The Grim Reaper of Christian Nationalist Fascism

Donald Trump released a video showing Russ Vought as the Grim Reaper of the Christian Bible Book of Revelation.

The image refers to the Christian prophecy of an angel of God who will torture non-Christians with fire in front of Jesus, and then crush their bodies until their blood flows into a lake as large as Lake Ontario.

This weekend, Donald Trump released a bizarre AI generated video through social media. In this video, Donald Trump himself is shown in a black hooded robe, beating on a cowbell while two skeletons play the guitar and drums behind him. The macabre trio is in Washington DC, in front of the U.S. Congress.

Many Americans were alarmed that the President of the United States would release such a sinister video during a time of high political tensions. What has not been so widely acknowledged is the violent Christian threat embedded in the video’s ominous imagery.

Part of the video’s message is not religious, to be sure. It comes in the context of the Republican Party’s decision to shut down the federal government of the USA. Donald Trump has threatened that he will give Russ Vought, his Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, free reign to destroy huge parts of the American government by withholding funds already allocated by Congress, and by firing massive numbers of government workers.

That destruction itself is an outrageous assault against America’s constitutional democracy. The Constitution gives Congress, not the President’s Executive Branch, the power to decide which government programs will be funded and how they will be run. The President’s job is supposed to be merely to execute the direction set by Congress. Trump’s decision to set Russ Vought loose to destroy large parts of the American government violates the highest law of the nation.

There’s more to this video than that, unfortunately. Donald Trump and Russ Vought share a lifelong hatred of the democracy embodied in the American government, but more than that, they share a Christian Nationalist determination to smash American democracy and replace it with a brutal Christian theocracy.

The cruelty of this vision is clear in the visual tone of the video, but its Christian Nationalism and biblical foundations are spelled out in the words that celebrate Russ Vought as The Reaper.

The Grim Reaper is a figure in Christian mythology that comes from the Bible’s violent final portion, the Book of Revelation. It’s this book, not the Gospels, that American Christian Nationalists worship as the central message of the Bible. It is a revenge fantasy, a culmination of the Christian Bible in which Jesus decides that peace and love are foolish, pursuing a campaign of planet-wrecking bloody revenge and heartless authoritarian rule, smashing his opponents with a rod of iron.

The Grim Reaper is a harvester, not of grain, but of human beings, cutting them down as if they are bad fruit. The Book of Revelation chapter 14 depicts non-Christians metaphorically as bad fruit, over-ripe grapes that are good for nothing but being crushed and fermented into a bloody beverage drunk by a furious Jesus. This threat of violence at the end of the Bible starts with a description of Jesus as the Son of Man, and the Lamb of God, watching while the angels of God persecute non-Christians.

I looked and there was a white cloud, and sitting on the cloud one who looked like the Son of Man, with a gold crown on his head and a sharp sickle in his hand. Another angel came out of the temple, crying out in a loud voice to the one sitting on the cloud, “Use your sickle and reap the harvest, for the time to reap has come, because the earth’s harvest is fully ripe.” The one who was sitting on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth, and the earth was harvested.

Then another angel came out of the temple in heaven who also had a sharp sickle. Then another angel from the altar was in charge of the fire, and cried out in a loud voice to the one who had the sharp sickle, “Use your sharp sickle and cut the clusters from the earth’s vines, for its grapes are ripe.” So the angel swung his sickle over the Earth and cut the Earth’s vintage. He threw it into the great wine press of God’s fury. The wine press was trodden outside the city and blood poured out of the wine press to the height of a horse’s bridle for two hundred miles.

The Grim Reaper is not servant of Satan. The Grim Reaper is an angel of God working by the side of Jesus to torment and kill human beings, wielding a sickle to cut people down before they are smashed to bits.

Donald Trump’s threatening video states explicitly that “Russ Vought is the reaper,” showing him as a wicked angel of God with a scythe, a kind of sickle, as described in the Christian Bible. The video then shows Russ Vought standing with the sickle in an office of terrified federal government workers, ready to cut them down under the orders of the Christian god.

What will happen to these government workers before they are crushed in the wine press of the wrath of God? The Book of Revelation says that they will be tortured in front of Jesus, who will watch them burn and do nothing to stop their agony.

“They shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out unmixed into the cup of His indignation and shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb, and the smoke of their torment ascends up for ever and ever; and they have no rest day or night.”

Accordingly, Donald Trump’s video shows federal government workers after they have been tortured by Jesus, Russ Vought and his other angels, stumbling through the streets of Washington DC at night in agony. It’s insanely sadistic, but the President of the United States is making a show of the way that he intends to torture American workers, and do it in the name of Jesus.

Russ Vought has already stated that this brutal vision of the apocalyptic, bloody destruction of American democracy is his goal. Last year, he declared that he wanted to use the power of the federal government to make the United States into an exclusively Christian nation. Vought said the following:

“I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation, and my viewpoint is mostly that I would be probably Christian Nationism. That’s pretty close to Christian Nationalism. Can we, if we’re going to have legal immigration, can we get actually get people who believe in Christianity? Is that something, or do we have to have, you know, are we not allowed to ask questions about sharia law?… In an ideal world, I think we could save the country in the sense of the largest deportation in history.”

Here, in Russ Vought’s own voice, you hear how far Donald Trump’s fascist mass deportations are intended to go. According to Russ Vought, it won’t be just non-citizens or criminals who are rounded up and put into prison camps and shipped overseas. Anyone who isn’t a Christian will be targeted as well. Russ Vought plans to make Christianity a requirement for citizenship in the United States.

Mass roundups of non-Christian Americans have not yet begun, but at the very same time that Trump and Vought have shut down the American federal government, Trump has sent the American military into many American cities, where they are helping masked ICE agents to break into people’s homes, grabbing large numbers of people, including American citizens. A couple days ago in Chicago, ICE agents even handcuffed large numbers of naked children and dragged them out into the street before sending them to prison. A totalitarian secret police that was once unthinkable in America is now roaming the streets, looking for people to victimize.

Donald Trump’s National Security Policy Memo 7 (NSPM-7) specifically categorizes anyone who fails to conform with the beliefs of Christianity as a “terrorist” who can be imprisoned by the US federal government. It’s an obvious, flagrant violation of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution, but then, Donald Trump, Russ Vought, and their ICE stormtroopers have made it plain that they don’t believe they need to follow the Constitution any longer.

Under Donald Trump and Russ Vought, anything goes. So, when they release a video that depicts a Christian Nationalist fantasy of enacting the bloody religious persecution of the Bible’s Book of Revelation, it would be foolish to think that it’s all just a sick joke.