As Donald Trump is about to take command, the hard-core Left is warning America that his Christian supporters are about to take over the country, destroying our basic freedoms.
CNN reporter John Blake wants us to believe that we are one step away from a theocracy. To make his case he has enlisted the support of Kristin Kobes Du Mez; she specializes in demonizing patriotic Christians. As a sociologist who has debunked the myth of Christian nationalism several times, I find this iteration to be among the most hysterical of them all.
Blake begins his attack on Christians by trotting out the familiar January 6 scene where some Trump supporters staged a riot at the Capitol in 2021. He takes note of a photo of a white man whose “head [was] pressed in prayer against a massive wooden cross, facing the doomed US Capitol building.” To top it off, there was an American flag nearby.
This scares the daylights out of Blake and Du Mez. Which raises the question: Why? When Antifa and Black Lives Matter routinely assaulted cops, setting police stations on fire, vandalizing churches, destroying property—while burning the American flag—it’s a sure bet they took it in stride.
Blake is worried that “a conservative supermajority, which has already blurred the line between separation of church and state in a series of decisions favoring Christian interests, controls the US Supreme Court.”
Now it is true that the American people were so fed up with the gross incompetence of the Biden-Harris administration that they gave Trump a supermajority. There is a word for that in the English language—democracy.
High court decisions affirming religious liberty, which was viciously attacked by Biden-Harris, were a necessary corrective to militant secular assaults on the First Amendment. As for “Christian interests,” it’s too bad Blake didn’t elaborate what they are. If he means support for traditional moral values, he would be correct.
As I have previously indicated, Christian nationalism is a fiction. It exists only in the heads of those who want to demonize patriotic Christians. Blake and Du Mez may say that not all patriotic Christians are Christian nationalists, but all one has to do is read what they say about so-called Christian nationalists to know this is a ruse.
Du Mez is more explicit. She says that plans to eliminate the Department of Education are a Christian nationalist proposal. As someone who has taught every grade from the second to newly minted PhDs from around the world, this proposal strikes me as simply good policy, having nothing to do with Christian anything, including Christian nationalism. But when looked through the lens of a radical ideologue, if Christian nationalists like baked potatoes, we need to be keep our guard up. Fries are a safer option.
“The anti-CRT (critical race theory) and anti-woke agenda that we have seen played out on a smaller scale in certain states—that is what we should expect to see on a national scale.” Let’s hope she’s right. CRT is an inherently racist concept—it teaches that all white people are hopelessly racist—and woke political ideas, such as the insane notion that sex is not binary, are anti-science and anti-common sense.
Du Mez warns that “There will be no meaningful religious liberty” under Trump. Wrong. We examined religious liberty under Trump and compared it to the Biden-Harris record and the results weren’t even close—Trump was by far the most religion-friendly. To be fair, what she sees as religious liberty is what most Americans would see as a diminution of it, so the scorecards would be different.
Let’s face it, the problem with those who have invented the Christian nationalist bogeyman is that they really have a hard time dealing with patriotic Christians who support traditional moral values. They should just say so and stop with the bigotry and the intellectual posturing. It makes them look like phonies.
Contact Blake: John.blake@turner.com
Contact Du Mez: kristin.dumez@calvin.edu
