Friday, April 29, 2022

QOTD -- The Asteroid Coming For Our Democracy

 

"White Christian nationalism advocates for maximum freedom for our group. But there is also this connection between authoritarian violence and social order. Christian nationalism wants order in the form of hierarchies. Men on top. Whites on top. Christians on top. Heterosexuals on top. And any threats to that order are met with justified, righteous, good-guy violence. That is what we saw on Jan. 6: the justification of righteous violence in taking back our country from, in the words of the QAnon Shaman, 'the tyrants, the communists and the globalists,' and showing them "this is our nation, not theirs." So there is this kind of holy trinity: Freedom for us, order for everybody else. And when that order is violated, they get the violence." --  sociologist Samuel Perry, in an interview regarding his book (along with Philip Gorski), "The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy," and the foundational mythology of a "Christian nation" under threat from "un-American and ungodly forces."  Perry describes White Christian nationalism as an "asteroid coming for democracy," the truth of which we observe daily in the existential threat that the words and actions of the Malignant Loser and his rotted out Republican Party/ cult represent.