“It is a beacon to guide us in the dark times we are going through! »
Sarah, a young mother, had only good words for Pastor Matthew Trewhella, who came, like every Sunday, to deliver his mass in a very generic conference room in an ordinary hotel in the west suburbs of Milwaukee.
Lost between the business lunch of a group of local entrepreneurs and several waves of young people and families returning home, bouquets of balloons in hand, the day after a festive gathering, the Sunday meeting had everything to go unnoticed, with its dozens of parishioners — mostly retirees and young couples — chatting at the door among small groups of children running and shouting all around.
A conventional spectacle, as it is played simultaneously at the doors of thousands of churches in the United States, but which had a little more to tell in this election year. It is that at 63 years old, Pastor Trewhella saw his influence go far beyond the intimate framework of the small Mercy Seat Christian Church (whose name is a biblical reference, that of the chest containing the 10 commandments), that he birthed in rural Wisconsin.
His name is regularly mentioned in the corridors of Trumpism, where Donald Trump’s former security adviser Michael Flynn recently praised a book self-published by the Protestant pastor in 2013, calling it “a masterful blueprint showing Americans how to successfully resist tyranny.”
The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates (“The Doctrine of the Little Magistrates”), this is its title, draws on a theory of resistance developed by the Calvinists in the 16the century, during the European wars of religion, to counter the oppression of governments. Five hundred years later, it is used by Pastor Trewhella to justify by “divine law” all opposition to governments, policies, legislative texts and courts – and this, within the framework of the cultural war currently being waged in the United States by the conservative camp against a change in morals perceived as a little too progressive.
Matthew Trewhella’s work was cited last year in the entourage of the governor of Texas, Republican Greg Abbott, to call on him to oppose the federal government’s migration policies and the government’s management of the borders. by Joe Biden.
The approach, which places God and local politicians on the same ideological front line, has been praised by Jenna Ellis, Donald Trump’s former lawyer and a member of his 2020 campaign team. She sees in the pastor’s writings a path to take to get out of “the excesses of the government”, a complaint that the Republicans have particularly succeeded in making resonate in their camp since the pandemic and its health measures, experienced as obstacles to freedom by many.
Power and frustration
In Waukesha County, the epicenter of Republican power in Wisconsin, Matthew Trewhella has forged very strong ties with the local leaders of Donald Trump’s party. The latter particularly appreciate how he interprets sacred texts to condemn abortion – murder, according to him – or to promote the right to own firearms. The supremacy of man over woman – a “creature unfit to occupy positions of power”, he says – and the condemnation of homosexuality are also part of his discourse.
“The state here in America is at war with you,” he said during his sermon on this August Sunday morning. “He is at war with every aspect of our culture and society. He wants to force you to do the complete opposite of what the word of God commands. He even wants you to believe that there are more than two sexes. »
In the room, several heads approve, in meditation.
“You must wage war against the state through your family by being a protector, provider and priest to them, by having children, although the state does not want you to have more than two », adds the pastor. The man boasts of having had 11, who gave him as many grandchildren, all schooled at home. “By owning guns when the state wants you to disarm, and educating your own children,” he continues.
At the opening of the meeting, the pastor invites his faithful to formulate their request to God. A woman in her fifties raises her hand, asking for divine help to bring enough people around her in the following days to form a demonstration in front of a public library in the region. She wants to denounce the presence of “toxic books” on the shelves, she says.
An uninhibited Christian nationalism
Making religion a political weapon: this is the project undertaken by Matthew Trewhella, known for his past as an extremist activist against abortion clinics in Wisconsin, which also earned him a few months in prison at the beginning of the century . He now makes his fight legitimate by combining sacred texts like the Magdeburg Confession, a Lutheran declaration of faith published in 1550, in a skillful exercise that allows him to add every Sunday his stone to a theocratic foundation on which the Party Republican seeks to establish part of its base.
“Christian nationalism no longer shames the politicians of the American right,” summarizes in an interview Anna Rosenzweig, professor of French specializing in the premodern era at the University of Rochester, in the state of New York, who follows closely fter the development of religious extremism in the United States. “This nationalism is even becoming normalized, driven by movements, like that of Pastor Trewhella, which take religious writings of the past out of context to better justify their present cultural war. »
She adds: “It is very dangerous, very undemocratic too, since they call for freedom of religion and democratic values to above all advance theocratic ideas which, in the end, lock us into authoritarian regimes. It is no longer a matter of debate or compromise for them. What they want is the suppression of the rights of several sections of society: women, African-Americans, cultural and religious minorities…”
At the end of July, Donald Trump certainly added grist to this mill by calling on Christians to “go out and vote” for him, while assuring them that they would no longer have to worry about the electoral process afterwards in the event of of victory. “In four years, you won’t need to vote anymore. We will have fixed it in such a way that you will no longer need to vote,” he said at the Believers Summit, an event hosted by the conservative group Turning Point Action in West Palm Beach, Florida.
A few days earlier, from the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, Republican Senator from Missouri Josh Hawley had for his part included Christian nationalism in a reform of the American political framework, affirming that, far from threatening American democracy, it “founds it , Above all “. “And it is the best form of democracy ever conceived by man: the fairest, the freest, the most humane and the most laudable,” he argued.
Bring down the wall between Church and State?
In 2022, the ascendant figure of Trumpism Lauren Boebert said she was “tired” of the separation of church and state in the United States — “bullshit that is not in the Constitution,” she claimed , cited by the Denver Post. “The Church is supposed to run the government; the government is not supposed to rule the Church. This is not how our Founding Fathers intended it. »
However, in 1802, Thomas Jefferson, one of the authors of the American Declaration of Independence, mentioned this wall in a letter sent to the Danbury Baptist Association which recalled that the American legislature should not “make law on the establishment of a religion or to prohibit its free exercise”.
A separation that 16% of Americans say they are ready to question today, according to a Pew Research Center survey unveiled last February. Some 83%, an overwhelming majority, however, believe that the government should not declare Christianity the country’s official religion, it is reported.
Matthew Trewhella is certainly not part of this majority, he who preaches a strengthening of the “divine function of civil government” and who in passing invites the families gathered around him to take part in the “counter-revolution”. A resistance inspired by a political theory of the past, nourished by the Bible, and which – in a “crumbling rule of law”, he says – could in practice involve violence, writes the pastor in his book, where he speaks of “moments” when men “must make their swords red” (by blood, he means).
“Calvin would have loved this guy,” says Professor Rosenzweig, who is concerned to witness today the rebirth of these ideas in a tense political context which does not shed enough light on their origins, and even less on the range of political and social projects that they support. “I recently attended a Lutheran conference in Wyoming. And besides the fact that I was the only woman without a husband or children in the room, what struck me the most was their pride in being undemocratic,” she adds.
And this, in one of the largest democracies in the world, which, on November 5, will go to the polls.
This report was financed thanks to the support of the Transat-International Journalism Fund.
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