Editor’s note: This profile is part of a GPAHE series examining the people shaping American Christian nationalism in post-Project 2025 America. Christian nationalism is distinct from Christianity itself; mainstream churches have publicly rejected the movement as a distortion of the Christian faith. The figures profiled here are the architects of a theocratic, political project working to fuse American national identity with conservative Christian supremacist rule and dismantle democratic institutions.
Longtime Christian nationalist Tony Perkins dismisses the term “Christian nationalism” while preaching that God designed the government, that America was never meant to be an agnostic nation, and that the country should be run according to Scripture. His political allies are working to make that happen.
Key Takeaways
- The U.S. Senate campaign Perkins ran was fined for concealing a payment to a company tied to Klan leader David Duke, and he later addressed the Council of Conservative Citizens, heirs to the segregationist Citizens Councils that emerged in the mid-’50s.
- He has been at the helm of the Family Research Council for more than 20 years, building it into one of the country’s most powerful anti-LGBTQ+ lobbies.
- His influence runs overseas, from a death-penalty bill in Uganda to international activists leading similar movements abroad.
Pastors from 19 states came to Washington, D.C. on February 6, 2023. Tony Perkins took them on a tour of the Capitol that afternoon, through to the Lincoln Room just off the House chamber, where Rep. Steve Scalise hosted them. Scalise had been majority leader for a month, and the two had served together in the Louisiana legislature.
The room was the House post office when Lincoln served in Congress. Standing there, Perkins thought about division: Lincoln’s era, and his own vision of a country he judged as divided as it was during the Civil War.
That night, at Family Research Council headquarters, Perkins delivered his annual State of Faith, Family and Freedom address. He opened by noting that President Biden would speak to a joint session of Congress the following evening. “It is safe to say,” Perkins said, “that our messages will differ on some key points.”
Biden, he observed, liked to say America was at an inflection point. “It’s at more than an inflection point,” he said, “it is at a crossroads, a place of choosing.”
For the next half hour, Perkins worked through a well-worn list of grievances, evidence of the “hostility toward religious freedom and biblical truth.” He told the audience how a Missouri school district had taken middle-schoolers to a drag show. A 19-year-old police officer in Georgia had been pushed out of his job over a Facebook post about marriage. The Food and Drug Administration had cleared pharmacies to fill prescriptions for abortion pills.
Near the end, he read from the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln’s line about government of the people, by the people, for the people, and how it must not perish from the earth. Then he gave the assembled pastors his own version.
“This is our government,” Perkins said, and the people, under the authority and direction of God, would “determine the future of this nation.”
“We will not wait for Washington.”
Joe Biden gave his State of the Union the next night from the Capitol’s House Chamber. “We meet tonight at an inflection point,” he told the country. “It is within our power, of We the People.”
The gavel in that House Chamber has since passed to Christian nationalist and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Days after taking the gavel in October 2023, Johnson gave his first sit-down interview to Washington Watch, the program Perkins hosts every weekday afternoon.
The show reaches more than 800 radio stations, nearly 100 Christian television stations, and DIRECTV, delivering the news with what it calls a “Biblical perspective.” One weekend edition in July 2026 carried Rep. Keith Self of Texas on Iran and on Sharia law, two religious-liberty litigators, and Perkins himself, teaching from a video series on the nation’s Christian founding. Guests and topics are decidedly on mission on Washington Watch. So is the merchandise. The episode page of its web site offers a commemorative coffee-table book marking 250 years of America’s biblical roots and an eBook titled “Should A Christian Support Israel?,” invited listeners to commit to pray over the conflict with Iran, and includes a discount code for Patriot Mobile, the program’s wireless sponsor.
Perkins, 63, has been swimming in the far-right pond since he was a young man. He wrote his own doctrine on lifelong, covenant marriage into Louisiana law when he was a state legislator, and he wants the Ten Commandments made the law of the land. He was in the movement before it had a name, built his career around it, and has helped shape and propel it ever since. The tools the far-right movement runs on today, Perkins was running two decades ago: the pastors, the summit stage, the persecution message, the direct line into Congress.
He has led the Family Research Council since 2003, and climbed to the top of the Council for National Policy, the invitation-only network where the American far-right’s donors and operatives set long-term strategy.
Perkins is one of the elder statesmen of the Christian nationalist movement. The mission he pursued in Baton Rouge is the one his organization now states as “championing faith, family, and freedom in public policy.” What has changed is who picks up when he calls.
The List
Perkins learned politics in Baton Rouge from Woody Jenkins, a state legislator who owned a television station. Perkins was a city police officer then, moonlighting as a reporter for that station.
When Operation Rescue blockaded a Baton Rouge abortion clinic in 1992 during its “Summer of Purpose” campaign, Perkins covered the protests while carrying the badge from his day job. He learned that the hundreds of activists who arrived planned to break police lines, but kept it from his own department, waiting outside the clinic with his camera crew instead as scores of protesters were arrested. The department suspended him.
Perkins chose politics over policing, won a seat in the Louisiana House, and ran his mentor’s 1996 U.S. Senate campaign while serving his first term. David Duke contacted the campaign that fall.
Duke had run the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan as its grand wizard and in 1991 carried 39 percent of Louisiana’s runoff vote for governor. He recommended a phone-bank company, Perkins signed the contract, but it was Duke’s name that appeared on voters’ caller IDs as they received robo-calls campaigning for Jenkins. The campaign paid the company $82,500 through its media firm, and federal regulators fined it $3,000 for knowingly filing false reports that hid the relationship. Perkins has said he did not know Duke held a stake in Impact until a 1999 tax investigation exposed it.
Covenant
As a legislator, Perkins wrote the nation’s first covenant marriage law in 1997. Couples who chose the covenant signed away the right to no-fault divorce and agreed to be married for life, with only very limited grounds for ending it. Louisiana’s Senate praised the law and its author for upholding “the traditional view of the roles of wife and husband.” The statute remains on Louisiana’s books. A couple who chose it cannot end the marriage by mutual consent, and a court can grant a divorce only on the narrow grounds the law lists.
When debate ran long on his bill to regulate the state’s abortion clinics, Perkins screened for the legislature undercover footage from inside one, depicting rusty instruments and bloody floors, and the story of a woman who nearly died there. The bill passed. The woman in the film had been represented by a young attorney, future Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.
Another Perkins bill required public schools to allow daily silent prayer. When Buddhist and Hindu traditions came up in the debate, he called them “goofy,” stating, “No one can legitimately challenge the fact that the God America refers to in the national motto and other places is the monotheistic God of the Jewish and Christian faith. There is no historic connection between America and the polytheistic creed of the Hindu faith.”
On May 17, 2001, still a sitting legislator, Perkins addressed the Louisiana chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), successor to the White Citizens Councils that fought integration, while speaking in front of a Confederate flag. The group’s website has described Black people as “a retrograde species of humanity.” Perkins claimed he had no knowledge of the CCC’s ideology, two years after Senator Trent Lott’s ties to the same organization cost him the Senate leadership.
Twice in five years, Perkins’s career had run through the world of organized white supremacy, and twice his defense was that he had not known.
In February 2003, while Perkins was still in the Louisiana House, the FRC joined Focus on the Family on a brief urging the Supreme Court to continue enforcing Texas’s sodomy law. The Justices struck the law down in June 2003, with a six-three ruling in Lawrence v. Texas that the Constitution protects what consenting adults do in their own bedrooms.
Perkins kept a pledge to leave the legislature after two terms, and on September 1, 2003, he became the fourth president of the Family Research Council, the Washington lobbying arm James Dobson had built for Focus on the Family.
Justice Sunday
In April 2005, Perkins put U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist on national television with a blunt message: Democrats filibustering the confirmation of President Bush’s judicial nominees were persecuting Christians.
“The courts have sought to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms,” Perkins said.
The Senate caved, and the majority of Bush’s nominees went through.
Perkins found his formula: a church, a camera, and politicians’ names broadcast to Christian constituents who were convinced they were under siege. He would run it for the next two decades.
Family Business
By 2010, the FRC was circulating material that claimed gay men were more likely than others to molest children.
Speaking at a religious-right summit in April 2011, he described LGBTQ+ activists: “They are intolerant. They are hateful. They are vile. They are spiteful.” That August, a fundraising letter went out over his name calling the It Gets Better suicide-prevention videos for gay teenagers “disgusting” and an attempt to recruit children.
In April 2012, Perkins told an American Family Association radio audience that doubts about Obama’s birth certificate were “a legitimate issue from the standpoint of what the Constitution says,” and that the media had harmed the foundation of government by marginalizing anyone who raised them.
In February 2013, days after the Senate confirmed Chuck Hagel as defense secretary over Perkins’ objections, he told listeners that the Democrats who backed Hagel “enjoy the money coming from the Jewish community.” The Forward, the Jewish daily, ran the remarks under the headline “The Jewish Lobby Pops Up Again.”
When the Supreme Court cleared the way for same-sex marriage in California and struck down the Defense of Marriage Act that June, Perkins told CBS the justices had “carjacked the nation.” On his show a year later, he asked a lawyer for a Colorado baker whether re-education camps were next, and when boxcars would haul Christians away. When a caller that August compared the coming treatment of Christians to Nazi deportations, Perkins agreed.
None of it slowed his rise.
The Mulligan
Perkins, then a leader of the CNP, joined roughly 1,000 evangelical leaders on June 21, 2016, to hear Donald Trump make his case. Trump left with their support. With a seat on Trump’s evangelical advisory board, Perkins helped write the GOP platform’s social planks and was given a say in judicial nominations.
By then, Perkins had spent 13 years building something the candidates wanted. He had grown Watchmen on the Wall, FRC’s network of political pastors, from about 2,000 ministers to nearly 25,000, and turned its Values Voter Summit (now called Pray Vote Stand) into one of the Christian right’s premier political events. By 2023, his mid-September summit booked Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Donald Trump in a single weekend.
In August 2016, historic flooding put 10 feet of water at the end of Perkins’s driveway. He escaped by canoe and moved into a camper, and told his radio audience the disaster was “an incredible, encouraging spiritual exercise.” A year earlier, when a guest called a hurricane God’s punishment for abortion and same-sex marriage, Perkins had agreed: “God is trying to send us a message.” Trump toured the wrecked Baton Rouge neighborhoods that August and met with him.
Only 16 percent of Islam is a religion, Perkins emailed supporters in December 2015; the rest a military, judicial, and political system, so Trump’s proposed Muslim ban posed no religious test at all. When federal protections for transgender students came months later, Perkins warned they would normalize “something as universally unnatural as men using women’s restrooms.” By February 2017, Target’s bathrooms had become, in his telling, crime scenes.
Months later, Perkins wrote the letter urging Trump to end the policy that let transgender troops serve openly, and sat in the day-long White House meeting where the subject came up. Trump announced the ban 15 days later; the New York Times reported Perkins had lobbied Trump and Pence on it for months. By August 2017, he was telling reporters he had visited the Trump White House more often in six months than in the entire Bush administration.
That October, Trump became the first sitting president to address FRC’s Values Voter Summit. “Values voters have waited eight years for a leader who puts America’s mission first,” Perkins said. In January 2018, weeks after the story broke about Trump’s $130,000 hush money payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels, Perkins went on a Politico podcast and explained the arrangement: evangelicals were tired of being kicked around, and were looking for someone on the playground to punch the bully.
Perkins publicly gave Trump “a mulligan,” a do-over. Trump, he reasoned, “has delivered more than any other president in my lifetime.”
The Export Business
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell named Perkins a commissioner of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom four months after the mulligan. The commission elected him chair in June 2019. “I’ve known and worked with Tony for over 20 years,” Steve Scalise said of the appointment. The head of GLAAD called Perkins the most recognizable anti-LGBTQ+ activist in America.
Perkins’s international interests predate his federal title. In 2010, the FRC spent $25,000 lobbying Congress over a resolution condemning Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which carried the death penalty for what it called aggravated homosexuality. The FRC said it had not opposed the resolution but sought to change its language, and that it supported neither the bill nor the death penalty.
FRC belongs to the coalition of American groups that make up the World Congress of Families, which carried the campaign against LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights into Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the United Nations.
Off the Books
In March 2020, the FRC asked the IRS to reclassify it as an “association of churches,” a designation used by denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention. The agency agreed within months.
Perkins was now the religious leader of a church, and a church files no Form 990. That annual return had listed the FRC’s revenue, its spending, and what it paid its executives. The filing never named donors. The IRS lets nonprofits keep those private. But everything else on it was public, and now none of it is. Liberty Counsel, Focus on the Family, Christian nationalist Sean Feucht, and the American Family Association have also made the same conversion. “It is far too easy,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said when the filing surfaced, “for powerful special interests to hide their donors.”
Plenary Power
On December 30, seven days before Congress met to certify the 2020 election results, Perkins signed a letter asking senators to “contest the electoral votes” from Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona, on the theory that state legislatures have full constitutional authority over presidential electors. Election denier Cleta Mitchell, who was on Trump’s call pressing Georgia officials to find him votes, signed the same page. The legal term for that power is plenary, power in full.
When the rioters broke into the Capitol on January 6, Perkins condemned the violence and blamed it on a nation that had kicked God out of its schools and its politics. When the House held Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, in contempt for defying its investigation of the attack, Perkins called the vote “politics at its worst.”
During a livestream on April 5, 2021, Perkins prayed that God would confuse Joe Biden’s government and that gridlock would settle on Washington.
Trump came back in 2025, and so did Perkins.
Delivered
At his Pray Vote Stand summit in September 2023, Perkins led the ballroom in prayer against transgender rights: “one of the most demonic agendas that we see in our nation today.” He preaches that the movement for LGBTQ+ rights is the zenith of man’s rebellion against God, run by people under the control of demonic spirits.
When the Heritage Foundation drew up Project 2025, its 900-page blueprint for a coming Republican administration, the FRC took a seat on the advisory board, and an FRC staffer, Arielle Del Turco, made the contributor list. Conservative family foundations put a combined $1.6 million into the organizations behind Project 2025 between 2021 and 2022. The finished document calls for closing the Department of Education and restricting access to abortion and contraception.
The alliance cost him something in 2024. Perkins took his seat on the Republican platform committee and launched a Platform Integrity Project to defend the anti-abortion amendment that has anchored the platform for nearly 50 years. The committee voted 84-14 for Trump’s version, which leaves the abortion issue to the states. Perkins and 18 other delegates filed a minority report, in his group’s words, the “only record to emerge from the unprecedented, closed-door meeting.”
On October 4, 2024, Perkins opened his summit and lost the thread of a sentence. “I want to examine this moment in which we are in,” he said, “which is a very, very…” He stopped.
Then: “potential.”
Trump had promised days earlier to veto a national abortion ban if elected, the cause Perkins had chased for 30 years.
Trump won in November. Perkins had endorsed him in 2016 and stood to gain from his return.
“You and I go back to when you were in law school,” Perkins told then-U.S. Representative Mike Johnson in April 2024, welcoming him as the first guest on his new Salem Radio show. Johnson has won FRC’s True Blue award three times for a perfect voting record with the group, and has called Perkins one of his biggest heroes.
On July 27, 2026, Perkins published a column under the headline “Change the Nation’s Character, and Its Politics Will Follow.” “[T]he battle to preserve the Republic,” he wrote, “will not ultimately be won in Congress.”
Perkins claims that the Christian nationalist movement, of which he is a leader, does not exist. Two days before the 2024 election, Perkins wrote that alarm about Christian nationalism is “a scare tactic meant to silence the voices of Christians.”
On the Fourth of July, he told his listeners that the founders did not build an agnostic nation, he said, or a Muslim one. They built it on God’s word, and it should be run that way.
“And this is God’s design for government.”
In His Own Words
“A Christian leader is to be preferred over a non-Christian.”
October 24, 2011: endorsing a religious test for public office on air.
“Gays and lesbians will always have an emptiness within them because they are operating outside of nature.”
January 25, 2012: claiming on his “Today’s Issues” program that gay people will never be content with the right to marry.
“Marriage equality will be the nail in the coffin of marriage and will take society down with it.”
November 2012: warning that same-sex marriage would destroy the institution.
“Redefining marriage is about the fundamental altering of society.”
March 6, 2013: writing in his Washington Update column.
“The human race would be extinct within time if [homosexuality] were normal.”
January 10, 2014: speaking on his program.
“You’ve just hit the nail on the head.”
August 12, 2014: answering a caller who compared the coming treatment of Christians to Nazi deportations.
“Bans on ex-gay therapy are locking kids into a lifestyle with devastating health, emotional, and societal consequences.”
December 2014: condemning Washington, D.C.’s ban on conversion therapy for minors.
“The military is now a parade that looks like the bar scene in Star Wars.”
August 3, 2015: telling his Washington Watch audience the armed forces had lost their way.
“The feminist movement [is] tearing down the difference between the genders.”
August 18, 2015: warning listeners about women who act like men.
“Islam is not protected under the U.S. Constitution.”
September 21, 2015: arguing that Muslims have no claim to religious liberty.
“His legislative agenda is from the pit of hell.”
April 5, 2021: praying on a Truth & Liberty Coalition livestream for “chaos, conflict and gridlock” against the Biden administration.
“Only a return to God will heal our nation.”
October 2, 2024: summoning Christians to Washington a month before the election.
