Doug Mastriano’s shock video on God and Jan. 6 | Will Bunch Newsletter

Was it political genius or dumb sexism that caused U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman to schedule his big Women for Fetterman rally in Montgomery County at roughly the exact moment the 2022 Eagles season was kicking off? Genius, apparently, as 3,000 folks — mostly, but not all, female — packed the house Sunday and roared when the pro-abortion-rights Democrat billed himself “John Fetterwoman.”

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up to receive this newsletter weekly at inquirer.com/bunch, and we promise we’ll never interrupt you when the Birds are on.

Did you notice we have a slightly new look? We’ve updated our reading experience to make it better for you. Let us know your thoughts by replying to this email. We appreciate the feedback!

State Sen. Doug Mastriano acted shocked and even hurt last year when the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker journalist Eliza Griswold wrote an in-depth profile of the Republican who would be Pennsylvania’s 48th governor and asked him whether he was a part of the Christian Nationalist movement — which wants to make its interpretation of God the driving force in governing the United States.

“Is this a term you fabricated?” Mastriano wrote back. “What does it mean and where have I indicated that I am a Christian Nationalist?”

A pretty good indication of Mastriano’s stance on church and state came on Dec, 30, 2020 — just over one week before the Capitol Hill insurrection where the lawmaker reportedly crossed police lines — when he made a case for God and his earthly servants to keep election loser Donald Trump in the White House. It happened in a Zoom meeting where Mastriano spoke to mostly far-right religious leaders while seated in front of a Revolutionary War flag with a green pine tree and the slogan, “An Appeal to Heaven.”

“You don’t have a flag like that unless you know what it means,” Bruce Wilson — the Massachusetts-based researcher of the Christian Right in American politics who unearthed the 2020 Mastriano video and shared it this weekend with Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson — told me on Monday. He said the Pine Tree Flag flown by members of the U.S. Navy in the American Revolution was established as a main symbol of the New Apostolic Reformation — a loosely knit network of influential Christian clerics and churchgoers seen as the vanguard of the Christian Nationalist movement — by its leading apostle, a pastor named “Dutch” Sheets.

Mastriano’s symbolism that day is alarming, but its tone was surpassed by the dark words of the future GOP gubernatorial hopeful. He cited a divine right and obligation for Congress and citizens to keep Donald Trump in power that winter, with no regard for the earthly realities that Democrat Joe Biden received 7 million more votes and handily won the Electoral College.

“We know we overcome Satan by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony and not loving our lives unto death,” Mastriano said near the start of a short, rapid-fire invocation on that pre-Jan. 6 Zoom call, part of a series of meetings that had been organized by leading Christian Nationalist minister Jim Garlow and were called a “Global Prayer for Election Integrity.”

Regarding the looming events at the Capitol, the retired Army colonel said, “I pray that … we’ll seize the power that we had given to us by the Constitution, and as well by You, providentially. I pray for the leaders also in the federal government, God, on the Sixth of January that they will rise up with boldness.”

It’s not news at this point that Mastriano — despite running to lead the state where America’s Founders laid out a revolutionary vision of separating church from state — mixes God and his extreme-right politics as casually as a Philadelphian lathers spicy mustard on a soft pretzel. His campaign rallies feature invocations from holy rollers like self-proclaimed prophet Julie Green, who foresees a Mastriano victory that will cleanse Pennsylvania — when she’s not making other claims like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “loves to drink the little children’s blood.”

But experts on the rise of Christian fundamentalism in modern Republican politics say the growing evidence that Mastriano has forged close ties with the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, movement — despite his ridiculous denials — should take on special significance for Pennsylvania voters. That’s because the increasingly visible spiritual and political leaders of NAR are clear-eyed in their focus on a government that would be dominated by the word of God and not the will of the people — or what we would call a democracy.

The view by Mastriano’s key backers and, apparently, the candidate himself, that Christian ideas and values should rule our political actions in Washington and Harrisburg looms large over his position in favor of an extreme ban on abortion, on his education policies that would undermine our public schools to give families cash they could spend on religious classrooms, and his view that a God-inspired government overrides earthly technicalities like who gets the most votes.

The researcher Wilson noted that Mastriano’s December 2020 Zoom monologue was larded with references that serve almost as dog whistles to the Christian Nationalists involved with NAR, such as a comment “that we will seize our Esther and Gideon moments.” He said Mastriano often invokes Gideon, who in the Bible takes on a massive army with just 300 men.

“Mastriano thinks he is a latter-day Gideon against impossible odds in the race for governor,” said Wilson, noting the candidate’s clear obsession with lost causes and martyrs, from the grey uniform of the Confederacy to the “Let’s Roll” of Flight 93′s Todd Beamer and his cockpit-charging suicide mission. American democracy feels on the brink of civil war; the last thing Pennsylvania needs is a governor with a martyr complex.

The relationship between Mastriano and Garlow is also significant. Researchers of the Christian right say the former California megachurch pastor has become a giant of the NAR, arguing that pastors should be freed to take part in political activity and that “Biblical principles should guide a voter’s choice.” In recent weeks, Garlow has openly touted the Mastriano campaign while forging closer ties with Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who — like Mastriano — is under scrutiny for his Jan. 6 role.

Wilson noted that Garlow and Flynn recently joined forces for a rally in which they commissioned pastors into what they called a “Black Robe Regiment,” an allusion to the myth of a minister who took up arms in a battle. He told me the ceremony was not a good look for Virginia, a state with a rising militia movement, but neither is it desirable for Pennsylvania.

Mastriano’s religious ties can seem confusing if not outright weird, especially for the majority of voters for whom the world of these rural far-right congregations might as well exist on Pluto. But it does exist on the ground here in the Keystone State, with a call to arms for a dangerous candidate that polls have pegged within striking distance of conquering Harrisburg on Nov. 3. I am not done writing about this.

Question: Why is the media so obsessed with what’s happening with the royal family? I, for one, would be happy if it was dismantled — Via @DurbanisS on Twitter

Answer: Thanks for this, as I did want to acknowledge the passing of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II without making a big fuss — as the American media has shamelessly done! It’s not only ironic, but kind of outrageous, that ABC, NBC, and CBS refused to carry President Biden’s speech on saving U.S. democracy but all broke in to carry King Charles III’s first address as a monarch. But no one should be surprised; U.S. TV news has been starved for ratings, and America’s celebrity-obsessed rank-and-file viewers are surely providing that. As for the second half of your question, the UK has invested far too much — both emotionally and in actual pound sterling — to end the monarchy. But the change at the top is the perfect opportunity to radically downsize the job and to apologize more forcefully for the colonial horrors it represents.

Once upon a time, there was a story about election fraud in which Bruce Marks and Mike Roman were the good guys. The year was 1993 (the autumn of the Phillies’ Macho Row) and the contest was a special election for a state senate seat in Philadelphia’s Lower Northeast that would determine which party controlled Harrisburg. Mike Roman was a working-class kid from Kensington who volunteered for the GOP campaign of boyish, up-and-coming lawyer Bruce Marks. When the initial ballots were counted, Marks had lost by a few hundred votes to Democrat William Stinson, but the GOP cried foul. The main allegation — that Democratic operatives had duped Spanish-speaking voters to sign absentee ballots — prompted a massive investigation by The Inquirer. That convinced a federal judge to do the unthinkable: overturn the result and send Marks to the state capitol.

A feel-good story ... if it ended there. Marks, who was voted out of office in the 1994 regular election, went back to private law practice, with a specialty, according to a 2010 Inquirer profile, of representing “apparatchiks and oligarchs in Russia and Ukraine.” Years later, he would connect with the Donald Trump campaign. Likewise, the young Roman became a blogger focused on alleged Democratic election fraud, then a writer for sites like Breitbart News, then a highly-paid consultant who landed a six-figure job in the Trump White House. In 2020, he joined Trump’s re-election campaign as head of Election Day operations.

That’s when things started to go south. Roman has been linked to pro-Trump Electoral College slates — “fake electors,” according to critics — that cast ballots in states that Biden narrowly won. This week, it was reported that a federal grand jury is seeking communications between Team Trump and Marks over the Philadelphia lawyer’s involvement in efforts to reverse Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania. (“It is a frightening attack on attorney-client privilege if DOJ is targeting my communications,” Marks told the New York Times.) On Monday, the Times reported that federal agents probing the Jan. 6 insurrection had not only served a subpoena on Roman but seized his phone. Where is this reversal of fortune headed? Stay tuned.