Jared Huffman

Rep. Jared Huffman witnessed the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, up close, from his office on Capitol Hill.

He was struck that day and in the weeks leading up to it, as protesters thronged Washington, D.C. to overturn Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, by the veins of extremist religion that coursed through those events.

These were not gentle, Sermon on the Mount-style expressions of faith.

“The MAGA Christian nationalism Trump stoked,” Huffman, a seven-term Democrat from San Rafael recounts in his new book, “seethed with grievance and hatred.”

The events of Jan. 6 – self-declared prophets exhorting thousands of followers to storm the Capitol and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power – underscored what has become, in Huffman’s eyes, the single-most dangerous political movement now facing America.

That’s the subject of “No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy from Christian Nationalism,” whose introduction includes a warning attributed to the novelist Sinclair Lewis: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

“No Prophets” is an eye-opening look at the Christian right’s extensive and growing reach in American government —and the fight to check that power, while defending and repairing the Jeffersonian wall intended to keep separate matters of church and state.

Huffman describes Christian nationalism as “the fusion of Christian religious and cultural identity with right-wing politics, rooted in a narrative of America as a ‘Christian Nation.’” It serves as the connective tissue “binding Trump’s disparate MAGA elements together.”

Today’s Christian nationalist movement is akin to but “much more virulent” than its 1980s forebears, Huffman writes. While Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority were “backward-looking” and “steeped in righteous absolutism, they were trying to win within the system, not burn it down.”

Five years after the Jan. 6 takeover of the Capitol, Huffman says, most Americans don’t grasp the prominent role played by Christian nationalism in that insurrection – “much less the greater danger it poses now.”

Waking from America’s “sleepwalk into theocracy,” he writes, requires crossing “one of the most stubborn taboos in our national discourse: the unwillingness to scrutinize Christian extremism with the same intellectual rigor we apply elsewhere.”

This “Christian privilege,” as he describes it, resulted in a glaring omission from the trenchant Congressional probe into January 6th attack. On Dec. 22, 2022, the House Select Committee tasked with investigating that insurrection released its findings in an 814-page report which, while comprehensive in most areas, was incomplete in one.

Huffman, who is running this November for an eighth term, sheds new light in the book on the decision by committee vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, to exclude from the report its extensive findings on the role played by Christian nationalism in the insurrection.

She feared that any criticism of right-wing Christians would be seized on by Fox News and other conservative outlets “to discredit the entire report and alienate millions of ordinary Christians,” Huffman writes.

“No Prophets” will be released Aug. 18. On Aug. 22, Huffman will appear at 11 a.m. at the Finley Community Center in Santa Rosa, where he will be joined in conversation by Peter Coyote, the actor, author and Zen Buddhist priest. The event is being put on by Copperfield’s Books.

“I’ve got a complicated relationship with religion,” Huffman shares on page 3.

That’s an understatement.

Raised in Independence, Missouri, he worshipped in a congregation that was an offshoot of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Huffman’s church was open to “direct prophecy,” he recalls, a tradition that has long “offered fertile ground for eccentric spin-offs and self-anointed visionaries.”

In its healthiest form, prophetic belief “animates churches with vitality,” he writes. “Like unstable DNA,” however, “it invites mutation.”

Under pressure, “prophetic fervor becomes dangerous” – as Huffman knows, too well.

As he was losing his religion while in college at UC Santa Barbara, a high school basketball teammate named Richard Brand became a follower of the self-declared prophet Jeffrey Lundgren, who in 1989 killed a family of five as a “blood sacrifice.” Brand was an accessory to those murders.

Huffman, who worked as an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading environmental group, before launching his political career, eventually found clarity in Humanism, which he describes as “a moral framework that emphasizes human reason and agency,” while affirming “our responsibility to lead meaningful, ethical lives based on compassion and rational inquiry, without the inducement of fear of an afterlife.”

In 2017, in part to create a bulwark against the forces of Christian nationalism unleashed in Trump’s first term, Huffman “came out” as a Humanist in an interview with the Washington Post.

The day after that story was published, he was approached on the House floor by Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, who congratulated him on that bold move, then engaged him in a conversation about their heroes of humanist history, including Einstein and Spinoza, authors Christopher Hitchens, Zora Neale Hurston and Kurt Vonnegut, who is Huffman’s favorite humanist writer, and Founding Father Thomas Paine, who is Raskin’s.

The following year the pair cofounded the Congressional Freethought Caucus, to promote public policy based on reason and science, and defend the separation of church and state. That caucus now counts three dozen members. Raskin wrote the foreword for Huffman’s book, describing him as “a badass patriot unafraid to get in some good trouble.”

Huffman spoke to The Press Democrat about his book, and the events and circumstances that inspired him to write it. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Press Democrat: While your decision to ‘come out’ as a humanist felt counterintuitive – atheists haven’t traditionally polled well, as you point out – Trump’s willingness to weaponize Christian nationalism made your decision easier. Please elaborate.

Huffman: I felt like this right wing theocracy was taking over our country, especially when Trump came in in 2017 and started populating his administration with all these extremists. That was a breaking point for me. I couldn’t go back to being silent about these things. It felt hypocritical, remaining silent and staying out of that fight.

PD: Your book breaks news, with its revelations on Liz Cheney’s essentially vetoing inclusion of Christian nationalism in the Select Committee’s report on Jan. 6. How does that tie in with the separate points you make about Americans’ reflexive deference to Christianity, and how that clouds our view of some religious extremism?

Huffman: (MAGA Republicans) have, like, an immune system where anything that threatens or criticizes them is attacked like antibodies protecting the host.

Criticize Christian extremists and they immediately call you anti-Christian, bigot. They bring up this persecution narrative, which is preposterous because Christians dominate American life in politics.

But it’s very effective, and no one wants to be on the receiving end of that stuff, and it’s why most people just avoid it.

But if you continue to look away, if you continue to be genteel about something just because it poses as Christian, you’re going to find yourself in something like Gilead – the totalitarian, fundamentalist theocracy of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

They’re weaponizing this persecution complex to lock in their privileged status, and that’s how you get this Liz Cheney episode, which I wrote about not just to talk out of school about what happened behind closed doors, but because I really think people should know about it.

It is just a perfect case study in Christian privilege.

PD: In the chapter titled “Three Roads to Theocracy,” you introduce readers to a trio of “ascendant religious factions” rooted in Christian supremacism and dominion theology, “the belief that God has chosen Christians to seize and hold power above all others.”

One of those factions is radical traditionalist Catholics – Rad Trads, as you refer to them. Another is Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, or Theo Bros.

But it’s the third faction, the self-anointed prophets of the New Apostolic Reformation, that you seem to perceive as the biggest threat. Is that accurate?

Huffman: By any measure, they are the biggest threat, which is why the title of my book evokes that faction. This is the prophetic belief system that is so volatile, as I’ve seen in my own life, and which throughout history has led to tragedies and mass suicides.

Seeing that type of volatile, prophetic belief system mainstreamed and platformed in the White House – that’s what got me off the sidelines and into this fight.

Numerically, it’s by far the biggest (faction). It is the most mobilized and powerful. I mean, these guys have a so-called prayer network that can reach millions and millions of people that will do whatever they say. There’s nothing else like that in American politics.

PD: A century after the Scopes Monkey Trial, as you point out in the book, “American finds itself relitigating basic questions of education, evidence, and reason.”

In chapter 8, “The Dumbing of America,” you examine Christian nationalism’s toll on public education, science, research and critical reasoning.

Huffman: This is not just about politics, and our form of government. This agenda, this movement we’re talking about, is dangerous in other ways. They are trying to undermine the foundations of our knowledge – things we count on to keep us healthy and safe and prosperous.

This backsliding is going to change our country, and the world, in terrible ways for future generations. If we let it.

PD: But your last chapter, “Defenders of Democracy,” offers optimism and hope.

Huffman: One of the most hopeful things we’re seeing is the number of Christians rising up against Christian Nationalism. There’s a whole coalition called Christians Against Christian Nationalism, thousands and thousands of ministers and faith leaders, and it’s growing.

PD: You open the chapter in Washington’s National Cathedral in early January 2025, with a description of Mariann Edgar Budde’s sermon at the Inaugural Prayer Service for Trump’s second term.

Bishop Budde didn’t exactly follow the script, but her address was rooted in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. She asked Trump to have mercy on immigrants, and on gay, lesbian and transgender Americans. It didn’t go over well with some in the audience.

Huffman: Right wing Christianity went nuts, while progressive and modern Christians said, “Yes! That’s what Christianity is!”

So I close with this debate, this emerging schism, these two variants of Christianity slugging it out – one trying to get back to the Sermon on the Mount and compassion and the decency everyone used to think were core teachings – and others who feel that’s not even relevant anymore.

And I try to make the point that these good Christians can’t do it alone. They’re outnumbered. They’re outgunned. And if we’re all just sitting back and waiting to see which of these two variants wins the debate, we’re screwed.

We’ve got to have a bigger coalition than that. We’ve got to realize this is not just about the fight over the Gospel. It’s about the future of democracy.

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at [email protected] or on Twitter @ausmurph88.