Dr. Tony Campolo’s warning – that the Moral Majority would form an alliance with the political far Right and attempt to get a stranglehold on US policy-making – was all too on-the-nose. From the weekend he said it to the present day, across 40 years, the Religious Right has done nothing but lean hard into ultra-conservative politics, working tirelessly for the election of legislators at all levels of government who would do their bidding in bringing about what is in their minds a “Christian nation”.
Campolo’s admonition – that such action is “doing God’s will, Satan’s way” fell on deaf ears. And today we frequently hear the extremists in this movement making no secret of their ambitions: they don’t use dog whistles; they come right out and say it.
They use Lakoff’s framing, couching those ambitions in metaphor – invariably, and inevitably, the war frame.
The members of one such group, the New Apostolic Reformation, “view current events through a lens of ‘spiritual warfare’ — seeing a constant battle between Christ believers and their enemies, whom they hold are literally afflicted by demons,” according to Tim Dickenson of Rolling Stone. Their ideology, Christian Nationalism, “is the radical notion that the United States should not simply protect the religious freedoms of Christians, but that the nation should be governed according to their biblical beliefs, and that Christianity’s moral codes should be imposed on all citizens. Christian Nationalism is a rising force within the Trumpist, authoritarian GOP, with sitting members of Congress now openly rejecting the separation of church and state.”
Christian Nationalism isn’t really new, of course, not even here in the US. Dozens of kingdoms and governments, from England to Greece to Nazi Germany, have been based on Christianity as national religion. Here in the US, there has been constant pressure from one Christian group or another to rebuild the government on the bible since the country was formed.
The Framers explicitly designed the US government to prevent exactly that, of course, and that may be the only reason it hasn’t yet happened. The pressure, however, is rising, as the Religious Right relentlessly extends its reach and authoritarian voices in government grow louder and louder.
Christian Nationalism, and the push toward a US government with the Religious Right sitting firmly in charge, is an inevitable outcome of several key events over the past few decades.
The alliance Campolo predicted, alliance between the Religious Right and the ultra-conservative political Right, occurred;
By pushing for larger and larger churches, the Religious Right truncated whatever community it had once possessed in favor of revivalist spectacle;
Establishing the megachurch, the Religious Right refocused congregations away from whatever diversity they possessed and created expanding cognitive clusters, amplifying the rhetoric and emotional expressions and responses of its leaders, which has been increasingly authoritarian;
A corresponding rise in authoritarianism among conservative political leaders in American government was synchronized through their alliance, such that each bolstered and encouraged the other.
And that is where we are today. Are all megachurches proponents of Christian Nationalism? No. Are all of them authoritarian? An argument can be made (and is, above) that the very hierarchy of Christianity is inherently authoritarian, but no, not all megachurches are authoritarian in the way that Christian Nationalists are.
And where do we go from here?
What would Jesus do?
Commentaires