It would be difficult to identify with certainty the most profound and damaging disruption of our country currently being wrought by a fanatical six-person “conservative” majority on the United States Supreme Court. Certainly the evisceration of women and pregnant people’s reproductive rights would rank foremost in many peoples’ minds, while others would cite the bizarre and suicidal countenance of the unchecked spread of automatic and semi-automatic weapons and the negation of any effective restrictions on them under a tortured and preposterous reading of the Second Amendment. Still others would point to the gutting of voting rights, the permissive coddling of race-based gerrymandering, or the neutering of the country’s established environmental and worker protection laws as the most “real-world” harm being inflicted by this malevolent cadre of reactionary abominations.
But one of the most insidious attempts at re-engineering this nation in accordance with the Court majority’s now routine, precedent-ignoring abandon is the elevation and weaponization of Christianity — specifically a muscular, white evangelical and conservative Catholic Christianity, invariably couched and defended in terms of religious persecution and victimization — with an evident goal of blurring (and ultimately eliminating) the so-called “separation” between church and state. The basis for this drastic alteration of existing law is the assumption of an innate “Christian nationalism,” aptly described as “based on the belief that the country’s authentic identity lies in its Christian roots and in the perpetuation of Christian privilege.” In modern, right-wing parlance this attempt to impose a religious dogma on the rest of the country is excused and justified as an attempt to exercise religious "freedom;” in other words, it’s a vehicle to promote and promulgate their intolerance on everyone who doesn’t accept their “faith.”
As Linda Greenhouse, writing for the New York Review of Books, explains, far from being a recent byproduct of the Trump administration and its cynical embrace of white supremacy and Christian evangelicalism as a means to further its political goals, this untoward acceptance and exploitation of Christian dogma by the political right has been well-established for quite a long time, dating back to justifications for the extermination of indigenous peoples in the country’s pre- and post-independence phases (as the underlying premise for the self-fulfilling doctrine of “Manifest Destiny”), the rationalization of and excusal for slavery, and the subsequent rejection of the Civil Rights movement. It’s now most often manifested in the feigned grievances and perpetual victimhood cosplay of privileged white Christians who have found a sympathetic audience in the modern Supreme Court and the Republican party that currently controls it.
As Greenhouse explains, the prevalence and dominance of this reactionary, vengeful and exclusionary strain of “Christianity” is now a fact of American political life: “Whether that has changed over the course of US history is beside the point: what’s new is the contemporary political and social salience of Christian nationalism.” She quotes author David Hollinger’s blunt assessment, set forth in his recent book, Christianity’s American Fate:
Christianity has become an instrument for the most politically, culturally, and theologically reactionary Americans. White evangelical Protestants were an indispensable foundation for Donald Trump’s presidency and have become the core of the Republican Party’s electoral strength. They are the most conspicuous advocates of “Christian nationalism.”… Most of Christianity’s symbolic capital has been seized by a segment of the population committed to ideas about the Bible, the family, and civics that most other Americans reject.
Greenhouse also reviews a new book titled The Flag and the Cross, by Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry, which explains the rise of Christian nationalism in our contemporary politics, placing it in context of white, evangelical rejection of what the rest of the country considers to be beneficial and socially progressive facets of the twentieth century, such as attempts to abolish segregation and empowering the voices, through the ballot box, of racial minorities. Gorski and Perry also trace the Supreme Court’s embrace of Constitutional “originalism” to the influence of white evangelicals who consider the Constitution (in its original form) to be “divinely inspired.” In a purely political context, however, this embrace is decidedly self-justifying, as evidenced by the so-called “Christianity” professed by Tea Party, now morphed into the MAGA movement.
As Greenhouse summarizes:
Of those who identified with the Tea Party, which reached its peak in 2011–2012 and has now been largely subsumed into Trump’s MAGA movement, more than half believe that America “is currently and has always been a Christian nation.” Yet on measures of individual religious behavior such as church attendance, this group scored notably lower than other elements of the religious right. “In other words, the myth of a Christian nation was far more important to them than Christianity itself,” the authors observe. “‘Christian’ instead functions as a cultural identity marker, one that separates ‘us’ from ‘them.’”
And who are “them”? They are “outsiders who wish to take what’s rightfully ours,” whether by asserting rights to equal citizenship, arriving from a foreign country, impugning the country’s history, or just voting. “Christian nationalism is the strongest predictor that white Americans believe we already make it too easy to vote in this country,” Gorski and Perry find. It may seem simplistic to interpret Republican hysteria over voter “fraud” as a dog whistle about too many of the wrong people voting, yet it’s nearly impossible to interpret it any other way.
So (at its core) it’s now all about “us” vs. “them,” and anyone who doesn’t pledge obeisance to these people’s peculiar and malicious interpretation of Christ’s teachings is most definitely a “them.” It’s also a cultural signifier for voting, specifically, voting for Donald Trump, who these so-called Christians revere as a modern-day Cyrus, ignoring his corruption and winking at his dearth of human decency and lack of morals because he stokes their grievances and taps into their wounded feelings of inadequacy. Christ’s actual teachings, of course, are an asterisk, if they’re even considered at all; if Christ were actually alive today, he’d be swiftly condemned by these folks as far too “woke.”
Greenhouse’s review of The Flag and the Cross also explores how a remarkably convenient interpretation of “race” is an integral component to white evangelical philosophy. As she notes, since white evangelicals view life only as a series of personal choices, “Historical and social contexts are irrelevant,” meaning (among other things) that the legacy of slavery has no claim on the privileges of whites, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a danger to the country’s authentic identity.” So if you were ever curious why voter suppression measures are so popular in the Bible Belt (and blithely ignored or justified by the conservative majority on the current Supreme Court), you now have your answer.
The crucial, constant element of victimization is also stoked by the demonization of “socialism,” which white Evangelicals equate with communism. In the white evangelical “us vs. them” mindset, measures, particularly political measures, that foster the “collective” good are immediately suspect. As Greenhouse points out, it’s no coincidence that “At an Evangelicals for Trump rally in January 2020, he warned that “the extreme left in America is trying to replace religion with government and replace God with socialism.” This was manna from heaven to those beholden to such exclusionary beliefs. It also goes a long way towards explaining why no Democratic policies, no matter how much in their own interest, will ever move this voting bloc, and why Republicans now feel secure in threatening Social Security and Medicare without fear of reprisal.
Along these lines, Greenhouse also explores how, from a historical perspective, the white evangelical movement separated itself from more inclusive (and Christian) forms of Protestantism. She quotes from Hollinger, who notes:
Evangelicalism created a safe harbor for white people who wanted to be counted as Christians without having to accept what ecumenical leaders said were the social obligations demanded by the gospel, especially the imperative to extend civil equality to nonwhites.
In other words, as Greenhouse explains, white evangelicals needed a good justification to oppose Civil Rights, and they found one: “[T]he evangelical churches provided a conservative refuge, and it didn’t take long before evangelicals also found refuge in the Republican Party.” As Greenhouse points out, Hollinger also elucidates why the prevalence of successful Jewish people in American culture threatened the hegemony sought and demanded by the white evangelical movement, and also, in particular, why the Supreme Court’s decisions in Griswold v. Connecticut (prohibiting states from criminalizing contraception) and Roe v. Wade (establishing a Constitutional right for those who become pregnant to choose to have an abortion) resonated so bitterly with the religious right Because they permitted “individual autonomy.” This was perceived by the reactionaries as fostering a “secular order” — one which held individual choices as important — something that flew in the face of their precious dogma.
Importantly, Greenhouse notes how ideas of “individual autonomy” and “pluralism” were immediately co-opted by the right as an excuse for religious discrimination. This, in fact, is what we see in the most recent cases to appear before the Supreme Court, with aggrieved, so-called Christians complaining that their right to discriminate — i.e., their “autonomy” is being violated by the prospect of decorating a cake for a gay wedding or including contraception coverage in their company health care plans. The right, it seems, is nothing if not ingenious in their sophistry, and the Supreme Court as it is currently constituted is more than happy to play along.
But that obscures the more central point: As Greenhouse herself, in her latest New York Times column on the latest Supreme Court (seemingly innocuous) agreement to consider a claim involving an employee’s assertion that he should be allowed an exemption from employment on Sundays, due to his alleged religious beliefs ( a claim in contradiction of prior Supreme Court precedent), illustrates how far the current Supreme lawgivers of this land have eagerly fallen in line with this type of fanatical, twisted bastardization of Christianity.
As she writes:
Whether today’s Supreme Court is helping to lead that movement or has been captured by it is by now beside the point. Religion is the lens through which the current majority views American society; as I have written, there is no other way to understand the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The endpoint of this project is not yet in view. Those of us not on board are left to watch, to try to understand, and to call the court out with each additional step it takes.
“Each additional step” is what is known in common parlance as a “slippery slope.” In truth, however, the basic question of Constitutional legitimacy seems no longer even a matter of debate to this reactionary Court majority, even if the consequences of this “Christianist” worldview literally implicate people dying as a result, perhaps after having their rights to vote summarily dismissed or trivialized by Republican legislators who seem hellbent — even over the objections of their own constituents — in enforcing it. We now see this noxious co-opting of Christianity by an electoral minority of ignorant, fearful and aggrieved people — aided by a cynical Republican party eager to exploit that ignorance as a way to prolong their political existence — as routinely teed up by those who claim religious persecution as a way to advance a hate-based, white supremacist, and delusional ideology.
And its poison is spreading. The Court majority’s decision in Dobbs reversing half a century of contrary jurisprudence is a direct result of this new, “religious” sensibility, as were their decisions last term on funding religious schools with taxpayer dollars, and legitimizing “religious” discrimination, intimidation and bigotry in the workplace, all in the name of coddling these imagined grievances and contrived victimhood.
But no one should ever mistake this for “Christianity.” These folks have a whole different agenda, one rooted in control, punishment and domination. If Jesus were around today, he’d spit them right out of his mouth.
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