Jason Rapert, founder and president of the Christian nationalist National Association of Christian Lawmakers, has issued a 16-page open letter calling on Americans to respond to the midterm election results with “repentance, fasting, and prayer.” He warns that Americans “are inviting calamity in our country and this could destroy our nation if we do not repent and turn back to God.”
Before the election, Raperts begged conservative Christians to vote, saying, “If the powers of darkness can get the lever of power in the United States government, we are in for some of the worst period in our history that we will have ever experienced.” Rapert is a former state legislature who led an anti-LGBTQ pro-censorship war against the Arkansas State Library Board. Before the 2024 election, he declared that God was using President Donald Trump “as a tool to save our country at this moment,”
Rapert's missive paints a dire portrait of America’s post-election future. “The most radical democrats ever elected to office in our country will now have access to government information and the ability to make changes within our country in ways that have never happened before,” he writes. “They promise to continue the unholy and unrighteous agenda to undermine all of the American ideals that ordinary American citizens have come to believe in since the beginning of our nation.
Like many religious-right leaders over the past week, Rapert excoriates Christians who decided to sit out this election. “By some estimates there are 80 million Christians who are sitting on the sidelines in our country while Islamists, abortion zealots, Satanists, communists, socialists, marxists, antisemites, LGBTQ activists and anarchists work together to topple the United States of America,” he writes.
Rapert's letter focuses on familiar Christian nationalist targets: LGBTQ people, Muslims, and supporters of safe and legal access to abortion.
“The Sin of Sodom and Gomorrah”
In his letter, the vehementlyanti-LGBTQ Rapert decries the Congressional Equality Caucus’s celebrating that the incoming Congress will be the “gayest Congress in American history.” Writes Rapert, “If the Republican Party does not wake up they will be totally hijacked by the LGBTQ movement just like some of the church denominations that first tolerated them and then were subdued by them.”
“The Danger of Islam”
Rapert devotes a much longer portion of his letter to fearmongering about the record number of American Muslims elected and reelected in this year’s elections to local, state, and federal offices.
“Has America really forgotten September 11, 2001 when the worst terrorist attack in American history was carried out by Muslim terrorists?” he writes.
“The greatest fallacy being spoken in our country today is that Islam is different than radical Islam,” he claims. “No it is not.”
“Our nation should never have allowed Islam to take root in our country,” he writes, ignoring our Constitution and our history as a country that made pluralism and religious freedom a core founding principle.
“The Sin of Abortion”
Rapert repeats the NACL’s stance on abortion, which is to immediately “stop all abortions in our nation from the moment of conception.” Unfortunately for Rapert, most Americans believe abortion should be legal in most or all circumstances. That political reality helps explain why the Trump administration has taken its time responding to religious-right demands that it ban the distribution of abortion medications by mail. And it’s reflected by the fact that voters in Virginia just enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution, and that Missouri voters rejected an attempt—despite the best efforts of Sen. Josh Hawley and his anti-abortion activist wife—to remove the protection for abortion rights they added to their state constitution two years ago.
“Where Do We Go From Here?”
Rapert says that his long letter has “not even scratched the surface of the deep troubles we face in our country."
“It can be argued that in some ways we are experiencing God’s judgement because we have refused his direction and chastisement,” he writes. “Now we are reaping the harvest of decades of bad decisions.”
Rapert ends by inviting people to the NACL’s annual meeting and gala which is being held in a hotel just outside Washington, D.C. Dec. 7-8 and will include a briefing with allied Senators and Representatives on Capitol Hill. It was at NACL’s 2023 gala that soon-to-be-former Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said that God had chosen him to be an American Moses to lead the country through a “Red Sea moment.” In 2024, the group honored Charlie Kirk’s “lifetime of service to God and country.”
This year the group plans to present religious-right activist Michael Farris with its “George Washington Lifetime Christian Leadership Award.” Other speakers include pundit Todd Starnes, and Rep. Marlin Stutzman, and a few state legislators. The NACL provides state legislators with model legislation on a range of right-wing issues.
Earlier this year, Rapert called for the Trump administration’s politically motivated investigation and indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center to be expanded to include Right Wing Watch.
Conservative white evangelical leaders have for years touted their status as the core constituency of the Republican Party. As pre-election polls showed Republicans in trouble, House Speaker Mike Johnson assured activists that their prayers would make a difference, and God would keep Republicans in control of Congress. He wasn’t the only one to see his confident predictions dashed by voters.
In the wake of last year’s historic GOP losses, religious-right leaders are offering varied explanations for the electoral bloodbath, if not for the failure of their vaunted turnout operations. The Family Research Council, for example, is blaming Republicans for suppressing anti-abortion voters’ enthusiasm by not doing enough to ban abortion medication. More extreme voices, like New Christian Right “theobro” Joel Webbon warn that Christian nationalists will seize power through nondemocratic means.
