Last weekend, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., reiterated her call for Republicans to embrace Christian nationalism, saying, “We need to be the party of nationalism and I am a Christian, and I say proudly, we should be Christian nationalists.
This is the same Greene who, in 2019, while running for office, claimed that the two Muslim women congressmen, Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. , wanted to impose “the sharia”. in America” and demanded that they “return to the Middle East.
This juxtaposition of a party that embraces white Christian nationalism as its platform, while condemning an imaginary attempt to impose the religious law of a different faith, is more than just blatant hypocrisy; it represents a very real threat to our freedoms and our democracy. Yet Democrats still haven’t found a compelling way to call out and rally against this xenophobic radical religious movement, even if the answer is staring them in the face: It’s yet another example of the GOP’s dangerous embrace. to extremism.
For years, GOP lawmakers have falsely claimed that Muslim Americans want to impose Islamic law on the United States — which they call “Sharia.” It didn’t matter that we Muslims, who only make up about 1% of the American population, certainly weren’t trying to do that. Republicans simply saw political advantage in stoking hatred against a minority group, a staple of the GOP playbook.
This is yet another example of the GOP’s dangerous embrace of extremism.
The irony seems even richer now that these same Republicans are openly seeking to legally impose their extreme religious beliefs on Americans.
Christian nationalism has a long and dark history in the United States, one of white supremacy, bigotry and ties to the Nazi Party. In the 1948 presidential election, a political party called the Christian Nationalist Party nominated Gerald LK Smith, a pastor who openly sympathized with Nazi ideologies in his party’s anti-Semitic and anti-black platform.
The term Christian nationalism is inseparable from white nationalism and is defined by the belief that the United States was founded as a white, Christian nation. It is also grounded in the fundamental belief that there should be no walls between church and state, rather that our laws should be based on extreme, right-wing interpretations of the Christian faith.
Greene is not alone in touting the fabricated threat that Muslim Americans wanted to impose Islamic law while advocating for their own religious views to be made into law. Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania in 2022, Doug Mastriano, warned in two 2018 social media posts titled “Stop Islam” that we should be afraid of Muslims being elected to Congress who “practice Sharia”, because according to him, Muslims are “people who respect neither the culture nor the rights of the original population. Today, Mastriano tells anyone who will listen that the separation of Church and State was a ‘myth’, as he seeks to ban abortion even in cases of rape, incest or threat for the pregnant woman’s life – all based on her extreme religion. beliefs. Hypocrisy would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous.
Since Roe v. Wade was overturned by the conservative Supreme Court, seven GOP-controlled states imposed laws banning abortion at conception. These laws are based on the religious belief that life begins at conception, which, in particular, is not shared by all denominations, or even all branches of Christianity. Yet the Republicans seek to impose their beliefs on us just as the religious radicals of the Taliban ignobly impose their extreme religious beliefs: by law.
There is a growing and noisy authoritarian tension in the movement that would accept the end of democracy if replaced by an autocrat who realized his Christian nationalist dreams.
Unfortunately, the GOP is far from done with its crusade. Former Vice President Mike Pence implored attendees of the Young America’s Foundation student conference on Tuesday to work toward just that goal: “We must not tire until we restore the sanctity of life.” at the center of American law in every state in the country. ,” he said.
Last week, we saw 195 of 203 House Republicans vote against codifying federal protections for access to birth control and nearly three-quarters of the House GOP caucus oppose codifying the marriage equality.
To say that white Christian nationalism is a threat to our democracy is no exaggeration. Yale sociologist Philip Gorski explained in a recent interview with Yale News that Christianity and democracy can and have complemented each other in the United States. But this Christian nationalism, he noted, is a dangerous threat to our democracy. The notion states that only white Christians should have full rights – even when it comes to voting. Gorski shared his finding of “strong correlations between white Christian nationalism and support for gerrymandering, support for the Electoral College, support for various other kinds of means of restricting the vote.”
Professor Kristin Du Mez, author of the New York Times bestseller “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation”, recently warned about my SiriusXM Broadcast that there is a growing and noisy authoritarian tension in the movement that would accept the end of democracy if replaced by an autocrat who realized his Christian nationalist dreams.
The challenge now for Democrats is to call out the threat of white Christian nationalism in a way that won’t allow the GOP to smear them as anti-Christian, an attack the GOP has long used against the Democratic Party. Democratic Rep. Susan Wild saw a mini-reaction from Fox News when recently on my SiriusXM show she criticized the GOP-controlled Supreme Court for overthrowing Roe and chipping away at the wall between church and state as “about making Christianity the law of the land.”
Sauvage is 100% correct. And this is yet another example of the GOP embracing extremism: from banning abortion that would force a 10-year-old child who is raped to carry the rapist’s fetus to term, to banning books opposing access to birth control and marriage equality.
Democrats cannot allow the GOP’s embrace of Christian nationalism to go unchallenged. They must demonstrate that there is a difference between Christianity and white Christian nationalism. The first is a beautiful religion, the second is a threat to our freedoms and our democracy.