Andrew Hastie: soldier for an extreme version of governing by Christ

Andrew Hastie is a more extreme Fundamentalist Christian than Scott Morrison. Australians cannot let his attempts to lead the nation go unchallenged. His place on the ARC Board is a warning.

It is tricky to determine whether Andrew Hastie’s Fundamentalist Christianity or his global networking with Trumpist forces should worry Australians more.

Andrew Hastie appears to be trying to take the leadership of the Liberal party (and thus Australia’s rightwing government option) for the Christian Nationalist and ethnostate faction.

Christian Nationalism is the ideology that intends for authoritarian nationalism defined by extremist “Christian” values to rule “White” nations. Voters must look deeper than the benign sounding “traditional values” label that this project deploys in public.

Its work to rob women of freedom and equality, alongside access to healthcare; its effort to strip firstly trans people but ultimately all LGBTQIA+ people of the right to exist in public; its devaluing of Muslim lives to the point that we continue to arm a genocidal government in Israel: all these are part of its fringe definition of what it means to be Christian.(1)

We are seeing these forces accelerating mass deportation without process in the US. What will remain, if they succeed, is complementarian heterosexual marriage. White men in charge everywhere, as their supposed biological fitness mandates. White wives at home, breeding and nurturing, as dictated by their “nature.”

Hastie recently made inflammatory declarations about immigration making Australians feel like “strangers in our own home.” He and his mentors, like Tony Abbott, seem to feel that a motley coalition of voters can be marshalled around the people willing to march on Australian streets with Nazis.

Hastie served with the military in Afghanistan in the lead-up to the time where it was assessed in a “survey of elite Australian Defence Force units” that “almost all members believe that the Muslim religion promotes violence and terrorism, despite having ‘cultural sensitivity training’.” To be clear, the belief is a simplistic myth in service to petroleum politics. This essay suggests Hastie was not an exception.(2)

Far-right politicians, globally, know that their position is a fringe one. For this reason, they are working to break democratic projects and game information systems. That, they plot, is the way to place their minority platform in government. Like Trump, they have no interest in a fair contest, or losing power once it is acquired.

They believe the majority’s views are gross, or sinful, and have no concern for representing them in government.

It is not a coincidence that Hastie has also placed a fight against climate action at the core of his pitch. Fossil fuel disinformation and money have long been central to the Christian Nationalist project.

Those who wish to argue that a politician’s faith ought to be private should look at Hastie’s role on the Advisory Board of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC).

ARC functions as an international meeting place for fossil fuel forces and for those who would impose authoritarian “Christian” government on a public that does not want it. ARC is also an ethnonationalist project: it is about White nations, coding that goal as “Western” or “(Judeo)Christian.”

It appears to have emerged out of tech-authoritarian Peter Thiel’s activity around the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University. Nafeez Ahmed’s research explains that eugenics - the idea that White people, in this case, are genetically superior - combined with conspiracy theories about cultural extinction of the West are core to Thiel’s operation there.

Thiel’s activity in foreign Christian Nationalist culture wars appears to coincide with further government contracts for his surveillance operation, Palantir.

Australia has more, and more high-profile, politicians on the ARC Board than the rest of the participating countries.

John Anderson, past Deputy PM, is credited with being a founder of ARC depending upon which account one reads. He is also a climate-obfuscation “think” tank leader and YouTube influencer, promoting Great Replacement-adjacent prejudice and Christian Nationalist government. Tony Abbott, past PM, is hyperactive in the space connecting his place on the Fox board with Orbánite Hungarian activity, with “Classical Christian” education in the US and more. John Howard, past PM, continues to push reactionary politics well past his use-by. Jacinta Nampijinpa Price serves there. Andrew Hastie (now appearing to set himself up as a future PM) with Amanda Stoker also represent serving politicians on the Board. Both Hastie and Stoker are “convinced evangelicals” promoted by Scott Morrison.

American MAGA congressmen Dan Crenshaw, Mike Johnson and Mike Lee are also on the Board. So too is erstwhile presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy. The latter has ties to Thiel and Leonard Leo, both central to the Project 2025 vision of America.

The first and second conferences in London showed the prejudices and myth making at work in this National Conservative (NatCon) space.

One of this second conference’s keynote speakers was the Christofascist head of the Heritage Foundation, whom John Anderson interviewed while they were in London. Desmog, which saw a leaked list of attendees, described the conference as hosting “Executives from some of the world’s biggest oil and gas firms”. Trump’s Energy Secretary conveyed Trump’s position by video. This article lists the corporate and far-right people and bodies represented there.

It is worth noting that this second London event platformed Erik Prince. That CEO of corporate mercenary forces was introduced by his disgraced brand rather than his more recent iterations. Blackwater was notorious for its massacre of Iraqi civilians. Prince has been described in sworn testimony as perceiving himself “as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe.” He displayed “sheer 19th century bloodlust and thirst for empire” in his efforts to hold Afghanistan as a US colony. In his ARC speech, Prince disdained the weapons industry as “woke.”(3)

It is not clear that Hastie went to the ARC conference in London in February 2025 where his colleagues and ideological allies mixed with Trump’s people, the head of the Heritage Foundation and the transnational far-right. Hastie did however suggest granting our rare minerals to Trump to appease him at a defence conference soon after his colleagues returned from the conference.

The big problem for Australia’s rightwing Coalition parties has been the lack of a credible face to lead them. Both Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton radiated stupid venom and an oleaginous performance of virtue. Andrew Hastie is a dangerous potential leader, not because he has the eyes of a “killer” as allegedly said by Liberal Party colleagues, but because he is a more presentable face concealing a more extreme Fundamentalist Christianity.

We cannot be certain for whose interest these MAGAus politicians are working. It’s certainly not for the majority.

(1) Not ranked by importance or urgency, but by the number of people likely to be activated by the thought. It’s a grim arithmetic.

(2) The Islamophobia Industry overlaps with these networks.

(3) It is worth noting, given the distinctive geopolitical flavour of ARC and Anderson’s Sinophobic interview with Heritage’s Roberts, that Anderson is a Council Member at ASPI, Australia’s weapons sector-funded defence thinktank. Heritage is also campaigning for nuclear weapons stockpiling.