Robert F Kennedy Jr began his tenure as secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services in February 2025 with an unusual message for the federal agency charged with protecting public health. America’s greatest challenge, he told HHS employees in his first address, was not chronic disease but a “spiritual malaise” – a soul-sickness born of moral decline. “Spiritual and physical maladies thrive on one another,” Kennedy said. The solution, he argued, “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 Kennedy had just addressed. This March, as the US faced its worst measles resurgence in 34 years – one he has largely ignored – Kennedy again warned of the same nebulous threat, this time in more militant terms. “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 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 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, critics say, that the Christian nationalist movement that helped propel Donald Trump back into the White House is now reshaping the public health agency from the inside.
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, who left the faith in her early twenties and now holds a doctorate in psychology, grew up immersed in the movement. Christian nationalists – a sprawling religious-political ecosystem of factions and networks – argue that American law should reflect a singular Christian vision of the country, elevating biblical law, eroding the separation of church and state, and hollowing out pluralism and democracy.
Some in the Trump regime openly claim the label. Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and a key author of the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 – which the research briefing describes as a “blueprint for recruitment and indoctrination” for a second Trump term – is one. Project 2025’s agenda includes imposing Christian nationalism on the US, advocating a patriarchal view that does not recognise gender equality or gay rights, and sanctioning discrimination based on religious beliefs. Vought has been nicknamed “the Reaper” for his enthusiasm for cutting federal programs.
Terms such as “spiritual warfare” and “spiritual attack”, Tate explains, 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,” she says, “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 called Christianity “America’s creed”. Secretary of defence 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”. 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 labour”.
Not all would describe themselves as Christian nationalists. But the label matters less than the legislation. “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 adds. 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. “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.”
The demolition of public health
Inside HHS, officials are not just talking about war – they are 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, Daskalakis says, to overcoming childhood bullying) and has worn a leather harness with a similar design. In fact, Daskalakis was raised Greek Orthodox, and has a much bigger tattoo of Jesus. Means knew exactly what he was doing by attacking him. As Vought put it in a private 2023 speech: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. 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 resigned in protest last summer after Kennedy unilaterally fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. “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.”
While Kennedy and Means prime the public with spiritual rationale for dismantling public health, Vought controls funding and does the demolition. 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. The research briefing adds that for FY 2026 the administration proposed a 26.2% cut to the HHS budget, and for FY 2027 a further $15.8bn (12.5%) reduction. The NIH faces proposed cuts of $5bn in FY 2027, the CDC $3.58bn, and the Health Resources and Services Administration $1.73bn. Research funding for Alzheimer’s and mental health has been cut in half, diabetes by almost 40% and cancer by almost a quarter. Vought was originally hoping to fold 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”.
HHS has also 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 the “spiritual malaise” underpinning addiction. The Center for Renewing America, an ultraconservative thinktank founded by Vought, described the Affordable Care Act as “cancerous” and Medicaid as a “weaponized monstrosity destroying the lives of children”.
A plague of preventable disease
The consequences are already visible. The administration has allowed states to increase access to religious vaccine exemptions. Measles, once eradicated in the US, infected more than 2,000 Americans in 2025 and more than 1,700 so far in 2026, according to the original article. The research briefing provides more detail: 2025 recorded 2,267 cases – the highest annual count in over three decades – and as of February 2026, cases continued to rise, with 49 outbreaks reported in 2025 and three in early 2026. The South Carolina outbreak, beginning in autumn 2025, became the largest single outbreak since 2000, with 997 cases as of April 2026. The economic burden of measles outbreaks in 2025 was estimated at over $244 million. Experts attribute the surge to declining vaccination rates, exacerbated by pandemic-related interruptions and growing vaccine skepticism.
Last August, the funds needed for the CDC to stem a measles outbreak in Texas weren’t available until after two children died. Under Senate questioning in April 2026, Kennedy allowed that vaccination might have saved those children’s lives. One South Carolina mother told the Independent this February after her son was paralysed by measles encephalitis: “God chose Ethan for a reason. If I knew this could be the outcome, I still wouldn’t have given my son the vaccine.” She cited the misleading scare line publicly shared by Kennedy and Trump that children today receive too many shots. “There will be a miracle,” she believes.
Prophets and profiteers
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 that outlines how believers plan to occupy top roles across key domains of public life – media, government, education, family, business, arts and entertainment, and religion – 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.” 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 centre 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, founder of the anti-vaccine group Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN). That MAHA branding now markets a broader anti‑vaccine and wellness‑adjacent movement, drawing audiences, donations and product sales from the climate of distrust Kennedy has helped cultivate. Calley Means, meanwhile, co-founded Truemed, a platform that helps people use health savings accounts to purchase unscientific wellness sundries 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 $25m and $50m in Truemed stock while working as a special government employee advising Kennedy. While he claims to have divested upon becoming a full-time government employee, his involvement has contributed to an appearance of divided loyalty.
The more Kennedy and Means can destabilise trust in mainstream science, the more their allies may financially benefit. Potential benefactors include Dr Mark Hyman, a business partner who fabricated the idea that “11 million people die from food every year … like a Holocaust”, and who makes money selling detox cleanses that 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”. Casey Means, Calley’s sister and a Truemed shareholder, was initially nominated for surgeon general but her nomination stalled and she was replaced by Dr Nicole Saphier, a radiologist and Fox News commentator who once told an interviewer she “clung” to her Bible through a teenage pregnancy.
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. Republicans and industry lobbyists are advancing high-deductible health savings accounts (HSAs), which benefit wealthier people but can mean ruinous upfront medical costs for 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 one 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? 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?
The job of public health, Daskalakis says, “is about creating health equity. If equity is something that they don’t agree with, it probably means that they either don’t understand the importance of that work, or it is somehow contrary to their mission.” The people dragging America’s public health system toward a new dark age are not demonic, the original article concludes. 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.