When we look at our current dysfunctional politics, we tend to focus on the GOP’s mad lust for power at any cost. As such, we often see the GOP courting of fundamentalists and conservative Catholics as strategic planning on the GOP’s part to get more supporters. But really, it’s the other way around; these extreme religious groups are using the GOP to advance their lust for power: they bought the GOP’s soul because it was for sale.
The goal of these religious nuts is to convert the United States into a post-millennialist Christian nation.
The belief that the world is coming to end any day now (commonly but not quite correctly called the apocalypse) is one of the most important Christian ideas, though its history is long and convoluted. For my present purposes, it’s enough to point out that the Puritans came to New England intending to build a “city on a hill” that would be start of the millennium — the thousand years of the kingdom of God on Earth before Jesus comes back to herald the Final Judgment. This version is called post-millennialism — Jesus comes back after the thousand years. The Massachusetts colony was originally post-millennialist.
Jonathan Edwards, possibly the greatest Protestant theologian in eighteenth century America, declared that “we can't reasonably think otherwise, than that the beginning of this great work of God [the millennium] must be near. And there are many things that make it probable that this work will begin in America.”
The basic premise of post-millennialism — which has many variations — is that Christians are duty-bound to create the kingdom of God on earth and hold it for a thousand years for Jesus. In the nineteenth century, and especially after the Civil War, post-millennialism fell out of favor. But in recent decades there has been a resurgence, which is now trying to come to fruition by forcing an extreme Christianity on the nation. That means turning the United States into a country where the Bible (as they interpret it) is law, with any deviation from it punishable by death. It is no accident at all that “abortion abolitionists” are now calling for punishments up to and including execution for the woman who has had an abortion. Similar reasoning is behind calls to execute gays, transgender, anyone who stands as evidence that “male and female created he them” is nothing more than a pious fiction. All this is part of their plot to make the world so attractive to Jesus that he will — finally — come back and put an end to it.
This is why the consequences of outlawing abortion, of reversing same-sex marriage, etc., don’t matter to these fanatics. (Though they undoubtedly see a side benefit in the economic, social, political impact it will have in restricting women.) All that matters to them getting Jesus to come back.
DeSantis in Florida has been particularly passionate in pushing his state in that direction. His latest move is to urge teachers to teach that religion — meaning his version of Christianity — is and was always supposed to be a part of public life, that “separation of church and state” is nonsense. Boebert (R-Christ) is another one; she recently called separation of church and state "junk." Dominion theology and post-millennialism are "inextricably linked." And Dominionists Say God Has ‘Anointed’ Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court.
To add to that complication, Alito and Thomas are very conservative Catholics, but the Catholic Church doesn’t subscribe to either pre- or post-millennialism. (The technical term for its position is amillennialism.) According to them, we are already in the millennial age, which — despite the name — is of indefinite length.
Whether Alito, Thomas, and the other Catholics realize it or not, the extreme Protestantism that Barrett represents is in a conflict with their church’s belief that is as strong and as dangerous as the earlier conflicts between Catholics and Protestants that led to the Wars of Religion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including the Thirty Years’ War, which killed off a quarter or more of the Germans.
This is not simply a battle against Republican greed. This is a battle for our souls.