Chapter review: The Blueprint for an Assault on Civil Rights

Context

This review covers the introduction and chapter 1, The Blueprint for an Assault on Civil Rights, of Sarah Posner's 2020 book Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump. Posner is a journalist (JD, University of Virginia) who spent years doing research among Evangelical Christians. She attended various Evangelical activities, ranging from national meetings to small prayer groups in churches and people’s homes. She listened carefully to their fears and aspirations. She watched how they operate, usually quietly and actively shunning major publicity wherever possible.

What she sees is a political movement completely focused on opposing secularism, and the civil liberties of non-Christians and minorities. The movement intends to elevate Christianity and White people to a privileged central place in American government, society and commerce. They want government and society to operate on a biblical worldview and biblical law. The do not want government or society to be based on the Constitution or the laws of mere, fallible men. 

Posner traces the modern origin of this movement to the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The court order to desegregate public schools sparked an intense backlash among White Evangelical Christians (WECs; Christian nationalists) and it launched a political movement that culminated in power and influence with the election of the ex-president and his close, calculated alignment with powerful WECs. Once established as acceptable among powerful elite WECs, Trump’s influence and acceptance spread within months to the rank and file.

Like no other Republican candidate, the ex-president spoke directly and clearly to the fears, resentments and hate that decades of WEC propaganda had instilled in the rank and file. They loved Trump and were loyal, even despite most of them understanding that he was a cheating philanderer and clueless about Christianity. One astonishing thing about the WEC movement is that it not just overlooks, but even justifies and glorifies the ex-president’s rotten, immoral character and behaviors because he was chosen by God. The burden is on true believers look past his flaws to see God’s hand in human affairs. The burden is not on the ex-president to prove himself worthy.

The question now is whether the ex-president’s influence will remain strong and how the WEC movement’s push for power and privilege will play out. WECs sincerely and firmly believe that God chose the ex-president (i) to save Christianity from evil secularism and acceptance of civil liberties for detested groups including the LGBQT community, Muslims and racial minorities, and (ii) to rescue them from years of intense, harsh governmental and social persecution of Christianity and the exercise of religious freedom in public activities and private worship. What the WEC movement wants is power, wealth and exclusive privilege. The movement is willing to use all available means that it can get away with, moral or not, legal or not. For the WEC movement, the sacred ends fully justify all means, even evil ones. 

Introduction

The introduction of Posner's book is a short summary of the origins of the ex-president’s grip on the WEC movement. Posner writes:

“When Donald Trump announced his candidacy in June of 2015, I was deeply skeptical that he would be their [the WECs] man. He did not even try to tell a personal salvation story or display the most rudimentary Bible knowledge. Instead, he was enthralling the alt-right, a once-fringe movement of White supremacists and neo-Nazis that was, alarmingly, was finding a foothold in mainstream politics as Trump buoyed them with his cruel nativism and his casual racism. But as Trump energized his sordid faction, he simultaneously drew the attention of curious white evangelicals, many of whom responded to his racist anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim rhetoric, cheering it as a brave assault on political correctness. .... one thing became clear: as a ‘Christian,’ Trump was a work in progress. But God had a plan. Trump was a strong leader, a rich man, a successful real estate mogul. He could fix what was broken .... and restore America’s true redeemers to their rightful place in American political leadership.”

Posner says that her ‘aha moment’ came once she understood that the ex-president was the strongman the Christian right had long been looking for. He talked the talk. When his rhetoric or behavior was bad, that was fine because it swept away the evil political correctness that was dragging America down into secularism and darkness. WECs saw in him a leader who would directly attack the legal, cultural and social changes that the movement hatred and feared. She directly linked racist WEC grievances to the 1950s Brown v. Board decision and accompanying changes in the 1960s and 1970s. All of this mindset was built in years before opposing abortion became the top evangelical priority. 

Posner points out that the press was and still ill-equipped to report on this movement, and its scope, complexity and power. She sees the origins of the Trump-WEC axis of power as having roots that go back decades and a grounding in relentless radical right fundamentalist Christian deceit and manipulative propaganda. All that dark free speech prepared the soil for the time when a toxic seed like Trump would just fall in, take root and grow into the kind of power the WEC movement had been dreaming of for decades. 

She points out that under Trump, federal judicial nominees could now refuse to say whether Brown v. Board was properly decided. That seems to open a door to overturning it and going back to school segregation when and if the time comes that society is ready to accept that reversal. That time is not now, but the WEC movement is patient and persistent. It very much wants to correct the severe damage and destruction that liberalism, diversity, secularism and civil liberties have inflicted on America and on their power.

Chapter 1: The Blueprint for an Assault on Civil Rights

Right from the start of the ex-president’s time in office, he was presented with and pushed for a radical WEC vision of America and how the federal government should behave going forward. There was no shyness or ambiguity about their intent to gain exclusive power and wealth for the movement. Posner writes: 

“Less than two weeks into Trump’s presidency, I was leaked an explosive document: a draft executive order ‘establishing a government-wide initiative to respect religious freedom’ [a copy is here] .... As I digested the four-page draft, I saw in it an audacious attempt to end run the democratic process to create with the stroke of Trump’s pen, rights for conservative Christians that exceeded what the courts, Congress and nearly every state legislature had ever granted them. The draft envisioned giving any person or organization .... permission to refuse to transact virtually any type of business with someone based on their sexual orientation, gender identity or marital status, or because they had premarital  sex or an abortion. It would have permitted such exemptions in nearly every facet of life, ‘when providing social services, education, or healthcare; earning a living, seeking a job; or otherwise participating in the marketplace, the public square, of interfacing with Federal, State or local governments.’ The document derided the government as the enemy, an arrogant tyrant to religious people. ‘Americans and their religious organizations,’ the draft read, ‘will not be coerced by the Federal Government into participating in activities that violate their conscience.’”

Posner asserts that document was the culmination of radical Christian legal and political advocacy toward an almost unlimited scope of religious freedom. Any objection based on conscience, which includes religious bigotry and intolerance, could be used against anyone who violated the sacred norms the draft specified. 

The draft executive order allowed Christian adoption agencies to refuse to deal with non-Christian couples. It allowed federal social services contractors, spending taxpayer money, to refuse services to a client because of a conscience-based objection to their legal, private sexual activity or because they were gay, lesbian or otherwise not acceptably heterosexual. Government employees could refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Law experts who Posner shared the draft with were astonished. They said that what the draft order proposed was an unconstitutional violation of the separation of church and state. But one has to keep in mind the fact that the WEC movement does not believe that any legal separation of church and state is constitutional or what the Founders ever intended. Both beliefs are false, but are core parts of the WEC movement’s radical, fundamentalist Christian ideology. That ideology routinely and completely sweeps aside inconvenient facts and truths as lies, political correctness run amok, and/or radical left Democratic, deep state socialist tyranny. 

By the time he was sworn into office in January of 2017, it was clear that the ex-president had no regard for restraining customs or norms, including the rule of law. His mindset was already attuned to throwing bombs at whatever obstacles he believed were in his way. He didn’t do political correctness. He just exercised power. 

WEC propaganda about this was sophisticated. The entire WEC agenda had always been shrouded in sophisticated propaganda, lies and emotional manipulation, so this was nothing new. WEC propagandists portrayed it as a simple non-discrimination order. In fact, it was a license for rampant discrimination against anyone that these Christians chose to discriminate against on the basis of personal conscience. In essence, the WEC was arguing that their inability to discriminate against others as they wished amounted to discrimination against them. In the radical Christian view, their inability to discriminate against others was just another garden variety example of the severe persecution that Christians were forced  by evil government to suffer. 

Fifty-two Republican House members and 18 Senators signed a letter in support of the draft order. The House letter asserted that an “overbearing, coercive government under Obama had stolen away God-fearing American's religious freedom.” The House letter stated: “We look forward to coordinating with your administration so that critical religious liberty and conscience protections may finally be restored to millions of Americans who have been harmed and unprotected for far too many years.” WCEs hated Obama intensely and they still do.

The ex-president eventually signed a revised order that was not quite so blunt in attacking the LGBQT community, but the general intent survived to some non-trivial extent. Posner writes that the WCE elites attacked the revised order as “worse than useless” and “betrayal,” but they failed to understand its actual scope:

“But its seemingly bland provision, overlooked by many, directing the attorney general to issue ‘guidance interpreting religious liberty protections in Federal law,’ was broad enough to carry out the scuttled order’s objectives. Five months later, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a twenty-five page memorandum, entitled ‘Federal Law Protections for Religious Liberty,’ directing federal agencies, in every action they took .... to protect religious liberty of individuals and companies. ‘Religious liberty,’ the memorandum read, ‘is not merely a right to personal religious beliefs or even to worship in a sacred place. It also encompasses religious observance and practice. Therefore, except in the narrowest circumstances, no one should be forced between living out his or her faith and complying with the law.’”

One expert commented that “the breadth of what the AG could issue is virtually unchecked.” In essence what the WEC movement had done was to convert religious belief and personal conscience into a sword to cut down the unworthy in both private observance and in public and business, even if it meant using tax dollars to support Christian discrimination and bigotry. 

With that executive order, Trump delivered major power to the WEC movement. On top of that massive gift, he gave 'em an arguably even bigger one. He expanded WEC access to an endless flow of tax dollars. In American politics money = power. In the  minds of these radical Christian fundamentalists, that transfer of power and wealth to them make him obviously someone who God anointed, chosen and sanctified to save America. Clearly, the ex-president can now do nothing to cause most WECs to abandon him. Whopper lies, massive corruption and treason can all be rationalized away. God works in mysterious ways.

 

Question: Is it reasonable to believe that the WEC is as powerful and bigoted as Posner describes, which is much like the description that Katherine Stewart gave of Christian nationalism in her 2019 book, The Power Worshippers?