How Montana Became a Testing Ground for Christian Nationalism

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The fifth season of the hit show “Yellowstone” premiered on the Sunday after the midterm elections, with Kevin Costner’s character, the rancher John Dutton, assuming Montana’s governorship. “This was never my plan,” he says, wearing a cowboy hat outside the State Capitol building in Helena. Dutton has reluctantly entered politics in part to stop an influx of rich outsiders he believes are transforming his home. In the last three years, Montana has become the second-fastest-growing state in the nation, largely because of the arrival of wealthy transplants. Unlike Dutton, many influential figures in the state’s real Republican Party have welcomed them, sometimes calling them “political refugees” fleeing blue states. Montana’s actual governor, the Republican Greg Gianforte, is himself a multimillionaire who was raised in Pennsylvania. Since assuming office in 2021, Gianforte has presided over this period of demographic change and economic growth, which has coincided with a hard shift to the right in state politics.

Montana has a tradition of ticket-splitting and has long been one of the most politically independent states in the union, resisting the kind of single-party rule that has flourished in the neighboring states of Idaho and Wyoming. But in recent years, Republicans have managed to secure an ironclad grasp over state government, and the religious right is ascendant. “We’re a country founded on Christian ideals,” Austin Knudsen, the attorney general, told me. “That’s what’s made us the country that we are.” In 2021, the Montana Legislature passed a bill banning transgender athletes on sports teams at public schools and universities, an increased tax credit benefiting private Christian schools and numerous anti-abortion laws. “They’re trying to convert the state,” said Whitney Williams, who ran for governor as a Democrat in 2020. When the state G.O.P. gathered in Billings last July to formalize its platform, Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, told those assembled that Montana was “a symbol for the nation.”

The Montana Republican Party has a few factions, among them free-market advocates and moderates willing to cross party lines. But the dominant voice is that of the far right. At the convention in Billings, that group was well represented. In attendance was the party treasurer, Derek Skees, who has called Montana’s Constitution a “socialist rag”; a state representative named John Fuller, who published an opinion column in The Flathead Beacon earlier that year declaring that democracy had “failed as miserably as socialism”; and a public-service commissioner, Randy Pinocci, who told me that he “hunt[s] RINOs” (Republicans in name only). During the convention, a group of delegates led an ultimately unsuccessful push to declare the 2020 presidential election fraudulent. (In Montana, such efforts occupy a curious logical space: Citizen groups sympathetic to Donald Trump have repeatedly demanded recounts of districts he won handily.)

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Gianforte, a bald, resolute man of 61, made only a brief appearance in Billings. He is an evangelical Christian and former entrepreneur who sold his cloud-based customer-service company, RightNow Technologies, to Oracle for $1.5 billion in 2012, before entering politics. For more than 25 years, Gianforte has belonged to a church in Bozeman adhering to a literal interpretation of the Bible that rejects evolution and considers homosexuality a sin. He doesn’t often discuss his faith, but his donations reflect a clear set of religious values. Through their foundation, Gianforte and his wife, Susan, have contributed to an organization that funds scholarships at private schools, many of which are Christian; a Montana fossil museum that challenges evolution; and Focus on the Family, a Christian organization that vehemently opposes gay rights. From 2013 to 2019, the Gianforte Family Charitable Trust gave $300,000 to the Alliance Defending Freedom, a global nonprofit dedicated to protecting religious liberty; its lawyers have represented several Christian business owners who refused to serve same-sex couples. (Through a spokesperson, Gianforte declined interview requests.)

https://www.yahoo.com/news/montana-became-testing-ground-christian-155720362.html