Priyantha Diyawadana, a Sri Lankan national who worked as general manager of a factory of the industrial engineering company Rajco Industries in Sialkot, Pakistan, was set upon by a violent crowd on Friday. The mob stripped and tortured him, before killing him and incinerating the body. His crime? Blasphemy. The details are sketchy. But it appears that during a renovation of the facility he managed, several religious posters with quotes from the Quran were taken down. This was considered a grievous insult to Allah and his prophet. And Diyawadana paid with his life.
This event has predictably garnered international opprobrium. Even the Pakistani authorities have condemned the act. However, let’s note that, in Pakistani law, blasphemy is still a capital offense. This is life in a theocracy, Where the laws are based on holy texts cherry-picked and interpreted by religious leaders.
And we should not be so sure something similar couldn’t happen in America.
At the end of the 18th century, at the time of America’s founding, most European countries had a state religion and a history of religious absolutism. All too aware of this divine tyranny, the Founders established the United States as a secular republic. The first amendment, while it protected every citizen’s right to practice their religion as they saw fit, showed the Founders fear of a state religion*. After the Civil War, the 13th and 14th amendments were interpreted by the Supreme Court to mean that much of the Bill of Rights also applied to the states.
For 200 years this was generally accepted. But since the rise of the Moral Majority in the 1970s and Ronald Reagan’s embrace of the religious right, the movement to establish a theocracy, either implicitly or explicitly, has picked up steam.
Abortion has been a rallying cry for American theocrats. And on that issue, it looks like we may be coming full circle. Fifty years ago, SCOTUS recognized a women’s constitutional right to abortion in Roe vs. Wade. But now, thanks to conservative maneuvering in the Senate, America has its most conservative court in decades. And it looks as if Roe may be overturned or at least severely constrained.
America is the most religious industrialized country. And while it has seen a decline in overall religiosity, religious fundamentalism is a stronger political force than ever. While liberal Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism have lost adherents, conservative evangelicalism now controls one of America’s two major political parties.
They have used their network of churches and media-savvy propagandists to convince many Americans, mainly white and rural, of another big lie — that the country was always intended to be a Christian nation. That part is said out loud. What is kept sub rosa is ‘dominionism’.
This is the belief that America is and has always been a Christian nation. That Christianity is the supreme religion. And that American law should be informed by the Bible.
Frederick Clarkson is a journalist whose interest is conservative evangelicalism, explains it thus,
- Dominionists celebrate Christian nationalism, in that they believe that the United States once was, and should once again be, a Christian nation. In this way, they deny the Enlightenment roots of American democracy.
- Dominionists promote religious supremacy, insofar as they generally do not respect the equality of other religions, or even other versions of Christianity.
- Dominionists endorse theocratic visions, insofar as they believe that the Ten Commandments, or "biblical law," should be the foundation of American law, and that the U.S. Constitution should be seen as a vehicle for implementing Biblical principles.
Ironically it was the secular Constitution, which institutionalized the outsize influence of small rural states, that opened the door for these religious fanatics to hijack the government. The Senate is the key to the success of the theocratic movement. It is where federal judges are confirmed. If a religious right controls the federal courts the doors are opened to increased state regulation. Let me explain.
Before Roe there wasn’t a national ban on abortions. Each state determined abortion’s legality. And in most states it was illegal. If Roe is overturned, states such as California and New York will still have legal abortion and many states where it was a crime in 1972 will judge it legal In 2021. In effect overturning Roe doesn’t ban abortion it merely allows states to do so. Which exponentially enhances state power.
The door could be open to states banning contraception again. LGBTQ+ rights may be rolled back. We can expect to see anti-sodomy laws. Most assuredly the theonomists will not stop at abortion.
If the Supreme Court enhances state power by overturning Roe, it will be the second step in turning America Into a theocracy. In gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013, (Shelby vs. Holder) SCOTUS hamstrung the federal government‘s ability to protect the rights of disadvantaged individuals. It allowed Republican governments in red states a free hand to write election rules. They have taken advantage. And now white rural voters have an outsize influence in selecting Representatives sent to DC.
It is hard to imagine that America would make blasphemy a capital offense. But one theocratic goal is to create a country in which it would be a possibility. And if you combined that with the Rittenhouse decision, which gave private citizens greater leeway to enforce the law as they see fit, vigilante-style, you open the door to mob rule.
The final nail in the coffin will be if SCOTUS upholds the Texas abortion law, which specifically empowers private citizens to turn in their neighbors. America will become like post-World War II East Germany. An authoritarian state, where the citizens cowered under the watchful eye of the secret police, the Stasi — where citizen informants make dissent a risky business. Or maybe it will be more like pre-World War II Germany, where a democratically elected minority government used putatively legitimate parliamentary tactics to establish a dictatorship. Germany in the 1920s was a cosmopolitan, culturally advanced, industrial country. And I’m sure the Germans had no idea they would end up living under tyranny. Which in the eastern part of the country, lasted for 67 years. Yes, it can happen here.
*Correction: An earlier version of this diary stated incorrectly that the first amendment prohibited religion from informing federal law.