FALSE PROPHET

Steve Bannon

political strategist and Catholic activist

Few Christian-nationalist charlatans have lived as many lives as Steve Bannon. Once a media mogul at alt-right propaganda site Breitbart News, Bannon joined Donald Trump’s bandwagon and inner political circle early on. First as 2016 campaign CEO and then as White House chief strategist, he injected a dangerous strain of Christian nationalism into the new administration from the very start. 

A self-described “proud Christian Zionist,” Bannon’s attempts to build the Christian-nationalist movement have included 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.

Bannon’s solicitation of donations to build a wall along the southern border netted him federal and state mail fraud and money laundering indictments. Trump gave Bannon a federal pardon, but he remains under state indictment as of September 2022. In July 2022, he was convicted in federal court on two criminal counts of Contempt of Congress for defying the January 6 House committee.

• 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.”