Far-right Christian fascism is swallowing us whole
Far-right Christian fascism is swallowing us whole
Bibles in the refrigerator is the least of our issues
Welcome to a Sunday evening edition of Progress Report.
It’s been pouring rain here in New York for two days straight now, and at this point, I’m a bit stir-crazy. The relentless downpour has also given me some time to reflect on the first four months of the year.
There has been palpable political progress in a number of newly blue states, including Michigan and Minnesota, and tangible victories in places like New Mexico and Colorado. Abortion rights, voting rights, labor rights, and health care access have all been in enhanced quite a few places, even if it’s been in piecemeal fashion.
Running parallel to these positive steps forward has been a violent lurch toward dangerous and puritanical laws in Republican-controlled states. In some places, democracy is being replaced by what are essentially gerrymander-protected white nationalist councils; because the lawmaking process happens concurrently in all 50 states, it can be hard for day-to-day media to put what’s happening in its proper context. Tonight, we’ll do exactly that.
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A Democratic legislator was forced to apologize this week after security camera footage showed her hiding several Bibles used by her colleagues around a members-only lounge in the Arizona state Capitol.
The twist? Rep. Stephanie Stahl Hamilton is an ordained minister and had been hiding the books for months as to protest how “the Christian Bible gets used like a weapon around this place."
"I have long been frustrated by the blurred lines between separation of church and state,” Hamilton added. The statement, even in the context of an apology, served as a reminder that the mainstreaming of Christian nationalism is a far more urgent problems than the mischievous misplacement of Bibles; that the Bibles have been in the lawmaker lounge since at least the ‘90s is evidence of this.
First elected to the legislature in 2020, Hamilton was dropped into the Capitol as it was being engulfed by the reactionary conspiracy theorists and armed lunatics that forced the state to pay for a humiliating and pointless ballot recount. The yearlong charade was the political culmination of the fringe right’s takeover of the Arizona Republican Party, and their hold continues unabated even after Kari Lake — who compared the MAGA movement to Jesus in September — lost her bid for governor.
Lake’s strain of extremism is already well-represented in the statehouse by people like State Sen. Wendy Rodgers. She’s a member of the Oath Keepers, an extremist paramilitary organization that was at the center of the Jan. 6th insurrection. The connection runs both ways; the Oath Keepers were founded by Stewart Rhodes, who once clerked for a justice on the Arizona state Supreme Court. Rhodes helped lead the Jan. 6th insurrection, an act of sedition that could put him in prison for up to 60 years.
The sentencing should happen any day now, but however long he spends in the clink, Rhodes will be regarded as a hero by a disturbingly large percentage of the American public — including some of the most powerful politicians in a nation that’s being rapidly consumed by white Christofascism.
This month (April, in case you read this on Monday) marks the 30th anniversary of the Waco siege, a 51-day standoff between the federal government and a far-right, militantly white Christian nationalist cult that festered in central Texas in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. The Branch Davidians were viciously bigoted, heavily armed, and rife with the sort of sex crimes that are usually found in cults led by a guy who fashions himself a messianic figure. Nasty people, who purposely isolated themselves from the rest of the country as they awaited the rapture.
Law enforcement at the time was focused on snuffing out the white nationalist, anti-government terror cells that were beginning to spring up across the country. The ATF’s pursuit of the Davidians was a mess from start to finish, and after nearly two months of international attention, it concluded with the incineration of the cult’s compound, the deaths of more than 70 cult members (including 20+ children), and a galvanized far-right white nationalist movement.
The Waco standoff confirmed fringe-right groups’ various suspicions about the federal government — generally that it was run by a cabal of Jews plotting a New World Order that would take away their freedoms to have guns and impregnate children. The NRA and other conservative groups, seeking to prevent a national gun control law, poured money into fanning the flames of anger and fueling the conspiracies around what really happened in Waco and who was responsible for it. (Naturally, they ignored the giant caches of illegal weapons, firefights with neighbors, and rampant sexual abuse.)
It took less than 30 years for the white nationalist movement to go from a cult under siege on a remote mountain to a national coordinated militia storming the US Capitol. The link to a malignant strain of Christianity is as apparent now as it was then, so size and scope aside, the starkest between difference between those early days and the fringe right as it stands now is its relationship to the government.
What began as complete and total mistrust of government evolved into an effort to take control of the levers of power, a campaign that has been so successful that white Christian nationalists are dominant forces in many states’ politics, have outsized power in DC, and often drive the daily political narrative. That Donald Trump launched his second presidential campaign in Waco was no accident — the takeover is so complete that Republicans now travel to that site to seek the approval of these dangerous fringe weirdos.
The Michigan GOP has been overtaken by reactionary extremists, including a group called America First Republicans that now controls more than half of the GOP county parties. The state party membership elected a devotee of QAnon to run the show for the next two years, which should see the fringe become entrenched in the Republican firmament.
The same is happening in Oregon, where insurrectionists are seizing control of the state Republican Party. And in states where Republicans have control, this fringe faction has had its ideas mainstreamed, reinvigorating a religious and cultural conservatism that when combined with legal authority leads to an increasingly fascistic implementation of laws shaped by moral panic and questionable interpretations of scripture.
People no longer bat an eye at speeches like this one from 2021, when Sen. Josh Hawley compared churchgoers to Gideon and complained that “we are embattled, we are the minority being silenced.” It’s rhetoric that would have fit in at Waco, now mainstreamed to the point of eliciting shrugs.
The church where Hawley was speaking was no small congregation. Harvest Rock Church successfully sued to overturn the state of California’s Covid safety guidelines, and as Hawley made clear, their use of religion to bludgeon the public interest represents the way forward for this radical right-wing extremists.
The veneer of secularism that Republicans try to apply to anti-LGBTQ+ laws and book bans no longer hides their desire to shape the law according to their warped iteration of Christianity. Similarly, their ethnonationalism has very obviously driven bans on history books that contain inconvenient truths about slavery and civil rights, crackdowns on voting rights, and embracing law enforcement designed to harass and imprison people of color.
With little political resistance possible in states where they have gerrymandered districts that make democracy all but impossible, these Republicans have also begun unilaterally overturning democratic elections by censuring or removing elected officials from office — in Tennessee, Montana, and Oklahoma, but also in Florida and Missouri — for the crime of disagreeing with the majority.
In Ohio, Republicans are debating over whether to schedule a special election in August that if successful would make ballot initiatives almost impossible to pass. Why August? Because in November, Ohioans will vote on an amendment to enshrine abortion protections in the state constitution, something that polling suggests a majority of the state’s voters support.
The ease with which Republicans now commit these crimes against democracy accentuates the audacity of the acts and points to far worse to come.
Political demographics right now offer the best hope of long-term relief, because polling consistently shows that millennials and Gen-Z absolutely loathe the weird church people who regularly try to take away their rights, but even that more progressive future is no guarantee.
While there are more violent and immediately harmful policies on the table, it’s the religious extremist takeover of public education that most concerns me over the long-term.
In Texas, the legislature is pushing a series of bills that would shove a right-wing version of Christianity down the throats of public school children. The proposal that’s gotten the most press is one that would require every single public school classroom to display a copy of the Ten Commandments. Whereas it would have been blatantly unconstitutional at any point over the past 130 years, a ruling delivered by the Supreme Court last year makes the divide between church and state far murkier.
Even murkier is this statement from Dan Patrick, the dimwitted Lt. Governor of Texas:
“I will never stop fighting for religious liberty in Texas. Allowing the Ten Commandments and prayer back into our public schools is one step we can take to make sure that all Texans have the right to freely express their sincerely held religious beliefs,” Patrick said when the bill passed the state Senate.
That displaying the Ten Commandments in classrooms is intimidating to non-Christian kids is beside the point, because people like Patrick don’t care about them. Later in the statement he said that one “cannot change the culture of the country until you change the culture of mankind,” not so subtly indicating that he would love to see non-Christians converted or wiped out entirely.
Another, less heralded bill making its way through the Texas legislature would allow schools to replace counselors with religious chaplains.
Here’s the outrageous language in HB 3614 and SB 763: “A school district may employ a chaplain instead of a school counselor to perform the duties required of a school counselor under this title. A chaplain employed under this subsection is not required to be certified by the State Board for Educator Certification.”
Let that sink in. A school counselor is there to help kids deal with what are often real low points in their lives and navigate the education system so that they are able to succeed. Now, Texas wants schools to swap out trained professionals with at least one master’s degree and two years of teaching experience and replace them with a bunch of small-time religious leaders who have no actual qualifications.
It’s not a one-off in Texas, either. The National School Chaplain Association aims to bring this policy to every state it can, promising that children of all faiths can benefit from chaplains instead of counselors. They may not even have to work that hard to convince many states, given the direction of public education.
The right has spent decades working to remove education from the state’s purview, and over the past few years, Republicans have had one alarming breakthrough after another in instituting statewide school privatization programs.
Arizona again leads the way. The state’s new universal school voucher program, launched this fall, is funneling millions of dollars from public education to private schools. No small fraction of those schools are explicitly Christian, explicitly conservative, and often explicitly discriminatory academies like the Great Hearts chain of schools.
Dream City, a conservative megachurch that lied about inventing a magic Covid-killing air purifier to lure people to a Trump rally, has its own chain of religious schools, which are now teaming with noted scholar Charlie Kirk to offer the finest in clownish indoctrination.
Arkansas, Utah, and Florida have all passed similar programs this year, while North Carolina may do the same. Over the past three years, no fewer than 15 states have either established to aggressively expanded their voucher programs.
In Florida, Ron DeSantis has taken a torch to the rights of teachers and students, and has openly declared his intention to turn the state’s public college system into a series of Hillsdale Colleges, a private religious college that has become one of the most influential right-wing incubators in the country. America will soundly reject his presidential campaign, but for right-wing Christofascists, democracy is increasingly besides the point.
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