FALSE PROPHET

Steve Bannon

political strategist and Catholic activist

Few Christian-nationalist charlatans have lived as many lives as Steve Bannon, the longtime Trump advisor and strategist who is currently serving a four-month federal prison sentence on contempt charges related to his role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection. Bannon is considered an ally of white nationalists and is one of the many Christian nationalists behind Project 2025, an extreme authoritarian policy agenda developed in anticipation of Trump's return to the White House. A self-proclaimed “Christian-zionist,” Bannon suggested that American Jews must “hard weld with Christian nationalism” to protect themselves and Israel. 

Once a media mogul at alt-right propaganda site Breitbart News, Bannon joined Donald Trump’s bandwagon and inner political circle in 2016. His attempts to seize power and build the Christian-nationalist movement extend beyond his previous role in the Trump Administration, including leading the effort to overturn election results, using smartphone location data to target Catholic church attendees for conservative organization CatholicVote, working to start a “gladiator school for culture warriors” at an 800-year-old monastery in Rome, and partnering with far-right Catholic activists like Milo Yiannopolus to undermine Pope Francis and “transform the Catholic Church” in a conservative direction. His show “War Room” often hosts conservative Christian activists like Father Frank Pavone and fellow False Prophet Sean Feucht. 

• In an August 10 appearance on a World Prayer Network prayer call, Bannon told conservative Christians: “What we need is poll workers. … If we want to win, your congregations have to be in the counting rooms and prepared to have those knife fights.”

• Says the West is founded on so-called “Judeo-Christian values,” a hallmark phrase of Christian nationalism not coined until well after the U.S. was founded

• Speaking to a Vatican conference on poverty hosted by a conservative religious think tank, Bannon warned: “We're at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which, if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs, but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting, will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years.”

• Bannon’s CPAC 2022 speech was tinged with an implied threat of political violence and rife with Christian nationalism, including calling progressives “radical, cultural Marxists” and “groomers” who “want to destroy the Republic” and declaring that conservatives must pursue absolute victory over “power-mad and lawless” opponents, asserting: “There can be no half measures anymore” for “This is war, this is war.”