As the nation hurtles toward election day, Anchorage First Presbyterian Rev. Matt Schultz is warning about a decades-old identity theft scam.
The progressive and very online reverend, who wears a pride flag pin along with his white clerical collar, says that Christianity and Jesus have been the victims of identity theft at the hands of Christian nationalism.
“As an ordained Minister, I also see the title Christian nationalism as a certain form of identity theft, taking the word of something that I hold dear to my heart and soul and using it for truly damaging and sadistic purposes,” he said.
Christian nationalism is a potent mixture of politics and faith, he explains, preying on flawed understandings of Christianity in support of harsh right-wing policies. It’s primarily predicated on the idea that America is a Christian nation and that a particular, very conservative version of “Christian values” should be reflected in our country’s politics and policies. In most cases, that takes the form of divisive, discriminatory anti-LGBTQ, anti-trans and anti-immigrant policies.
All things that Rev. Schultz says are antithetical to what it means to be a Christian.
He and Elder Larry Michael hosted a series of seminars earlier this month to raise awareness about Christian Nationalism and provide methods to confront and combat it in everyday life. The events were well-attended by a diverse group, many of whom had personal struggles with friends and family members consumed by right-wing politics. As anxious as they were about the upcoming election, the meetings had a strong sense of hope and community.
“Your job is not to tell them that they’re a horrible, awful person. Your job is to help them see how to be,” Rev. Schultz told the audience. “You have to be the non-anxious presence in that conversation. You’re not going to win the country. You’re not going to win the whole church on this day, but it could maybe open that person’s ears.”
He urged people to be open, listen to others, and ask questions that might make people confront the contradictions between their faith and right-wing politics.
On a fall morning, Schultz and Michael sat down for an interview with The Alaska Current, filled with what Rev. Schultz called “theo-wonking” — nerding out over theology. For every one of the tenets of Christian Nationalism — the division, hatred, xenophobia, classism and nods toward authoritarianism — he could point to a passage of the Bible that contradicted their points.
He said he feels strongly called to confront the politics.
“Personally, I think it’s hugely pertinent to the upcoming election because there are obvious, overt Christian nationalists impacting policy, and there are more subtle ones who try to hide the fact that they’re Christian nationalists” that are shaping public policy, he said.
While right-wing politicians may bristle at the label of Christian Nationalism, there are many state legislators with connections to the ideology.
Several Republican legislators attended a training this year to produce “well-trained Christian, pro-family legislators,” according to its sponsor, the Family Policy Alliance Foundation. The organization was involved in putting together Trump’s controversial Project 2025, a framework for what a second Trump term would look like. It includes things like mass deportation, a strict abortion ban and vastly expanded presidential powers.
For Michael, the battle against Christian Nationalism is personal. That’s because he grew up in a very conservative faith, leaving him torn between what he was taught about Christianity and the reality that he is gay. It created a rift for him, causing him to leave his faith behind, only to eventually reconnect with it much later in life when he found more progressive churches that showed he didn’t have to choose between his faith and his identity.
“I think I was just way too serious as a young kid trying to figure it out,” he said.
He jokes that if he could do it all over again, he would still want to be gay. Michael says that all the challenges he’s been through have given him essential perspective and ultimately freed him from the burdens of a close-minded conservative life.
Michael is also very clear in his teachings that everyone is open to their opinion and beliefs, even if they are antithetical to the kindness and compassion he believes are core to Christianity. He said the issue with Christian Nationalism is that it takes those beliefs and seeks to impose them on everyone else. That, he said, is where he draws the line.
“There may be people in this room that really don’t like the gay thing, don’t like the queer thing,” he said at the seminar. “You can have that view; you really can. Just don’t have the state come on it. You can really have an issue with atheists … but don’t make the state suppress the atheist. We are a country free to have our beliefs, but that’s where the separation comes … Even with those kinds of opinions, isn’t that the beauty of this country? That we are pluralistic. That we have diversity. That we have differences.”
While the Bible is featured heavily in their presentations, so is the U.S. Constitution.
And for as much “theo-wonking” that Rev. Schultz and Michael can do, they are also filled with laughter, jokes and self-effacing humor. It’s a stark difference to what is frequently the deadly serious tone that Christian Nationalists adopt. And Rev. Schultz says that’s part of the point, confessing that he might have been a comedian in a different life, like his brother.
“There is that history of comedy as truth-teller and prophecy in the Bible. It doesn’t mean telling the future; it means speaking the truth to the power. And that’s the role of the jester, and it’s the role of the good satirist,” he said. “If they’re doing it right, they’re punching up and taking the lights out from under the tyrant and the despot. And if you’re more along the lines of Christian nationalists, what you’re doing is punching down and making fun of the immigrant and the refugee and the stranger and the other.”
Rev. Schultz is highly active online, and you can frequently find him getting into the weeds with right-wing trolls on Twitter/X.
“They wouldn’t consider me a Christian,” Rev. Schultz said, laughing as he noted the latest push back he’s gotten from right-wing trolls online is to put his title in quotation marks.
In his interview, he said that the fight might feel like an uphill challenge, and he’s well aware that he’s probably not changing the mind of any right-wing die-hard anytime soon. But he said it’s important to have such fights in a public place because you never know who might be listening.
“They sling all sorts of mud my way, and I’m just like, ‘all right, I’ll take that,’ because I know there are ten other people watching us talk to each other,” he said. “And they see that other person being horrible, and me at least trying to be less horrible. But what they do is they hear the back and forth, and they recognize, ‘Oh, I could be a Christian and still maintain my compassion.’”
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.
