While Graham admitted that those who stormed the Capitol “were wrong,” he contended that the “vast majority of the million or so people who went to Washington that day were patriots who love this country and were there to take a stand for our nation.”
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was recently given a permanent ban from Twitter for spreading misinformation but who is nevertheless quite popular among evangelicals, has said of the riot, “They spent all day convincing me that it wasn’t Antifa, and I wouldn’t believe it. Because I was like, ‘Trump supporters don’t do things like this.’”
“We’re ashamed of nothing,” said Representative Matt Gaetz, who is holding a press conference on the one year anniversary of the Capitol attack. “We’re proud of the work we did on January 6.”
“And we’re actually going to go walk the grounds that patriotic Americans walked from the White House to the Capitol who had no intent of breaking the law or doing violence,” Gaetz said.
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Metaxas, Gaetz, and Greene are among the many Trump supporters who still contend that the 2020 election results were fraudulent and that the presidency was stolen from Donald Trump, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Further, they represent the sentiments of many American evangelicals.
Notably, evangelical support for the former president has remained strong in the past year, despite his continued support for falsehoods and conspiracy theories, and even his condoning of calls to execute Pence on January 6. Recently, Trump was even welcomed into a Texas megachurch to offer a Christmas greeting turned political rally.
Nevertheless, not every evangelical is on board. In fact, there are many who are deeply concerned about the mixture of Christian symbolism and right wing conspiracy theories that led to violence a year ago and may do so again in the future.
Russell Moore, who serves as director of the Public Theology Project at Christianity Today, recently reflected on how the presence of Christian symbolism at the Capitol riot and the ongoing involvement of white evangelicals in propagating conspiracy theories is evidence of a “paganizing church.”
“Some might dismiss the Christian symbols at the insurrection—not only signs but prayers ‘in Jesus’ name’ right next to a horn-wearing shaman in the well of the evacuated US Senate,” Moore wrote. “And yet, survey after survey shows that alarming numbers of white evangelicals believe the lie behind the attack—that the 2020 election had been stolen by a vast left-wing conspiracy that somehow included the conservative Republican governors and election officials in Georgia and Arizona.”
