When Robert F Kennedy Jr took over the Department of Health and Human Services in February 2025, his first message to federal employees was unusual for a health secretary. America's real crisis, he told them, was not disease but spiritual malaise. Within weeks, the same administration moved to slash 20,500 jobs from the agency itself.
Kennedy's language of spiritual forces and cosmic struggle sounded like wellness culture at first blush. But experts tracking Christian nationalist movements saw something more deliberate. His repeated invocations of "spiritual warfare" and "malevolent forces" were, in fact, signals that a coordinated ideological project was reshaping public health from inside the government.
The Christian nationalist movement that propelled Trump into office is now operational across the federal health apparatus. Senior officials openly use the movement's vocabulary. Russell Vought, director of the office of operations and budget, designed the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, which functions as a Christian nationalist governance blueprint. Trump himself described his second term as "a war from within" against "anti-Christian bias." Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth belongs to a Christian nationalist church and bears its symbolic tattoo.
These officials are not shy about their goals. The movement seeks to place its vision of Christian authority over institutions, culture, and government. It views institutional science as a threat to Christian supremacy. And it is willing to dismantle the structures that protect public health to achieve those aims.
Inside HHS, the strategy is two-pronged. Kennedy and his advisers prime the public with spiritual rationales for distrusting medical experts. Meanwhile, Vought controls the funding. He has slashed $518 million from NIH research grants, $698 million from the National Science Foundation, $6.9 billion from CDC public health programs, and $28 billion from the Environmental Protection Agency. The administration fired the entire board of the National Science Foundation in April and is seeking to cut the HHS budget by $16 billion.
The rhetoric targeting individual scientists reveals the movement's intensity. Calley Means, Kennedy's senior adviser and the architect of the Kennedy-Trump alliance, attacked epidemiologist Demetre Daskalakis on social media, calling him a "proud satanist" because of a pentagram tattoo (which Daskalakis said marked his overcoming of childhood bullying). Daskalakis was raised Greek Orthodox and has a larger Jesus tattoo. He resigned in protest last summer after Kennedy unilaterally fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
Russell Vought, in a 2023 private speech, articulated the strategy plainly: "We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains."
The consequences are already measurable. The measles resurgence is the worst in 34 years, with more than 2,000 cases in 2025 and over 1,700 so far in 2026. Last August, the CDC lacked funds to respond to a measles outbreak in Texas until after two children died. Kennedy has acknowledged under Senate questioning that vaccination might have saved those children's lives. The administration has also allowed states to expand religious vaccine exemptions.
Funds cut from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration have been redirected toward faith-based addiction programs, reflecting Kennedy's framing of addiction as rooted in spiritual malaise. The HHS has slashed $389 million from mental health and addiction services overall.
Savannah Tate, who grew up in the Christian nationalist movement and now holds a doctorate in psychology, describes the ideology as dominionist: it seeks militant Christian authority over all spheres of life. The language of spiritual warfare is central to its toolkit, invoking fear and binary thinking to mobilize believers against perceived enemies.
Rev Dr Gary Gunderson, a Baptist minister and public health science professor at Wake Forest University, calls the current regime "Christofascist." He argues that what distinguishes Christian nationalism from traditional Catholic or mainline Protestant faith is its aggressive political vision and its hostility to the scientific basis of democratic institutions. "What we're seeing is an attempt to erode a scientifically based social contract of trust between government and the people, and replace it with a more authoritarian relationship," he said.
Scholars who study the movement note that science represents an alternative source of moral authority beyond divine revelation. Public health, which applies science to benefit all races, faiths, and genders equally, fundamentally clashes with the hierarchical moral order Christian nationalists envision, in which Christians hold special divine protection.
Kennedy has long served as a bridge from wellness culture into more conservative Christian nationalist views. This April, Trump withdrew Casey Means's surgeon general nomination over vaccine concerns, replacing her with Fox News radiologist Nicole Saphier, whose religious views are more mainstream and whose faith was tested through teenage pregnancy.
Kennedy's rhetorical strategy, according to linguistics researcher Fatima-Zahra Aklalouch, frames naturalness as good and unnaturalness as evil, casting institutions and their workers as morally corrupted. This frames skepticism toward medical experts as spiritual freedom, a framing that aligns seamlessly with Christian nationalist objectives.
The dismantling is driven by what scholars describe as a neoliberal-theological fusion: the belief that destroying public institutions is not just fiscally sound but morally necessary to combat demonic forces. The Center for Renewing America, Vought's ultraconservative think tank, published a healthcare blueprint this year embedding this theology into policy.
Author James Rodriguez: "This is not a policy dispute about tax rates or regulatory efficiency. It's a coordinated assault on the institutions that protect public health, dressed in the language of spiritual struggle and dressed up by officials who openly name themselves after the movement driving it."
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