In February 2025, Robert F Kennedy Jr began his tenure as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with an unusual message for the federal department responsible for protecting public health. America's greatest challenge, he said, was not just chronic disease but a 'spiritual malaise,' a kind of soul-sickness derived from America's moral decline.
'Spiritual and physical maladies thrive on one another,' Kennedy told HHS employees in his first address. The solution, he said, 'must begin with a spiritual question,' of personal responsibility and inward vigilance against the dark forces that would keep Americans 'sedated' and 'compliant.'
Weeks later, the White House moved to cut 20,500 jobs across the very agency tasked with protecting public health. This March, as the US faced its worst measles resurgence in 34 years, Kennedy again warned the nation of the same nebulous threat. This time, he took a more militant tone. 'Malevolent forces,' he told an audience of doctors-in-training, must be met with 'spiritual warfare,' waged through the 'sacred ritual' of eating dinner together as a family.
Now over a year into his tenure, Kennedy champions personal discipline while casting institutional science as a dark force in a cosmic struggle against the light. He has promoted pseudoscientific or unproven remedies, including vitamin A for measles, peptides for longevity, and raw milk, while sowing doubt about vaccine safety and efficacy.
Because of his granola aura as a former environmental advocate, Kennedy's invocation of the 'spiritual' can initially sound benign. Yet his repeated references to spiritual forces are more than wellness vernacular. They signal that the Christian nationalist movement that helped propel Trump into office is now reshaping the public health agency from the inside. The effect is corrosive, eroding the nation's shared epistemological reality.
A War from Within
'The warfare thing is a dog whistle to stoke Christian nationalist ideology,' says Savannah Tate, the daughter of megachurch pastor Benny Tate. Tate grew up immersed in the movement, caught between patriarchal forces and biblical literalism. She left the faith in her early 20s and now speaks publicly about her experience.
Christian nationalists argue that American law should reflect a singular Christian vision, elevating biblical law, eroding church-state separation, and hollowing out pluralism and democracy. Some in the Trump regime openly claim the label, such as Russell Vought, director of the Office of Operations and Budget and a key author of Project 2025.
Terms such as 'spiritual warfare' and 'spiritual attack,' Tate says, are central to the movement's vocabulary, leveraging fear and disinformation. Maga Christian nationalism is dominionist, seeking to place its militant version of Christian authority over institutions, culture, and government.
Kennedy's speech reflects a broader pattern of strident religious language moving into the highest levels of government. Trump described his second term as 'a war from within' against 'anti-Christian bias.' JD Vance has called Christianity 'America's creed.' Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth considers America a 'Christian nation in our DNA,' and House Speaker Mike Johnson has backed Christian nationalist aims to roll back civil rights.
'I do think the term Christofascist is appropriate theologically as well as politically,' says the Rev Dr Gary Gunderson, a Baptist minister and professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Christian nationalism is not a 'normal faith,' he says; believers are less concerned with Jesus's teachings than exercising power from the highest levels down to local counties.
'What we're seeing in the US today is the attempt to use religion and Christian nationalism to erode a scientifically based social contract of trust between government and the people, and replace it with a more authoritarian relationship,' Gunderson adds.
'We Want the Bureaucrats to Be Traumatically Affected'
Inside the HHS, officials are waging war against scientific consensus and individual experts. Calley Means, Kennedy's senior adviser, took to X to write that Trump and RFK were 'quite literally fighting demonic forces to return the CDC to real science.' He targeted Demetre Daskalakis, then director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, calling him a 'proud satanist' because of a pentagram tattoo.
Means knew what he was doing. 'We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,' as Vought put it in a private 2023 speech. Daskalakis, who resigned in protest, is not a satanist; he was raised Greek Orthodox and has a larger tattoo of Jesus. 'One of the things that the secretary of health says frequently is that trusting experts is a feature of religion, not a feature of democracy,' Daskalakis says. 'In fact, what we're seeing is a cultish religiosity.'
Kennedy's speech cultivates the perception that skepticism toward medical experts equates to spiritual freedom. Fatima-Zahra Aklalouch, a linguistics researcher, says Kennedy starts with a 'basic moral intuition that naturalness is good and unnaturalness leads to evil,' framing institutions as corrupt. This 'meshes very easily' with Christian nationalist goals.
While Kennedy and Means prime the public with spiritual rationale, Vought controls funding and does the demolition. According to watchdog Grant Witness, Vought has slashed $518 million from NIH research grants, $698 million from the National Science Foundation, $6.9 billion from CDC programs, and $28 billion from the EPA. In a proposed 2027 budget, he seeks to cut HHS by $16 billion from 2026.
The consequences are visible. Measles infected over 2,000 Americans in 2025 and over 1,700 in 2026. Funds to stem a Texas outbreak weren't available until after two children died. Driving these cuts is a neoliberal-theological fusion: dismantling public institutions is seen as morally ordained to combat demonic evils.
The Center for Renewing America described the Affordable Care Act as 'cancerous' and Medicaid as a 'weaponized monstrosity.' Research funding for Alzheimer's, mental health, diabetes, and cancer has been cut drastically. Reproductive healthcare is being dismantled, LGBTQ+ people erased from federal policy, and EPA authority stripped away.
'The job of public health is about creating health equity,' says Daskalakis. 'If equity is something they don't agree with, it means they either don't understand the importance of that work, or it is somehow contrary to their mission.'
Prophets and Profiteers
When health fails and no help is available, it's tempting to turn to God, supplements, or both. The sicker Americans become, the more lucrative the alternative wellness space grows. The 'Seven Mountains Mandate' outlines how Christian nationalists plan to occupy top roles across public life, including health.
'Christian nationalists destroy a system to create a vacuum,' says Matthew Boedy, author of a book on the mandate. 'Then they say, OK, our friends who are selling this product can move right in to fill that vacuum.'
Kennedy sits at the center of a financial web. He has earned over $2.4 million in referral fees from a law firm litigating against pharmaceutical companies. At his confirmation hearing, he refused to stop these payments. He also registered 'Make America Healthy Again' as a trademark, reportedly earning about $100,000 before transferring it to an LLC.
Calley Means co-founded Truemed, a platform helping people use HSAs to purchase unscientific wellness products. Means held between $25 and $50 million in Truemed stock while advising Kennedy. The more Kennedy and Means destabilize trust in mainstream science, the more their allies financially benefit.
The people dragging America's public health system toward a new dark age are not demonic. They are morally bankrupt and high on theocratic self-righteousness. Christian nationalist language gives calculated government neglect the sheen of providence. 'God chose Ethan for a reason,' one South Carolina mother told the Independent after her son was paralyzed by measles encephalitis. 'There will be a miracle,' she believes.
