We need to save it for them as well as for ourselves.
In this as in all things, the young must lead. My generation – coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, ending the war in Vietnam, marching for civil rights and the liberation of women – we thought we had succeeded in slaying the ancient monsters and changing the world. We were wrong. The monsters lurked in the shadows and they have re-emerged to fight again. This battle is not simply a political one – it is a moral one. Indeed, I believe it is primarily a moral one. So as scholars, students, and practitioners of divinity, you have a critical role to play. The question is not whether you can succeed, the question is whether you must try. And under any moral or ethical framework of which I’m aware the answer is unequivocal – you must.
Thank you.