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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 – one he has largely ignored – 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 the nutritional benefits power of raw milk, while sowing doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines.

Because of his granola aura as a former environmental advocate, Kennedy’s invocation of the “spiritual” can initially sound benign – more hippy than doctrinaire.

Yet his repeated references to spiritual forces are more than run-of-the-mill wellness vernacular. They are a 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 – like a worm working its way through brain tissue.

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. Now 32 with a doctorate in psychology, she speaks about her experience publicly.

Christian nationalists – a sprawling religious-political ecosystem of factions and networks – argue that American law should reflect a singular Christian vision of the country. That project would elevate biblical law, erode the separation of church and state, and hollow out pluralism and democracy.

Some in the Trump regime openly claim the label, such as Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the office of operations and budget and a key author of the ultra-conservative Christian thinktank Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which has come to function as a Christian nationalist blueprint for governance.

Terms such as “spiritual warfare” and “spiritual attack”, Tate says, are central to the movement’s vocabulary – part of a binary, warcentric and mystical rhetoric leveraging fear and disinformation to keep people on their toes against enemies both tangible and spiritual. Maga Christian nationalism is dominionist, meaning it seeks to place its militant version of Christian authority over institutions, culture and government.

Kennedy’s speech, taken together with the rhetoric of other Maga leaders, reflects a broader pattern of strident religious language moving into the highest levels of government.

Trump himself described his second term as “a war from within” against “anti-Christian bias.” JD Vance has courted Turning Point followers by calling Christianity “America’s creed”, advancing the myth that America was founded as a Christian nation, rather than a democracy grounded in equality.

Secretary of defense Pete Hegseth, who belongs to a Christian nationalist church and has a tattoo of a Christian nationalist symbol, considers America a “Christian nation in our DNA”. And House speaker Mike Johnson has long backed Christian nationalist aims that would roll back civil rights for women and LGBTQ+ people, or sentence doctors who perform abortions to “hard labor”.

Not all would describe themselves as Christian nationalists. But the label matters less than the legislation. Regardless of what they call themselves, the cumulative effect of their language and policy is a coordinated, full-throated attack on secular democratic institutions that protect everyone equally.

“I do think the term ‘Christofascist’ is appropriate theologically as well as politically,” says the Rev Dr Gary Gunderson, a Baptist minister and professor of public health science at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, referring to Trump’s regime.

Christian nationalism is not a “normal faith”, he says. Believers are far less concerned about Jesus’s teachings than exercising power from the highest levels of government all the way down to local counties, he adds. It has a more aggressive political vision than traditional streams of Catholic or mainline Protestant faith.

“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,” adds Gunderson.

The sociologists Joseph Baker, Stephen Perry and Andrew Whitehead, who have studied the movement, write that because science provides an “alternative source of moral authority beyond divine revelation”, Christian nationalists perceive institutional science “as a threat to the supremacy of Christianity”. Public health’s use of science in the collective interest of all races, faiths and genders clashes with their hierarchical moral order, in which Christians are seen as more virtuous and divinely protected than others.

Tate observes an element of religious-patriarchical insecurity at play. “It’s a lot about fear of losing power overall,” she says. “Fear that the more medicine we figure out and the more we’re able to help people from getting sick, the less that people will depend on God.”

‘We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected’

Inside the HHS, officials are not just talking about war, they’re waging it against scientific consensus and individual experts.

Calley Means, who engineered the Kennedy-Trump alliance and now serves as Kennedy’s senior adviser, took to X to write that Trump and RFK were “quite litterally [sic] fighting demonic forces to return the CDC to real science”.

He was referring to Demetre Daskalakis – then director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases and a gay, Harvard-educated epidemiologist. Means called him a “proud satanist” because his Instagram posts reveal he has a pentagram tattoo (a reference, he says, to overcoming childhood bullying) and has worn a leather harness with a similar design.

Means, who has working ties with the Heritage Foundation, knew exactly what he was doing by attacking him. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” as Vought put it in a private 2023 speech. “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.”

Daskalakis, who resigned in protest last summer after Kennedy unilaterally fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, is not a satanist, according to Poynter Institute factcheckers – and himself.

In fact, he was raised Greek Orthodox, and has a much bigger 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 I think what we’re seeing is a cultish religiosity,” mired in fundamentalism, spreading throughout the HHS.

Kennedy has long been the pied piper of the crunchy-to-fascism pipeline, where wellness culture emulsifies into more conservative Christian views. This April, Trump rescinded Casey Means’s surgeon general nomination (officially over her vaccine stance, though some of her critics were discomfited by her pagan-adjacent views). She was replaced by Dr Nicole Saphier, a radiologist and Fox News commentator who is more mainstream in her religious beliefs, and once told an interviewer she “clung” to her faith through a teenage pregnancy.

Kennedy’s speech is uniquely useful to the administration in that it cultivates the perception that skepticism toward medical experts and systems equates to spiritual freedom. Fatima-Zahra Aklalouch, a linguistics researcher at Université Paris Cité who has studied Kennedy’s rhetorical strategies, says he starts with a “basic moral intuition that naturalness is good and unnaturalness leads to evil”, a framing that casts institutions and the people who work in them as corrupt. By implying institutions and their representatives are morally compromised, this framing “meshes very easily” with Christian nationalist goals, she says.

While Kennedy and Means, in other words, prime the public with spiritual rationale for dismantling public health, Vought – nicknamed “the Reaper” – controls funding, and does the demolition, determining which programs are amputated or left to die.

Vought seems to detest public health. He was originally hoping to fold the HHS into a new entity he planned to call “the Department of Health and Public Welfare” – a name chosen, a former government analyst told the New Yorker, precisely because “it sounds bad”.

According to watchdog Grant Witness, Vought has slashed $518m from NIH research grants, $698m from the National Science Foundation, $6.9bn from CDC public health programs and $28bn from the Environmental Protection Agency. This April, the administration abruptly fired the entire board of the National Science Foundation, a major funder of scientific research at US universities. In a proposed budget for 2027, Vought seeks to cut the HHS budget by $16bn from 2026.

HHS has cut $389m from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, though a fraction of those funds have been bookmarked for faith-based addiction programs to address what Kennedy calls “spiritual malaise” underpinning addiction.

The consequences are already visible. The administration has allowed states to increase access to religious vaccine exemptions. Measles, once eradicated, infected more than 2,000 Americans in 2025 and more than 1,700 so far in 2026. Last August, the funds needed for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to stem a measles outbreak in Texas weren’t available until after two children died.

(While RFK rejects the “anti-vax” label, instead identifying as “pro-safety”, critics and now courts argue his questioning of vaccines is costing children their health. Under Senate questioning this April, Kennedy allowed that vaccination might have saved those two Texas children’s lives.)

Driving these cuts is a neoliberal-theological fusion: the belief that dismantling public institutions is not just fiscally sound but morally ordained to combat demonic evils the likes of which, to most non-Pentecostal ears, sound a lot more exotic than a leather-wearing public health official.

The Center for Renewing America, an ultraconservative thinktank founded by Vought, puts that fusion in writing. In a healthcare blueprint published earlier this year, it described the Affordable Care Act, which extended coverage to tens of millions of Americans, as “cancerous”, and Medicaid, associated with lower all-cause mortality and access to care, as a “weaponized monstrosity destroying the lives of children”.

Meanwhile, research funding to support new ideas for curing Alzheimer’s and mental health disorders have been cut in half, diabetes by almost 40% and cancer by almost a quarter. Reproductive healthcare is being dismantled, LGBTQ+ people are being erased from federal policy, and the EPA’s authority to protect Americans from environmental health hazards such as lead and Pfas is being stripped away.

These are not abstract losses. Cutting research into the diseases that disproportionately kill the poor while simultaneously dismantling protective coverage compounds existing disadvantage. Health inequities have a greater influence on Americans’ wellbeing than even genetics, driven by lack of education, poverty, environmental pollution, structural racism and lack of food access – all of which Kennedy’s HHS is making worse.

The job of public health is “about creating health equity”, says Daskalakis. “If equity is something that they don’t agree with,” he says, “it probably means that they either don’t understand the importance of that work, or it is somehow contrary to their mission.”

In exchange for the infrastructure of the common good, the administration is using tax incentives to promote inadequate substitutes for insurance that save them money.

For instance, Republicans and industry lobbyists are advancing high-deductible health savings accounts (HSAs), which benefit wealthier people but can mean ruinous upfront medical costs to everyone else.

Lobby groups are also pushing for subsidies to support more health-sharing ministries – Christian alternatives to health insurance where churches function as their own micro-insurers, with members pooling money to cover each another’s medical expenses – so long as those expenses don’t include abortion or LGBTQ+ care.

Under this new regime, healthcare isn’t a shared, national responsibility, it’s an individual purity test: can you work? Can you afford private coverage? Do you belong to a church? Do you cook dinner at home? Can you give birth on their terms?

Fail these tests, and you’re shamed and blamed by the righteously smug: isn’t it your own bad choices, your diet, your sexual orientation, your lack of proper faith that put you in this predicament?

Prophets and profiteers

When health fails, and no help is available, it’s tempting to turn to God, supplements or both.

Where Means and Kennedy find their most profitable common ground with the Christian nationalist worldview may not be its fire-and-brimstone zealotry so much as its prosperity gospel tenet: that accumulating wealth and power is divine. The sicker and more desperate Americans become, and the weaker the public health system that might support them, the more lucrative the alternative wellness space grows.

Enter the “Seven Mountains Mandate”, the Christian nationalist get-rich-and-powerful strategy. It outlines how believers plan to occupy top roles across key domains of public life – including media, government, education and the family – asserting authority over every facet of society.

Matthew Boedy, a professor and author of The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy, says we’re seeing its effects on public health, “which really has not had that attack on it in my lifetime … It’s almost a deep-state health attack.”

The Seven Mountains Mandate recalls a 1990s business executive coaching plan: capture “mountains” (key institutions and social systems), strip them of collective, progressive and public-serving elements, and replace them with free-market, theologically aligned alternatives run by allies.

Christian nationalists destroy a system to create a vacuum, Boedy explains. Then they say, “‘OK, well, our friends who are selling this product can move right in to fill that vacuum.’”

Health isn’t itself a mountain, but it winds through three others: family (restricting reproductive care, promoting traditional marriage), government (dismantling public health infrastructure) and business, where the $7tn global wellness industry represents enormous profit.

Kennedy sits at the center of a financial web. While positioning himself as a vaccine-safety whistleblower, he has earned more than $2.4m in referral fees from Wisner Baum, a law firm litigating against pharmaceutical companies over vaccine safety claims.

At his Senate confirmation hearing, Kennedy refused to commit to stopping these payments while overseeing the agencies that regulate the vaccines central to those lawsuits. An initial ethics arrangement would have allowed him to continue receiving proceeds; only after public scrutiny was it revised to route payments elsewhere, including to his son.

Kennedy also registered “Make America Healthy Again” as a trademark, reportedly earning about $100,000 before transferring it to an LLC led by his ally Del Bigtree. That Maha branding is now marketing for a broader anti‑vaccine and wellness‑adjacent movement, drawing audiences, donations and product sales from the climate of distrust in health institutions Kennedy has helped cultivate.

Calley Means, meanwhile, co-founded Truemed, a platform that helps people use HSAs to purchase unscientific wellness sundries sold by Truemed or its affiliates, such as cold plunge pools and beef hotdogs.

Means’s policy vision maps straight on to Truemed’s business model: cut federal healthcare dollars from programs that assist poorer Americans, such as Medicaid, and boost consumer markets catering to the trendy wellness whims of the upper middle class. Recently released financial records reveal Means held between $25 and $50m in Truemed stock while working as a special government employee advising Kennedy. While he claims to have divested from the company upon becoming a full-time government employee, his involvement in it has nevertheless contributed to an appearance of divided loyalty between his own interests, and those of the American people.

And the more Kennedy and Means can destabilize trust in mainstream science, the more some of their friends and allies can financially benefit.

Potential benefactors include Means’s and Kennedy’s business partner Dr Mark Hyman, who fabricated the ridiculous idea that “11 million people die from food every year … like a Holocaust,” and makes his money from selling detox cleanses, which do not work. According to a recent Public Citizen watchdog report, Hyman “oversees a wellness empire that stands to benefit significantly from HHS policies under Kennedy”. They also include Casey Means, Calley’s sister, a Truemed shareholder.

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As the administration keeps widening the Overton window on physical maladies being linked to spiritual causes, many citizens will have their faith and fears exploited by the politicians who were supposed to help them be safe.

The people dragging America’s public health system toward a new dark age are not demonic. Rather, they are morally bankrupt and high on the supply of theocratic self-righteousness, with no regard to how their words and actions affect real people’s wellbeing.

Christian nationalist language gives calculated government neglect the sheen of providence.

“God chose Ethan for a reason,” one South Carolina mother told the Independent this February after her son was paralyzed by measles encephalitis.

“If I knew this could be the outcome, I still wouldn’t have given my son the vaccine,” she said, citing the misleading scare line publicly shared by Kennedy and Trump that children today receive too many shots.

“There will be a miracle,” she believes.