Neiman Lab is a great group that stud­ies jour­nal­ism and they’ve come out with a “Pre­dic­tions for Jour­nal­ism, 2025″ list. Whit­ney Phillips has a great entry, “Religious-sounding lan­guage will be every­where in 2025” that looks at the cur­rent vocab­u­lary being pro­mot­ed by so-called Chris­t­ian Nationalists:

this lan­guage often cen­ters, instead, on hatred of an amal­ga­mat­ed, shape-shifting, ulti­mate­ly invent­ed lib­er­al dev­il that maps, as con­ve­nient, onto “the left,” the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, “elites” some­how aligned with Marx­ism, and what Project 2025 describes as “the Great Awok­en­ing.” Spread­ing the Chris­t­ian faith isn’t the point; fight­ing the lib­er­al dev­il is. This dev­il is ulti­mate­ly sec­u­lar, based on things like DEI ini­tia­tives and the exis­tence of trans peo­ple, and is also the quasi-religious antag­o­nist in a decades-old cos­mic show­down between the ulti­mate good of “real” Amer­i­ca and the ulti­mate evil of left­ists hell-bent on tear­ing it asunder.

Much of the world­view of these groups has lit­tle resem­blance to the humil­i­ty and meek­ness of Jesus’s Ser­mon on the Mount and I appre­ci­ate Phillip­s’s fram­ing of it as “religious-sounding.” The nom­i­na­tion of the emi­nent­ly unqual­i­fied train wreck that is Pete Hegseth has brought some of this to the fore­front. A lot of the vit­ri­ol is based on clas­sic anti­se­mit­ic tropes; the absolute­ly bizarroworld claim that pets being eat­en could have been lift­ed right out of the Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion. “Reli­gious free­dom” is a ral­ly­ing cry, and while I agree that it’s always a chal­lenge to bal­ance per­son­al reli­gious with civic norms, a lot of the com­plaints are rather pet­ty. Some of these folks have latched onto Quak­er fig­ures, espe­cial­ly William Penn, to the point where I feel I need to fact check sources when­ev­er I read any­thing about him any more.

It’s also very much the case that some of the peo­ple with deeply Chris­t­ian world­views are very decent, well-meaning peo­ple who would nev­er think to do harm. Part of our work is to try to dis­en­tan­gle this all as best we could. This is far from the first time bad actors have sought to weaponize Jesus’s faith.

Hat tip Julie Pey­ton on Bluesky.