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I’m going to start this piece with recommendations for further reading, because strict organized religion played a major part in my life, but for a relatively short time. Here are some recent pieces to put it all in context, starting with two pieces by friends and fellow South Carolinians, which speak more directly to the Evangelical culture of the region.
Amberlyn Boitier, “Another Bill Passes, Another Trans Kid Dies; The ‘Most Progressive Party in American History’ Comforts Us with Apathy”
Paul Bowers, “The far side of the creek: On leaving church, leaving journalism, and never leaving home”.
Charles M. Blow, “Alabama’s I.V.F. Ruling Shows Our Slide Toward Theocracy”.
Robert Reich, “The Emerging Republican Theocracy”.
I have resisted writing about this, because I don’t feel qualified, but the encroachment of theocracy and religious nationalism into government seems to be something we should all be considering.
The main reason the subject has entered the most recent news cycle is that the Alabama Supreme Court ruled two weeks ago that embryos frozen for in vitro fertilization are legally human beings. Beyond the controversial decision itself, Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker’s overtly religious legal opinion and other statements should alarm religious and non-religious Americans alike.
Parker’s concurring opinion evokes the Alabama constitution and other legal documents, before traveling deeper and deeper into quotations from the Christian Bible, theologian Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, 17th Century theologian Petrus van Mastricht, John Calvin, and other explicitly Christian religious authorities. He ends the first section of his concurring opinion with this:
In summary, the theologically based view of the sanctity of life adopted by the People of Alabama encompasses the following: (1) God made every person in His image; (2) each person therefore has a value that far exceeds the ability of human beings to calculate; and (3) human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself. Section 36.06 recognizes that this is true of unborn human life no less than it is of all other human life -- that even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.
In his conclusion, Parker writes,
The People of Alabama have declared the public policy of this State to be that unborn human life is sacred. We believe that each human being, from the moment of conception, is made in the image of God, created by Him to reflect His likeness. It is as if the People of Alabama took what was spoken of the prophet Jeremiah and applied it to every unborn person in this state: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, Before you were born I sanctified you." Jeremiah 1:5 (NKJV 1982).
As Media Matters reports, Parker participated in an interview—uploaded the same day as the Court’s decision was released, with “self-proclaimed ‘prophet’ and QAnon conspiracy theorist Johnny Enlow, in which “Parker indicated that he is a proponent of the ‘Seven Mountain Mandate,’ a theological approach that calls on Christians to impose fundamentalist values on all aspects of American life.”
Parker is not the only powerful public official making headlines for his overtly religious interpretation of his political role.
As Heather Cox Richardson recently wrote, “House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) identifies himself as a Christian, has argued that the United States is a Christian nation, and has called for ‘biblically sanctioned government.’ At a retreat of Republican leaders this weekend, as the country is grappling with both the need to support Ukraine and the need to fund the government, he tried to rally the attendees with what some called a ‘sermon’ arguing that the Republican Party needed to save the country from its lack of morality.”
Even at my most rigidly religious, and perhaps most during that time, I should have and probably would have objected passionately to any whiff of American theocracy, like the kind supported by Parker, Johnson, and other powerful political figures. It was confusing to me that people who truly built their lives around faith could risk the dangers of placing one specific faith in a position of ultimate political power, and that people were willing to engage in what seemed to amount to idolatry, while proclaiming religious beliefs that were categorically incompatible with idolatry.
The most obvious reason for this is that there is almost no chance that my self-directed, relatively esoteric understanding of Christianity (the kind of self-directed, literally Bible-based personal exploration that was the impetus behind elements of the movements that created Protestantism) would have matched up with the beliefs and aims of a theocratic state (or, for that matter, any state).
For one thing, I came to my own religious journey by beginning to read from a few different translations of the Bible (and, if I’m honest, a lot of questionable late-’90s internet resources). I began to pray and to have personal conversations with God in a vaguely Protestant framework I had picked up during sporadic chapel visits (I went to a Presbyterian daycare center) and occasional church visits (a relative, the Reverend Billy Shand, was an Episcopalian minister who we would occasionally see preach during family vacations).
Based on that framework, I saw the Church as a spiritual body with God/ Christ at its head, which was above all concerned with the suffering of the poor and marginalized, which required obedience to human laws at times but which ultimately called people to follow the higher laws of God. As I spent time in spiritual counseling with first a Presbyterian minister and then a Greek Orthodox priest, I began to let go of the focus on the rules and to embrace the mysteries of faith, but the focus on uplifting the downtrodden remained. None of this sat easily with the idea of a human political system speaking on behalf of God, particularly in a culture suffused with a kind of rebellious Protestantism— or at least a surface-level adherence— that arose at least partly in opposition to the hierarchical structure and worldly politics of the Catholic Church of the 1500s.
None of this came from my experience of mainstream Southern Protestant Christianity growing up in South Carolina. Without painting with too broad a brush, I can only describe that experience as a series of encounters with people— usually children, to be fair— who were absolutely certain they were right about something, but who often didn’t seem to know what that something was. Religion, in that context, seemed like a series of fairly easy slogans. The goal, aside from “being saved” often seemed obscure. The means to that goal included some charitable works, but also seemed to be largely about joining one of many socially powerful clubs.
I read Acts as an adolescent, a book of the Bible which describes the early Christian community in this way:
All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.
All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had.
One member of the community who sells some property and holds part of it back even spontaneously dies.
Yet when I listened to contemporary Christian radio, I heard an evangelist (it might have been Pat Robertson) declaim the evils of Marx and socialism as a kind of anti-Christ. The argument of that era seemed to be that in the political world, to be Christian was to embrace rightwing “conservatism,” and Leftist concepts and ideas were utterly un-Christian, even when elements of them seemed to dovetail pretty easily with the beliefs and actions of Biblical (as in, present in the Bible) Christians.
It was confusing, this exploration of faith and philosophy, and I sincerely understand the desire to have a human being just explain it all. I feel fortunate that the clergy I was close with during that time did not exploit my searching or my confusion, or give me simple answers, because I might have devoured them, too.
Over time, I became convinced that while some of this dissonance was a result of sincere differences in interpretation, much of it was a result in a difference of goal: Christian nationalists, or Seven Mountains dominionists, or straight-up theocrats seem to see as their goal, not responding to the needs of the world, but remaking the world in an image that suits them.
But even in conservative, heavily religious South Carolina, theocracy is not a popular goal. According to a Winthrop poll released this month, most SC respondents do not believe leaders are “ordained by God” and the largest number (46%) didn’t believe the US was a fundamentally Christian nation. In a similar South Carolina poll from 2022, 70% of respondents said their should be a separation of church and state. Most Americans, according to multiple polls over the past several years, also support a separation of church and state.
Yet theocracy is an open, obvious goal of many anti-democratic groups intent on capturing power in American politics. It is just beneath the surface, for example, of the most public statements of groups like Moms for Liberty. But it is also way out in the open in local spaces where adherents feel more free, such as their private social media pages.
For example, in a private Moms for Liberty Facebook group for the Richland County, SC, chapter, a moderator recently shared a post featuring a documentary from the Epoch Times featuring James Lindsay (who, incidentally, is a self-proclaimed atheist). Based on the trailer, which intersperses images of President Biden, LGBTQ+ flags, Nazi salutes, Hitler and Stalin, against a backdrop of scary graphics and music, the documentary equates what the creators see as contemporary cultural “Marxism” with the rise of the Nazi regime (leaving aside the fact the Nazi’s were virulently anti-Communist). In the trailer, Lindsay, a prominent anti-LGBQT+ activist and conspiracy theorist, intones, “Christianity is not just about saying Jesus loves you and then going to Heaven one day, but that there is a war that’s raging”. Charlie Kirk, over images of Stalin says, “The Church is weakening, and that’s why Marxism is ascendant today.”
In another post from the same group, another moderator makes the argument that it is somehow a violation of “religious freedom” to pass laws preventing states from enforcing religious prohibitions on same-sex marriage; again, proponents of religious hegemony frame it in terms of “religious freedom”.
Similarly, former Heritage Foundation leader/ Palmetto Promise Institute founder Jim DeMint (who was apparently “too bombastic and political” for the Heritage Foundation) shared a post on Twitter/ X recently, which retweeted Wade Miller of the group Citizens for Renewing America (a group which features the words “Critical Race Theory” in front of a Communist hammer and sickle on its homepage). DeMint’s words in the post quote Thomas Jefferson and the religiously diverse group of authors of the Declaration of Independence in a way meant to suggest there is something originalist about theocratic government.
“Make your choice,” DeMint writes, “Do you believe our rights: Are undeniable & endowed by our Creator..?”
DeMint’s post, of course, ignores much of the historical context around the Declaration. Jefferson, for example, was a Deist who explicitly rejected parts of Biblical teaching, going so far as to make his own Bible by literally cutting out the miracles, and might have used the words “endowed by their Creator” rather than “endowed by God” to intentionally distance the Declaration from orthodox Christian belief.
After the tragic death of Nex Benedict, an Oklahoma sixteen-year-old who was either transgender or nonbinary, state senator Tom Woods, while expressing sadness over the student’s death, also said:
We are a religious state. We are going to fight to keep that filth out of the state of Oklahoma, because we’re a Christian state. We’re a rural state. We want to lower taxes, and for people to live and work, and to go to the faith they choose.
In his probably off-the-cuff remarks, Woods may have unintentionally given away a major rhetorical strategy of those who reject religious pluralism and seek a Christian nationalist or a theocratic form of government. It’s in the phrase the faith they choose. Those words elide the fact that perhaps the religious faiths of many Oklahomans might tell them that Nex was living their life in a moral way, that being LGBTQ+ was not a sin or a crime. In not supporting LGBTQ+ Oklahomans, in proclaiming the state a “Christian state,” Woods’ words attempt to deny the religious (or non-religious) freedom of many of his own constituents.
Similarly, Oklahoma Superintendent of Education Ryan Walters, according to BBC News, “told the New York Times that Benedict's death was a tragedy, but restated his view of gender identity: ‘There's not multiple genders. There's two. That's how God created us.’"
Walters has been rightly criticized for an ongoing series of anti-trans statements and actions that put have transgender children in greater danger. (My own Superintendent of Education, while standing next to Walters at the Moms for Liberty conference this summer, made essentially the same transphobic comment, although she delivered it as an awkward laugh line, like a true professional.)
The worldview reflected in these remarks shares large overlaps with antisemitism and QAnon-style conspiracy theories: a paranoia about stealing/ sacrificing/ brainwashing children; a sense of a secret (anti-Christian/ Jewish/ Deep State) order behind things; a paradoxical anti-authoritarianism which sees its ultimate solution in the adoption of a messiah-like political leader. Ultimately, conspiracy theories seem to catch on with people who are emotionally activated, who are anxious and afraid and seeking control; people who are feeling this way also seem more likely to embrace authoritarianism or strongmen.
But theocracy, or white Christian nationalism, or whatever you prefer to call it, whatever else it might be, is a worldly political movement. Christians are not apparently immune to the desire that seems to tempt all religious groups— much as the Biblical Christ was tempted— to possess worldly power.
And it is a powerful political movement, perhaps because of that temptation.
A recent PRRI/ Brookings study found that although 54% of Americans completely disagree with the statement that “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society,” 50% adherents of white Christian nationalism strongly agreed and 35% somewhat agreed with the statement. In other words, 85% at least partly support a form of government that outlaws religious and philosophical pluralism, which discriminates against those who do not adhere to whatever a theoretical theocracy defines as a “Christian” government.
Only ten percent of the surveyed group were defined as adherents of white Christian nationalism, meaning they strongly agreed with the following statements:
The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.
U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.
If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.
Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.
God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.
Four out of five of those bullets are clearly related to the idea that Christianity— however survey participants understood that term— should have a central place in ruling American society. But setting aside the specific religious context, the goal here is a tyranny of the minority, in which a tenth of the population has dominion over the other 90%.
Again, this is not just a problem for non-Christians. Consider, for a moment, what “Christianity” looks like to the ten percent of Americans who strongly agree with the above statements. Does it look like Christianity as you understand it? How much does it comport with your own worldview, or your own religious or spiritual beliefs, if you hold them?
Those supporting a Christianity that has dominion over every aspect of society are unlikely to, for example, believe in a higher moral authority that supersedes politics, or in the inherent imperfection of human motivations and decisions. They are unlikely to accept that political leaders are fallible human beings and that part of living in an effectively open society is engaging in an ongoing debate about how best to govern.
Even modern Iran, for example, is (arguably) not fully theocratic in the sense that some white Christian nationalists support. The country has elections, it has a kind of balance of secular power, and its Supreme Religious Leader (technically, at least) doesn’t have “dominion over all areas of society”. And yet Iran’s current political regime is inarguably oppressive and restrictive by the standards of most Americans, and by the standards of a growing number of Iranians.
For many of us— and this isn’t exclusive to supporters of theocracy— on an emotional level, what is frightening is not that a single belief system will conquer our society, but that someone else’s belief system will conquer our society. If you believe— or have been persuaded, by yourself or someone else— that your beliefs are so set that they will not change, and that they are correct on an objective, perhaps divinely inspired level— it might be easy to want someone who shares those beliefs to have ultimate authority over your country.
But in real life, when has it ever happened that way? Sincere people across the spectrum of belief and non-belief have, throughout history, found themselves at odds with political authorities. The more open the society, the better opportunities they have to engage in dialogue and debate— but the more centrally the power of the group is affixed in the political sphere, the more likely your dialogue will be censored and your debate labeled as dissent.
Our founding fathers were deeply imperfect and disagreed about many things, but they also enshrined religious protections in the very first amendment to the Constitution.
The Islamic Republic of Iran came to power in 1979 when a broad coalition overthrew the last Shah of Iran. Many of those who supported the revolution were supporters of theocracy, and/ or the Ayatollah— a religious and political leader who had been forced to flee the country— specifically. Many, including, presumably, a large number of supporters of theocracy— also wanted a freer, more open society. Whether anyone got what they wanted is debatable, but what is not is that Iran’s (mostly) theocratic regime has overseen the stifling of free speech, and the arrest and killings of protesters.
It would be nice if we could point this out to supporters of a far-right and/ or QAnon-style takeover of our (somewhat) democratic existing systems, but of course the reality is that people are pushed into extremism by emotion, not by logic.
It’s important, instead, to defend what is good about our institutions now, ourselves, and not to wait for others to do it. And it’s important not to let supporters of theocracy hijack conversations about faith and morality, as if all religious Americans are a political monolith, or as if many religious Americans don’t see in the rise of theocratic and white Christian nationalist rhetoric a threat to their own religious freedoms.