You keep citing the 34% Christian Nationalist/Dominionist figure, but the source you're using is an advocacy group with an agenda. That's not immediately disqualifying, but it's entirely reasonable for skeptics to want to know how they did their research, and defined their terms, especially for something as nebulous as Christian Nationalism, which according to the first few paragraph's of its Wikipedia article, covers everything from borderline theocracy to blue laws to nativity displays.
So how did they arrive at this figure, well according to the link you cited:
Mikey Weinstein
Our best estimate here at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. We’re the only organization that focuses with laser-like precision on the military. Is that we’ve got somewhere and we talked about it last time. Between 28% and 34%, maybe 35% of the military that would qualify as Christian nationalists in that their belief is that they can propagate the Great Commission again. Mark 16:15, Matthew 28:19. Jesus saying, get everybody and that’s your prime directive, not love the Lord, your God and the Golden Rule. Get everybody in. [crosstalk 00:31:34]
Paul Jay
How do you get to that number, though? 25%-30%.
Mikey Weinstein
Just through our experience, we’ve been doing this for the better part of 20 years, and we see it everywhere. So you start just like if you ask a dentist, what is it like when you do a root canal? If you get someone right out of dental school, there’ll be a small sample. But we’ve been doing the law of big numbers. I know the names of the glitterati of people that you’ve interviewed. You’re an excellent interviewer. I’m not buttering you up. You probably weren’t this good when you started years ago, but it’s the experience of doing it over and over again.
I had to have some emergency surgery a week ago, and I asked the surgeon who was about to do the procedure. How many times have you done this? He said I started when I was 25 years old. I’m 57 now. So I’ve been doing this for 22 years. I’ve done it a few thousand times. So when people look at us, when I tell you that we’ve got over 77,000 hamburgers served here, if we were McDonald’s clients that were helping and that we’ve helped all the way through, you start seeing where the trends are.
We believe that about the military chaplaincy are evangelicals. That again means that they follow the Great Commission, not the Great Commandment. About a third of those, roughly a third of the chaplains, would be considered Christian nationalists. And whether there’s a direct relationship or not. I’m just telling you, we are subject matter experts. I’ve been hired by the Pentagon before to give my expertise. And when they were trying to put together a spiritual fitness test, which, of course, would be a violation of clause 3, Article 6 of the Constitution, which states quite clearly, we will never have a religious test for any position in the federal government.
I kept telling them that. And I said you can go put lipstick on a pig and call it something else. But the bottom line is now. The reason Milley was terrified is, you see that he reports to someone called the commander in chief. And that is Donald Trump. I believe that Donald Trump is mentally ill. I believe that he is the same. Exactly the same he is now as he was when he was two or three, not just petulant, mentally ill. He’s a complete coward. He’s a very stupid man, but he’s been enabled his entire life.
The problem is the Daisy chain. I think we might have talked about. It goes like this. You stopped teaching civics in high school, and my sophomore civics teacher was a retired lawyer named Mr. Gerrard. It was a rite of passage. Poor education breeds ignorance, which gives rise to fear, which catalyzes hate, which gives birth to bigotry and prejudice, which leads to blood in the streets. We are already seeing blood in the streets.
I’m not trying to be a naysayer. I’m just trying to say that if we’re going to save this country and this means that progressives, if you want to coordinate progressives, Conservatives, you get them in a room together and they work like hand in glove, like the Christian nationalism, a nationalist handling Trump and his folks, you get a bunch of Progressives in a room together and they’ll try to Peck each other’s eyes out with a pencil.
I mean, I love Michelle Obama, but when she says, when they go low, we go high. No, Michelle, no. When they go low, we have to go low to fight them there. Otherwise, we’re going to lose. I couldn’t believe that. I lived long enough the other day. Maybe you saw it where Karl Rove was calling out Trump and his people. Karl Rove is barely almost Homosapien.
No poll, no study, just the intuition of an activist mixed into a rambling non-answer about his methods. As BRTD says it sounds like he pulled his numbers from his arse.