QOTD -- Imposing A Preferred Religious Doctrine

 

“We are preparing a lawsuit to challenge H.B. 71. The law violates the separation of church and state and is blatantly unconstitutional. The First Amendment promises that we all get to decide for ourselves what religious beliefs, if any, to hold and practice, without pressure from the government. Politicians have no business imposing their preferred religious doctrine on students and families in public schools.

“Louisiana’s communities and public schools are religiously diverse, yet H.B. 71 would require school officials to promote specific religious beliefs to which people of many faiths, and those of no faith, do not subscribe. Even among those who may believe in some version of the Ten Commandments, the particular text that they adhere to can differ by religious denomination or tradition. The government should not be taking sides in this theological debate, and it certainly should not be coercing students to submit day in and day out to unavoidable promotions of religious doctrine.

“All students should feel safe and welcome in our public schools. H.B. 71 would undermine this critical goal and prevent schools from providing an equal education to all students, regardless of faith. We will not allow Louisiana lawmakers to undermine these religious-freedom rights.” -- press release from the American Civil Liberties Union and associated groups, on the law just signed in Louisiana by MAGAt Christofascist Gov. Jeff "Jeff Davis" Landry, which requires all elementary, secondary and post-secondary public schools in that state to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom.  Landry had said "I can't wait to get sued" over the law, so his wait wasn't long.  He's counting on the illegitimate Republican Supreme Court with six ultra- conservative Catholic pols to somehow finesse the clear language of the establishment clause in the First Amendment and to allow the unconstitutional displays.  Regardless, Christofascist Republicans want to make this yet another culture war wedge issue during the 2024 campaign, with their notably pious "Christian" cult leader leading the charge.  This is where "Christian nationalism" is headed in this country.

Meanwhile, the ACLU summed it all up:  "Public schools are not Sunday schools."

White Christofascism Central To Trump's Policy Agenda

 

The Malignant Loser and his circle of white nationalist advisors have been quite open about their plans should they gain power after November, and they should be taken literally and seriously. One advisor, the openly Christofascist former OMB director Russell Vought, has the agenda:

Apart from Donald Trump’s objectives, political operatives surrounding the GOP front-runner have their own policy goals. At the top of the list? Infusing Christian nationalism into the heart of his next term.

Behind the hidden agenda is Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, who runs the influential conservative think tank the Center for Renewing America. Over the last several years, Vought—who has been rumored to have a good shot at becoming chief of staff should Trump win a second term—has increasingly adopted the ideology that Christian nationalists are under attack.

Documents by CRA staff list several Christian nationalist-oriented goals as a part of the think tank’s top priorities in a second Trump term, reported Politico Tuesday. Other contributions to the list included invoking the Insurrection Act in order to stamp out dissenting protests and creating other ways to expand Trump’s presidential power.

But Vought also serves as an adviser to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which has proposed a flurry of other objectives for a potential second term, including repealing policies that help LGBTQ+ people and single mothers, on the basis that these laws threaten “Americans’ fundamental liberties.”

Vought’s simmering extremism has been influenced by a yearslong partnership with Christian nationalist William Wolfe. Vaught has publicly lauded Wolfe’s work on “scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism,” saying he’s “proud” to be a part of it...  (our emphasis)

When we say "Christofascists," in Vought and Wolfe's cases the emphasis is mainly on "fascist." They have other plans to use the military beyond putting down "dissenting protests":

Trump pledges that as president he would immediately launch “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” As a model, he points to an Eisenhower-era program known as “Operation Wetback,” using a derogatory slur for Mexican migrants. The operation used military tactics to round up and remove migrant workers, sometimes transporting them in dangerous conditions that led to some deaths. Former administration officials and policy experts said staging an even larger operation today would face a bottleneck in detention space — a problem that Trump adviser Stephen Miller and other allies have proposed addressing by building mass deportation camps.  [snip]

Trump has made similar promises and has used inflammatory smears since his 2016 campaign. But he, his aides and allies say a second turn in office would be more effective in operating the levers of the federal bureaucracy and less vulnerable to internal resistance. During his term, former officials said, Trump learned to install more officials at the Department of Homeland Security who would carry out his orders instead of trying to curb his impulses.

Throughout his current campaign, the former president has exerted his influence on the immigration policy debate on several fronts. He pressured congressional Republicans to reject a bipartisan compromise to expand enforcement funding and powers, arguing that it would give the Democrats a political victory and that it was not restrictive enough. He has also escalated his use of dehumanizing language to describe migrants, accusing them of “poisoning the blood of our country” and calling the record unauthorized border crossings an “invasion,” an “open wound” and a source of imminent terrorist attacks.

But his deportation proposal is one part of his emerging platform that experts, current and former government officials and others described as especially alarming, impractical and prone to significant legal and logistical hurdles... (our emphasis)

Those hurdles won't stop these jackboots from doing what they say they'd do.  

It can't be said enough:  this is American fascism.  It's not an exaggeration.  It's not a fantasy. It's not off in the distance.  It's here now, and it's being open and plain about its ultra- reactionary agenda.  They have the advantage of having learned from their mistakes in the Malignant Loser's administration, and would be "more effective in operating the levers" of government if given a second chance.  People need to understand why putting these crackpot Christofascist charlatans in power once again will forever change this country into something dark and unrecognizable.  

It also can't be said enough: (to borrow a quote from Pennsylvania's Gov. Josh Shapiro) to forestall this, "we need to stop worrying and start working."

BONUS: More discussion here.

(Photo:  the banality of evil personified /Seth Wenig, AP)

QOTD -- More Dangerous Than Authoritarianism

 

"... [T]he forces of Christian nationalism—those who seek to demolish the wall between Church and state, asserting far-right religious dominion over the government as well as the country’s core institutions—are now ascendant both inside the Church and inside the Republican Party. It is no coincidence that, just recently, Donald Trump began suggesting that he would ban any migrant from entering the United States unless they are Christian. Those who don’t share 'our religion,' the famously impious ex-president pronounced, won’t be welcome here if he’s elected again. Many of the people poised to hold high-ranking posts in a second Trump administration don’t view today’s societal disputes through the lens of Republican versus Democrat or of conservative versus progressive, but rather of good versus evil.

"Perhaps the only thing more dangerous than authoritarianism is authoritarianism infused with religious justification. It hardly matters whether the would-be tyrant is personally devout; Vladimir Putin’s lack of theology didn’t stop him from partnering with the Russian Orthodox Church to frame the bloody invasion of Ukraine as God’s ordained conquest of a satanic stronghold. To believe that it couldn’t happen here—mass conflict rooted in identitarian conviction and driven by religious zeal—is to ignore both 20th-century precedent and the escalating holy-war rhetoric inside the evangelical Church..." --  Tim Alberta, writing in The Atlantic.  Alberta, who was raised an evangelical Christian and still self- identifies as a follower of Jesus Christ, is the author of "The Kingdom, The Power, And The Glory - American Evangelicals In An Age Of Extremism."  More than many observers of the dangers of Christian nationalism, the evangelical movement, the Christofascist Republican Party and their cult leader Malignant Loser, he speaks with the authority of one who has been inside the belly of the beast, and has seen the transformation of the evangelical church into the Manichean, paranoid threat to American democracy that it's become.

QOTD -- Christofascism And The Compulsion To Normalize

 

Kate Cohen today in the Washington Post, with a fact- based op/ed about new MAGAt House Speaker Mike Johnson:

... In “The Flag and the Cross,” Perry’s book with Philip S. Gorski, the authors show that the higher White people rate on the Christian-nationalist scale, the more likely they are to agree with the notion of “righteous violence” — specifically that “the best way to stop bad guys with guns is to have good guys with guns.”

Those with a casual knowledge of Christian theology might have trouble squaring this pro-violence stance with Jesus’ reported instruction to “turn to them the other cheek.”

Johnson has an answer for that. “This is not someone’s personally affronting you or saying something horrible about you to turn your other cheek and forgive them,” he told that Shreveport congregation. “We’re talking about the very survival of the truth in our nation.”

He went on: “We serve the Lion of Judah, not some sort of namby-pamby little king. … ‘Our weapons are for pulling down strongholds’ — this doesn’t sound like a namby-pamby gospel.”

No. It doesn’t sound namby-pamby. It sounds like exactly the sort of ideology that might encourage rioters, who were told Christianity was under threat, to charge the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, carrying twin symbols of Jesus and guns.

“We can charge the very gates of hell and we must,” Johnson has preached...

But the Post can't bear to let this demonstration of Johnson's radicalism go without trying to normalize him at the same time with an article whose scurrilous, tendentious headline is "Democrats quickly seek to make Speaker Johnson a boogeyman". Ooooh!  Bad Democrats must be exaggerating mild- mannered Mike's politics in order to make him a boogeyman!!  This f*cking paper (which continues to use "Democracy Dies in Darkness" as its increasingly ironic motto) refuses to see the plain, objective truth, even as our democracy dies, not in darkness, but in shallow, clickbait journalism.  Its compulsion to normalize the abnormal says as much about it as it does about those it's sanitizing.

BONUS:  Thomas Zimmer does a deeper dive into another WaPo article normalizing MAGA Mike!  Good read.

(Photo: Win McNamee/ Getty Images)

Poll: Half Of Republicans Support Christian Nationalism

 

From a new PRRI/ Brookings poll:

More than half of Republicans support Christian nationalism and believe the United States should be a strictly Christian nation — that’s according to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution.

Christian nationalism is an extreme and divisive worldview rooted in the belief that the U.S. is an inherently Christian nation and that the country’s laws should be rooted in Christian values. 

The view has been prominent in white evangelical spaces for decades, but it gained significant national attention following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and throughout the Trump presidency. Now, according to researchers — who surveyed more than 6,000 Americans — the public’s view on Christian nationalism is divided mostly along political party lines.

The survey found that most Republicans surveyed view themselves as either Christian nationalist sympathizers (33%) or adherents (21%). While most Democrats lean toward rejecting Christian nationalism, with 36% of them indicating they are skeptics of the ideology and 47% saying they reject it...

This is, as the poll makes clear, the Trump/MAGA base, and represents one-fifth to one-quarter of the voting population.  What it also represents is a failure to inculcate all of our citizens in the nation's expressed values:  church/state separation, pluralism and tolerance.  Sic transit gloria, America.

Poll: Majority Of Republicans Want U.S. Declared A Christian Nation

 

The results of a new University of Maryland Critical Issues poll reveal the cognitive dissonance of Christofascist Republicans who claim a passionate regard for the Constitution, but only when it serves their interests and beliefs:

We started by asking participants if they believed the Constitution would even allow the United States government to declare the U.S. a “Christian Nation.” We found that 70 percent of Americans — including 57 percent of Republicans and 81 percent of Democrats — said that the Constitution would not allow such a declaration. (Indeed, the First Amendment says Congress can neither establish nor prohibit the practice of a religion.)

We followed up by asking: “Would You Favor or Oppose the United States Officially Declaring the United States to be a Christian Nation?” The findings were striking.

Overall, 62 percent of respondents said they opposed such a declaration, including 83 percent of Democrats and 39 percent of Republicans. Fully 61 percent of Republicans supported declaring the United States a Christian nation. In other words, even though over half of Republicans previously said such a move would be unconstitutional, a majority of GOP voters would still support this declaration. (our emphasis)

Those results should shock and repel any American who truly stands by the Constitution and the doctrine of separation of church and state.  It should not be necessary in 2022 to restate this, but:  We were not established as a Christian Nation;  the Founding Fathers instituted a secular- based form of government, bolstered by the very First Amendment to the Constitution's "Establishment Clause" (see this historical discussion for more clarity).  That we are a "Nation of Christians" is very debatable, given what we see many self- identified "Christians" doing in the name of their religion.

The near- full embrace of rightist Christian Nationalism by the Republican Party has been ongoing for many decades.  As they see their world changing around them, becoming more diverse and secularized, and their cult leader under criminal investigation, they're responding with calls from some of their most prominent sub-morons to "rise up", and with acts of performative cruelty toward the weakest and most vulnerable by others in power (i.e., DeSantis' human trafficking and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin's various publicity stunts).  

That's the road they're trying to take us down.  In 47 days, we have a chance to respond.

BONUS:  See Ed Kilgore's "Mixing Christianity With Nationalism Is A Recipe For Fascism."