Category Archives: Religious Liberty

Today’s Unwelcome Klan

Hoosiers For Democracy recently reminded readers of a shameful portion of the state’s history– the time in the not-all-that-distant past when Indiana was the epicenter of KKK activity. Interestingly, a contemporaneous essay from noted historian James Madison, published by the Indiana Citizen, also focused on that history.

In both cases, the reminders of our state’s inglorious past were triggered by emergence of a contemporary version of Klan activity, a rally planned for an undisclosed, secret location somewhere in Fishers, Indiana by an organization called Save Heritage Indiana, featuring former Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino, Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith and Attorney General Todd Rokita.

Madison wrote The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland, a definitive history of the Klan in Indiana, and focused on Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson, who Madison describes as “evilest man who ever walked the soil of the Hoosier State.” He sees deep similarities between Stephenson and Beckwith, writing

Connecting these two men across time is their hatred of others. Catholics were Stephenson’s primary enemy. For Beckwith it seems to be Muslims. Both despised immigrants. Both claimed the privilege of deciding for all of us who was a 100 percent American. Both had no use for the Constitution or the rule of law, certainly not the separation of church and state so important to our Founders. And, sadly, despite their desecration of fundamental democratic values, both found allies in the Republican Party and in the churches.

Hoosiers for Democracy also connected the dots between past and present, reminding readers that between 1922-1925, Indiana was the center of the national Klan movement. In 1924, Indiana voters even elected a Klansman–Edward Jackson– as Governor. During that era, one out of three Hoosier men were members of the KKK, with wives in Klan women’s auxiliaries and children who “wore masks and marched in parades as the Ku Klux Kiddies.”

The Klan proudly advertised what it stood for: “the absolute superiority of one race and one religion and the inferiority of all others—Catholics, Eastern European Jews, Polish, Greeks, Asians and Blacks.” The Klan insisted that ‘real’ Americans were losing their country, and that only the Klan could save the nation.

Echoing that rhetoric, Save Heritage Indiana warns that “our world is being destroyed.” The organization’s webpage asserts  that “our home will be erased” by those “others”–the immigrants they insist must be driven from American shores. Like the Klan, they claim that America is being invaded by immigrants who will destroy our culture and way of life.

As I pointed out yesterday, changes to American society have had little or nothing to do with immigration. What I find truly ironic is the reality that those harboring anti-immigrant fear and hatred ignore:  the economic consequences of repelling that “invasion.” Nursing homes and hospitals need aides. Farms and factories need workers. And the “real Americans” willing to fill those jobs are increasingly hard to find. These racist attitudes aren’t just unAmerican, inhumane and immoral, they’re ultimately self-defeating–something Indiana’s born-again Klan figures seem unable to comprehend.

Other Hoosiers, however, get it.

In dramatic and heartening contrast with Indiana’s past embrace of the Klan, Hoosiers in Fishers confronted the bigotry. As the Indianapolis Star reported the next day, hundreds of people braved rain and thunder to march against the mass deportation rally. (The linked article notes that although the event was advertised as a rally, it was invitation-only; men were expected to wear suits and ties, and women told to wear dresses. Attendees were also asked to provide references attesting to their “conservative bona fides” and were required to purchase $50 tickets. A separate “VIP experience” had a price tag of $500.)

The contrast between the very public affirmations of the marchers and the secrecy of the anti-immigrant “conservatives” was telling, and those organizing the mass deportation event evidently got the message that they were not welcome in Fishers. According to political observer Abdul Shabazz, the rally was moved from Fishers to a pole tent in a Boone County field. Photographs smuggled from the event suggested fewer than 100 people were in attendance–in stark contrast to the estimated one thousand Hoosiers who showed up to protest.

Save Heritage Indiana had advertised the Aug. 1 rally for Fishers since mid-July. The group never disclosed the venue publicly, saying on X that it was withholding the location because of harassment and threats. Ticket-holders were instead emailed staging instructions the day of the event, directing them to a Thorntown parking area by 6 p.m., where they would show identification and walk to the site in small groups.

It’s been said that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.

Good people in Fishers did something. Emphatically. It bodes well for November.

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Leave It To Beaver Wasn’t A Documentary

In the run-up to the “Save our Heritage” rally in Fishers, Indianapolis Star columnist James Briggs deconstructed the argument that immigrants are responsible for destroying that heritage. Briggs (unlike the Star’s other opinion columnist, who shares a range of less-informed perspectives) is a thoughtful and generally perceptive observer of the contemporary scene.

Briggs notes the irony of Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith’s participation in a rally to save Indiana’s heritage, given that it is Beckwith and his ilk who are engaged in gleefully destroying that heritage. Save Heritage Indiana, the sponsor of the rally, claims that “Indiana’s identity is eroding under mass migration and weak enforcement.” Both Beckwith and Attorney General Todd Rokita recorded videos for the event. (Rokita’s participation was announced after the publication of Brigg’s essay, but the points he makes about Beckwith also apply to Indiana’s embarrassing AG.)

Groups like Save Our Heritage are nostalgic for a “Leave it to Beaver” past, a past that Briggs says was “perhaps the quintessential mid-century American life.”  That life no longer exists, but it wasn’t eroded by immigrants; Briggs attributes the decline to a retreat from public service and the dismantling of various institutions. He quotes economist Noah Smith, who wrote that

The United States used to have a bunch of institutions that bound us together and forged us into a unified society. Many American communities were centered around churches; these facilitated networking, helped people find spouses, provided community services like day care and mutual aid, and homogenized values and culture at the local level. During the World Wars (and to a lesser extent, the Vietnam War), the military was very large and threw together Americans from various social classes. In the early postwar decades, corporations were also a unifying institution. Mass media provided us with shared cultural context. Even public transit put people of various backgrounds in close social contact on a daily basis.

In the half-century from around 1970 to 2020, those unifying institutions became much weaker. Church attendance slowly declined and then fell off a cliff in the 2010s. The military shrank into a small, professionalized volunteer force. Corporations ended their brief flirtation with lifetime employment, and outsourced many of their roles. Mass media fragmented in the age of the internet. Public transit dwindled in importance as Americans moved to the suburbs and drove.

Immigrants didn’t destroy that “Leave it to Beaver”  lifestyle. Instead, it has been eclipsed by  technological and social change. Briggs noted the effects of technology– “Advanced weaponry reduced the need for soldiers, automation reduced the need for workers and the internet splintered our shared reality.”  I would add the effect of movements for positive social change–the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the gay rights movement were all efforts to give people who had  previously been marginalized a seat at the American table.

MAGA folks like Beckwith and Rokita believe that these and other technological and social changes have cost them their rightful status in American society. The “Heritage” they want to save is the belief that American society should be dominated by straight White Christian males. They need a scapegoat to blame for the loss of that superior status, and they’ve chosen immigrants (and in Beckwith’s case, non-Christians).

In one respect, the quote from Noah Smith is misleading: his description of a “unified” America requires us to overlook the multiple ways in which American society was unfair and definitely un-unified. I strongly recommend Stephanie Coontz’ 1993 book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, in which she provides overwhelming evidence that “Leave it to Beaver” was not a documentary.

I grew up in small-town America in the 1950s, and have subsequently been astonished by efforts to portray those years as somehow “golden.” Granted, if you were a straight Protestant White Male, things were pretty good–if you were female, or Black, or Catholic, or (as I was)  one of very few Jews in a very small town, not so much.

Today, nostalgia for the way we never were has become a primary dividing line between people who live in the real world (and who are, these days, disproportionately Democrats) and angry defenders of a society that never existed (these days, disproportionately MAGA Republicans.)

Nostalgia for a mythological American past–for the “way we never were”–is pernicious; it’s a refusal to learn from experience, and a way for people like Beckwith and Rokita to defend bigotries that are otherwise indefensible.

It’s an indulgence we can’t afford.

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Where’s “Anti-Sharia” Beckwith Now?

Indiana’s looney-tunes Lieutenant Governor refuses to moderate his all-out attacks on the Muslim religion (and is scarcely nicer about the Jewish clerics who had the nerve to publicly support their Muslim neighbors). But I’ve heard nary a peep out of him about the decision of his cult leader’s government to effectively turn a huge portion of America’s media over to Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar.

As the American Prospect has recently reported, if Paramount’s purchase of Warner Brothers goes through, those three nations’ funds will own 49.5 percent of the merged company, with the possibility that that share might grow to a majority interest. As the Prospect reminds readers, CNN and BBC are the world’s leading television news services. The ownership of CNN by foreign nations would raise some significant questions about its news coverage–questions similar to those raised by  ownership by the Ellison family, whose takeover of CBS and installation of Bari Weiss has prompted numerous reporters and producers to leave that once-storied network.

The purchase of Warner Bros. by foreign nations hasn’t been investigated by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the Treasury Department agency that should have conducted such an investigation, and a number of Democratic senators—Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren, Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, and California’s Adam Schiff—have protested that failure. But as the Prospect points out, the most striking absence has been the silence and presumed acquiescence of the GOP’s far-Right Beckwithian bigots.

It’s that of the far-right Republican elected officials who’ve sought to generate and mobilize anti-Muslim bigotry by campaigning against the completely nonexistent threat of Sharia law infiltrating and overtaking American jurisprudence. Last December, Texas Republican Congress Members Chip Roy and Keith Self founded the Sharia-Free America congressional caucus, in which they were quickly joined by Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville. (Roy has since waged an unsuccessful campaign for Texas attorney general, having been defeated in the Republican primary; Tuberville is currently seeking election for Alabama governor—both likely calculating that mobilizing anti-Muslim sentiment on their behalf might help and couldn’t hurt their campaigns.) “No more Muslims,” Roy posted on X.

Roy and Self are hardly outliers among their fellow Texas Republicans. This year’s Texas Republican primary ballot included a ballot measure, Proposition 10, calling on their state to prohibit Sharia Law. A hefty 94 percent of Republicans voted yes on the measure.

And yet, these “Christian warriors” have yet to utter a peep, despite the fact that Saudi Arabia’s Basic Law states that the nation’s governance is founded on the Koran and Saudi courts routinely apply Sharia law. (In Abu Dhabi and Qatar, Sharia law is mostly applied in family law cases, but it is applied.) Given the role of Sharia law, as the Prospect says, “you might think that these nations’ substantial ownership of Hollywood studios and a news network would concern these Republican stalwarts, as the purchases represent the only overlap between the dreaded Sharia code and American studios and networks.”

Harold Meyerson, author of the linked article, notes that he has been able to find no mention either of Paramount’s proposed takeover of these American institutions, or the ownership stake of these nations, by these Sharia-phobic officials. It’s hard to debate his conclusion–that they “don’t cease to invoke their anti-Sharia rants because they’re patently absurd. Rather, they cease to invoke them—in this one sole instance when they could in fact draw a line between American institutions and nations partially reliant on Sharia jurisprudence—because it might thwart their ambitions.” (Or, one presumes, anger their cult leader.)

Here in Indiana, our own version of absurdity–Micah Beckwith–continues to spout anti-Muslim diatribes. He has insisted that it is not unAmerican to hate Islam, and refuses to walk back or modify any of his intemperate comments. (In all fairness, Beckwith isn’t just ignorant about religious liberty; he has also called the three-fifths compromise, which did not allow slave-holding states to count enslaved people as whole persons, a “great move.”) When challenged about his anti-religious freedom beliefs, Beckwith’s office responded that he would “never apologize for saying the United States of America is now and always should be one nation under God.” His God, of course…

Given the Lieutenant Governor’s adamant opposition to Sharia law, I am waiting for him to express his objections to the purchase of Warner Brothers by nations that employ that law. Since he has made it a point of pride that he is willing to piss off anyone who disagrees with his highly idiosyncratic religious views, I can only assume that he will be willing to oppose this takeover.

I hope someone in the media tests my thesis…

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Hijacking Religion

It has taken a while, but genuinely religious folks are coming out to fight the neo-Nazis, racists and assorted nut cases who  use the trappings of religion in service of some very ugly beliefs. 

One of my favorite pastors, Phil Gulley, who writes the “Plain Speech” Substack blog, recently posted “God Save Us from Religious People,” an essay in which he shared his frustration with self-identified “religious” folks.

At the risk of alienating those readers who first met me via my theology books, I will nevertheless say I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with religion. Religion remains the last acceptable vestige of superstition and tribalism, making acceptable that which should never be accepted─the diminishment of intellectual progress, cultural growth, and global well-being. Wherever there is resistance to advancement, religion can be found, dragging us back to a darker, less enlightened era.

Gulley isn’t the only religious figure pushing back against religious appropriation. Christians Against Christian Nationalism was founded in 2019; Compassionate Conservative Revival is another organization combating Christian nationalism. There are others.

In The Contrarian, Robert P. Jones, Founder and President of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), attacked the hijacking of religion, writing that, as America turns 250, it’s time to celebrate “the pluralistic nation we have organically become instead of a mythical white Christian nation we have allegedly lost.”

Jones points to the increasingly obvious White supremacy at the heart of the Trump administration–pointing to the profoundly racist removal of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians while rolling out the welcome mat for White South African refugees. (Those “refugees” were evidently gifted with a PragerU children’s book highlighting the so-called reverse racism and white genocide of South Africa along with a document produced by Trump’s short-lived “1776 Commission” defending America’s founding on slavery.)

Jones accurately places the MAGA movement’s “true cultural power” on its embrace of Christian nationalism.

Trump tells his white Christian base that he is going to “bring back the churchgoer.” JD Vance’s language is more polished, but his appeals to “western civilization” and “Christian values” (made while campaigning for authoritarian leaders like Viktor Orbán) ultimately make the same claim—that both our past and our future lie in the reclaiming of our European Christian origins. That was certainly the vibe at the recent “Rededicate250” event, which I attended, on the National Mall. A cross between a white evangelical tent revival and a Trump rally, this publicly funded nine-hour extravaganza, which attracted a nearly all-white crowd, featured calls for the salvation of both individuals and the nation, not just through God but through “our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

As Jones notes, these “pious” patriots focus on language in America’s constituent documents like “nature’s God,” while  conveniently overlooking the fact that the  founders wrote a governing document that “omitted references to God, secured religious liberty for all, and ensured that there would be no government-established religion or religious test for public office.” It was the Constitution of the Confederacy that used “the favor and guidance of Almighty God” to justify White supremacy and the institution of slavery.

Jones skewers the Christian nationalist’s insistence that the early American colonies were filled with churchgoing Christians. Historians tell us that only 10 percent of that population were actually members of a congregation, and even the inclusion of more loosely affiliated people only brings the number of religious folks to 17 percent. As he points out, Americans today are far more religiously engaged than at either the nation ‘s foundin or through our first 150 years.

So why the hysteria over “decline”? That narrative is only accurate if we focus on White Christianity. As Jones notes, “in 1976, roughly eight in ten (81 percent) Americans identified as White and identified with a Christian denomination, twice the percentage (40 percent) who identify as White and Christian today.”

The God conjured by MAGA is not the compassionate creator of an expansive universe but a vengeful tribal deity tailor-made for a white Christian ethno-religious state. In Trump’s brooding imagination, our collective task in 2026 is not to celebrate the pluralistic nation we have organically become — one that has flourished precisely because of the non-establishment protections in our Constitution — but to forcefully restore a white Christian nation we have allegedly lost.

Jones ends with some good news: PRRI’s most recent survey found that “two thirds of Americans embrace religious pluralism and repudiate the Christian nationalist worldview. And nearly six in ten (59 percent) Americans, including 65 percent of independents, now agree that “President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy.”

Those six in ten need to vote.

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The Contrarian Has A List…

Nice Americans–okay, real Americans–increasingly issue anguished commentaries insisting that Trump’s America “isn’t who we are.” Much as I would like to believe that, it is clearly untrue (or at least an exaggeration). “We” rather obviously come in wildly different varieties–the racist MAGA cult, and the rest of us. Survey research suggests that some 37% of us are either MAGA or MAGA-adjacent, a far larger cohort than I ever imagined.

So who are the MAGA cultists who want to jettison the limits of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and trash the aspirations of the Declaration?

As regular readers know, I attribute MAGA’s support for Trump and the fascism of his administration to racism–to the resentments of White folks (mostly but not exclusively men) triggered by changes in the social order. White “Christian” nationalists and the “intellectuals” at places like the Heritage Foundation are reacting to a perceived assault on their status by those they insist are “lower”–Black and Brown folks, women, non-Christians. (Their fulminations always remind me of that song from Cabaret, where the emerging Nazis sing “The future belongs to us.”)

It has become increasingly difficult to ignore the rancid bigotries that motivate MAGA and Trump. In the wake of Trump’s most recent exercise–portraying the Obamas as apes–even the pathetic Republicans in Congress (who have assiduously avoided reacting to his multiple prior offenses) have been trying to distance themselves.

Can we spell “too little, too late”?

A recent post by Jen Rubin in The Contrarian addressed the numerous racist, misogynistic and anti-Semitic actions of an administration that is increasingly and obviously fascist. Rubin blamed the mainstream press for failing to point out Trump’s racism–ignoring the racism of his accusations about Obama’s birth certificate, and his ride down the golden escalator and launching his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants drug dealers, criminals, and rapists.

As Rubin points out, there had been ample evidence of Trump’s abject bigotry for decades, including his insistence that the (exonerated) Central Park 5 should get the death penalty, and his “nonstop racist commentary about immigrants.”

His attack on DEI is rooted in this same racism, although the legacy media and timid politicians dare not call it that for fear of being labeled “woke.” Blaming the 2025 D.C. plane crash on DEI; taking down a tribute to Jackie Robinson; replacing MLK, Jr.’s birthday as a federal holiday with his own at our National Parks; trying to write slavery out of the Smithsonian; and arresting Black journalists…are plainly efforts to demean and erase African Americans from our history.

Rubin quotes the ACLU’s description of the anti-DEI ideologues who have ferociously attacked inclusion efforts in and out of government. “These ideologues have weaponized the term ‘DEI’ to mean ideas and policies that address systemic racism and sexism.” These attacks are part of “a larger effort by right-wing foundations, think tanks, and political operatives to dismantle civil rights gains made in recent decades.”

Trump has turned the top ranks of civilian and military personnel into a virtually all-white boys club. He has restored the names of Southern slaveholders to military bases; while refusing to appoint a single Black woman to the federal bench in his second term. He has repeatedly hired neo-Nazis and elevated White Nationalist sympathizers. He selected primarily Black and Muslim countries to enforce restrictions and provoke adverse treatment on visas.

Furthermore, his constant insults directed at women — evidenced by the E.J. Carroll sexual assault verdict, or his ongoing mistreatment of female reporters — leave no doubt about his misogynistic venom. His compulsive dehumanization of immigrants and resorting to enabling White supremacists have been at the heart of his presidency. It is hard to conjure what more proof of deep-seated racism and misogyny would be sufficient to persuade those who feign inability to know Trump’s real motives.

Rubin is entirely correct when she says that the corporate/legacy media could–and should– examine the racist views of Trump’s voters and explain how his policies, however rationalized, are racist. They could point out that MAGA’s efforts to destroy the Voting Rights Act is intended to return America to Jim Crow politics, that his mass deportation crusade (and limits to immigration from “shithole” countries) is an effort to make America White again.  They could refuse to let feckless Republicans “scamper away” without addressing Trump’s most recent racist comment. And they could stop “pretending there are benign reasons for policies and personnel decisions that (wow!) just so happen to bolster white men at the expense of all those easily classified as others.”

MAGA and Trump are not who most Americans are–but most Germans weren’t initially Nazis, either. The resistance understands that we are currently choosing who we are–and how history will remember us.

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