30 Jan 2017 4:21 pm
President Trump’s right-hand man Steve Bannon called for Christian holy war: Now he’s on the National Security Council
Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s right-hand man, made what was essentially a call for a Christian holy war in a speech in a international conference only a few years ago.
In remarks to a 2014 conference at the Vatican, Bannon warned his Christian audience, “We’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict.”
“We are in an outright war against jihadists, Islam, Islamic fascism,” Bannon continued.
He likewise condemned “the immense secularization of the West” and the increasing secularism among millennials.
Bannon stressed that “the people in this room, and the people in the Church” must “bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the Church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting that will literally eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000 and 2,500 years.”
In his speech, Bannon articulated a view of the world as a constant conflict between the capitalist “Judeo-Christian West,” which is a benevolent force of “enlightenment,” and the malevolent forces of socialism, atheism, and Islam.
Trump’s chief strategist, who will now play a crucial role in crafting U.S. foreign policy and sit in on meetings of the National Security Council Principals Committee, has been described even by hard-line conservatives as an extremist.
Ultra-right-wing pundit Glenn Beck compared Bannon to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, a close ally of Adolf Hitler, and said the Trump campaign was “grooming Brownshirts,” in reference to Nazi paramilitaries.
According to Beck, Bannon is “quite possibly the most dangerous guy in all of American politics.”
Republican strategist John Weaver, who worked on Republican John Kasich’s 2016 presidential campaign, likewise warned that, with Bannon as Trump’s chief strategist, “The racist, fascist extreme right is represented footsteps from the Oval Office.”
(The Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party praised Trump for appointing Bannon to his top positions.)
Bannon made these holy war remarks in a speech — which has previously been reported on by BuzzFeed — at the 2014 International Conference on Human Dignity, the third annual meeting organized by the Rome-based Christian organization Dignitatis Humanae Institute.
The Dignitatis Humanae Institute is a religious group that advocates for “the active participation of the Christian faith in the public square.”
It promotes what it calls “authentic human dignity” by, in its words, “supporting Christians in public life, assisting them in presenting effective and coherent responses to increasing efforts to silence the Christian voice in the public square.”