A documentary airing soon on CNN warns its dwindling audience about the danger of “Christian Nationalism” in the United States.
Teasing her upcoming project, CNN show host Pamela Brown says she has been hard at work for several months examining “the growing influence of Christian Nationalism in America,” according to an article by the Media Research Center.
In case CNN’s audience doesn't know what that it, Brown defines "Christian Nationalism" as an ideology “rooted in the belief that our country was founded as a Christian nation, and that our laws and institutions should reflect Christian values.”
Reacting to that description, Christian apologist Frank Turek told American Family News it sounds, at first, like a reasonable description of American history. After all, it is true the historic Declaration of Independence states that mankind’s individual rights come from our Creator, not from the king of England or from a government.
The problem with that description, Turek warned, is the phrase “Christian Nationalism” is a pejorative at CNN. So nobody expects a CNN documentary about it to be fair and honest.
“If they want a pejorative term,” Turek countered, “I can give them a pejorative term back. ‘Christian Nationalism’ is better than ‘Secular Internationalism,’ which is what the Biden administration was all about.”
It didn’t go unnoticed at MRC that Brown used the assassination of Kirk to build her documentary around his death. In her teaser, Brown says “experts” cite Kirk’s death last fall as a “pivotal moment for the movement” that she says “unified Christian nationalists” and the Trump administration.
It's not clear if the CNN documentary paints the Right with terms such as “fascism” and similar Nazi-like imagery, but that is a standard description in left-wing media. Over on MS Now, previously MSNBC, the cable outlet has a long history of scaring its audience with such rhetoric. A segment from 2023 warned “American democracy can be over” if Donald Trump returns to the White House.
MRC analyst Nicholas Fondacaro, who wrote the article on Brown’s documentary, told AFN the documentary uses footage from Kirk’s moving memorial service to bash the Christians who attended it.
“CNN saw a liberal extremist assassinate Charlie Kirk, in front of a crowd of people, to deny him his right to free speech,” he observed. “According to them, the people who gathered in prayer in that aftermath were the real ‘threat’ to the country.”
The “expert” cited by Brown for her documentary is a Matthew Taylor, a reliably liberal Georgetown professor. His biography at the Center of Faith and Justice states he is an expert on “religious extremism” who founded Sojourners, the well-known organization that mixes religious faith with “social justice” and Marxist philosophy.
In the documentary, Taylor warns the CNN audience that many American Christians wrongly believe they are the “persecuted ones” who need to stand up for “Christians’ rights.”
That is quite an accusation for Taylor to make in the documentary considering numerous Leftists - from school teachers and military members to a firefighter and an MSNBC guest – openly celebrated and defended Kirk’s murder as justification for “spewing” cruel, racist, and fascist beliefs. That cold-blooded view about Kirk, which leans heavily on defeating fascism, would presumably extend to other Americans who share his beliefs about politics and faith.
Also, during the Biden administration, conservative-leaning Christians witnessed the Department of Justice arrest and prosecute elderly pro-life activists; use undercover agents to investigate “radical traditionalist” Catholics at a Virginia church; and organize a federal task force to investigate disruptive parents at school board meetings.
After the Dobbs abortion ruling was leaked, which would overturn Roe v Wade, hundreds of pro-life pregnancy centers and churches were firebombed and vandalized across the nation. Few arrests were made despite those attacks qualifying as domestic terrorism.
Fondacaro, who is Catholic, told AFN many fellow Catholics couldn’t ignore CNN announcing what he calls a “smear campaign” about religious faith during the week of Lent.
“With the media becoming more secular,” he said, “this is this is how they mark us as others and ‘radicals.’”
