Tag Archives: Christian Nationalists

Trashing The First Amendment

Ten months into the Trump administration, the outlines of America’s cold civil war have become too stark to miss. MAGA is determined to remake the United States into a nation where White Christian Nationalists are legally privileged and in control. And they’re making progress.

The evidence is overwhelming. Masked ICE agents focus on people of color. Trump reportedly wants to “revamp” immigration rules in order to make it easier for Whites and harder for others to enter the country. From day one, the administration has pursued an all-out war on “DEI”–insisting that any effort to level the playing field for previously marginalized folks is really anti-White discrimination. Aided and abetted by a thoroughly corrupted Supreme Court majority, the hits have kept coming: universities prevented from continuing programs even slightly resembling affirmative action, the continued gutting of the Voting Rights Act…

And as we’ve recently seen, the racism motivating MAGA isn’t diminishing; it infuses the GOP’s young activists.

I have previously written about the faux-Christianity that motivates much of this. I particularly recommend Tim Alberta’s book, “The Kingdom, The Power and the Glory.” Alberta is a genuine Christian Evangelical, and his critique is informed by his own deep religiosity. More recently, David French–another committed Evangelical– has described what is happening in thousands of churches as a religious “revolution”–not to be confused with a true revival. In his telling, America is close to a religious revolution, and the difference between that revolution and a true religious revival is immensely important for both church and state.

Decades of scholarship, very much including scholarship by religious organizations, have attributed America’s religiosity–far greater than in other Western Democratic countries–to the fact that the First Amendment requires the separation of church and state. That understanding fails to persuade the MAGA folks who’ve turned religion into a political identity.

The Christian Nationalists who dominate Red state governments reject the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. They intend to indoctrinate the nation’s schoolchildren, and they aren’t satisfied with mandates to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms. In Texas, they’ve introduced a “revised” and bible-infused English curriculum.

A new state-sponsored English curriculum infused with lessons about the Bible and Christianity could reach tens of thousands of Texas schoolchildren this year.

More than 300 of the state’s roughly 1,200 districts signed up to use the English language arts lessons, according to data obtained by The New York Times through a public records request. Many are rural, and relatively small.

The curriculum was created as several states, including Oklahoma and Louisiana, fought to bring prayer or religious texts like the Ten Commandments into public school classrooms, blurring the line between church and state.

According to the analysis done by the New York Times, the Texas curriculum features content on Christianity, the bible and the life of Jesus. Lessons include the Biblical story of his birth in a Bethlehem manger, New Testament accounts of the angel who described him as the Messiah, and even stories about the miracles he was purported to perform.

Fifth graders examine a psalm in a poetry unit. First-grade students discuss the parable of the prodigal son alongside stories like “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Kindergarten children learn in depth about the Book of Genesis in a lesson on art exploration that notes that “many artists have found inspiration for creating art from the words in creation stories in religious books.”

The Times analysis found that Christianity was heavily favored in the lessons. In the materials used in the second grade, for example, “Christianity, the Bible and Jesus are referenced about 110 times. By contrast, Islam, Muslims, the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad are mentioned roughly 31 times in lessons spanning from kindergarten to fifth grade.”

The Times article has much more detail, and it is worth clicking through and reading. The curricular changes were summed up in a quote by David R. Brockman, a Christian theologian and religious studies scholar at Rice University. After he reviewed all of the Texas materials, Brockman concluded that the lessons amounted to Bible study in a public school curriculum, and he worried that the state’s adaptation of its curriculum would send an implicit message to children “that Christianity is the only important religion.”

Well, duh! Of course that’s the message, and it’s intended. In MAGA’s America–a country distant from the one occupied by the rest of us–the only real Americans are lily-White and “Christian.” The rest of us–including genuine Christians–are intruders.

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It’s About Time!

Regular readers of this blog know that, when I address the threats posed by Christian Nationalism, I always put quotation marks around the word Christian. I do so because the movement we call Christian Nationalism seems–to this non-Christian–incredibly unChristian. I have several friends in the clergy, and they are admirable humans who follow a very different religious path from the proponents of bigotry and White Supremacy who have appropriated the title.

But because I do know wonderful people who identify as Christian, I have been frustrated by what I have seen as a tepid response by the genuinely Christian community to the usurpation of their identity. I would have expected members of the kind and thoughtful congregations that I know are “out there” to respond forcefully to those who are militarizing and distorting the tradition, but until very recently, there has been minimal pushback from people who are entitled to call themselves Christian.

It wasn’t until 2019 that Christians Against Christian Nationalism was formed, the first welcome sign of organized resistance of which I’m aware. And now, in an equally welcome response to ICE and its efforts to rid the country of Black and Brown people by categorizing them as “illegal immigrants,” a network of 5000 churches has organized to protect worshippers.

As The Bulwark has reported, a network of five thousand faith communities is now disseminating a blueprint for clergy and lay leaders who want to push back against what Trump and the agents of his newly emboldened ICE are doing to immigrants across the country.

This rapid-response action plan for churches and faith communities to protect people during ICE raids is the brainchild of evangelical pastor Doug Pagitt and his group Vote Common Good, which is not only providing these resources to the faith communities in his network, but also sending an open letter to the White House Faith Office calling for justice and compassion for immigrants, and slamming plans to open more detention centers like Florida’s Everglades detention facility. Thousands of faith leaders and congregations cosigned the letter.

The plan includes formation of rapid-response teams of volunteers willing to monitor reports of raids, verify them, and show up to raids as “moral witnesses.” They also coordinate shelter, transportation, and legal aid for vulnerable immigrants.

The activism of these congregations is largely in reaction to Trump’s over-reach: Churches are no longer safe from ICE incursions. But whatever the trigger, my reaction is “better late than never.”

The question that confronts adherents of all religions is deceptively simple: do you actively defend the core values of your faith, or do you simply wear the label? When that label is appropriated by people whose actions are diametrically opposed to the most fundamental values of your religion, what do you do? (It isn’t just American Christians who must choose a path under those circumstances; Jews in Israel who see Netanyahu’s actions as fundamentally inconsistent with Jewish values face the same decision.)

Of course, it isn’t just religious folks. When the fascists come calling, we are all obligated to choose a side. Lawyers must decide how dedicated they really are to the rule of law; university personnel must stand–or not–for intellectual freedom. These really are the times that try men’s (and women’s) souls–the times that challenge us to decide where our values really lie and how willing we are to defend them.

Pagitt, the founder of Vote Common Good, has been disappointed to see the way church groups have been co-opted and bullied during Trump’s second term. He isn’t the only one.

“Much to my sadness, we’ve seen faith communities quiver and shake and be afraid like universities and law firms and so many institutions,” he said. “We want to be on the other side of that and say to skeptical people of good conscience to not play the silent hypocrite card.”

It’s encouraging to see the real Christians begin to stand up. The rest of us need to emulate them.

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The Theocracy At The Center of Project 2025

A writer for The Guardian recently read the entire 900+/- pages of Project 2025, rather than relying on what she called “snippets.” What she found was even more appalling than the various excerpts most of us have seen.

Basically, the Project lays out a road to theocracy.

The document repeatedly characterizes America as a country poisoned by “wokeness.” And it proposes, as an antidote to “wokeness,” remaking the government in accord with a fundamentalist version of Christianity.

Across multiple agencies, it would make access to abortion infinitely more difficult. It would change the name of the federal health and human services department to the “Department of Life”. It would criminalize pornography. There would be mass deportations and curtailments of legal immigration programs, including Daca. It would dismantle the Department of Education.

Throughout the manifesto, authors also recommend ways to increase funding for religious organizations by giving them more access to government programs – largely through increased use of school vouchers that could go to religious schools or by modifying programs like Small Business Administration loans to make religious groups eligible for funding.

In some parts, the project takes a more explicit Christian worldview. In the chapter about the Department of Labor, the manifesto suggests a communal day of rest for society because “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest”. One way to enforce this idea would be for Congress to require paid time-and-a-half for anyone who works on Sundays, which the project calls the default day of Sabbath “except for employers with a sincere religious observance of a Sabbath at a different time”.

In nearly all chapters, there is a mention of driving out any forces that seek to increase diversity in the federal government. And whenever LGBTQ+ rights are mentioned, it is to say there should be fewer of them.

Heritage might just as well have named Project 2025 “Project Christian Nationalism.” The document doesn’t stop with the enumeration of goals, either–it outlines the practical steps that would enable a Trump Administration to reach those goals.

Achieving the goal of “Christianizing” America would be the task of loyalists who would replace civil servants–as has been reported, Project 2025 advocates reclassifying thousands of federal jobs as “political” rather than non-partisan, in order to replace the civil servants who are currently doing those jobs with Trump loyalists.

The effort would also require taking control of the census.

The census helps decide how federal resources should be allocated to communities, but, for our purposes here, it’s most relevant that census data is used to decide how to divvy up seats in the US House and make electoral maps during decennial redistricting done by states. The census can alter the balance of power in statehouses and in Congress.

Given its influence, the project suggests an incoming conservative president needs to install more political appointees to the census bureau and ensure ideologically aligned career employees are “immediately put in place to execute a conservative agenda”. The next census isn’t until 2030, but plans for it are already under way.

That conservative agenda includes adding a citizenship question, something Trump tried to do for the 2020 census but was blocked by the US supreme court. The project says “any successful conservative Administration must include a citizenship question in the census.”

The project also suggests reviewing and possibly curtailing plans to broaden the race and ethnicity categories because “there are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”

There is much more, of course, but the quoted material is enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck, and probably the necks of most rational Americans.

Those of us tempted to dismiss Project 2025 as a theocratic fever dream unlikely to be realized even in a Trump administration need to understand that the people committed to imposing their beliefs on the rest of us are nothing if not patient. They worked for fifty years to overturn Roe v. Wade. If Trump wins, their wait will be shorter–as the article notes, to the (very limited) extent that Trump has enumerated any policies (or would recognize one if he encountered it), they’ve aligned with those in Project 2025. Even if he loses narrowly, they will be encouraged to dig in.

Even a massive loss–a Blue Wave–will only slow them down. They will bide their time and continue trying to “return” the country to a place that existed only in their twisted imaginations. Americans who want to protect our constitutional system will need to stay perpetually alert.

As the saying goes, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

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The Book Of Beckwith

The Snyde Report–an Indiana website promoting the state’s Democratic candidates–has begun including what it calls The Book of Beckwith–quotes from Micah Beckwith–in its daily reports.

As Indiana readers know, Beckwith is one of the four far-Right theocratic candidates on this year’s statewide Republican ticket. He’s the only one who has publicly described himself as a Christian Nationalist, although it is highly probable that Jim Banks and Todd Rokita share that mindset. (Unlike Beckwith, however, they’re sufficiently politically savvy to avoid publicly embracing it.)

Here are some “Beckwithisms” from a recent report on “the book of Beckwith.”

Micah, 1:8 -Pastor Micah Beckwith pushes the racist White Replacement Theory in post.
Pastor Micah Beckwith, Republican candidate for Lt. Governor and self described Christian Nationalist pushed the racist White Replacement Theory in a recent Facebook post.

Micah, 1:7 – Micah Beckwith compares vaccination policies to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews.
“And that to me is the issue here, because now you’re, it’s what the, it’s what the Nazis did to the Jews. They legitimized some citizens to be legal citizens and, they, they delegitimize, they made delegitimize citizens out of the Jews.”

Micah 1:6 – Pastor Micah Beckwith shares post advocating that brown people crossing the border should be shot
Pastor Micah Beckwith, the MAGA Republican Lt. Governor candidate shared a post on Facebook advocating brown people crossing the border should be shot. No comment from Pastor Beckwith’s running mate, Mike Braun.

Micah, 1:5 – Micah Beckwith states people should not vote for a politician who is not pro-life
“I always tell people. Don’t vote for a politician if they’re not first pro-life because the Declaration of Independence says there are three unalienable rights that our creator has given us and has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And if he will not protect, your life, he will not protect your liberty and he will not protect your pursuit of happiness.”

Micah, 1:4 – Micah Beckwith states The Indy Star, members of the left and Methodist and Lutheran ministers want to cut off the private parts of children “they were praising that these pastors for saying you’re doing the right thing by, by allowing people to be able to cut off the private parts of children and, and so I think again the reason that The Indy Star sees me as a threat and they should because they want to do an act, they want to act things that are just plain wicked.”

Micah, 1:3 – Micah Beckwith states The Indy Star wants to mutilate children, put pornographic material in the hands of children and murder babies. “They want to murder babies. I mean, like, so I’m against that. So, they probably are a little scared.”

Beckwith is running for Lieutenant Governor, a post dealing with tourism and agriculture, not “biblical fidelity,” but like his fellow culture warriors, he displays little to no interest in those boring governmental tasks. And while Braun constantly minimizes the importance of his running-mate’s theocratic extremism, Braun–as Star columnist Briggs recently pointed out–is 70, an age where life insurance “gets more expensive for a reason.” 

If Beckwith was truly an aberration, that would be one thing–but he isn’t. Thanks to Indiana’s extreme gerrymandering, which has moved the “real” election in many districts to the primaries (where GOP challenges come from the Right), Republican candidates for legislative office have become more and more extreme. I’ve written about the contest in District 24, where the Republican running for the Statehouse is a Beckwith clone, but that isn’t the only Indiana contest featuring a looney-tunes Republican more focused on culture war than on the mundane tasks of governing.

I would ordinarily hesitate before calling a political candidate a “looney-tune,” but a look at the “Book of Beckwith” really requires that label. Does any sane American really believe that the “Star, members of the Left and Methodist and Lutheran ministers” want to “cut off the private parts of children”? That we should indiscriminately “shoot Brown people at the border”? That vaccinations are a Nazi plot? Etc.

Granted, the Presidential election is by far the most important choice voters will face this year, closely followed by contests for the House and Senate. But we ignore state down-ballot races at our peril. Thanks to a state legislature in thrall to a super-majority of Rightwing extremists, Indiana is rapidly becoming a “health desert,” where medical care–especially but not exclusively for women–is increasingly difficult to access, where public education is being purposefully starved in favor of religious schools, and gun ownership with no pesky “strings” attached is proliferating.

Hoosiers need to Vote Blue all the way down the ballot.

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How Hateful Can They Be?

Here’s a “what-if.” What if orphans with serious medical problems–say asthma or epilepsy–were intentionally placed with foster or adoptive parents who were devout Christian Scientists or Jehovah’s Witnesses? Parents who would “pray away” attacks rather than provide medical care? What if a federal law required those doing the placements to ignore such parental beliefs on the basis of “religious freedom”? What if refusal to place a seriously ill child with a family that rejected medical science was considered “discrimination”?

I think–I certainly hope–most rational people would be appalled. 

Of course, Indiana Congressman Jim Banks is a culture warrior, not a rational person.

A Republican congressman has proposed a bill to prevent child welfare agencies from turning away prospective foster and adoptive parents who refuse to recognize transgender and nonbinary children’s identities.

U.S. Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) introduced the bill earlier this month in response to a proposed rule from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The rule would require child welfare agencies to place LGBTQ-identifying children in homes where they will not be mistreated or abused due to their sexual orientation or gender identity. 

Caregivers for LGBTQ children would be required to receive training on how to provide for any unique needs those youth may have because of their identity.

Banks calls the rule discriminatory. He says it’s unfair to the “loving prospective parents who do not support the idea of transgender identity or who oppose homosexuality based on their religious beliefs.”

Yes, I can just imagine how “loving” those families would be to a child already struggling with both an absence of birth parents and thorny identity issues. Why not place Jewish children with “loving” Neo-Nazi families, or Black children with “loving” racists?

What the hell is wrong with these people?

Banks has instead proposed the Sensible Adoption for Every Home Act (SAFE), which would ensure that families that are headed by parents who hold anti-LGBTQ views are not rejected as foster parents. It would enforce that by prohibiting placement agencies that refuse to place LGBTQ children with otherwise qualified couples from receiving federal funds.

Even though social transition does not necessarily involve medical interventions, Banks — like many Republicans pushing anti-transgender legislation — equates affirmation with pursuing surgical and hormonal treatments.

His bill also seeks to protect parents who oppose psychological treatments or counseling for trans-identifying children, or refuse to use gender-affirming pronouns, from being discriminated against by placement agencies. 

Banks has company. Eighteen Attorneys General (all Republicans, of course) have signed a letter opposing the rule. And of course, the GOP’s rank hypocrisy is once again front and center.

As much as Republicans claim it’s unfair to discriminate against non-affirming parents, 13 states currently have laws that allow placement agencies to reject same-sex couples, single or unmarried parents, older opposite-sex couples, interfaith couples, and other prospective parents based on their purported religious beliefs.

I guess it’s okay to discriminate against people if the”sincerely held religious beliefs” of Republican lawmakers require legislating disapproval of those people. 

I have previously described Jim Banks as a Christian Nationalist’s wet dream. The remainder of the linked article supports that (admittedly unkind but arguably accurate) description.

In Congress, Banks has amassed a record that is hostile to LGBTQ rights.

He previously co-introduced a bill to allow adults who experience “regret” after undergoing transition-related treatments as youth to sue their former doctors.

He introduced another bill earlier this year, in conjunction with Sen. Marco Rubio, seeking to ban transgender individuals from serving in the U.S. military.

Last year, Banks submitted a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill to bar transgender women and girls from participating in female-designated sports. 

Banks was also previously banned from Twitter, prior to Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform, for deliberately misgendering Adm. Rachel Levine, the country’s first transgender four-star admiral with the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and the Assistant Secretary of Health at HHS.

This is the culture warrior who wants to be Indiana’s next U.S. Senator.

I recently became aware of a PAC established by several of Banks’ current constituents; it’s called the Hoosiers for Common Sense PAC and its “primary goal is to elect a common-sense Hoosier Democrat, Marc Carmichael, and prevent Jim Banks from advancing to the US Senate.” You can contribute here. 

Or you can contribute at Marc Carmichael’s website. Among his other eminently sensible positions, Carmichael wants to put an end to demonizing trans children for political advantage. It’s hard to disagree with his statement that harming innocent children in an effort to garner votes is simply beyond the pale.

Way beyond.

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