It’s Not Christianity vs. Atheism. It’s Religious Freedom vs. Religious Power.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comBelieve in God. Don’t. Go to church every Sunday or never set foot in one. That’s your right — and that’s the whole point.Let me be clear up front, before half the internet loses its mind: this isn’t about whether Christianity is good or bad, and I’m not here to tell anyone what to believe about God. This is about the difference between a religion and a political weapon.Congressman Jared Huffman of California has a new book out — No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy From Christian Nationalism. He’s unusual in Congress: the only member who publicly calls himself a humanist. And his argument isn’t that Christianity threatens American democracy. It’s that Christian nationalism does. Those aren’t the same thing. Christianity is a faith. Christian nationalism is a political ideology that wants to use government power to privilege one version of Christianity and bake it into American law. And Huffman says that movement has become extraordinarily influential inside the Republican Party and inside the Capitol itself.He describes pastors working the halls of Congress almost like lobbyists — approaching lawmakers and staff on the way to votes, handing out cards, inviting them to Bible study. If members want to hold a Bible study, fine; they have the same religious freedom as anyone. But Huffman says some of these operators aren’t there to pray. They’re there to push doctrine into public policy.That’s the line, and that’s where the problem starts. The First Amendment doesn’t just protect your right to practice your religion. It protects my right not to practice yours. You believe what you want, I believe what I want, and neither of us gets to use the government to force it on the other. That’s the deal, and it’s a good one.Huffman points to Ralph Drollinger, founder of Capitol Ministries, who runs Bible studies for government officials — calling him one of the most extreme religious activists operating around Washington and arguing his access to powerful people should concern us. For his part, Drollinger disputes that characterization and says his work is about accurately teaching scripture, not pushing personal opinion. Fair to note.But the bigger point isn’t one pastor — it’s the ecosystem around power. And nobody illustrates it better than Speaker Mike Johnson.Johnson has never hidden how central his evangelical faith is to his politics, and by itself that isn’t the problem. Raphael Warnock is a Baptist pastor and a U.S. senator. James Talarico is running for Senate in Texas and talks openly about his Christian faith. There are devout Democrats and Republicans everywhere. Huffman actually praises Warnock and Talarico — because, in his view, they speak authentically about faith without trying to use the coercive power of government to impose it. That’s the distinction. Mike Johnson can believe abortion is a sin, pray about it, preach it, and vote his conscience like anyone else. But when a leader starts presenting government policy as God’s will, we’re somewhere else entirely.After Republicans passed Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” Johnson said he’d been on his knees praying every day and called its passage God’s will and God’s plan. Think about that coming from the Speaker of the House. That’s not a sermon — it’s legislation governing hundreds of millions of Americans, Christian and Jewish and Muslim and atheist alike, and one of the most powerful officials in the country is framing his party’s win as the will of God. Huffman notes Johnson also moved the Congressional Prayer Breakfast into Statuary Hall and launched a National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance at the Museum of the Bible, where lawmakers gathered to repent for what they called national sins, abortion among them.Any one of these you can wave off. A prayer breakfast, who cares. A politician thanking God, they’ve done that forever. Huffman’s point is that you have to look at all of it together — and when you do, the wall between church and state starts looking a lot less solid.There’s one more piece I can’t let go of: January 6th. I was there on those steps. And Christian imagery was all over parts of that crowd — flags, crosses, prayer. Huffman says the January 6th Committee actually considered addressing the role Christian nationalism played in the radicalization around the attack, and that Adam Kinzinger believed there was a responsible way to tell that story while making crystal clear the committee wasn’t attacking Christianity. But Huffman says the material got cut from the final report — he believes Liz Cheney worried it would let Fox News paint the committee as anti-Christian. Cheney didn’t respond to The New York Times about the claim, so take it as his account. But it points to a real Democratic problem: they’re so afraid of sounding anti-Christian that they’ve managed to make religious and nonreligious Americans feel unwelcome at once.Here’s what people miss. Separation of church and state isn’t hostile to Christianity — it protects it. If you’re Catholic, it shields you from a government run by Protestants. If you’re Protestant, from one run by Catholics. If you’re Jewish or Muslim or Hindu, from a majority deciding your faith counts less. And if you don’t believe at all, it covers you too. Nobody has to win. The government doesn’t get to rule on whose God is right. Because the day you hand government the power to impose religious doctrine, you’d better be dead certain the people running it will always believe exactly what you believe. Someday they won’t.That’s why I don’t care whether Mike Johnson prays. I care whether he thinks his convictions hand him a mandate to use the United States government to impose them on the rest of us. Those are very different things — and you can say so without insulting the millions of Christians who believe just as hard in religious freedom.This isn’t believers versus nonbelievers. It’s religious freedom versus religious power. You have the right to worship God, to worship differently, or to worship no one. The moment the government starts telling Americans which of those is correct, we haven’t protected religious freedom. We’ve destroyed it.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!