Photo changed — seems Lewis never actually said the “fascism” quote. Pity. H/T to Friend of Harry Lime.)
I wrote a diary the other day (currently on Community Spotlight) titled We are Heading Toward a Post-Millennial Christian Nation. This diary is a follow-up. Katherine Stewart, who has been reporting on the religious right for over a decade, wrote a guest essay for the NY Times this morning that goes even further than I did: Christian Nationalists Are Excited About What Comes Next. She does not mince words:
The shape of the Christian nationalist movement in the post-Roe future is coming into view, and it should terrify anyone concerned for the future of constitutional democracy.
Getting right to the point:
[M]ovement leaders are already preparing for a new and more brutal phase of their assault on individual rights and democratic self-governance. Breaking American democracy isn’t an unintended side effect of Christian nationalism. It is the point of the project. [emphasis added]
She cites a major piece of evidence from the past month:
A good place to gauge the spirit and intentions of the movement that brought us the radical majority on the Supreme Court is the annual Road to Majority Policy Conference. At this year’s event, which took place last month in Nashville, three clear trends were in evidence.
First, the rhetoric of violence among movement leaders appeared to have increased significantly from the already alarming levels I had observed in previous years.
Second, the theology of dominionism — that is, the belief that “right-thinking” Christians have a biblically derived mandate to take control of all aspects of government and society — is now explicitly embraced.
And third, the movement’s key strategists were giddy about the legal arsenal that the Supreme Court had laid at their feet as they anticipated the overturning of Roe v. Wade. [paragraph breaks added]
There is clear and growing evidence that Dobbs, far from satisfying them, has only whetted their appetites. They are going after medication abortions next, and explicitly targeting anyone anywhere who helps (eve inadvertently) someone to get an abortion — which creates a greater climate of fear that they will further exploit. Thomas was also candid enough to invite attacks on other rights the Christian Nationalists object to, such as contraception and same-sex marriage. (One has to wonder, as many have, how he would feel about an attempt to overrule Loving, which allowed interracial marriage. That is based on the same reasoning as Griswold, and also goes against the Bible, as they interpret it.)
I’m getting close to the fair use limits, but I need to add this quote:
Americans who stand outside the movement have consistently underestimated its radicalism. But this movement has been explicitly antidemocratic and anti-American for a long time.
It is also a mistake to imagine that Christian nationalism is a social movement arising from the grassroots and aiming to satisfy the real needs of its base. It isn’t. This is a leader-driven movement. The leaders set the agenda, and their main goals are power and access to public money. They aren’t serving the interests of their base; they are exploiting their base as a means of exploiting the rest of us.
My diary was centered on the post-millennialist trend in radical American Christians. Stewart focuses on the desire for power and money — though I would add that the desire to tell everyone what to think is also high on their list. It’s the “hunger for dominion,” in Stewart’s words.
Europe and later parts of the Americas, suffered for centuries under the dominion of the Catholic Church. What broke that dominion was a combination of factors ranging from Luther’s rebellion to the rise of the Enlightenment and the growing ability of secular powers to resist religious demands. The secular and pluralist world some of us live in now is the result of that struggle, which killed off millions of people and left central Europe a ruin. Various American colonies were also established to empower one or another Protestant sect (Maryland was a Catholic colony), though their rule didn’t last as long as the Catholics’ did.
The difference this time, for what it may be worth, is that, in addition to the religious sects competing for dominion, we now have a large body of secularists and pluralists who don’t want to be dominated by any religion. That is the great majority of the country, but, as Stewart cautions us, we’ve been ignoring the religionists for too long.
In short, we may be looking at a multi-front civil war before too long.