Power, wealth and intolerant, anti-democratic rule are key goals. The vehicle is sacred Christian religious dogma based on what fundamentalist White Christian nationalist elites tell the rank and file what God's sacred dogma is. All of the key elites are frauds, liars, sexual predators and/or dark ages brutes. From what I can tell, some of them might actually believe they are actual Christians.
Paul Weyrich
Arguably one of the foremost Christian nationalist toxins is Paul Weyrich (1942-2008), a radical far right Catholic and a key architect of the antiestablishment New Right he started in the 1970s. He co-founded the conservative think tanks The Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the Republican Study Committee, a powerful group focused on RINO hunting ideologically impure apostates out of the Republican Party. Tolerance is not part of the Weyrich mindset, just as the case for the modern fascist Republican Party. He coined the term "moral majority," the name of the political action group Moral Majority that he and Jerry Falwell co-founded in 1979. The Weyrich toxin is powerful and heavily grounded in the White Christian persecution myth. Among a slew of other things that most Americans at least used to support, Weyrich hates elections and majority rule.
Posner writes about deceitful and divisive propaganda and rhetorical techniques of the New Right: “From his early days in Washington, Weyrich was well-versed in propagating the rhetoric of White grievance. .... ‘Opposition to busing does not mean opposition to civil rights’ .... ‘Forced bussing is a step backwards in the whole civil rights picture.’”
In other words, Weyrich and his associates posited that civil liberties laws were misguided because ending racism was entirely a matter of individuals and government had no role in it. Of course, that left government, society and commerce completely free to be racist, sexist and bigoted in any ways it choose. That, along with crippling democracy and the rule of law, is a core goal of the current Christian nationalist movement.
Posner commented that the New Right strongly objected to the old, now deposed, conservative Republican elites who were too focused on free markets and foreign policy. New Right Christian nationalism was focused on moral, cultural and religious issues, prominently including the family structure, and male and White dominance. Weyrich wrote in a 1982 essay that “culturally destructive policies” such as “racial hiring quotas and busing” because “the damage they can do is enormous and practically irremediable.”
For Weyrich, vehement opposition to abortion what mostly drove him early on. After the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, Weyrich advised Catholic bishops to “adopt a program that will make the abortion a hot enough political question that is it viewed as a key issue by nearly every congressman.” He wanted a constitutional amendment banning abortion. In there early days, Evangelicals had no strong consensus about abortion. By the 1980's Weyrich and his adherents managed to change that.
Christian propaganda myth 1: Abortion
To help drag previously reluctant Evangelicals into radical Christian nationalism, master liars like Weyrich concocted and spread a myth that Jerry Falwell was politicized into supporting the New Right by the Roe decision and the abortion issue. That was a lie that even the MSM was duped into believing and repeating in print and on the air. Falwell’s grievance was not abortion, it was civil rights. But no matter, it was important in nudging more and more Evangelicals into radical right, anti-secular Christian fundamentalism. On civil rights Falwell’s beliefs were well known. He saw the 1964 Civil Rights Act as “a terrible violation of human and private property rights.” That reflected at least as much a commitment to segregation and laisse-faire capitalism as to fundamentalist White Christian nationalism.
Over time, the wily lying propagandist minnow Weyrich trapped and swallowed the whale Falwell by his skill at deceit and guile. Most of the rest of American Evangelical Christianity eventually fell in line and remains there to this day.
Christian propaganda myth 2: Deadly Christian persecution by a secular federal government
This lie was the real deal clincher for a lot rabid, haters of civil liberties and seccular government. The lie was that the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) was going to close Christian schools using the excuse that some discriminated against accepting racial minorities as students. In a speech Weyrich stated that this was the issue that pushed Evangelicals “into a final awareness.” Awareness of what? The evil of secular government, pluralism, public education, civil liberties, segregation and the like.
The truth is that the IRS never had any such plan. Instead the IRS sent letters to some private Christian schools warning them that if they discriminated on the basis of race, they faced possible loss of their tax exempt status, not closure of the school. All the schools had to do was sign a form stating that the school would not discriminate on the basis of race. A few, 110 out of about 3,500, refused and they lost their tax exempt status. The IRS policy was in line with court decisions holding that tax exemptions were not compatible with racial discrimination. Despite that truth, liars like Weyrich claimed this was an all out assault on Christianity by the federal government and secular civil liberties. Christians were taught and learned to hate and distrust the federal government, civil liberties, public education, secularism and inconvenient facts and truths. Christians also learned that they were under severe oppression and attack by the federal government, liberals, public education, secularism, and Godless immorality.
Rev. Bob Billings; Rev. Jack Hyles
Billings: Two other colorful but sleazy characters merit some mention. Billings was a key driver of private Christian education. He firmly believed in and advocated for teaching of creationism and Biblican corporal punishment, using the “rod of correction” to drive “foolishness” out of naughty children. Over time Billings rose to power as a federal bureaucrat in the Reagan administration. He fought hard and dirty, i.e., lies, deceit, irrational emotional manipulation, etc., against segregation of tax-subsidized private schools. Billings was astute enough to avoid racist appeals. Instead, his propaganda and lies turned to vilifying the political left.
As an educator in private religious schools, Billings taught that the White majority was besieged and oppressed by minority rights. He complained in writing about minorities that were demanding their rights. He railed against “false philosophies” being taught in classrooms while “old fashioned Americanism and Christianity” were excluded.
Billing’s Christian love manifested itself as strictly limiting student admission to Christian schools. Students with an IQ under 90 were unacceptable. Ones with a “Christian indoctrination” were required, while those who “show by their clothes, language, actions and hair-dos that they have left the way of righteousness, humility and righteousness” were unacceptable. Children who were “emotionally disturbed .... should never be admitted to the Christian classroom unless the teacher has faith to believe that the disturbing emotions and their influences will quickly be nullified.”
Billings was a fraud. He claimed to have a PhD from the Clarksville School of Theology in Tennessee. While he was in Reagan’s Department of Education, someone figured out that Clarksville Tennessee state authorities had shut the school down because it was a diploma mill. The state of Tennessee determined that the faux school issued “false and misleading educational credentials.” The modern Republican Party and Evangelical contempt for real education and actual expertise predates T**** by decades. That is a core faith of both the modern Christian nationalism and the heavily overlapping fascist Republican Party.
Hyles: Hyles was a Baptist educator who taught at religious schools. He founded Hyles-Anderson college in 1972. He was a hard core racist and rejected civil rights: “You can no more legislate people to love Negroes than you can cut the moon in pieces and have it for lunch. .... [he saw public schools as] cesspools .... [of] sordid, wicked communist [infiltration].” Hyles urged people to attend his school even if they needed to get second jobs to pay the tuition for his school where “clean-cut, dedicated kids sit at the feet of cultured, fine, educated Godly people who believe the Bible.” He preferred that his son go to Vietnam because “I’d rather him die for freedom than be taught filth and rot by folks [at Indiana University] trying to destroy freedom.”
Questions: So, what do you think -- is that mostly hyperbole and/or lies or mostly not, or is it mostly unclear?
Can a determined minority of radical religious fundamentalist ideologues working diligently and ruthlessly for decades eventually take control of the US government and bend the law to accord with its ideology and vision for American society?
Given the open contempt and hate that Christian nationalism holds for out groups such as atheists (including me), and the LGBQT community in, is it reasonable to be nice with them, start playing hard ball, or take another approach?
Should intolerant or bigoted Christian schools, or any Christian schools, be accorded the gracious privilege of the generous tax subsidies they now enjoy at everyone’s expense?
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