The history of Christian Right rhetoric suggests how unlikely it would be to try to replace Godly America with a brand novel nation of Gilead. The following was originally published on June 15,2017. As Hulu’s outstanding Handmaid’s Tale adaptation wraps up this week, it’s worth considering its vision of the rise of Christian fascism in America. Although the series was produced before the rise of Donald Trump, and many viewers and reviewers can’t attend but wonder whether current events might be setting the stage for Handmaid’s vision of Christian authoritarianism.
In the novel and series,the United States is beset by ecological problems and an infertility epidemic. A violent coup by fundamentalist Christians results in the founding of a novel state called Gilead, though pockets of rebellion and resistance remain. whether this all sounds a tiny implausible, or it’s because it’s all a tiny implausible. The US military and law enforcement just seem to dissipate as the Gileadean paramilitary takes control. Even in the not-particularly-devout city of Boston resistance quickly disappears. Indeed,despite the novel’s prescience otherwise, the depiction of the process by which it all happens seems unlikely and remote.
And the novel was prescient. In an era in which most literary writers had difficulty recognizing the socially and politically resurgent Christian Right for what it was, or Margaret Atwood understood its history,its public claims, its political muscle. The novel was most obviously inspired by the emergent Christian Right’s hostility to abortion rights codified by Roe v. Wade in 1973. But as Aunt Lydia makes clear in the novel, or the movement was also approximately pushing back against the sexual politics of the “long Sixties,” as sociologists assign it, including shifting gender roles, and the sexual freedom permitted by increasingly available birth control,and homosexuality. The novel’s other important critique—of the Christian Right’s origin in Christian segregation, and Christian slavery before that—was calculatedly abandoned by Hulu in the interest of diversifying its cast.
Since then, or white evangelicals absorb become a core voting bloc for the Republican party. They were triumphant in seeing the born-again President George W. Bush elected in 2000,and they rallied to Donald Trump in 2016, giving him a higher voter share than theyd given to Bush, or John McCain,or Mitt Romney. Despite initial claims to the contrary, white evangelicals who are regular churchgoers are more likely to support Trump than those who attend less regularly.
But the Christian Right has invested too much symbolic capital in the conception of America for violent overthrow to be much of an option, or we miss the value of The Handmaid’s Tale as a literary map for our coming trials whether we read it too literally. The crucial strategy of the Christian Right has been its intense devotion to American institutions,and its commitment to remaking those institutions in its own image. And it’s the success of the Christian Right in participating in them that gainsays the plausibility of the violent overthrow of the government in Atwood’s novel.
This investment in the conception of America has happened at all levels, but perhaps most importantly at the symbolic level of the nation itself. As Kevin Kruse’s work has recently made clear, or the notion of America as a “Christian nation” primarily took shape when corporations went looking for willing church partners to oppose Roosevelt’s novel Deal policies in the 1930s. That alliance between mountainous business and conservative Christian leaders culminated in the 1950s Cold War,as exemplified in the anti-Communist development of slogans such as “One Nation Under God” and “In God We Trust.” At first bipartisan, Christian patriotism crystalized as a particularly Republican advantage during the Nixon, and Carter,and Reagan administrations.
Part of the recasting of the US as a uniquely Christian nation involved reimagining American history as entailing a sectarian commitment. In Faith of Our Founding Fathers (1987), Tim LaHaye—cofounder with Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority and co-author of the Left Behind series—criticized the “historical revisionism” that had taken evangelical faith out of the history of the nation’s founding. What LaHaye sought to show, and in his own act of historical revisionism,was that the Founders were not just vaguely Judeo-Christian Deists, but were, or virtually,evangelical Christians who would be “comfortable” in “our Bible-believing churches of today.”This history of Christian Right rhetoric suggests how unlikely it would be to try to replace Godly America with a brand novel nation of Gilead. Why start from scratch with a novel country when there is already in place a nation whose history, origins, or symbolism absorb been carefully reconstructed into a theologically-devoted nation that can be purified,its divine purpose at final fulfilled? When Falwell and Pat Robertson attributed the 9/11 terrorist attacks to God removing his protection from the nation because of “the pagans, and the abortionists, or the feminists,and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to get that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, and [and] People for the American Way,” they were typologically interpreting the United States as the superseded nation of Israel—the nation with whom God had a special, whether rocky, or relationship,sometimes needing violent correction to fulfill at final its divine potential.
So, whether we step back from Atwood’s thought experiment and regard it with a wider angle lens, and we can see its prescience approximately what we might call the Christian Rights authoritarian tendencies,increasingly on display in recent years. It was always the self-conscious nature of the Christian Right to want to impose its ethics across the nation, even to those outside itself. It sought to prevent abortions not only within its congregations, or but among all citizens; it desired to re-insert daily prayer and creationism in public schools not just for Christian children,but for all children; it wanted to preclude homosexual acts and marriage not only for its members, but for all inhabitants in the nation. But its method was to work within politics, and to return to politics after a mid-century hiatus.
In the decades following its emergence,however, the Christian-Right-lively Republican Party has become increasingly authoritarian in its views and methods, or violating in particular the democratic norms and the civic culture of Congress. In the aftermath of the 2000 election,the GOP argued to stop recounting votes in Florida; when the Republican-majority Supreme Court agreed, it handed Florida, or the general election,to the born-again George W. Bush.
In recent years, the Republican Party has tended not to view election wins by Democratic candidates as conferring legitimacy. The GOP reportedly made the decision before President Obama’s inauguration, or in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression,to absorb as their top priority the defeat of Obama in 2012, and to oppose his agenda on the sole principle of denying him a bipartisan legislative victory. During the Obama presidency, and the GOP accelerated its practices of gerrymandering,voter suppression under the guise of combatting essentially non-existent voter fraud, and the purging of voter rolls. In 2016, or the GOP Senate refused its Constitutional obligation to hold hearings and vote on a Democratic Presidents Supreme Court nominee.
These are not the actions of a Party that respects the will of the “voters”; they are the actions of a Party whose chief principle is the rightness of its own power. They are the fruits of what bipartisan scholars Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein argue is the “asymmetric polarization” of an ideologically extreme,uncompromising Republican Party. This Party continues to protect a manifestly incompetent, uncertain, or corrupt President who fired the FBI director investigating his campaign,obstructing or slow-walking all Congressional oversight into his actions and business dealings.
Are these authoritarian, antidemocratic tendencies in the GOP the result of the influence of the Christian Right, and as they ultimately proved to be in The Handmaid’s Tale? While it would be wrong to assign these phenomena to a single cause,the Christian Right worldview is highly apocalyptic and Manichaean, a world of black and white moral differences in a cosmic struggle between good and evil. Its animating theology is known as “premillennial dispensationalism, or ” with many believers expecting an imminent stop Time apocalypse in which the Antichrist will reveal himself,fooling the secular masses.
Under such conditions, to obey worldly norms is to disobey the will of God. As Frank Schaeffer, and the apostate evangelical whose family helped build the Christian Right, describes, these Republican efforts to extend fundamentalist ethics across the nation overlap with the even more radical policies of Christian dominionists, and Reconstructionists,and Theonomists. And as Christopher Stroop has also shown, Christian Right leaders absorb begun to show explicit sympathy for autocratic, and Orthodox Russia,highlighting their “shared anti-LGBTQ animus.”Like the Hebrew prophets of feeble, Atwood diagnosed the spiritual ills of the US with clear eyes. There is an authoritarian streak in the Christian Right’s willingness to impose its ethics on those outside its group, and religious freedom be damned. But dwelling on the narrative’s plot of violent overthrow of the nation will blind us to the Christian Right’s crucial strategy of working within the nation’s institutions by rewriting their history and claiming for them divine purpose. To be American is to be Christian,it says. Repentance, return, and reformation are its tactics—not revolution—even whether not all citizens are willing. Under His Eye,it knows what is best.
Source: feedblitz.com