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One of the most important groups in Donald Trump’s reelection campaign for President of the United States is Christian nationalists. Their influence is best captured in the promotion of the rightwing Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which seeks to implement a Christian supremacist government in the United States.
But increasingly, the thought leaders of Christian supremacy and their supporters in the United States are looking to Central and South America. Among these examples they have embraced are El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, and Argentina’s libertarian firebrand president, Javier Milei.
“In countries like Hungary, Argentina, and El Salvador, bold Christian leaders are defending democracy and fighting corruption,” Lance Wallnau, a Christian dominionist and promoter of the dangerous Seven Mountains Mandate wrote in a post on X. “In El Salvador, a leader embraced Christian values to combat a corrupt Marxist regime, using the military to dismantle gangs like MS-13.”
The Seven Mountains Mandate is a branch of dominionist theology that argues that Christians must take control of key aspects of society, specifically the family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government, in order to guide the country in a Christian direction.
Both Bukele and Milei have gained popularity in Christian supremacist and far-right circles. The two were welcomed like rockstars at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference in Delaware. Wallnau unabashedly praises their “unconventional leadership” and “breakthrough strategies.”
Bukele has gained popularity in these circles due to his crackdown on gang activity in El Salvador, while Milei is known for his libertarian economic policies to address inflation and his rollbacks of state institutions. Both presidents have carried out increasingly authoritarian actions, including human rights violations and lack of due process in Bukele’s crackdown on gangs, as well as a direct violation of the country’s constitution by seeking and winning an illegal re-election to a second presidential term. Milei has ignored international diplomatic norms and brought about a widespread rise in poverty in Argentina through his policies.
But the celebration of these increasingly authoritarian leaders highlights the complete hatred of democratic norms coming from the leaders of the Christian supremacist groups. This has been brewing for decades, beginning with the rise of megachurches led by charismatic leaders and, along with them, the rise of dominionist theologies.
“The entire religious life [for many evangelicals] is organized around this single powerful leader at the apex of a hierarchy, and that’s not democratic,” Philip Gorski, a sociology professor at Yale University and the co-author of multiple books on Christian nationalism in the United States, tells The Progressive. “There is a sense of threat, a sense of urgency to trust a charismatic leader, so how surprised are we that authoritarianism appeals?”
The religious far right in the United States has celebrated dictatorial administrations in Latin America before. Previously, the U.S. far right celebrated the rule of Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator who held power for seventeen years following the CIA-backed coup d’état against the democratically elected president Salvador Allende in 1973.
However, many of these new authoritarian leaders in the hemisphere are not only embarrassing far-right ideologies, but also being political opportunists. Rather, they follow the trends of whatever will maintain their power. Even Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela has increasingly embraced evangelical groups in a ploy to stay in power.
“Bukele is not a man of the right. Nor was he ever of the left,” wrote El Faro’s editorial board, marking the beginning of Bukele’s illegal second term. “He is a politician without ideology, with a compass moved only by the political headwinds. He is nothing more than an opportunist.”
While Bukele may be classified as a political opportunist, many of those who have bought into the Chrisitan supremacist movement are just north of El Salvador in Guatemala. Over the last several decades, Christian supremacist movements have made major inroads into successive administrations in Guatemala.
In 2023, Wallnau declared Guatemala under the administration of Alejandro Giammattei as being another “model for America” in a live stream for the far-right Flashpoints podcast.
Christian supremacists from the United States have long looked upon neighboring Guatemala with interest and looked to work closely with the state apparatus. Major figures of the movement, including Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Billy Graham, began to grow close to communities in the Central American country beginning in the 1970s, but they greatly expanded their influence during the eighteen-month dictatorship of General Efraín Ríos Montt following the March 1982 coup d’état. General Ríos Montt, who died in April 2018 during a third attempt to convict him of genocide, was a born-again Christian who had attended the Gospel Outreach Church in Eureka, California, before he returned to Guatemala.
But Christian supremacists have since made deeper in-roads into the Central American country, with far right Guatemalan leaders implementing policies that reflect evangelicals’ support of Israel, anti-abortion beliefs, and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments.
“[Churches have] sent American missionaries to Central and South America for decades,” Gorski says, “where they can push their conservative social agenda, anti-gay policies, anti-abortion policies, sometimes even push them even further than they would ever be able to do realistically in the United States.”
In 2015, Guatemala elected Jimmy Morales, a television comedian and born-again Christian, to the presidency. While Morales promised voters he was “neither corrupt nor a thief,” his administration undermined anti-impunty and anti-corruption efforts by closing the United Nations-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, commonly known as CICIG. Morales also backed international efforts to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, moving the embassy there in 2018.
Further far-right-backed advances were made during Giammattei’s administration from 2020 to 2024, from adopting pro-life legislation to corruption exploding across the country. Giammattei’s administration approved anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation—even though the “Protection of Life and Family” law was quickly declared unconstitutional. Giammattei called Guatemala the “pro life capital of Ibero America,” which earned him international attention from far-right groups like the Family Research Council, U.S. Republicans, and religious leaders who invited Giammattei to speak in events in the United States during his administration.
“If they are going to call me a dictator for promoting religious freedom, I will gladly be a dictator,” Giammattei said in his June 2022 speech at the Annual International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington, D.C. “If they are going to tell me that I am a violator of human rights for respecting life from its conception, I am a violator of human rights.”
But even after Guatemala elected President Bernardo Arévalo, a center-left who campaigned on an anti-corruption mandate, the religious far right has maintained a deep influence over branches of the government accused of corruption, including with congressional representatives, the public prosecutor’s office, and the judicial branch.
This influence came to the forefront on June 28 when the Constitutional Court issued a decision permitting the yearly LGBTQ+ pride parade, but as long as marchers had “good manners” and as long as they didn’t include children. But in the same decision, the country’s highest court justified their reasoning as arguing Guatemala had a “Judeo-Christian society”—while misspelling “Judeo” among other gaffes in the ruling.
Unsurprisingly, Guatemala’s Constitutional Court has connections with Christian supremacists in the United States. In March 2023, Pentecostal pastor and Chrisitan nationalist Mario Bramnick posted a photo of himself and the members of the court on his Facebook page, stating that he was at the court.
But Guatemala continues to see this influence spread through churches and creep into policy—at a time when the public prosecutor’s office seeks to undermine the Arévalo administration.
“[The example of] Guatemala is important,” Paulo Gracino de Souza Jr., a Brazilian professor of political sociology at the University of Brasilia, tells The Progressive. “Pentecostal evangelicals have maintained a discourse that leads every problem to being something spiritual, something evil. For them, problems are resolved spiritually and thus complex realities that must be combated with complex public policies end up being simplified.”