A year ago, I dressed in drag at a public university in West Texas to protest the university president’s drag ban, which he justified by citing his personal religious beliefs and the Bible. As far as I can tell, the university is still functioning quite well despite my flowing skirt and blue suede heels. But my sartorial sparkle may have overshadowed the substance of my talk, which answered a question at the core of the blog posts we shared over the last two weeks: Democracy and its connection to the separation of church and state.
Previous posts have examined issues such as church politicking, voting in houses of worship and the scope and power of Christian Nationalist groups.
Today, I want to answer the big question: Why? Why are Christian Nationalists set on undermining and destroying our democracy? When we understand this WHY, so many other puzzle pieces fall into place.
The modern wave of Christian Nationalism is largely a backlash against the strides our country has made toward equality for all. Conservative White Christian Americans’ status as the dominant group is threatened. It has been for some time. They’re losing the “culture wars,” and their constant attacks on human rights alarms Americans. Their benighted ideology is unpopular.
Those numbers terrify Christian Nationalists. They are scared. They’re losing their privilege and the deference which they believe they are due. Why? Because every day we are closer to racial and gender and LGBTQ+ equality. And because they are so used to seeing a narrow world which reflects only their straight, white, conservative Christian patriarchy, that the existence, let alone equality, of others feels like a threat to them.
When the dominant group or caste in society feels threatened or left behind by circumstances, it reacts, or overreacts, by seeking a way to retain that status. This is why we’re seeing them turn to Christian Nationalism, violent insurrection, the so-called strongmen and tearing down democratic norms.
Of course, they’re wrong. Parity is not oppression. Equality, even when it means the erosion of privilege, is not discrimination. We’re not actually expanding rights or giving new rights; we are recognizing rights that have always existed under the law but were never enforced. We are affirming the humanity of our brothers and sisters and siblings and admitting that we’ve been wrong. As we realize the aspirational values implicit in “We the People,” “equal justice under law,” and other founding maxims — as we recognize that humans are human and worthy of rights — conservative white Christian America is dying a slow demographic death and rebelling.
They are raging against the dying of their privilege. And so, they declared war.
This permeates their crusade, including the hostile takeover of the Supreme Court. Leonard Leo is universally recognized as the man who orchestrated that takeover. A former employee described Leo’s mission: “He figured out twenty years ago that conservatives had lost the culture war. Abortion, gay rights, contraception — conservatives didn’t have a chance if public opinion prevailed. So, they needed to stack the courts.” They did stack the courts. And notice the anti-democratic admission and goal in that mission. They target the courts because if they didn’t, the majority would rule. Public opinion would prevail. Democracy would work.
They cannot persuade us of the righteousness of their positions — which is how democracies are meant to work — so instead, they will capture and abuse the machinery of the state to impose their wildly unpopular positions on us all.
This is why I’ve long warned that Christian Nationalism is an existential threat to our democracy. But I think Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United, put it best when she said, “The end point of white Christian nationalism is the toppling of democracy — nothing less than that.”
