Christian Nationalists Seem Content to Destroy Christianity and the Country
There they go again, conservative Christians rolling out the Ten Commandments as a political prop. Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry made no bones about it last week: his goal was not the moral education of Louisiana’s children; it is the lawsuits, and the confrontation with the federal judiciary that is sure to come. What better way to burnish his image as a leader in the Christian nationalist cause, in pursuit of whatever higher office he might have in mind.
We have seen this movie before. Last time around, it was then-chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court Roy Moore installing the Ten Commandments on stone tablets far larger than anything Moses could have carried down Mt. Sinai, on the courthouse steps in Montgomery, Alabama.
Things didn’t play out exactly as Moore imagined, however. Sure, Moore got his confrontation with the feds, and the elevated status that ensued among many in Alabama’s large evangelical community, who saw his struggle as one more chapter in the never-ending saga of a man of faith being persecuted by the forces of a godless nation.
But things went downhill from there, and higher office proved not to be in the offing. Moore was removed from his seat on the court for defying a federal order to remove the offending tablets, and in the waves of publicity that he brought on himself, he was outed as a serial sexual predator with a penchant for young girls. Donald Trump endorsed Moore’s candidacy for the U.S. Senate despite the sexual assault charges; but it was not enough. Moore lost the race, as Alabama voters — by the thinnest of margins — chose to send a Democrat to the Senate rather than a serial sexual predator.
This all has a familiar ring to it. In an ascendent moment for Christian nationalists, they have once more thrown their lot in with a man whose credentials as a God-fearing Christian are dubious, at best. Dragging the Ten Commandments back into the public square, as Landry did last week, begs the question of whether there is a commandment Donald Trump has not violated on a regular basis. Lying. Fraud. Theft. Cursing. Coveting. Adultery. Murder, of course, stands out; though he assured us early on that were he to shoot someone in the light of day, he would surely be forgiven by his followers, if not by higher authorities.
And then there is the first commandment. “I am the Lord thy God, you shall have no other gods before Me.” One might have imagined that Trump circulating an image of Jesus sitting alongside him in the New York City courtroom would have been one graven image too far, even for his most devoted evangelical followers. But, instead, it simply heightened the devotion of his followers. As one Baptist pastor who has not drunk the Kool-Aid observed, “What is noxious and toxic here is that Trump’s followers find his body and face as glorious as Jesus.”
As confounding as it continues to be to those of us who see Donald Trump as a grifter, manipulating people of faith to his own ends, the devotion of many evangelical Christians to Donald Trump has only deepened with time. It transcends any simplistic calculus, such as a transactional exchange of votes-for-judges, or a bonding over a shared sense of resentment toward establishment elites. Rather, a community that one might have imagined would have been repelled by Trump’s conduct on so many levels, has been unwavering in its allegiance and continues to believe that he shares its faith and values.
It has been two years since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, and the ink was barely dry on Samuel Alito’s majority opinion before the anti-abortion movement pivoted to a larger Christian nationalist agenda. For years, striking down Roe and returning abortion regulation to the states had been the siren call of the Christian right. No longer. Now, a national abortion ban — countermanding the power of states to regulate abortion that the Court had just returned to them — is on the table. And the agenda now goes well beyond abortion, as reversing Supreme Court rulings supporting the rights to contraception and gay marriage, and banning school segregation, are all in their sights.
The direct line connecting southern white resistance to desegregation and the anti-abortion movement is particularly notable. At the time of the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, abortion was not a defining issue for the evangelical Christian community as it long had been for conservative Catholics.
Indeed, when the decision in Roe was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas applauded the decision: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person. And it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.” W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press mirrored Criswell’s comments: “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.”
In contrast, in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, segregation was the animating theme of southern politics. Five years before Roe, Alabama Governor George Wallace won five southern states in the 1968 Presidential campaign on his platform of “Segregation now…Segregation tomorrow…Segregation forever,” and many in the southern white evangelical community viewed the federal government as an occupying army.
By the mid-1970s, the target of segregationist anger was the Internal Revenue Service. Pursuant to the Civil Rights Act, the IRS was seeking to remove the tax-exemption of racially segregated educational institutions, notably including southern “segregation academies” that had emerged following the Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, and Bob Jones University, a private, segregationist school in South Carolina.
The “Pro-Life” movement was the brainchild of Paul Weyrich, a conservative political activist who had been searching for years for an issue around which to mobilize the white evangelical Christian community. As powerful as opposition to desegregation might have been, Weyrich had concluded that it was infeasible to build a national political movement focused on supporting segregated schools. Instead, he landed on abortion as a viable theme for his new political campaign, and in 1979, six years after the decision in Roe was handed down, he and evangelical preacher Jerry Fallwell co-founded the “Moral Majority.”
When it came, the pivot in evangelical attitudes toward abortion was decisive. By 1985, the Pro-Life movement had emerged as a critical, single-issue voting block within the Republican Party. Or, as a liberal evangelical blogger with a sense of humor put it: “In 1979, McDonald’s introduced the Happy Meal. Sometime after that, it was decided that the Bible teaches that human life begins at conception.” If opposition to abortion had ever been anything but a doctrinal absolute for evangelical Christians, you would never know it.
Last month, the same Southern Baptist Convention, whose leader applauded the Supreme Court decision in Roe, voted to embrace the decision of the Alabama Supreme Court this past February that ruled that frozen embryos in IVF facilities were entitled to the same legal protections as the rest of us.
While the court ruling was the logical extension of the theological view that life begins at conception, it tested the convictions of Alabama’s political establishment who were uniformly in the absolutist anti-abortion camp. And in a matter of weeks, the Alabama legislature and Governor Kay Ivey folded, passing a law that preserved the viability of the IVF industry, sanctioning, in the words of the court’s decision, the “murder” of thousands of “extrauterine” Alabama babies. Demonstrating the extraordinary moral flexibility and verbal dexterity of the “pro-life” community. Alabama Senator and evangelical superhero Katie Britt defended the legislation, deeming it to be “pro-life” and “pro-family.”
Tom Parker, the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court who crafted the decision is a full-throated believer in “Seven Mountain Dominionism.” Dominionism is an evangelical movement that believes that Christians must rule over unbelievers and impose Christian values in the seven realms of family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government, as a necessary step to realizing the second coming of Christ.
Parker’s views may be extreme, but they are not uncommon. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a dedicated Christian nationalist, has argued that the separation of church and state is a “misnomer,” and appears to embrace the view of those who argue that “Christians” must now take the reins and reform society to impose their vision of a “Biblical republic” on the rest of us. Or, as Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert explained it: “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church…I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk that’s not in the Constitution.”
The Christian nationalist world presents a frightening vision of Christianity, to say nothing of seeming remarkably unchristian. One can only imagine the pain felt by Christians of all types — evangelicals, mainline protestants, Catholics, and others — who see Donald Trump for who he is, and have had to watch their faith and their identity usurped by Christian nationalists who purport to speak for them and their faith.
Among the ironies of watching Moore and Landry make hay on the 10 Commandments is that those are Jewish laws, not Christian laws. As any number of theologians have noted, Jesus reframed the question when asked which of the ten laws Moses handed down was the greatest commandment, and simplified things. According to Matthew (22:37–40), Jesus suggested that his followers should, first, love God, and, second, love their neighbors as themselves. If they did that, everything else would take care of itself.
That is to say, Jesus articulated the historical pivot from Judaism, a religion based on laws, to Christianity, a religion that is supposedly based on love. Yet to a lay observer, that essence of the Christian faith appears to have been lost today among those evangelical Christians most engaged in our politics today. Instead, they have reimagined a Christianity with the militant fervor of Islam; and they have embraced as their leader a man who makes no bones about his failure to live by the Mosaic laws that Roy Moore and Jeff Landry love to embrace as political props, and has built his political movement on a foundation of retribution, resentment and hate.
You can find all of David’s recent posts at dpaul.substack.com, and his writing dating back to 2004 at https://authory.com/DavidPaul
Artwork by Joe Dworetzky, some of which may have been facilitated by AI. Follow his cartooning on Instagram at @joefaces and his journalism at authory.com/JoeDworetzky
