At one point in Jared Huffman’s incisive and engaging new book, No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy from Christian Nationalism, he sarcastically surveys the hellscape that Christian nationalists claim they are being forced to endure:
“[B]elievers are being barred from public life and forced to worship in secrecy. No public prayer. No ‘Merry Christmas.’ No mentioning Jesus at a school board meeting. In this gripping fantasy, Christians wander around clutching their Bibles like contraband, while secular elites and Jews patrol the perimeter with copies of The Origin of Species and NPR tote bags.”
W. W. Norton & Company
W. W. Norton & Company, 240 pages. Publication date: August 18, 2026.
This narrative of widespread repression, Huffman conveys, is as dangerous as it is ridiculous. It was deliberately concocted by Christian nationalists to bolster their influence in the political realm. Scaring the bejesus out of people, it turns out, is a winning approach.
Huffman is a Democratic member of Congress, representing California’s Second Congressional District in the San Francisco Bay area since 2013. He is co-founder and co-chair (along with Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, of Maryland, who wrote the book’s foreword) of the Congressional Freethought Caucus, which is devoted to protecting the separation of church and state. Christian nationalism is exactly the opposite—“the fusion of Christian religious and cultural identity with rightwing politics, rooted in the narrative of America as a Christian nation.”
Throughout the book, Huffman interweaves his own life experience with the events he describes. For instance, he attended the University of California, Santa Barbara in the 1980s, where he studied under a famed religious studies professor named Walter Capps. Capps sounded an early warning about Christian zealots, including Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell. “My main takeaway from Capps’s course,” Huffman writes, “was that the New Religious Right was not a spiritual revival but a political machine, one that cloaked its ambitions in Scripture and wielded faith for partisan ends.”
By the early 1990s, church attendance was falling, and rightwing Christians were grasping for new strategies. The culture wars that now dominate American political life acquired new urgency, and attention turned to domestic enemies, as Huffman explains: “Government, portrayed as demonic and evil, joined liberal culture as the new foil. Guns became sacred, and violence was increasingly justified, if not sanctified.”
This mindset became increasingly prevalent, culminating in the 2016 election of Donald Trump, who “weaponized Christian nationalism like no one before him.” Huffman says this was done with the active involvement of Republicans, but also with the cowed complicity of his fellow Democrats, who “seemed incapable of even naming, much less confronting, Christian nationalism head-on.” His decision, in November 2017, to come out as a humanist—a term he prefers to atheist—was prompted by this failure.
Huffman tells how the select committee formed to investigate the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol found overwhelming evidence that Christian nationalists played a major role in this insurrection. But committee co-chair Liz Cheney, a Republican representing Wyoming, objected to including this finding in the committee’s final 845-page report, feeling it would be used to discredit the effort and distract from other findings. Of course, the Democrats acquiesced.
Now, in Trump’s second term, Huffman says one “glaring embodiment of America’s tilt toward theocracy” is the ascent of House Speaker Mike Johnson, an evangelical Christian who rejects the notion of church and state separation and calls for “biblically sanctioned government”—which, Huffman translates, amounts to “enshrining Old Testament morality codes into law and policy.” Johnson not only opposes abortion but also contraception and in vitro fertilization; wants to ban same-sex marriage; supports criminal penalties against gay sex as well as gender-affirming care; and “advocates legal carve-outs for Christians to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people.”
But Huffman holds out hope that American institutions can withstand the challenges presented by Christian nationalism. Building “a pro-democracy coalition big enough to meet the scale of the threat,” he writes, will require “clear-eyed resolve” and “faith in each other.” No Prophets is a bold and enlightening contribution to that cause.