An Oregon Republican Legislator said that Christians are uniquely suited for elected office. When OR GOP chair Walter Huss said that in 1978, he got huge pushback...from Republicans.

On the fuzzy line between hard and soft Christian Nationalism

In a recent interview on a Christian Nationalist show called “Save the Nation,” Republican State Rep. E. Werner Reschke from Klamath County said America needed more people like the Christian founding fathers in positions of power. “You don’t want a materialist. You don’t want an atheist. You don’t want a Muslim… You want somebody who understands what truth is, and understands the nature of man, the nature of government and the nature of God.”

This is what we might call “hard Christian Nationalism”—that is, the idea that America is a nation that should be run by and for Christians, and that non-Christians are not as authentically or legitimately American as Christians.

As you can imagine, Reeschke’s anti-constitutional and anti-pluralistic statement has garnered a significant amount of criticism, as detailed in this story from OPB.

Notably, none of that criticism so far has come from Reschke’s fellow Republicans. Such people would like us to believe that Reschke only meant to say the “soft” version of Christian Nationalism, which holds that Christianity as a faith produces citizens with the sort of moral character that makes them especially suited for public office. House Republican Leader Jeff Helfrich, when asked about Reschke’s comments, merely restated his abstract commitment to religious pluralism, but refused to criticize his colleague’s bigoted statement directly. Helfrich choose instead to focus on what he considered to be the real problem, the “radical and destructive” Democrats.

“House Republicans, like all elected members, swear an oath to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of Oregon. Neither document contains a religious test for elected office. We welcome all people, regardless of religion, who share our values and wish to see Oregon set a new course away from the radical and destructive policies of the majority party.”

It wasn’t always thus with Oregon Republicans.

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In August of 1978 Walter Huss, a white supremacist and Christian supremacist who the FBI credibly suspected of being associated with the Nazi party and the Posse Comitatus, shocked the Oregon Republican establishment by winning the election for GOP state chair. Though he’d been diligently working at it for over a decade by organizing far right county and precinct chairs across the state, few establishment Republicans saw this coming, and they were grievously unprepared to respond to Huss’s hostile takeover of their party.

One of the first news cycles after Huss’s takeover revolved around a statement he made at the state convention that he preferred “Republican candidates to be Christian.” Vic Atiyeh, the quite conservative Republican candidate for governor in the upcoming November 1978 election, said that Huss should retract that statement because it was a slur against non-Christians. For context, when Atiyeh won the election in 1978 he became the nation’s first Arab-American governor. Throughout his career he took the issue of racial and religious discrimination very seriously, as did most establishment Oregon Republicans at the time. Atiyeh’s statement, in other words, was not just a PR move aimed at damage control, he was genuinely concerned about the forces of religious bigotry that Huss was channeling and stoking.

[Salem] Statesman Journal, 10 August 1978

Huss responded to Atiyeh’s criticism with an odd sort of non-correction correction. He said he didn’t mean his comments to be derogatory or a slur at all, in fact, Huss thought everyone could and should be a Christian! To Huss’s mind (and probably the minds of his supporters), such a statement seemed like a compliment, though in the eyes of people who understand how pluralism works in modern societies it came across in precisely the theocratic spirit in which it was meant.

In a later interview in 1978, Huss came closer to publicly stating what he really meant when he said he preferred Christian candidates. "The problem is not one of faith but of historic values. Portland has a Jewish major (Neal Goldschmidt) and a Jewish-controlled press (the Newhouse papers), and Jews are well-represented in the system. One of my best friends is a Jew - Jesus Christ."

Using a Hitlerian term like “the Jewish-controlled press” in 1978 would have rung alarm bells for a lot of people. Huss had a tendency to let the mask slip like that, which is why he rarely granted interviews to the mainstream press. Of course, Huss thought the criticisms he received for saying bigoted things just proved how much of a threat his “truths” posed to “the Jewish/communist/anti-Christian mafia” that he “knew” ran Oregon and the country

“They commit the act, I simply stated the fact. / If they would abide by the Judeo ethic, people wouldn’t hate them so much. They force themselves upon you, & take over as much as they can. They bring on their own persecution.” Walter Huss, 3 April 1982. Located in the folder labeled “Jews” in Box 2 of the Walter Huss Papers, University of Oregon Speical Collections.

To call Huss a “hard Christian Nationalist” might be an understatement because he literally believed his entire life that Jews were behind the Communist threat that posed an existential threat to America. While the conspiratorial, “anti-globalist” narrative core of contemporary Christian Nationalism’s victimization complex has its roots in old-school antisemitism, most contemporary Christian Nationalists are not avowed or self-conscious antisemites. Huss, however, thought America could only be saved if Christian Patriots like him defeated, perhaps even eliminated, “the Jewish menace.” He believed this in 1960 when he first set up shop as a conservative political activist in Portland, and he believed it in 1998 when he last ran for public office (Governor). He was, however, usually smart enough not to explicitly say it, other than to people who he knew already “got it.”

Now I don’t know enough about Rep. Reschke to say whether he’s the kind of Christian Nationalist who, like Huss, maintains a few folders labeled “Jews” that serve as a convenient depository for reams of antisemitic and Holocaust denying reading material he receives in the mail and collects at gatherings of far right political activists.

Box 2 of the Walter Huss Papers at the University of Oregon, Special Collections.

One thing I do know, however, is that the sort of hard Christian Nationalism that Rep. Reschke articulated has deep roots in the political culture of the OR GOP, and it’s quite reasonable for people who care about pluralism to be concerned by statements like his. After all, he’s not just some random citizen, he’s one of the handful of people charged with making laws for the state of Oregon.

Another thing I know is that in the past it was very easy for Oregon Republicans in positions of authority and influence to clearly state their opposition to statements like Reschke’s. In 1978, former Republican Governor Tom McCall called Huss "a religious zealot whose entire demeanor seems to scream, 'Stop the world - I want YOU to get off.'" Republican Senator Mark Hatfield accused Huss of trying to create a religious cult inside the Republican Party (ironic given Senator Hatfield’s connections to The Family, which arguably became a religious cult inside the Republican Party.)¹ And Republican Governor Atiyeh’s criticisms we’ve already seen.

The contemporary GOP’s squishiness around the distinction between hard Christian Nationalism and soft Christian Nationalism is not just a matter of analytical or rhetorical imprecision; rather, blurring the line between saying “I’m simply proud to be a Christian who is in politics” and “I think people who aren’t Christian don’t belong in politics” is a central, enabling feature of American far right politics. Here’s how I talked about that dynamic in a piece from last summer about the time Josh Hawley tweeted out an apocryphal, Christian Nationalist Patrick Henry quote that actually originated in a 1950s fascist publication.

Over the decades, activists have built momentum for the increasing far right radicalization of the GOP by simultaneously letting illiberal bigots know that the GOP sees them, while also professing to “normies” and the mainstream media that it’s only the softer version of Christian Nationalism they endorse. Depending on the politician, they may even authentically believe in that softer version and revile the harder version, but regardless, the folks who hear the harder version are the ones these days who are more likely to be staffing the Republican Party tables at county fairs or running for precinct captain or serving as county GOP chair or writing for “conservative” media outlets. I think there’s not much use trying to definitively nail down whether it’s the softer version or the harder version that a politician like Hawley actually believes in. Since when have we been able to say with great confidence what any politician truly believes in anyway? The point is that Hawley’s GOP is an evolving coalition of people in both the harder and softer Christian Nationalist camps and which is moving steadily rightward toward a more open embrace of that harder version. This dynamic will likely continue until those who believe the softer version explicitly reject and drive out the growing numbers who believe the harder version.

America is not a Christian nation, but if politicians like Reschke and Hawley get their way, we very well might become one. That’s why this matters, because ideas, even unpopular anti-democratic ones with scant historical evidence to back them up, have consequences. Trump’s previous administration was rife with gut bucket Islamophobes…I mean, John Bolton was considered too embarrassing of a religious bigot to be confirmed by the US Senate during the GWBush administration but then under Trump he seemed like one of the sober-minded adults in the room. While the overwhelming majority of Americans reject Christian Nationalism as an ideology, let’s not forget that an overwhelming majority of Americans also support the right to abortion care, and a lot of good that did.

The idea that the US could become a nation in which Christianity is officially privileged over other faiths might seem like a far-fetched, future-tripping fantasy. But there are large numbers of people in the GOP who think it would be a great, benevolent thing for the nation to do. They think it would be a return to the nation’s true roots, rather than a radical departure from them. When Walter Huss advocated for an explicitly Christian vision of American politics in 1978 he was roundly criticized by Republicans in positions of power and authority. Republicans with such a robust commitment to the ideal of religious pluralism now comprise a much smaller and less consequential portion of the GOP leadership class. Given that there are so few people willing to police the boundary between soft and hard versions of Christian Nationalism in the GOP, it seems quite likely that the party will just keep moving in the anti-pluralistic direction its been heading for quite a while now.

A few months after Walter Huss’s 1978 victory, former President Gerald Ford anxiously asked his friend Wendall Wyatt, a moderate Republican Congressman from Oregon, if they’d “gotten rid of that nut yet.” If only Ford and Wyatt had lived to see what became of their Republican Party in Oregon, and elsewhere.

1. It’s also worth noting that The Family was run by Doug Coe, who, like Hatfield, was a graduate of Willamette University where I teach.