A reporter for Politico is firing back at critics she says are taking her out of context based on comments she made bashing “Christian nationalists.”
Appearing on MSNBC Thursday, Politico national investigative correspondent Heidi Przybyla was asked about the “infusion of Christian nationalism” in Congress following the appointment of Louisiana representative and devout Christian Mike Johnson as House Speaker.
“The base of the Republican Party has shifted, right?” Przybyla began. “Remember when Trump ran in 2016, a lot of the mainline evangelicals wanted nothing to do with the divorced, you know, real estate mogul who had cheated on his wife with a porn star and all of that. So what happened was he was surrounded by this more extremist element. They’re gonna hear words like ‘Christian nationalism,’ like the ‘New Apostolic reformation.’ These are groups that you should get very, very schooled on because they have a lot of power in Trump’s circle.”
“The thing that unites them as Christian nationalists – not Christians, by the way, because Christian nationalist is very different – is that they believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority. They don’t come from Congress, they don’t come from the Supreme Court. They come from God. The problem with that is that they are determining- man, men, it is men are determining what God is telling them,” Przybyla said.
“And in the past, that so-called natural law is, you know, it’s a pillar of Catholicism, for instance. It has been used for good in social justice campaigns, Martin Luther King evoked it in talking about civil rights, but now you have an extremist element of conservative Christians who say that this applies specifically to issues including abortion, gay marriage, and it’s going much further than that,” she continued, before citing the Alabama Supreme Court ruling on IVF.
A portion of Przybyla’s comments, especially the ones talking about how Christian nationalists believe rights come from God not government, went viral on Friday with many critics accusing her of attacking Christians and being ignorant of basic American civics.
The Declaration of Independence cites “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”