An American Christian Chapter XVII — Christian Fascism
From Martin Luther to Amy Coney Barrett, White Christian Supremacy has always been the heart of the religion.
I’ve avoided most online spaces dedicated to deconstruction over the past two years, but have vigilantly kept up with the rise of open Christofascism. I say open, because this way of thinking has been around for millennia, but not with the same organization, nor reach. It might be better to classify it as White Christian Supremacy.
I know not all Christians are fascists or white supremacists. I know the current rise of Christofascism is by the minority and isn’t necessarily representative of Christians writ large. However, this sort of ideology is in the DNA of Christianity. As much as one can point out and say that following Jesus means loving people and caring for them, you can just as easily point to other passages of the Bible and interpret a message of doom, destruction, and iron-fisted Christian authority. It’s what the faith has been built on for two thousand years.
No matter how often pastors and evangelists try to drive home the infallibility of the Bible, there’s simply no proof of its divine inspiration. There’s only proof that a bunch of Apostles — long after the crucifixion of Christ — stated that some of the books in the New Testament were God-inspired and others weren’t. The early Church took that as an inarguable truth (despite arguing about it constantly) and the question wasn’t raised again until a few hundred years later.
This does not include all the retro-fitting that was done every time there was a discovery of ancient texts around the holy land by Templars, grave robbers, and archeological thieves. All of this also hinges on centuries of translations and interpretations, which have often been entirely and horribly wrong.
For the most part, everyone agreed on the validity Old Testament because of the Torah. It was helped by the passing down of other Hebrew traditions and texts, but as the books and letters of the New Testament grew to several thousand, it required multiple councils of European men to determine their validity and whether they should be included in their version of the Bible. If you fast-forward to the 1450s when Johannes Gutenberg* created a printing press in Germany, you’ll see how this allowed the Bible, as it currently was, to spread, taking away the sacred power of the Church to read from and disseminate its knowledge.
In the early 1500s, Martin Luther, a man often praised for splitting the Catholic church and fathering Protestantism, sent out his infamous Nintey-Five Theses; his list of propositions for academic disputation. One of his main complaints was that of the Catholic Church’s selling of indulgences (a way to reduce your time in purgatory). Luther was summoned to the Diet of Worms soon after to be allowed to recant his indiscretion or defend it. He doubled down. Five days later he was presented with the Edict, which declared him a heretic and stated anyone could kill him without consequence. Luther traveled home (On the way he was kidnapped by supporters to keep him safe) and translated the Bible into German from Greek, and solidified them into the 66-book collection of the current Protestant Bible.
This is giving a lot of credit to Luther, who mainly tapped into the religious milieu of the time. Further, Luther was only concerned with some of the issues of Catholicism, but not the aspects that benefitted him personally. Nevertheless, Lutheranism spread and a lot of people did a lot of murdering.
The history of the Bible expanded further when several radical Protestant fundamentalists journeyed from Europe to the stolen lands of North America. They soon created a demand for printing presses to quickly create as many copies of the Bible as possible. Considering they felt God ordained them to wipe out indigenous people and force others to subscribe to their piety, this wasn’t the happy little band of God-fearing settlers that is talked about today with such glaring and purposeful oversight.
Despite the United States not at all being founded on Christian principles, many early Christian leaders assumed it was or actively told people the founding of the new world was God-ordained. In 1630, while still sailing to Massachusetts, Puritan pilgrim John Winthrop preached a sermon “A Model of Christian Charity.” Quote:
“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”
Early Puritans wholeheartedly believed that the newly colonized land embodied Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:14 — “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.” This ideology stuck around and in 1989 during his presidential farewell address, Ronald Reagan, the poster child for the Christian right, reiterated this quote while adding “So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important — why the Pilgrims came here…”
You have almost certainly heard the phrase separation of Church and State, in which case, if you grew up Evangelical, you also heard from your pastors that the aforementioned phrase isn’t in the constitution. This is correct. It’s a quote from Thomas Jefferson in a letter to the Baptist Church about the first amendment in the Bill of Rights.
Though, like most US history, the first amendment is grossly misunderstood. These same pastors and Christian leaders that like to correct others on the facts about that quote, tend to forget or at least not acknowledge the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause which states:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
According to Cornell Law School, “This clause not only forbids the government from establishing an official religion, but also prohibits government actions that unduly favor one religion over another. It also prohibits the government from unduly preferring religion over non-religion, or non-religion over religion.”
Unfortunately, the wording of the Establishment Clause is just vague enough for those with untoward intentions to muddy the waters around it. For the past two and half centuries, Christian nationalism has been fighting against this Establishment Clause through court cases and all-out political assault on government institutions.
But it’s still important to point this out. As much as we can all look at the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and all the Amendments that followed, and see that not only was the United States founded on secular principles to better take care of all its citizens, it specifically states that there cannot be an official religion and that no religion should influence the actions of the Government.
It’s not difficult to see just how much Christians have ignored this and pushed their agenda through anyway.
As I’ve discussed before, people like Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell pushed very hard to elect Christian politicians who would execute their agenda. You can easily trace a line from Amy Coney Barrett and the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in the summer of 2022 back to Falwell founding the Moral Majority (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one) in 1979.
The problem with Christian principles and ideology being pushed through government and legislation is much more concerning than simply disagreeing with their form of Theism. As Evangelicals have moved further right, alienating large swaths of their base as well as anyone they disagree with politically, they have embraced more extreme ideology not found anywhere in the Bible. This willingness to reinterpret and add to the Bible they claim is infallible, is not only gross hypocrisy, but they have pushed it so far as to be indiscernible from Republican politics, and vice versa.
The unholy alliance between Evangelicals and the Republican party has opened the doors for extreme Christian nationalism to invade our government from local to federal, passing laws that fundamentally hurt individual humans based on the incorrect notion of religious freedom.
Republican voters — and especially Libertarians — often proclaim how they care about personal freedom because “this is a free country”. There is a purposeful disconnect though on how their concept of personal freedom means discrimination and often death for others. Christian Supremacy dictates that Evangelicalism knows what is best for all people and that the government should be second to God. Second to God as interpreted by Evangelicals. This means that there is Christian freedom, or freedom only to live by Christian values. Which, like the Book of Mormon, are frequently changed.
To boil this down further, we have good old-fashioned white supremacy mixed in, creating White Christian Supremacy. This is what the Southern Baptist Convention was founded on, as well as public funding for private Christian Schools during desegregation in the south.
I can go further, but all of this can be derived from simply looking back through US history without white-washing it. The United States of America was built on genocide, slavery and wreckless Capitalism with Christianity smack dab in the middle of all of it. While many people of Christian faith were socialists, abolitionists, and even anti-racists, there certainly wasn’t enough to help stem the tide of Christian Nationalism that is now fervently taking ground in American politics giving rise to fascism and legalized hatred of anyone who doesn’t fit within White Christian boundaries.
*He wasn’t the first. A moveable type press was created in China by Bi Sheng around 1088 and other forms of printing were in use at least one thousand years before
