Christian Nationalists Pursue State Capture — and North Carolina Is Exhibit A

The Christian right has a new charismatic leader: Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina, who is running a bone-chilling campaign to become the state’s next governor. Most recently, he made news when he delivered a speech in a church saying some people who are “evil” or “wicked” might just “need killing.”

North Carolina is among the southern states that should be regarded as canaries in the coal mine for “state capture”: the process by which the far right is wresting control of U.S. politics in spite of representing a minority of the population’s views.

State capture is usually discussed in the context of international politics and countries with threatened democracies. Scholar Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett defines it as “a type of systematic corruption whereby narrow interest groups take control of the institutions and processes through which public policy is made, directing public policy away from the public interest and instead shaping it to serve their own interests.”

Right-wing state capture is increasingly a threat within U.S. states, which are systematically being taken over by Christian right leaders and their corporate and wealthy supporters through a combination of gerrymandering, voter suppression, organized and coordinated propaganda, and privatization. Public institutions that often serve as venues for free debate and social change — such as libraries and universities — are under aggressive attack.

North Carolina has been among the testing grounds for this approach, alongside states like Texas, Florida, South Carolina and Oklahoma. (just to name a few). Now Mark Robinson poses an imminent threat of pushing the state’s undemocratic policies to a new level.

Robinson came onto the political scene relatively recently, catching people’s attention with a fiery speech he gave on gun rights at a Greensboro City Council meeting in 2018. Since then, he’s been a splashy figure with a fast rise to fame: He is a Black arch-conservative known for calling education about sexuality and gender identity “filth,” calling Muslims “invaders,” tweeting about Holocaust denial and promoting anti-Jewish tropes, and spreading coronavirus conspiracy theories. Robinson, a former factory worker and army reservist, ran a successful campaign to become North Carolina’s first Black lieutenant governor in 2020.

Robinson is in some ways low-hanging fruit for liberal pundits, and an example of what our politics in 2024 have boiled down to: inflammatory, viral and uncompromising. But more important than his attitude and style is Robinson’s actual policy and platform. The problem is not just his words, but the actions they lead to: state capture dressed up as righteous Christian populism.

Robinson’s vision for North Carolina is a kind of Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale: He dreams of Christian supremacy, openly enforced by both police and armed civilians. This brand of Christian nationalism would mean rolling back abortion rights even further; defunding public schools and severely restricting all school-based discussions of race, gender and sexuality; preventing trans people’s access to health care; deporting immigrants; increasing policing; and even taking up arms against what he describes as anti-patriotic and anti-Christian forces.

Robinson may seem like a loose cannon, but with him as a spokesman, the state’s Republican Party is in fact pursuing most of these goals systematically. After the Dobbs decision in the Supreme Court, the Republican-run legislature passed a ban on abortions after 12 weeks, overriding current Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto with their powerful supermajority vote. If Robinson is elected, he plans to further those goals: He supports a total ban on abortions except in cases of rape, incest or endangering the life of the parent.

“Abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers,” he said in a video that his Democratic opponent Josh Stein has made a key part of his campaign ads. “It’s about killing a child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.”

Just last year, Robinson also supported a “Parents’ Bill of Rights” passed by the North Carolina legislature that restricts young people from accessing sexual and gender identity education or changing their names or pronouns without parental consent, and makes it impossible for trans youth to get health care or even mental health support at school if their parents do not approve. Teachers essentially become mandatory reporters of children’s trans identities, a prospect that has both LGBTQ advocates and educators concerned.

This bill came on the heels of a performative attack on public education that Robinson spearheaded over several years. Robinson led a task force that claimed to be investigating “indoctrination” in schools — he called it the Fairness and Accountability in the Classroom for Teachers and Students (F.A.C.T.S.) Task Force. After a brief period of “investigation” with no public meetings or even minutes regarding the process, the task force produced a report baselessly claiming that kids in the state were being indoctrinated with “critical race theory” and exposed to so-called white shaming and sexualization of kids, among other things.

In reality, the report cherry-picked submissions from conservative parents and teachers whose complaints included teachers posting Black Lives Matter signs, children being required to learn about racial discrimination and racial equity, counselors being given instructions on how to support trans kids, and even — gasp — a teacher telling his fifth-graders about having “two daddy’s and two mommy’s [sic] and how that was okay.”

“There’s no reason anybody anyplace in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth,” Robinson quipped on a church stage the year the task force launched.

Education advocates are angry about this infringement on their freedom to teach and support students as they see fit — and equally concerned about the GOP’s underlying agenda of increasing school vouchers and offering them to wealthy families while shifting funding out of the public school system. A bill that would shift hundreds of millions in school funds from public schools to vouchers is currently stalled in the state legislature.

While right-wing politicians are shrouding all these actions in preachy morality, their long-term impact is actually to defund public schools, creating — over time — an ill-informed and disempowered electorate with little power.

Meanwhile, the wealthy whites and business interests who back people like Robinson use the state’s limited regulation, low taxation and rock-bottom minimum wages to line their own pockets. Special interest groups like police unions and privately run charter schools gain both political power and state funds, as in a recent move in which UNC Chapel Hill defunded DEI programs and shifted that money to police.

All of this aligns with the vision Robinson paints for the state and ultimately the country: We should all live in a place where police and the military have ultimate power, where civilians are also armed and trained to shoot, where schools are run with Christian moral values, and where women, trans and queer people are prevented from bodily autonomy.

And, while aggressive gerrymandering and restrictions on voting rights play a role, a bloc of voters does appear to be persuaded that the Christian right represents their cultural and moral interests. Perhaps an even large bloc of state residents simply believes we are powerless to stop them.

Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson tends toward the flashy and apocalyptic, implying that “Christian patriots” ought to take up arms. “Our government is out of control,” he told a crowd in Raleigh. “But I can assure you, just as the barefooted patriots who stood on Bunker Hill got the British under control, the angry and indignant patriots of the United States and North Carolina are going to rein this government back in control.”

Pro-democracy activists in North Carolina are rightly pointing out that the state provides a blueprint for state capture by the Christian right. This process is already well underway in North Carolina, and a Robinson win would only accelerate it. The viability of his current campaign should be a warning to all who care to protect both states and the nation from a future in which more and more of us live under regimes of Christian supremacy.