Jeff Hunt Aligns with Christian Nationalism

Jeff Hunt, the director of Colorado Christian University’s Centennial Institute, seems keen to stir the pot. Recently he baselessly called me along with some of Colorado’s most prominent journalists “anti-Christian bigots,” as I’ve reviewed. Now he has decried Colorado’s lack of “Christian leadership”—the governor and some other officials are Jewish—and sympathized with “Christian nationalism” as the cure for what he alleges ails our society.

On December 4 Hunt wrote:

Colorado is deciding that it doesn’t want Christian leadership. Result? Life is cheapened (abortion, suicide), pleasure is paramount (sex, drugs), government is savior, neo-marxism is dogma, schools indoctrinate. Family, church are oppressive to these ends and must be diminished.

Ian Silverii, a long-time Progressive activist and husband to Congressperson-elect Brittany Pettersen, replied:

Our Governor, Secretary of State, and Attorney General are Jewish, as is one of our two US Senators. Hunt seems to believe that we Jews “cheapen life,” are hedonistic communists, and are brainwashing children. Anti-Semitism plagues the GOP, and the masks are off.

Hunt replied:

I know reading is hard Ian. Neo-marxism is the dogma and the problem. The growing alignment between conservative Christians and orthodox Jews is welcomed and needed in our confrontation of a philosophy that seeks to destroy America.

I spoke the other day with a journalist from the settlement region of Israel. He encouraged me to embrace Christian nationalism in an effort to protect Jews in America from Marxists.

Apparently Hunt never absorbed the aphorism that you should quit digging when you find yourself in a hole.

I’ll be as generous as possible. I don’t think Hunt meant to contrast “Christian leadership” with that of Colorado’s Jewish elected officials. Still, it’s not hard to see how a reasonable person could interpret his remark that way.

That interpretation occurred to 9News anchor Kyle Clark, who Tweeted:

One of Colorado's most prominent evangelical leaders reacts following landslide victories by elected leaders who are Jewish (Governor, Attorney General, Senator, Secretary of State).

Clark was not impressed by Hunt’s claims that he was referring to Marxists rather than Jews, writing, “With respect, Jeff, Coloradans didn’t elect neo-Marxists. They elected Democrats who are Jewish. Claiming otherwise is less convincing than that hat,” referring to the black cowboy hat that Hunt has taken to wearing.

I think Hunt meant that Colorado government is not implementing his conservative, evangelical vision of Christian principles, which happen to align pretty well with conservative Jewish principles. Still, the “optics” are very bad. It was a deeply insensitive and stupid thing for him to say, especially given the rise of antisemitism in this country.

Hunt’s remarks swirl around a variety of related issues.

Which Christianity?

Some of the issues that Hunt raises are more relevant to legislative action than to the actions of holders of statewide offices. In that context, what does Hunt mean that Colorado lacks “Christian leadership”?

I don’t know the religious makeup of the Colorado legislature offhand, but undoubtedly its members mostly are Christian. Some are Jewish; there’s been one Muslim legislator in Colorado, ever; apparently there’s a single atheist, one agnostic, and a few who are “spiritual but not religious.” On the whole, Colorado has “Christian leadership,” if that means leaders who mostly are Christian.

Hunt, with the same hubris that I previously discussed, presumes that his conservative version of Christianity, in which certain faith-based beliefs play a prominent role in politics, is the “real” Christianity, and he implies that Progressive Christians are not Christians at all.

Hunt’s Handwringing

Hunt blames people who do not follow his own narrow view of Christianity for social woes generally, which is ridiculous.

In my view, the people who “cheapen life” are those who, like Hunt, would outlaw all or nearly all abortions—this cheapens the life of the pregnant woman for the sake of an undeveloped embryo—and would forbid people to take their own lives even to escape relentless physical agony.

I don’t know what Hunt is getting at with the line about sex—maybe he’s worried that somewhere, someone is enjoying sex outside of his church’s blessing? I’m not sure what that has to do with politics—unless he thinks the legislature ought to ban certain sorts of sex now legal among consenting adults?

Regarding drugs, the voters, not the leaders, partly legalized marijuana and hallucinogenic mushrooms. To me, the main issue is that it is very wrong for the government to lock people in a cage merely for possessing the “wrong” herb or fungus.

Who is trying to diminish family? It is Hunt calling into question the families led by gay couples—including the family of the governor of Colorado. Progressives would argue that things like their child tax credit help families. That’s a debatable political issue, but Hunt is wrong to imply that his political opponents somehow uniquely hate families.

Who is trying to diminish the church? People are free to worship as they please, so long as they do not in the process violate the rights of others. The foolishness and outright meanness of Hunt and other MAGA evangelicals is a bigger threat to U.S. Christianity than outside critics could ever be.

The Hunt–Ellis Connection

Speaking of meanness. . . In the context of the discussion about Hunt’s Christian nationalism, Clark also noted as a follow-up:

On a related note, two weeks ago today we asked @jeffhunt whether Jenna Ellis, who suggested #ClubQ shooting victims are burning in hell, is still a Policy Fellow at his @CentennialCCU. Today Hunt sent a written statement that did not answer the question.

Clark was referring to a recent statement by Ellis that the victims of the Club Q murders probably “are now reaping the consequences of eternal damnation”—one of the most despicable things I’ve heard someone say in recent memory.

A False Choice

After the debacle over his line about “Christian leadership,” Hunt Tweeted a long message claiming, among other things, that “classical liberalism was consumed by neo-Marxism. “We have a political philosophy that is rooted in Marxism that sees religion, particularly Christianity in America, as a threat,” he writes. Hunt concludes:

So what is political battle happening in CO? Conservative vs. Liberal? No. Republican vs. Democrat? No. Christians vs. Jews? No. Christians vs. Muslims? No. Classical Liberalism vs. Neo-Marxism? No. Most classical liberals have become Marxists. It’s Christianity vs. Neo-Marxism.

Apparently Hunt has something in mind like this: A Marxist Critical Theory spawned Critical Race Theory and Critical Gender Theory, and that entire “critical” project is screwing up America and Colorado.

There is a grain of truth to Hunt’s claims. There is something that could be described as “neo-Marxism,” or at least as a set of ideas distantly related to Marx’s ideas, that is obsessed with things like “the patriarchy,” “white privilege,” “cissexism,” and things (“power dynamics”) along those lines.

And, you know what, some of the criticisms coming out of those lines of thought are on point.

One need not be a Marxist to recognize the history of oppression. Women really have been oppressed throughout much of the country’s history. Today in various parts of the world women continue to be brutally oppressed—often by men motivated by their religious faith. A brutal slave regime in the U.S. gave way to Jim Crow, segregation, and terror campaigns against Black Americans, including public lynchings. Even today, Black people often are abused by the criminal justice system and shortchanged by the public school system, problems that can aptly be described as “systemic racism.”

One need not be a Marxist to recognize that some people are gay, that gay people often want to get married, that gay couples with kids generally make great parents, and that the principle of legal equality dictates that marriages between gay people be treated on par with marriages between heterosexual people.

One need not be a Marxist to recognize that biological sex does not always match expressed gender and that transgender people deserve legal equality and cultural respect. (Some of the details of how transgender equality works out are thorny.)

One need not be a Marxist to condemn bigotry against gay and transgender people, even if hidden behind the fig leaf of religion.

Classical liberalism has been discussing power dynamics and problems of oppression since long before Marx came on the scene.

No, classical liberals have not become Marxists. The choice between Marxism and (Hunt’s narrow brand of) Christianity is a false one. The problem is illiberalism to the left of me, illiberalism to the right. A genuine liberalism puts front and center human liberty and human flourishing. Hunt’s religiously inspired illiberalism is at least as dangerous as the illiberalism found in pockets of the hard left.

The Rhetoric of Christian Nationalism

Some advocates of Christian nationalism employ a cheap rhetorical trick. It’s okay to be Christian, they say, and okay to be a nationalist; hence it is okay to be a Christian nationalist.

Such dodges evade the profound differences between someone who is privately a Christian and who endorses the separation of church and state, and also is a nationalist in the benign sense of thinking it’s a good idea to have nations, and someone who advocates a sort of Christian nationalism that seeks to drive public policy by sectarian, faith-based beliefs of a conservative and evangelical bent.

The Persecution of Jeff Hunt

Hunt is a member of a group—conservative Christians—suffering relentless persecution. If you don’t believe it, just ask him. He Tweeted on December 7:

What we’re discovering at this moment in American history is that secular leftism is highly intolerant of opposing worldviews—to the point of persecution. Much more intolerant than many societies influenced by Christian values.

Now, some people might think conservative Christians in the U.S. do not actually suffer much persecution and that other groups suffer more.

For example, someone might say that some people get rather the raw end of the criminal justice system. Aurora police and paramedics killed Elijah McClain for no good reason, and Clear Creek sheriff’s deputies killed Christian Glass for no good reason. Someone might argue that that sort of thing counts as persecution.

Or someone might look to historical examples. The Ku Klux Klan rose to prominence in Colorado politics for a time in the 1920s. “Completely excluded from ‘100 Per Cent Americanism’ [advocated by the KKK] and depicted as threats to the nation’s ideals and values were the Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and blacks,” writes historian Robert Alan Goldberg. (The KKK did not regard Catholics as legitimate Christians.) Members of those groups might reasonably have thought they were being persecuted. So too might Black Coloradans refused service where whites were served. Or someone might suggest that the people brutalized by the 1880 Chinatown riot in Denver or murdered in the Sand Creek Massacre were persecuted.

Returning to present day, someone might argue that gay and transgender people face relentless and often violent persecution. Recently I wrote about a few examples.

But are conservative Christians by virtue of their faith the real victims in our society, despite the fact that two-thirds of U.S. adults are Christian, the large majority of elected officials are Christian, and conservative Christians dominate the Supreme Court?

Hunt has invoked three main examples: The Denver Post suggested that any Catholic school that flagrantly discriminates against LGBTQ+ students and staff not be invited to other schools’ athletic events; various people suggested that a nonprofit that flagrantly discriminates against LGBTQ+ people not receive millions of dollars of tax funds; and Colorado government claims that, as a condition of doing business, one has to bake a cake for a gay wedding when asked, if one is in the business of baking cakes for weddings, or make a web site for a gay wedding when asked, if one is in the business of making web sites for weddings.

The first two cases simply are not examples of persecution, any more than disinviting to a party someone who insists on publicly using the “n word” to reference Black people is an example of persecution.

I agree the third case is an instance of persecution—one that the Supreme Court is likely to soon remedy.

But let’s be serious. Millions of people around the world—in Iran, in Afghanistan, in China, in North Korea, in Syria, in Ukraine, in Russia (as examples)—gladly would trade the extreme persecution they suffer daily for the persecution of having to bake a cake for someone they don’t like, as a condition of running a business of baking cakes. So let’s keep some perspective on degrees of persecution.

Hunt, who attended events surrounding the recent Supreme Court case about the Colorado web designer, did offer a couple of examples of leftists being total assholes to religious conservatives. One person blared a bullhorn in the face of a conservative Jew; another screamed profanities at conservatives involved with the case. (See also Hunt’s remarks about the case.) Everyone should condemn those sorts of personal abuses, whether directed at conservative religious people, LGBTQ+ people, or others.

A Free Marketplace of Ideas

Incidentally, Hunt also wrote—prior to blocking me on Twitter—“There is no desire for a free marketplace of ideas by the political elite.” Apparently among the things that Hunt lacks is a sense of irony. (Maybe he blocked me for saying, “The only thing ‘oppressing’ @jeffhunt is his own foot in his mouth”—which was on point given his remark about “Christian leadership.”)

Hunt also blocked former speaker of the Colorado house Terrance Carroll (one of the nicest people that I know), Denver Post editorial editor Megan Schrader, 9News anchor Kyle Clark, 9News reporter Steve Staeger, and others.

As I suggested, people should start calling him Jeff “Snowflake” Hunt.

Hunt sometimes says extremely stupid things in public and then gets offended when others call him out for it. “Persecution” indeed.

Lessons from History

Lamentations about the alleged breakdown of social order are not new. Nor is conspiracy mongering about Marxists and “the Communists.”

I am definitely not saying that any criticism of Communism is conspiracy mongering! Communist regimes slaughtered scores of millions of people, brutally oppressed many more, and posed a serious threat to the security of the United States. That doesn’t change the fact that, among pockets of the American right, conspiracy mongers often baselessly accuse their political opponents of being Communists or having Communist sympathies, and often these accusations thinly cover antisemitism and other forms of racism.

I close by drawing on a couple of quotes from the historian Robert Alan Goldberg, the first from his Hooded Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Colorado. What I am not doing is comparing Hunt to the Klan. I am suggesting that, though many of the particulars are different, the echoes among pockets of today’s nationalist right are loud enough to be worth noting.

Clothed in the symbols of Protestantism, the Klan posed as the savior of the “old time religion.” The Klan promised to unite Protestants in a crusade that would combat the teaching of evolution and restore faith in God, the Bible, and the Christian fundamentals. . . .

Evidence of moral laxity was everywhere; new styles of clothing, “suggestive” dances, and “titillating” motion pictures were symbols of the decay sapping America’s strength. Klansmen vowed not only to banish loose women, roadhouses, and “joyriding neckers and petters” but also to restore decency and decorum to their communities. The Klan’s main thrust was directed at the bootlegger, for it was his product that fueled the revolution in manners and morals.

The second quote is from Goldberg’s 2001 book, Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America:

The Red Scare of the 1950s was for most Americans a sudden fright, and they soon moved on to other, more mundane concerns. Some were not so easily reassured, and they kept their faith in conspiracy, convinced that communism had been confronted but not defeated. In the front ranks of the suspicious were Robert Welch and the members of his John Birch Society. To understand and thus master the enemy, Welch studied history for secret patterns and intrigues. He found what he was looking for in a centuries-old master conspiracy of “Insiders,” for whom communism was but one means to world domination.

We’d be in a lot better place as a society if a lot more people would read and take to heart Goldberg’s works. See also my podcast episodes with Goldberg about the Klan and conspiracies.

The problem is that various Americans have used fearmongering over social breakdown and Communist plots to rationalize bigotry toward members of targeted groups. We can help vaccinate ourselves against such craziness by becoming more aware of the historical precedents.