Christian Nationalism Built Upon Assumptions

In an article written by David L. Holmes for Encyclopaedia Britannica (see The Founding Fathers, Deism, and Christianity) he starts, “ For some time the question of the religious faith of the Founding Fathers has generated a culture war in the United States. Scholars trained in research universities have generally argued that the majority of the Founders were religious rationalists or Unitarians.”

The Age of Enlightenment made ideas like Deism, a natural God who does not interfere in the affairs of humankind, and THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE, popular in the time when our nation’s founders were being reared overseas. These same ideas shaped many of their political ideals, like renowned Deist Benjamin Franklin, when they colonized America.

Most of them did attend Christian churches, such as Christ Church in Philly, Pohick Church in Virginia, United First Parish Church in Quincy, Mass, Old Meeting House in Boston and Trinity Church in NYC (source here). The majority attended offshoots of the Church Of England, like the Anglican and Episcopal denominations. Others were Puritans, Quakers and Catholic. Not all of them practiced Orthodox Christianity and very little of it looks like American Baptist, Methodist or Pentecostal denoms today. In fact, if most Protestants stepped into an Anglican mass, they would probably think it was Catholic.

It is very important to remember that the revolution they fought was against a tyrannical king who was coronated by THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND! In effect, the revolt was not only against the crown, but against the very church that propped up his government…CHRISTIANITY! Our Founding Fathers were explicit in their disdain for a religious monarchy where the Church ran the state by coronating its leader. There was no separation of church and state nor freedom from religion.

So how any half-educated person in 21st Century America believes they were bent on forming a theocracy over here is literally insane! They didn’t leave one Christian monarchy just to establish George Washington as the Christian monarch of America. No they used Enlightenment era ideals and deist language, “their Creator,” instead of Almighty God. The Constitution uses that language and never mentions Christianity, or names the Creator or quotes any Bible passages. If the founders of this country wanted to establish a national religion, don’t you think they would have done all three things? Why leave England, then lead a revolt against their God-ordained king? Why not just institute The Church of America (be it Anglican or Episcopal) and deem Washington our nation’s monarch?

They didn’t like that system of government…not one bit! They fought a revolution over it and setup a Representative Republic because they believed in equal representation for everyone in the colonies. Every American was given the right to worship how they wanted freely without their government ramming religion down their throat or one church anointing their leader. This is just historical fact!

And it’s gaslighting by America’s fundamentalist leaders and their political think tanks, like Heritage Foundation, that would have us believe otherwise. They are selling the myth that the religion of 18th century, students of Enlightenment lines up perfectly with their 21st century Christianity and it doesn’t. They further promote the lie that our Founding Fathers established America as a Christian Nation. They did not.

Christian Nationalism, with its roots in genocide, xenophobia and racism, is built on an absolute lie. Look at how the Puritans who landed at Plymouth in 1620 treated indigenous people. They were even ruthless with other Christian believers—Quakers and Baptists—because they believed they were of the pure faith. Christian Nationalist are extreme, cult-like brutes of that same ilk. They believe only American fundamentalism is the true religion and they are hellbent on cramming it down our throats. And like the Puritans, they feel it is Manifest Destiny to rewrite our history and implement their theocracy over this nation. It’s pure bullshit! Our forefathers are rolling over in their graves.

Kristi Burke touches on some of this, including Manifest Destiny, in her new series on Christian Nationalism.

I think it is very dangerous, to allow a cult of one branch of one sect of any religion to rule over America. I see it no different than if the Taliban were to overthrow our government and institute (religious) Shariah Law over all of us. I call the Heritage Foundation and their ilk THE XIAN TALIBAN! Their fundamentalist views are just as barbaric, savage and unAmerican. They must not be given power over us.

WTF, AMERIKKKA???

 

I knew we had a supremely racist country stained with a bigoted past whose foundation was laid on the backs of slaves. Even still, the presidential candidacy of an Illinois Senator in 2008 gave us hope. Barack Obama ran his campaign of hope on the slogan, “Yes We Can” and won the presidency as the nation’s first African American to hold that office. And if that weren’t a monumental step forward for America, he was successful and earned a second term. My pride in America, faith in her Constitution and hope for our future was at an all-time high.

But there was a severe backlash across the largely red states in this country. The innate racism, a systemic issue affecting the heart of our democracy and tearing at the fabric of our union, reared its ugly head in response to eight years under a black progressive president. A crescendo from white Amerikkka, especially in “the Heartland” and “Bible Belt,” the poorest and least educated of our neighbors, built into a red wave which overtook our democracy and became MAGA World and Trumpism (aka The Cult of Trump). An outcry from the lower and middle class, that started with The Tea Party movement a year into Obama rule, bolstered by neo-Nazi and Confederate-loving rednecks, grew into a roar of the alt-right until neo-conservatism was overtaken by fascism and a sense of false national pride. Like post-World War I Germans, Christian Nationalists cried for the fatherland and a new white messiah to save it from the hoard of brown immigrants (“vermin,” just like the Jews had been to Germans). There was also a rise in anti-semitism JUST LIKE in Germany and in 1920’s Amerikkka. Yes, the height of the Ku Klux Klan in the good ol’ US of A!

That backlash is what got us a pornstar-fucking, reality TV star and fake billionaire playboy as president in 2016. The alt-right MAGA cult was now the ruling class. We saw what it unleashed immediately. The Klan’s hoods came off. They marched, unhooded, through the streets of Charlottesville in 2017, leading to violence. They even stormed our fucking Capitol waving Nazi and Confederate flags in 2021! UN-REAL!

Racism reared its ugly head in a very real way. Thank you, MAGAts.

The nation barely survived COVID, racial unrest, growing economic disparity, culture warfare and recession during the Dark Years of 45 and MAGA rule. But we booted his impeached ass out of office and replaced him with another rich, white dude and career politician. We threw a bunch of his cult-loving insurrectionist traitors into prison. We thought we had moved on.

Enter Kamala Harris. She was thrust into the political spotlight in what “the cult” saw as another coup. It wasn’t. It was a necessity. The old, white patriarchy—yeah, the ones who brought us slavery, America’s original sin—needed to be dismantled. The bi-racial woman of color seemed just the person to do that…finally.

Only racist, white Amerikkka wasn’t ready. The only thing worse than an African-American male candidate, apparently, IS A FEMALE. Ask Hilary Clinton.

The misogyny in this vast Republic of 330 million is very deeply rooted. The Christian Nationalists, whose archaic views take a very narrow and fundamental view of the Bible, hold women in shackles very much like their extremist cousins in the Middle East. I prefer to call these American terrorists the Christian Taliban because of their extremist views on women and their desperate need for theocracy. There’s a reason June Cleaver archetypes were so popular in 1950’s American culture. From this worldview, women should “know their place.” Or as 1 Corinthians 14:34 instructs, “Let your women keep silence in the churches, for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law.” The shariah law of the Taliban demands it.

We saw the Harris/Walz campaign end Tuesday night in utter defeat. It wasn’t the first time a woman dared to shatter that last glass ceiling and begin to dismantle the patriarchy, propped up by centuries of white aristocracy (aka privilege). Hopefully, it won’t be the last. And her campaign of joy and hope, Obama at the forefront in the final month, fell on deaf ears.

But white Amerikkka spoke loudly. They said yes to a black male BUT HELL NO TO A WOMAN!

The first Trump administration rolled back women’s rights 50 years. White, Christian Amerikkka thought that didn’t go far enough. They want the Christian Taliban to roll them back 100 years to women’s suffrage, as outlined in their manifesto, Project 2025.

At least Hitler put his name to Mein Kampf and never distanced himself from his own playbook. Tim Walz tried to warn us. You don’t draw up a 900-page-plus playbook just to shelve it! You also don’t name its authors to your Presidential Transition Team, while publicly denying you even know these people. C’mon, mini Hitler, own up to your work! You are named more than 500 TIMES in its pages!

ITS MESSAGE: Women, know your place and keep silent!

Amerikkka shouted that from the top of the ballot box Tuesday.

White America, Simma Down!

In my March 2016 post about white angst, I wrote, "But the Trump phenomenon is beyond weird. He played upon the growing angst of white, conservative America. He served up, in true reality TV fashion, all the most inflammatory rhetoric he could muster, like a grand dragon at a KKK rally in the deep woods of Mississippi. He's yet to distance himself from that domestic terrorist organization, by the way." And I wrote this a full year and a half BEFORE the Charlottesville incident!

White angst is rooted in the real population data which shows a declining percentage of white Americans, down more than FIVE MILLION in the second decade of the 2000's. Pew Research Center found in 2021 that only FIVE PERCENT of Republicans think the dwindling of white Americans is "a good thing." And because the whites now feel marginalized--Native, Black and Brown Americans are saying "WELCOME TO THE CLUB!"--and their way of life under attack, they have lashed back. "This is why they cling to their 'traditional' and 'family' values. They want to believe that life was actually once like 'Leave It To Beaver' and their favorite black-and-white television shows of the 1950's. They'd like nothing more than to turn back the clock and relive those heydays of segregated bliss. They want prayer back in school, abortion abolished and white privilege to once again reign supreme," as I wrote way back when. That last line could be the promotional ad for Project 2025, Trump's current platform of Christian extremism. But I highlighted the segregation part of my quote because that gets to the root cause of white angst, a topic I've taken on several times on this blog page.

No longer in the majority, many whites feel like they're world is crumbling, like the people of color are taking over and their rights will be stripped away. To heighten those fears, the traditional, family and "Christian" values they've held since the 50's (when a lot of GOPer's were born) are no longer in the mainstream, widely accepted, adhered to or en vogue. In the 2020's we've seen church attendance dip below 50% for the FIRST TIME EVER in this country. More and more Americans are non-religious; and those who once were are no longer attending church nor are they requiring their children to attend Sunday school, VBS or youth services. Those were all things I was required or encouraged to do, growing up in a middle class, Christian American home.

But this country, sorry to tell you Heritage Foundation, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, WAS NOT FOUNDED on the Bible or Christianity. Morality DOES NOT depend on your scriptures or sacred texts. There were codes of morality in the Mesopotamian region LONG BEFORE your religion or the texts even existed. Morality is determined by humans who make the laws governing society--humans who are both influenced by religion, but also by humanism, atheism and lots of other ISMS! Quit ringing your hands that Jesus was taken out of government and the classroom. HE NEVER BELONGED THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE! Even HE washed his hands of government and politics. "Then he said to them, 'So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.'" Luke 20:25, Mark 12:17 and Matthew 20:21. So for those keeping count, that's ALL THREE Synoptic Gospels quoting Jesus on his views about taxation and government. He wasn't too concerned with it. His concern was "his father's heavenly kingdom," which he makes quite clear throughout the gospels (and might I insert here, he never once mentions homosexuality anywhere in the gospels).

So now that we've made clear that Jesus agreed with our Founding Fathers on one issue--that is separation of church and state--let's get back to our main point. White Christians, in particular, feel that they are under attack. Because they no longer control the narrative or censor Hollywood or the media or control the halls of justice, they feel marginalized and bullied. Guess what, TOUGH SHIT! You controlled the narrative for long enough! Ever since the Roman Empire co-opted Christianity, white Europeans have controlled the narrative, written and told the story still printed in our history textbooks today. Talk about INDOCTRINATION!?!?! When was the minority view ever considered? When were they're stories ever told?

Only since the civil rights movement of the 1960's have we even BEGUN to learn about black and brown contributions to our great country. Only in recent decades have the voices of Native Americans been heard. ALL OF THOSE MARGINALIZED PEOPLES since the beginning of Western Civilization contributed greatly to our history! Think of the Native American code breakers who assisted our war effort, the black Union soldiers (and black veterans in every war since) who left their blood on battlefields around the South and the World, the migrant workers who put half of the produce in your local Walmart, etc...they have helped to shape America into the inclusive, representative republic that it was supposed to be. Their stories are finally getting added to the history books, but not without white backlash. Take for example, Critical Race Theory and how angry that made white Christians and other conservatives. HOW DARE THEY HAVE A VOICE! DON'T 'THOSE PEOPLE' KNOW THEIR PLACE???!

Which brings us back to whites becoming the minority. When you are the minority, your stories don't get to dominate the history books, the media, the collective narrative anymore. Again, WELCOME TO THE CLUB! How does it feel to get a taste of your own medicine???

Like I wrote in March 2016, "white privilege breeds fear and it has ever since the end of slavery." Conservatives who want to roll back time and "Make America Great Again," are just perpetuating age-old stereotypes, now including brown immigrants, and preying on white people's fear, their angst. Back in the 1870's, they didn't know what to do with newly freed slaves roaming the countryside, looking for work, housing, equal rights to free white citizens, so there was a huge backlash. Enter the Jim Crow era for the next 100 years!! And now, since civil rights assured them their equality, we are seeing the same Jim Crow-like backlash. It's called Project 2025 and the new, more aggressive, more fascist Trump regime. He's preying on that white angst like a mother####er!

Those "Christian values" they hold so dear are the same ones that "put Africans in shackles, Native Americans on reservations, turned a blind eye to the mostly Jewish Holocaust, interred Japanese-Americans and now wants to deport every 'illegal' back to their homeland," I wrote in 2016. Are the whites now afraid of a new black and brown backlash? That the same oppression they perpetuated for millenia will be brought back to bear on them??? Is that their fear? "Did the African-American President ever open those FEMA camps to inter white folks? Has any minority--Latino or otherwise--ever considered putting privileged white folks in shackles and selling them into slavery? So what are they so scared of?"

We've seen how the Establishment of old, rich white dudes react every time black or brown people seek to be heard, whether it's kneeling through an anthem or marching to protest George Floyd's death. I wrote in October 2017, "It's like a sudden eruption of white-hot angst from just below the surface that bubbles over in the form of hate, outrage and bigotry." And now that a WOMAN OF COLOR will probably be the next Democratic candidate for President, watch how the right responds. We already know how the white Christian right feels, it's in their manifesto (Project '25).

Their fear is that eons of "white privilege" is slowly being eroded away due to the fact that they will SOON no longer be in the majority. The socialist redistribution of wealth is a threat to the stranglehold they've had on this country since it's foundation. This is at the heart of their angst. This is why conservatives have aligned themselves with hate groups (like in Charlottesville, 2017) who shout, "WHITE POWER!" They are not ready to give over their privilege or their power. It causes them to lash out in anger and support a neo-Fascist (but only on Day One, right?) who whips them into a frenzy, even leading them to attack our government (like on Jan 6, 2021), to deny election results and to hate their black and brown neighbors--both legal and illegal. See my post from May 2019, "White Privilege Breeds White Nationalism."

It's about to all play out again this November and probably in January, when the election results are contested by the Orange Cult Leader and his minions.

I'm just going to need the white Christian nationalists and those worried about their white privilege, to sit down and simmer down! We've heard ENOUGH out of you. Let the black and brown people speak. It's their turn now.