B2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAY, OCTOBER 23 , 2021
RELIGION
NARINDER NANU/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGESA time for devotion
Sikh devotees carry the Guru Granth
Sahib, a key religious text, at the
Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, on
Thursday. The text was placed in a
palanquin — a form of transportation
carried by people — and then traveled
during a procession to honor Guru
Ram Das, the fourth Sikh guru. The
Golden Temple, built by Ram Das in
the 1500s, is key to Sikhism.BY JACK JENKINSIt was late September when
Andrew Torba, founder of the so-
cial media platform Gab, tapped
out a message to his users declar-
ing the website would update its
online infrastructure. Upgrades
are common in the tech industry,
but Torba’s reasoning for expand-
ing Gab’s data center was any-
thing but: He wanted to touch up
the tech, he said, to “preserve a
parallel Christian society on the
internet for generations to come.”
“One day our great grandchil-
dren will learn what really hap-
pened during the greatest Spirit-
ual war of our time,” Torba wrote,
“and how we laid the foundations
for a new parallel Christian soci-
ety.”
“It is my intention that they do
so on Gab,” he wrote.
Bearded and given to wearing
baseball hats pulled low on his
brow, Torba, who has described
himself as a “conservative Repub-
lican Christian,” long ago exiled
himself from Silicon Valley. He
now lives, he says, in a “forest in
Pennsylvania,” where he is plot-
ting what he calls a “Silent Chris-
tian Secession.”
His dream resonates with
seemingly millions of other pri-
marily right-wing netizens who
frequent his site and others in-
cluding Natural News, Brighteon
and CloutHub — online clones of
larger social media platforms that
tout themselves as havens of free
speech on an Internet that has
begun (belatedly, according to
some) to police conspiracy theo-
rists, armed right-wing groups,
white supremacists and Christian
nationalists.
These sites have much the
same mix of cartoons, memes and
raucous political debates as Twit-
ter or Facebook. Many of their
mission statements — CloutHub’s
is “empowering individuals to
connect and solve issues they care
about” — would not look out of
place anywhere else on the social
Web.
But the messages shared by
their users skew heavily pro-gun,
anti-vaccine, anti-President
Biden, vociferously pro-Donald
Trump and frequently are laden
with rhetoric that connects ad-
herence to Christianity with
American identity. There is a
sense among many users that the
fall of the country or Western
civilization is imminent, and ex-
tremist views are not uncommon:
In 2018, the attacker who killed 11
people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life
synagogue posted antisemitic
and anti-refugee messages on
Gab shortly before the mass
shooting. (Gab reportedly later
deleted the account and cooperat-
ed with investigators.)
David Golumbia, a professor of
English at Virginia Common-
wealth University and author of
“The Politics of Bitcoin: Software
as Right-Wing Extremism,” said
the creation of alternative digital
platforms is a tradition in right-
wing circles, religious or other-
wise.
“People who promote alterna-
tives to Twitter say that ‘We’re
above politics; we just care about
free speech,’ ” Golumbia told Reli-
gion News Service. “And when
people point out that they are
being used to organize political
violence.... The people who cre-
ate it say, ‘Oh, this is unintended
and unfortunate, and there’s just
nothing we can do about it.’
“But from where I sit, this is the
main-use case for these tools....
They’re just beacons to [extrem-
ists].”
To his point, the number of
registered users on Gab reported-
ly more than doubled to 3.4 mil-
lion in the weeks after the Jan. 6
mob attack on the U.S. Capitol.
While decrying the violence of
the insurrection, Torba welcomed
Gab’s swelling virtual ranks in the
weeks after the attack with a mes-
sage steeped in faith.
“America is a Christian nation,”
he wrote Feb. 1. “The foundation
of Western Civilization itself is
built on Christianity and more
specifically: on the firm founda-
tion of Jesus Christ.” Shortly, he
said, he intended to shift all of his
personal expenditures to support
organizations and businesses he
deemed Christian.
The widespread pushback to
websites like his after Jan. 6 —which he claimed included Gab’s
rejection by banks and other com-
panies — was evidence that Chris-
tians could no longer operate
freely in American society and
needed to build their own econo-
my, entertainment industry and
Internet, he said.
Torba, who has invoked a per-
sonal policy of “not communicat-
ing with non-Christian and/or
communist journos,” declined an
interview request from Religion
News Service in a one-word
email: “No.”
The spiritual bluster may belie
a practical subtext: A parallel
Christian nationalist digital
world may be a necessity for sites
such as Gab to survive at all as Big
Tech moves to restrict or ban their
content.
Gab’s app was removed from
the Google Play Store in 2017, with
the company explaining that de-
velopers failed to moderate “con-
tent that encourages violence and
advocates hate against groups of
people.” Apple twice rejectedGab’s bid to appear on its app
store, once for allowing porno-
graphic content and the second
time for failing to moderate “de-
famatory or mean-spirited” posts.
In 2019, Facebook deleted a
page dedicated to Natural News
— a website widely regarded as a
purveyor of conspiracy theories
— citing violations of the compa-
ny’s spam rules. Facebook later
banned links to its content as well
as Brighteon, an affiliated video
site where Natural News CEO
Mike Adams posts video dia-
tribes. In a S eptember 2020 video,
he declares that “America was
founded on Christian principles”and warns that the United States
has “attracted God’s wr ath” be-
cause of campaigns in support of
abortion rights and LGBTQ
equality.
He concludes: “America has no
future unless we eliminate those
influences of society that are anti-
God.”
In response to the crackdowns,
some sites have tried to reduce
their reliance on extremist users.
CloutHub CEO Jeff Brain has im-
plemented content restrictions
and tried to distance his project
from competitors such as Gab,
accusing Torba’s site of going “too
far” in its tolerance of extremists.
But CloutHub, critics say, was a
core organizing tool for “Patriot
Caravans” traveling to D.C. for the
Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally that
preceded the insurrection. Its
app, like Gab’s website, also saw a
surge in downloads after Jan 6.
A month after the insurrection,
Brain introduced Tennessee pas-
tor Greg Locke as one of the
platform’s “ambassadors,” who
are “actively engaged in helping
grow our platform.” Locke, who
has been blasted for vocal Chris-
tian nationalist rhetoric, was per-
manently banned from Twitter in
September. In a F acebook Live
video bemoaning his ban, Locke
encouraged his listeners to follow
him on CloutHub.
If creating a separate Christian
nationalist digital world would
skirt the power of Big Tech, it may
not keep extremist chatter entire-
ly safe. Brighteon, CloutHub and
Gab have a common home in
Epik, a Web host and domain
registrar whose founder, Rob
Monster, has faced fierce criti-
cism for his willingness to host
extremist content. A self-de-
scribed Christian libertarian,
Monster regularly posts video
musi ngs on his Twitter account,
once suggesting that Western civ-
ilization needs Christianity to
survive.
In September, purported mem-
bers of the “hacktivist” collective
Anonymous attacked Epik, mak-
ing off with more than 150 giga-
bytes of user data and promptly
leaking the data to the public.
Monster responded by setting up
a video chat on Epik’s in-house
“Prayer meeting” service, inviting
anyone to show up and discuss
the hack.In the chaotic confab that fol-
lowed — which included a brief
religious debate with a man
whose chest was emblazoned
with a swastika — Monster re-
peatedly broke out into prayer,
asking for God to dispel “de-
mons,” “evil spirits” and “agents
of Satan” in the chatroom. He
urged listeners to delete the sto-
len data, explaining that his team
had “cursed” the files during a
“courts of heaven” prayer session.
“I’m just giving you a heads up.
There are curses. Laptops will
burn. Hard drives will burn,”
Monster said. Efforts to contact
him about the hack were unsuc-
cessful.
The big gest obstacle to estab-
lishing a virtual Christian nation-
alis t promised land, however,
may be simple inertia. A sizable
chun k of Christian separatists
still operate on mainstream plat-
forms. “There’s still a lot of this on
YouTube, there’s still a lot of this
on Twitter and Facebook,” said
Alex Bradley Newhouse, deputy
director of the Center on Terror-
ism, Extremism and Counterter-
rorism at Middlebury Institute of
International Studies at
Monterey.
The actual size of the potential
audience is also unclear. Susan
Benesch, founding director of the
Dangerous Speech Project, ac-
knowledged that the influence of
some Christian nationalist lead-
ers has “increased dramatically”
in recent years but pointed to a
recent study conducted by the
Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
nology: Researchers found that
among the 20 most popular
Christian Facebook groups of
2019, all but one were operated by
Eastern European troll farms.
A view of what a parallel Inter-
net might look like, however, may
be seen at GiveSendGo, a Chris-
tian crowdfunding website that
drew criticism in August 2020 for
hosting a campaign for Kyle Rit-
tenhouse, a teenager charged
with shooting three people, two
fatally, during demonstrations af-
ter the police shooting of Jacob
Blake in Kenosha, Wis.
The website also hosted a fund-
raiser for the f ar-right group
Proud Boys after i ts leader, En-
rique Tarrio, was arrested for fire-
arm magazine possession and
burning a church-owned BlackLives Matter sign. Ali Alexander,
an activist who helped to organize
the Stop the Steal movement, re-
portedly raised more than
$30,000 on GiveSendGo in the
days after the Capitol attack,
claiming that his “patriotic,
Christian work is being deplat-
formed by dark corporate forces
and political opponents.”
The site’s co-founder, Jacob
Wells, told RNS he was passionate
about his own evangelical faith
but ambivalent about some itera-
tions of Christian nationalism.
Yet, Wells expressed concern that
the term is used to “denigrate
Christianity in general” and said
he believes the United States was
founded with a “Judeo-Christian
underpinning.” While distancing
himself from many of the cam-
paigns on his platform (“I com-
pletely agree what he did was
wrong,” he said of Tarrio’s sign-
burning), he framed his support
for largely unfettered access to
GiveSendGo’s services as a Chris-
tian value in itself.
“There’s always an inherent
danger with freedom, but I think
the opposite of that is, in essence,
slavery,” he said. By way of inspi-
ration, he pointed to Jesus’ will-
ingness to spend time with sin-
ners.
Despite widespread pushback
against his methods (PayPal
stopped working with the site
shortly after Jan. 6), Wells sug-
gested that his approach has been
a boon to the platform: It grew
about 100 percent annually be-
fore the Rittenhouse campaign,
he said, but has expanded mas-
sively — “probably 1,500 percent,”
he estimated — in the year since.
His work recently caught the
eye of Torba, who published a post
in September framing GiveSend-
Go — which advertises on his
website — as a faithful alternative
to more mainstream platforms
such as GoFundMe.
“This is what a parallel society
looks like,” Torba said of Gi-
veSendGo. “An ecosystem of me-
dia, communications, actual jour-
nalism, fundraising, advertising,
and technology working together
to get the truth out.”
— Religion News ServiceThis article supported by the Pulitzer
Center is the second in a series on
Christian nationalism.Christian nationalists seeking a ‘ parallel’ digital haven
Aim is to skirt Big Tech
to preserve a religious
society on the Internet“America has no
f uture unless we
eliminate those
influences of society
t hat are anti-God.”
Mike Adams,
chief executive of Natural News,
whose Facebook page was deleted by
the platform in 2019 for allegedly
violating Facebook’s spam rulesincluding 175 at the high school
level, 173 at the middle school
level and 282 at the elementary
school level. Students of color
were more likely to select remote
learning: The online student body
is 36 percent Hispanic, 24 percent
Black, 17 percent Asian and 17 per-
cent White. Thirty-nine percent
of Arlington’s online learners are
children whose first language is
not English, 60 percent qualify for
free and reduced-price lunch pro-
grams, and 24 percent are stu-
dents with disabilities.
SCHOOLS FROM B1 The system had initially stum-
bled in rolling out its online offer-
ings, after a staffing shortage
for ced hundreds of students to
miss class. But Arlington, which
enrolls about 26,000, has since
filled all its empty virtual posi-
tions, including hiring a school
principal and a school counselor,
administrators said Thursday.
Now, as flu season and winter
breaks approach, school districts
in the region are getting ready to
enforce vaccine mandates they
issued earlier in the fall for em-
ployees. The vast majority of
school staffers in the area are
already vaccinated, but thou-
sands refused to comply, meaning
they now face regular testing or
possible punishment.
The Fairfax school system
mandated vaccination for its
roughly 28,000 employees but al-
lowed staffers to opt out without
requiring a reason, while mandat-
ing that anyone unvaccinated af-
ter Nov. 1 m ust undergo weekly
testing.
In a survey completed by
92 percent of staff, 97.6 percent
reported being fully vaccinated as
of Oct. 12. Roughly 3,000 employ-
ees remain unvaccinated, Fairfaxofficials said Tuesday.
Beginning Nov. 1, Fairfax will
launch its regular testing pro-
gram for these employees. The
rapid tests will be administered
each week by a third-party pro-
vider at nine designated off-cam-
pus areas.
That same week, Fairfax will
also begin weekly testing for stu-
dent-athletes older than 12 who
remain unvaccinated for medical
or religious reasons. The district
adopted a vaccine mandate for
student-athletes earlier in the fall.
About 2,000 student-athletes will
have to undergo testing eachweek, officials said, although they
will do so only with parental per-
mission. If the result on that ini-
tial rapid test is positive, it will be
followed by a confirmatory PCR
test, known to be more accurate.
The second week in November,
Fairfax will launch random
screening testing for unvaccinat-
ed elementary-school students;
testing for unvaccinated middle-
and high school students will be-
gin the following week. The effort
is intended to help gauge levels of
community spread and infection
rates.
Only students whose parentsconsent to the testing will be eligi-
ble. Fairfax officials said Tuesday
that roughly 11,000 to 12,000 stu-
dents across the entire system
will participate each week.
Also on Tuesday, Brabrand, the
Fairfax superintendent, revealed
changes to the school district’s
snow day policy. Fairfax will offer
traditional days off for the first
five days that bad weather — of
any kind — forces the school sys-
tem to close. After that, the sys-
tem will hold virtual learning
days rather than give students
time off.
[email protected]Fairfax schools will randomly test younger students, enforce vaccine mandates for employees