Deconstructing church-state separation and reconstructing Christian theocracy

“If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken. Every day, it is going to be a fight. And that is what I’m proudest about Donald Trump. All the opportunities he had to waver off this, all the people who have come to him and said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to moderate’ — every day in the Oval Office, he tells Reince and I, ‘I committed this to the American people, I promised this when I ran, and I’m going to deliver on this.’ .... [The Trump administration is in an unending battle for] ‘deconstruction of the administrative state.’” -- Steve Bannon in 2017 referring to the mainstream media, political opposition, and the radical right populist intention to completely restructure the federal government and society

In addition to attacking and eliminating civil liberties such as abortion and same-sex marriage, the Christian nationalist (CN) wing of the fascist Republican Party wants to completely obliterate all separation between church and state. In the minds of the elites who control the CN political movement, establishing a Christian theocracy with society controlled by Christian sharia law, is the ultimate power and wealth grab. Radical Christian fundamentalists would control both political power and tax revenues for its own ends. Those ends include making fascist Republican elites richer and more powerful than they already are. 

An opinion piece by MSN comments on the prospects for destroying church-state separation:

Many legal scholars in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s radical decision to reverse Roe v. Wade have focused on the dangerous implications of the court’s centuries-old worldview on protections for things such as same-sex marriage and contraception. This concern is real, but there is another issue with equally grave constitutional consequences, one that portends the emergence of a foundational alteration of American government itself.

Considered alongside two First Amendment rulings last term, the Dobbs decision marks a serious step in an emerging legal campaign by religious conservatives on the Supreme Court to undermine the bedrock concept of separation of church and state and to promote Christianity as an intrinsic component of democratic government.

The energy behind this idea was apparent in Justice Samuel Alito’s speech last month for Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Initiative in Rome. Calling it an “honor” to have penned the 6-3 majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and mocking international leaders for “lambast[ing]” the ruling, Alito spent the bulk of his remarks lamenting “the turn away from religion” in Western society. In his mind, the “significant increase in the percentage of the population that rejects religion” warrants a full-on “fight against secularism” — which Alito likened to staving off totalitarianism itself. Ignoring the vast historical record of human rights abuses in the name of religion (such as the Taliban in Afghanistan and even his own Catholic church’s role in perpetuating slavery in America), Alito identified the communist regimes of China and the Soviet Union as examples of what happens when freedom to worship publicly is curtailed. Protection for private worship, he argued, is not enough. Because “any judge who wants to shrink religious liberty” can just do it by interpreting the law, Alito insisted that there “must be limits” on that power.

Dobbs is significant not just because it reversed 50 years of precedent under the “due process clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment (under which the Court has recognized certain rights, even if unenumerated in the Constitution, as so bound up with the concept of liberty that the government cannot arbitrarily interfere with them). In Dobbs, Alito subverted that notion and fashioned a brand-new, two-part test for assessing the viability of individual rights: (1) whether the right is expressed in the Constitution’s text, and if not, (2) whether it existed as a matter of “the Nation’s history and tradition.” This second part of the test is the crucial one when it comes to religion — and in particular, its installation in government.

Under Dobbs’ step two, Alito time-traveled back to the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1868, when women could not even vote and, in his words, “three quarters of the States made abortion a crime at all stages of pregnancy.” Alito then regressed even earlier, to 13th century England (before America’s birth), to shore up his dubious quest to excavate historical authority rejecting abortion rights. Alito gave no guidelines for identifying which chapter of history counts in this calculus. Nor did he grapple with ancient law that actually went the other way. All we know going forward is that, for this majority, text is paramount and, barring that, very old history is determinative.

This article makes it clear, once again, that the Republican CN judges on the Supreme Court are opaque and unprincipled in their decision-making. They know the decisions they want to make before a case is heard, and they then dream up a reason that their decision is legal and constitutional. When there is no sound legal reason for what they want, they just make one up. The power that gives the Supreme Court is enormous.

On the one hand Alito complains that protection for private religious practice is insufficient because a judge can shrink religious liberty just by interpreting a law. On the other hand, Alito and four other theocrat CN judges decide to take power from judges to interpret law and instead tells them to look to cherry-picked ancient texts that he claims support the decision he wanted to arrive at the day he and the other Republican CN judges were sworn in as federal judges. 

There is no legal precedent for determining if a personal civil liberty is constitutional based on whether it existed as a matter of “the Nation’s history and tradition.” Alito just made that up. The whole point of judges being there is and has been since 1803 to interpret law. Now Alito and his Christofascist friends are turning to selected ancient texts to tell Americans in 2022 what their Nation’s history and traditions are and therefore what rights they can have and not have. This is pure Christian bullshit masquerading as sound legal reasoning in a secular country with a secular Constitution, secular traditions and a living Constitution that adapts to secular social change over time. 

The Christian fundamentalist intent here is crystal clear. The CN movement needs an excuse (they call it a rationale) to obliterate church-state separation. Looking at convenient cherry-picked ancient texts eviscerates what the Founders and drafters of the Civil War Amendments tried to do. Ignoring inconvenient ancient texts makes the bad situation much worse. The Founders tried to keep Christianity and religion generally out of government as best they could in their times. They tried to protect personal rights and civil liberties as best they could. 

Now, the Christofascist Republican Party has taken control of the Supreme Court. That court intends to generally get rid of secular law, in particular, laws related to civil liberties. They intend to replace that with Christian sharia law. 

That is core CN dogma. It is not a secret. It is a true conspiracy, but one so big that it cannot possibly be fully hidden from the public. What CN movement elites and their propagandists (Faux News, etc.) try very hard to do is to hide their real intent. That is where the conspiracy is. In that, the CN movement is quite effective. Millions of Christian fundamentalists have bought into core CN lies and propaganda. For example, most believe that America was founded as a White Christian nation, which is a lie. Most also believes that God Almighty demands that White heterosexual men should rule over all others with an iron fist, which is propaganda.

Our secular democracy and civil liberties face at least two major, urgent threats from the fascist Republican Party. One is the fall of secularism and pluralism to intolerant White Christian bigotry. The second is the fall of professional bureaucracies to lawless authoritarian radical right ideologues and regulation, taxes and government hating capitalists. Both are lethal separately. Together they are more than lethal.

A part of Sotomayor's dissent in a recent case that 

punched a huge hole in the wall separating church and state

Acknowledgement: Thanks to FriendlyGoat for bringing the MSN article to my attention.