Tag Archives: Christian nationalism

Indiana’s “Christian” Soldiers…

Elections have consequences–and in Indiana, those consequences are potentially frightening.

Thanks to gerrymandering and the refusal of rural voters to cast a ballot for anyone who doesn’t have an R by their name, the state is currently “governed” (note quotation marks) by  a slate of pathetic wanna-bes and Christian Nationalists. We have a governor who is clearly more interested in the title (and in staying in Trump/MAGA’s good graces) than in policy; an Attorney General who evidently skipped his law school class on ethics, and who has turned the office into a performative culture war outpost; a Secretary of State who was elected despite obvious incompetence and corruption and has continued to exhibit both.

And then, of course, there is our Lieutenant Governor, Micah Beckwith, who consistently displays his ignorance of the Constitution and Bill of Rights while working to turn Indiana into a Christian theocracy.

The Statehouse File recently reported on meetings Beckwith has been having with others in the Christian Taliban.

At a closed-door meeting in April, Micah Beckwith and members of what the Indiana lieutenant governor called his Anti-Woke Advisory Committee laid out an aggressive strategy to expand conservative influence in public schools and push back against what the group identified as “woke policy creep.”

The committee detailed plans to launch conservative student clubs, reshape teacher training programs, and identify school districts where diversity and pro-LGBTQ+ policies are in place, according to meeting notes obtained by The Indiana Citizen and verified as authentic by a person familiar with the committee. Many of the discussion topics were aimed at ramping up political pressure on school boards.

Attendees at the meeting included the Executive Director and Education Director of the far-ritht Indiana Family Institute, Former Attorney General Curtis Hill ( you will recall his law license was suspended over groping allegations),  Jay Hart, a Morgan County conservative who unsuccessfully challenged state Senate President Pro Tem Rodric Bray in a 2024 Republican primary, State Senator Craig Haggard, a Republican from Mooresville, and several other Christian Nationalist activists.

The committee was formed by Beckwith, who self-identifies as a Christian nationalist, and the Statehouse File reports that the meeting focused on “specific steps to launch conservative clubs in schools and target teachers, education colleges, and programs they see as promoting pro-LGBTQ+ content or “leftist ideology.”

Beckwith’s animus toward the gay community and his efforts to marginalize the members of that community are longstanding, and the committee spent considerable time focusing on potential anti-gay measures. Participants noted that some teachers continue to display LGBTQ+ flags and classroom décor to signal inclusion, which they described as a way to “push agendas.”

I guess it’s only an “agenda” when it isn’t consistent with your effort to “Christianize” the state, an effort that somehow isn’t an “agenda.”

The committee extended its focus beyond classrooms to nonprofit organizations, recommending audits of groups with state-issued specialty license plates to ensure they were in compliance with what they called “anti-DEI executive orders.” The Indianapolis Youth Group, which provides services and support to LGBTQ+ youth, was specifically named for review.

The linked report also documents Beckwith’s relationships with figures of several national far-right groups.

During the meeting, members proposed a quarterly “Woke Radar Report” to track what they consider “problem districts” and suggested mechanisms that would give Beckwith a platform to pressure local school boards. According to the article, the institution of such a report “would function both as a watchdog tool and a political instrument, spotlighting schools where progressive policies are growing.”

The article has much more–all pretty terrifying, and absolutely none of it consistent with the job description of the office of Lieutenant Governor. That office is charged with heading up the Indiana State Department of Agriculture, the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority, and the Office of Community and Rural Affairs. (I believe it also heads up efforts to increase tourism.) Nowhere does that portfolio include the Christianizing of the schools.

Of course, the Lieutenant Governor also becomes Governor if the sitting governor dies, resigns, or is otherwise unable to serve. I’m no fan of empty suit Mike Braun, but I certainly hope he’s healthy…

These sorry excuses for state “leadership” sure don’t make me proud to be a Hoosier….

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MAGA’s Road To Gilead

Given the Trump administration’s daily effort to elevate White “Christians” over people of color, it can be easy to overlook its equally rabid effort to return women to third or fourth-class citizenship–to return us to powerless and submissive possessions of our fathers and husbands.

Suddenly, opinions that once would not have been uttered publicly–opinions that would have marked their holders as deeply unwell residents of the modern world–are spewing forth from the mouths of people who have been allowed to occupy some of the highest positions in American government.

A recent newsletter from Lincoln Square focused on the effort to strip the nation’s women of our rights as citizens, in the name of a perverted “Christianity.” It reported on a recent endorsement by Pete Hegseth, the inept drunkard who currently heads the Department of Defense, of his pastor Doug Wilson’s belief that women should not have the right to vote.

As the author of the essay wrote,

In a way, Hegseth performed a public service by bringing to wider attention the “Christian nationalist” movement that is gaining strength and has much support in the Trump Cult. As the title of the CNN report indicates, it seeks “Christian” domination of America. All of us need to know what they mean by that. Pastor Wilson is a flat-out nutter who envisions an America that is a “Christian nation” the way Saudi Arabia is an “Islamic nation.” The ultimate goal is replacing secular democracy with a government ruled by “Christ the King.” Jesus presumably being unavailable for such a role that rejects his most important teachings, it would mean “Donald the King” or perhaps “Doug the King.

This movement is all about reverting women to what was for thousands of years considered to be their proper place of inferiority and submission. Indeed, as I explain in the book manuscript on which I am currently working, An Agreed-Upon Fiction: The Creation of the ‘Inferior’ Sex — How It Misshaped History and the Present, the whole authoritarian enterprise is based on a Foundational Lie that arose more than five thousand years ago. I call it Male Monocreationism: the assertion that men have all reproductive power and women merely provide a place in which men’s creations grow. “Women are the kind of people that people come out of,” Wilson said in the CNN interview.

The article quoted Wilson’s book, in which he wrote “A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission.”

I’m sure that there has always been some number of men who find this “philosophy” comforting–some subset of men who have found themselves unable to operate in a world that doesn’t afford the males of the species automatic dominance. (There are the Incels, for example–men who can’t get dates, let along amorous partners.) These are not healthy humans; they are clearly threatened by the realities of a modern world in which intellect rather than brute strength gives entree to civic and economic equality.

It’s one thing to recognize that society has always harbored such men; it is far more troubling when they feel able to announce their beliefs publicly, and frankly terrifying when people in positions of power publicly embrace them.

MAGA isn’t just waging war on democracy and the Constitution. At its core, it’s an effort to destroy modernity, to return us to a time of superstition and ignorance in which its members felt more comfortable. MAGA’s Christian Nationalists want to return us to a past in which women, LGBTQ+ folks, non-Whites and non-faux-Christians were all subservient to straight White “Christian” males.

And they’re through pretending otherwise.

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Framing

The most important thing I learned in law school can be summed up with the adage “he who frames the issue wins the debate.” The most consequential move a lawyer–or any debater–can make is to define what the argument is all about. (Our idiot-in-chief clearly does recognize that, at least at some subconscious level, since his response to any and all accusations is always to insist that the real issue is whether the accuser is “fake.”)

What reminded me of that old law school conclusion was a recent article in the New York Times, citing a communications professor from Texas A&M, one Jennifer Mercieca. According to the article, her recent book addresses that issue– what she calls “frame warfare.” Mercieca argues that the power to name things is the power to define reality, and she identifies that tactic as Trump’s most potent. As she points out, it’s a tactic that goes hand in hand with his constant assertions that fly in the face of facts and evidence. Redefinitions of reality, she writes, have been central to his success.

As Mercieca explains frame warfare, “What you call a thing determines the contours of the debate around it — or precludes debate altogether. Did you borrow a car without permission, or did you steal it? Was the crush of migrants at the Mexican border an invasion or a humanitarian crisis?”

The importance of framing is obvious in the fulminations of America’s White Christian Nationalists. One of the most obvious examples is the debate about abortion. “Christian” paternalists focus on the “sin” of terminating a pregnancy–on the propriety of the decision being made by a pregnant individual. Civil libertarians insist that the issue is really who decides? In our frame, we ask: is this a decision government should have the authority to make, or is it a decision properly made by the  individual woman? As I used to tell my students, the Bill of Rights is essentially a list of things that government is prohibited from deciding–what prayer you say (or whether you pray at all), what political opinions you hold, whether you have a right to travel without offering justification to authority…

Back when Republicans could credibly claim to be proponents of limited government, many weighed in on the side of  individual liberty. (I remember–back in the day– being part of a group called Republicans for Choice.) Barry Goldwater famously said that government didn’t belong in either your boardroom or your bedroom. (That belief also led him to support gay rights–he even got an award from PFLAG.)

Rather obviously, if we decide that the role of government is to require people to live in accordance with God’s will, we have to decide whose version of that will government should enforce. “Christian” nationalists are fine with giving government that power, so long as they get to be the arbiters of what is “godly.’ They also talk a lot about religious liberty–for them. They aren’t so solicitous about religious liberty for adherents of other (wrong) religions. Their version of religious liberty turns out to be their liberty to use government to impose their particular religious beliefs on those who don’t share them.

It isn’t just the “Christian” nationalists whose framing is perverse. It’s also MAGA. 

Just what makes America great? Or more properly, since “again” is a prominent part of that slogan, what DID make America great? If you listen to Trump’s base, it’s pretty clear that their version of “greatness” requires the social dominance of straight White males. 

Over the past several years, Americans have stopped debating policy–after all, policy debates require evidence, consideration of past experience ….FACTS. It requires respect for people who come to the conversation with a different–but rreality-based– perspective. The reason we can no longer engage in civil discourse is that MAGA has framed control of government as a fight between the resistance of those of us who live in the real world and their right-their need– to impose their “alternate reality”–their preferred frame– on the rest of us.

I think the proper frame for the culture war we are fighting is this: Both MAGA and the “Christian” nationalists want to take America back to a time that never was.

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Out Of The Closet

Gay folks came out of the closet several years ago. These days, it’s “Christian” Nationalism that is emerging, “out and proud.” A number of “Christian” congregations (note quotation marks) have decided to ignore that “woke” stuff in the Sermon on the Mount–not to mention biblical admonitions about widows, orphans and strangers–and have chosen to refashion religion as political ideology.

I’ve previously written about the book published in 2023 by Tim Alberta, titled “The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory,” in which Alberta–himself a very devout Evangelical–shared his horrified observations of that transformation, and the thousands of Evangelical churches that have essentially jettisoned theology for the political ideology of the MAGA movement. 

Here in my city of Indianapolis, just a couple of weeks ago, the Sure Foundation Baptist Church recently advocated for the death penalty for LGBTQ+ individuals. The pastor, Stephen Falco, suggested they should kill themselves. (He made these remarks during a “Men’s Preaching Night,” and his “sermon” was streamed online.) 

Talking Points Memo recently reported on an Idaho church that has moved to Washington, D.C., where it “ministers” to MAGA movers and shakers like Pete Hegseth and assorted Republican operatives. Pastor Jared Longshore opened the initial service by declaring that “The option before you is quite plain. It is Christ or chaos, Christ or destruction.”

According to the reporter who wrote the piece, the church in D.C. is part of a growing, international network of churches that someone named Doug Wilson founded. It is called the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC).

I attended what the CREC called the “planting” of a D.C. church on Sunday after spending months growing increasingly fascinated with Wilson and his influence on the New Rightthat is ascendant in Trump’s Washington. America is full of people with big, apocalyptic visions and hardline views on how the country can redeem itself. But Wilson is a rare bird: along with the CREC, he’s built a small, theocratic empire in Moscow, Idaho, far away from D.C. And yet, through his own sermons, those of affiliated pastors like Longshore, and a publishing house, Christ Kirk (also known as Christ Church) has managed to bridge the geographic divide and gain a following among right-wingers across the country. It’s spawned what some call the “Moscow Mood” — a postmillennialist view that the Christian right should employ a new level of aggression in fighting to dominate the culture, and use the government to enact policies in accordance with its religious teachings…

Planting a church in the nation’s Capitol follows naturally from the organization’s vision: just as a member must incorporate their religious belief into every aspect of their personal life, so too must they fight for the group’s favored ideas in politics and culture: banning homosexuality, embracing more patriarchal family structures, ending abortion, and removing female soldiers from combat roles. In a phone interview after the sermon, Longshore told TPM that he wants a Christian government in the most direct sense: all government officials must “acknowledge that Christ is Lord and then actually listen to what he is telling them to do.” That would include the need to “execute the wrath of God against the wrongdoer,” he said. 

Members of this church–like so many of those described by Alberta– are self-described “warriors” of the Christian right. They believe they are fighting a war against modern America. Those members see themselves, as the author of the report notes, as “underdogs, besieged on all sides by a secularism that’s violent and bent on destroying the remnants of a Christian America that they’re trying to revive.” That victimization mentality has persisted, even while the influence of the Christian right as grown. (The author lists the end of Roe, the hard-right, Christian SCOTUS majority, and rising church attendance among young men.) They believe they exist within what Longshore, in his sermon, described as “a lapsed nation, a fallen nation, a nation that was Christian to the core, nearly to a man when it was founded.” (Accurate history wasn’t his strong suit.)

 In a conversation after the sermon, Longshore told TPM’s reporter that the problem he sees is the “emphasis on democracy.” Democracy, he said, leads to falsity: people start “trusting the mind of man to determine how things should go,” while “ultimately God is the one who has spoken.”

And of course, we know who speaks for God…

When I encounter “religious” people so devoid of anything remotely resembling loving-kindness or humility, I always think of that quote by Anne Lamott: “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

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The Stakes

Remember that old song lyric, “What’s It all about, Alfie?”

Those of us who are appalled and confused by the administration’s daily abuses of the Constitution and rule of law can be forgiven for losing sight of “what it’s all about.” As usual, Heather Cox Richardson has provided context–and an answer. She points to the obvious: Trump’s economic policies are designed to transfer wealth to the already-obscenely-wealthy from the rest of us–then provides context: “From 1981 to 2021, American policies moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.”

But just enriching the already-rich is only one part of the overall goal. Richardson points to the administration’s gutting of a government that “regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights and to replace it with a government that permits a few wealthy men to rule.”

The CBO score for the Republicans’ omnibus bill projects that if it is enacted, 16 million people will lose access to healthcare insurance over the next decade in what is essentially an assault on the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The bill also dramatically cuts Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Plan (SNAP) benefits, clean energy credits, aid for student borrowers, benefits for federal workers, and consumer protection services, while requiring the sale of public natural resources.

It gets worse. (I know, you’re thinking “how much worse can it get?” Trust me.)

Richardson is only one of the observers who pinpoints the real “mover and shaker” behind this assault on constitutional government–Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought. Vought is determined to decimate those parts of the government that are inconsistent with the Christian Nationalist goals outlined in Project 2025, the production of which he directed. As Richardson reminds us,

Vought was a key author of Project 2025, whose aim is to disrupt and destroy the United States government order to center a Christian, heteronormative, male-dominated family as the primary element of society. To do so, the plan calls for destroying the administrative state, withdrawing the United States from global affairs, and ending environmental and business regulations.

Racism is, of course, an essential element of Christian Nationalism, which works to elevate the civic and social dominance of (certain) White Christian males. Vought founded the Center for Renewing America (CRA), which focuses on combating its (utterly phony) version of “critical race theory.” The organization’s affiliated issue advocacy group, American Restoration Action, has a similar mission: to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God”.  Both groups hope to provide the “ideological ammunition to sustain Trump’s political movement after his departure from the White House.”

It is worth noting that the administration’s war on education and empirical knowledge is an essential element of the Christian Nationalist plan to de-secularize America. The assaults on science, on research, on academic freedom are an indispensable part of the movement to substitute theocracy for a country that respects the intellectual liberties protected by the First Amendment. In service of that goal, Christian Nationalists have worked diligently to redefine “religious freedom” to mean the right of fundamentalist Christians to impose their beliefs on others, and to redefine “free speech” to mean privileging opposition to the “woke” values they abhor.

One of those “woke” values is education.

In my own Red state of Indiana, where performative “Christians” dominate the legislature and self-identified Christian Nationalists hold statewide offices, the assault on education has been unremitting. The voucher program that pretends to honor “parental choice” sends millions of Hoosier tax dollars to religious schools, in what is a dishonest work-around of the Establishment Clause while starving our public schools. More recently, steady assaults on Indiana University–a once-storied and highly respected academic institution–have ranged from political interference with its latest choice of a president–allowing the post to go to an less distinguished (but presumably more well-connected) “dark horse” candidate, to legislation threatening curriculum considered “liberal,” to the more recent and appalling substitution of far-right political operatives (including the odious Jim Bopp) for the choices of alumni on the university’s board of trustees.

Thanks to those assaults–and Indiana’s ban on abortion–Indiana University is losing many of the students who formerly enriched intellectual life on campus.

America is at an inflection point. What is at stake isn’t simply our global dominance (which Trump has already discarded), but our essential domestic identity. America hasn’t been seen as the “City on the Hill” because we embraced fundamentalist religion, but because we aspired to protect individual liberty and civic equality.

We didn’t always live up to those aspirations, but we can ill-afford to replace them with a Taliban-like theocracy.

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