The U.S. Faith Party was founded by Rick Santorum and other members of the New Christian Policy Council (NCPC) in 2021. Having become disillusioned with the Republican party after his failed 2016 presidential run, Santorum announced in 2018, that he "had accidentally marked independent when renewing [his] voter registration, and decided that [he] thought it looked better that way." In 2019, Santorum helped co-found the NCPC, which served as a forum for evangelical leaders to discuss the future of politics in the country, and the role that evangelicals and their allies should search for. The 2016 and 2018 elections caused significant discontent in the evangelical right, who felt used and abandoned by the GOP. With the signs of the breakdown of the two-party system emerging in 2020, Santorum argued that the christian right needed to form its own political engine if religious politics were to remain relevant in the country. In early 2021, the NPEC voted in favor of Santorum's proposal, and the Faith Party came into existence. The Faith Party was originally conceived as to be economically center-left, while socially conservative. Its platform took a vaguely social-democratic stance on most economic issues, while affirming a commitment to evangelical social doctrine. This way, it would be theoretically possible to unite the religious left and right, which could serve as a sizable base. However, throughout the 2020s, both Santorum and the party's economic ideology began to shift noticeably to the left. Part of it had to do with Santorum getting back in touch with his leftist, European relatives, and part of it had to do with Santorum's reading when formulating the party's platform. While the official platform drew upon more modern progressive economics, Santorum also began reading about America's earlier christian socialists, as well as other leftists, and he took a peculiar liking to Karl Kautsky's
Communism in Central Europe at the Time of the Reformation, as well as some early Synthesis Marxist writings. By 2025, Santorum was willing to mention in private that he saw himself as a Christian Socialist. By 2028, when he was hospitalized for stomach cancer, Santorum affirmed that he believed, "Jesus would probably have been some type of communist. Not the bad type, but a good one." His reaction to the announcement of the Vienna Consensus in 2029, to which he simply responded, "fuckers," a rare expletive from the former senator. This coarse response, however, was enough to give the Faith Party, which Santorum had centralized around his leadership, a go-ahead to shift farther to the left and become involved in anti-government activities.
In its 2032 platform, the Faith Party explicitly endorsed Synthesis Marxism as an economic and political ideology. In 2033, the Faith Party established its own paramilitary wing, the Sons of Jehu. The Sons of Jehu became one of the founding members of the Revolutionary Alliance when it was formally established in 2035. While the Sons of Jehu and the Faith Party participated in the May 31st Revolution, and were successful in seizing their delegated targets in the early weeks of the rebellion, reports of violence and brutality from across the country made the party leadership rethink their decision to abet the revolution. The Sons of Jehu announced its withdrawal from the alliance, and the Faith Party signed a ceasefire agreement with the American Moderate Party government. In exchange for handing over their weapons and seized equipment to the government, the Sons of Jehu officially disbanding, and turning over intelligence on other members of the Revolutionary Alliance, the Faith Party and its members would be granted political amnesty from their role in the revolution. While this action got the party decried as cowards and traitors by their former allies, and while it forced the party Chairman to personally fly to Cairo and beg Ihsan Farraj himself for entrance to the Fifth International, it did allow the Faith Party to remain a legal party during Reconstruction and the 2040s, where it became the U.S.'s 2nd largest party in the period, with 24% of House and 15% of Senate seats at its peak. However, with the return of free elections in 2052, the Faith Party quickly lost support. Most of Faith's voters are now either ultra-conservatives protest voting against the AMP and the other parties, or those who feel personal loyalty to the Faith party for saving them from experiencing a violent siege by the government. However, with both of these groups now starting to either die off or lose their loyalty, the Faith Party will likely slide into utter irrelevance.
(He's probably a real conservative, but it's amusing to think about.)
