Christian nationalism: Origins, dogma, tactics and goals for all of us

“There are very good Christians who are compassionate and caring. And there are very bad Christians. You can say that about Islam, about Hinduism, about any faith. That is why I was saying that it was not the faith per se but the adherent. People will use their religion to justify virtually anything.” — Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Multiple online sources have written about the existence of Christian nationalism and its aggressive, toxic power. An article in The Nation (solid liberal bias, high fact accuracy), How Do We Confront White Christian Nationalism?, discusses various aspects of CN ideology and the CN political movement. The author, Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis writes:

Christian nationalism has influenced the course of American politics and policy since the founding of this country, while, in every era, moral movements have had to fight for the Bible and the terrain that goes with it. The January 6 assault on the Capitol, while only the latest expression of such old battlelines, demonstrated the threat of a modern form of Christian nationalism that has carefully built political power in government, the media, the academy, and the military over the past half-century. Today, the social forces committed to it are growing bolder and increasingly able to win mainstream support.

When I refer to “Christian nationalism,” I mean a social force that coalesces around a matrix of interlocking and interrelated values and beliefs. These include at least six key features, ....

• First, a highly exclusionary and regressive form of Christianity is the only true and valid religion.

• Second, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity are “the natural order” of the world and must be upheld by public policy (even as Latino Protestants swell the ranks of American evangelicalism and women become important gate-keepers in communities gripped by Christian nationalism).

• Third, militarism and violence, rather than diplomacy and debate, are the correct ways for this country to exert power over other countries (as it is our God-given right to do).

• Fourth, scarcity is an economic reality of life and so we (Americans vs. the world, white people vs. people of color, natural-born citizens vs. immigrants) must compete fiercely and without pity for the greater portion of the resources available.

• Fifth, people already oppressed by systemic violence are actually to blame for the deep social and economic problems of the world—the poor for their poverty, LGBTQIA people for disease and social rupture, documented and undocumented immigrants for being “rapists and murderers” stealing “American” jobs, and so on.

• Sixth, the Bible is the source of moral authority on these (and other) social issues and should be used to justify an extremist agenda, no matter what may actually be contained in the Good Book. 

Such ideas, by the way, didn’t just spring up overnight. This false narrative has been playing a significant, if not dominant, role in our politics and economics for decades.

In the Poor People’s Campaign (which I cochair with Reverend William Barber II), we identify Christian nationalism as a key pillar of injustice in America that provides cover for a host of other ills, including systemic racism, poverty, climate change, and militarism. To combat it, we believe it’s necessary to build a multiracial moral movement that can speak directly to the needs and aspirations of poor and dispossessed Americans and fuse their many struggles into one.

A Feb. 2020 article in Washington Monthly (center-left bias, high fact accuracy), Christian Nationalists Found the Leader They’ve Been Looking For, writes: 

I had previously referred to the group [Christian nationalists] that has shown unwavering support for Trump as “white evangelicals.” But that is a bit of a misnomer, primarily because, as we saw with the article in Christianity Today calling for the president’s removal from office, there are pockets of white evangelicals who aren’t part of the movement. There are also members of other religious groups that espouse the same beliefs. For example, Catholic leaders like Attorney General William Barr and Federalist Society President Leonard Leo are major players in the Christian nationalist movement. 

Equally important for us to understand is that this movement isn’t simply about culture wars. [Quoting Katherine Stewart's 2020 book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism]: 

It is not a social or cultural movement. It is a political movement, and its ultimate goal is power. It does not seek to add another voice to America’s pluralistic democracy but to replace our foundational democratic principles and institutions with a state grounded on a particular version of Christianity answering to what some adherents call a “biblical worldview” that also happens to serve the interests of its plutocratic funders and allied political leaders…This is not a “culture war.” It is a political war over the future of democracy. (emphasis added)

When it comes to that “biblical worldview,” we often hear about the fact that Christian nationalists oppose abortion and LGBT rights. But as Stewart explains, the movement is actually based on the idea that “the Bible is very clear about the right answers to the political issues American voters face in the twenty-first century.” For example, they also believe that the Bible:

• opposes public assistance to the poor as a matter of principle—unless the money passes through church coffers;

• opposes environmentalism and, as a matter of theology, denies the science that human contributions to greenhouse gases causes global warning;

• opposes gun regulation;

• supports strong national borders;

• favors the privatization of schools;

• favors a gender hierarchy in both the home and church, with women being submissive to men;

• favors the use of corporal punishment when discipling children;

• favors government deregulation of business and minimal workers rights; and

• favors capitalism and property rights.

For me personally, the major myth about Christian nationalists that Stewart busted was to provide some history of where this movement came from. In this case, I have to disagree with my colleague Martin Longman. Trump hasn’t corrupted his Christian supporters, he is the apex of decades of work that led up to his election. Here are just a few of the men who laid the groundwork for where we are today.

Robert Lewis Dabney

Dabney was a Presbyterian minister and theologian who was born in 1820. He was an anti-abolitionist, who argued that opposing slavery was “tantamount to rejecting Christianity.” After the Civil War, Dabney, who referred to democracy as “mobocracy,” took up the cause of his “oppressed white brethren of Virginia and neighboring states to the south.”

Their oppression consisted in, among other things, having to pay taxes to support a “pretended education to the brats of black paupers.” These unjustly persecuted white people, as Dabney saw it, were also forced to contend with “the atheistic and infidel theories of physical science.”

As Stewart notes, “Christian nationalism came of age in the American slave republic” due to the proslavery theology of men like Dabney, who fused religion with a racialized form of nationalism.

Rousas Rushdoony

The importance of Dabeny can be seen from the fact that Rushdoony, whose writings provided the core of today’s Christian nationalism, considered him a role model.

The views of the theologian who lies at the center of so much influence are not hard to state simply and clearly: Rushdoony advocated a return to “biblical” law in America. The Bible, says Rushdoony, commands Christians to exercise absolute dominion over the earth and all of its inhabitants. Women are destined by God to be subordinate to men; men are destined to be ruled by a spiritual aristocracy of right-thinking, orthodox Christian clerics; and the federal government is an agent of evil. Public education, in Rushdoony’s reading of the Bible, is a threat to civilization, for it “basically trains women to be men,” and represents “primitivism,” “chaos,” and “a vast integration into the void.”

Two of the themes that are critical for today’s Christian nationalists emerged from Dabney and Rushdoony: (1) the fight against government (ie, public) schools, and (2) the disdain for democracy in favor of a hierarchy of authoritarianism. As Stewart wrote: “the new generation of leaders promoted a theological vision that emphasized the divine origins of the existing order, which invariably involved domination and subordination.”

Paul Weyrich

Weyrich wasn’t a particularly religious man. Instead, he was a Goldwater Republican who was passionate about “anticommunism, economic libertarianism, and a distrust of the civil rights movement.” It was Weyrich’s genius to meld those commitments with Christian nationalists in order to form a new radical right.

Initially, Weyrich joined with leaders like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Bob Jones to rally around the cause of fighting against federal attempts to desegregate their schools. In that effort, we can see the groundwork that was laid by Dabney and Rushdoony.

But they had a problem. As Weyrich understood, building a new movement around the burning issue of defending the tax advantages of racist schools wasn’t going to be a viable strategy on the national stage. “Stop the tax on segregation” just wasn’t going to inspire the kind of broad-based conservative counterrevolution that Weyrich envisions. They needed an issue with a more acceptable appeal.

That is when, several years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v Wade was actually embraced by most conservative Christians, they decided to focus on the issue of abortion. The rest, as they say, is history.

One of the most important moments of the so-called “Reagan revolution” was the fact that he launched his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi with a dog-whistle shout-out to states rights. But equally important was the speech the not-so-religious presidential candidate gave at the Reunion Arena in Dallas, Texas to a crowd of 15,000 pastors and religious activists.

I know that you can’t endorse me,” he declared, but “I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing.” The pastors went wild. Reagan went on to air his personal doubts about the theory of evolution. Then he offered a homespun hypothetical: if he were to be trapped on an island with only one book, he said, he would take the Bible. “All of the complex questions facing us at home and abroad,” he said, “have their answer in that single book.”

With his speech in Mississippi, Reagan secured the support of southern white racists. But it was his speech in Dallas that married Christian nationalists to his candidacy and forged the bond with the Republican Party that lasts to this day. Weyrich’s vision came to fruition.

Those are some of the historical highlights that led Stewart to this conclusion.

America’s conservative movement, having morphed into a religious nationalist movement, is on a collision course with the American constitutional system. Though conservatives have long claimed to be the true champions of the Constitution — remember all that chatter during previous Republican administrations about “originalism” and “judicial restraint” — the movement that now controls the Republican Party is committed to a suite of ideas that are fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution and the Republic that the founders created under its auspices.

Mr. Trump’s presidency was not the cause of this anti-democratic movement in American politics. It was the consequence. He is the chosen instrument, not of God, but of today’s Christian nationalists, their political allies and funders, and the movement’s legal apparatus.

Paul Weyrich in a 1980 speech directly 

attacking free and fair elections

(0:41 video)

From what I can tell, most rank and file Christian nationalists do not understand that they are Christian nationalists. The CN movement is highly disciplined in the dark arts of deceit, lies, irrational emotional manipulation and hyper-partisan motivated reasoning. CN elites know that most Americans do not want to buy what they are selling. That is no different than government-hating laissez-faire capitalist elites. Most Americans are not radical Christian fundamentalists who want Old Testament Biblical law with, for example, (i) death by stoning of gay sex and adultery, and (ii) legalized overt discrimination against, and oppression of, people who God commands be discriminated against and oppressed.  

When one combines the radical CN movement with wealthy, ruthless, government-hating laissez-faire capitalist political donors, one gets the modern but deceitful, autocratic and poisonous Republican Party.

Rousas Rushdoony arguing that if humans make laws humans 

are God, but when God makes laws, God is God

(2:45 video)

Corruption in China

The New York Times writes on how China's government is doing with its anti-corruption campaign:

One by one, the officials spoke candidly on camera about how they abused their power and accumulated enormous wealth. They looked relaxed, confident and even happy as they described bribes, kickbacks and other perks of corruption.

Getting seafood boxes stuffed with $300,000. Owning a fancy house for nearly every season. Running red lights without getting tickets.

The documentary work, produced by the state, was meant to celebrate the success of the top Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s signature anti-corruption campaign. But the series seemed to prove the opposite: The party hasn’t figured out a way to stamp out corruption.

“Zero Tolerance” is the eighth in a series of shows about fighting corruption that the party has produced since 2014 — and the best journalistically and artistically.

But the show’s producers, the state broadcaster and the party’s anti-graft enforcer, seemed unaware or unconcerned that they were airing the dirtiest laundry of the Communist Party, which, as the ruling party of a one-party state, has no one to blame for the rampant corruption but itself.

At times the documentary felt like a political satire show that offered absurdly detailed yet credible insights into how the corrupted acts were conducted and what drives its senior officials. And, yes, the motivations were the usual ones: power, money and sex.

Sun Lijun, then a vice minister of public security, in 2020, 

described in the documentary how he would receive boxes of  

“seafood,” stuffed with $300,000 in cash

Here is what I learned from watching it:
1) It’s awesome to be a Chinese official: Officials can enjoy many perks, big and small; get all their whims pampered; and live a privileged lifestyle that even money can’t buy.

Wang Fuyu, formerly a deputy party secretary in Hainan Province and later in Guizhou Province, asked businesspeople to buy him houses in three cities for different seasons: winter on tropical Hainan Island, summer in the cool Guizhou Plateau, and spring and fall in the southern city of Shenzhen. An avid golfer, he had a mansion on a golf course and could start swinging as soon as he stepped out of his door.

2) It’s all in the family: The officials weren’t usually directly involved. A lot of times their wives, children and siblings acted on their behalf by taking the bribes or channeling them through shell companies.

Sons of two senior officials in Inner Mongolia set up a coal company that had no staff, capital or real business activities. Their only “work” was to sign contracts that let them buy coal at low prices and sell it at high ones.

3) Power is money: The Chinese government has a lot of say in the economy because it owns almost all the land, natural resources and banks. Officials, in turn, have enormous power to pick winners and losers at their whim, leaving a lot of room for corruption.

Some of the officials saw nothing wrong with the power-for-money arrangement.

“I always felt that they owed me,” Liu Guoqiang, former vice governor of northeastern Liaoning Province, said of the businesspeople who bribed him. “I helped them growing from small to big. They gave me money because they were genuinely grateful.” He accepted bribes worth $55 million. (Ahh, the awesome power of the human mind to rationalize anything inconvenient, including blatant corruption) (emphasis added)

Not surprisingly, some of the public isn't reacting the way the Chinese government expected. So, it has started censoring the documentary. One observant and understandably grumpy Chinese citizen, a little tater, commented: “I don’t understand why little potatoes like us should watch ‘Zero Tolerance.’ Is it to remind us how poor and pathetic our lives are?” 

Good question comrade tater tot! Hm, maybe this documentary ought to be censored. It's got some capitalist microaggressions in it!

Why mention Chinese government corruption 

when we are awash in it here?

Good question comrades! I mention Chinese government corruption because it is dead-on relevant to the US. The underlying drivers of corruption and its persistence, power, money and sex, are the same in the US government as they are in the Chinese government. Shocking as this revelation may be to many self-righteous ideologues, but few cynics, humans are human in both the US and China. That is especially true for men with raging libidos. 

Power + testosterone = bad combination.

Power + wealth + testosterone = worse combination.

The thought keeps coming back that men are often bad at leadership and women would probably do better on balance. That is because women might not think and act with their sex hormones and nasty bits nearly as much as inherently defective men and their nasty bits.

Power + estrogen ± wealth = unknown combination.

Also note the same mental trait of rationalizing and justifying the blatantly irrational and unjustifiable, e.g., “I always felt that they owed me.” That is a core human cognitive biology trait. It is rampant among ideologues and other people simply lusting after power and/or wealth. That is probably also true for most demagogues, autocrats, plutocrats, narcissists, religious zealots, crackpots, and the like (QAnon, the GOP, the ex-president, Mitch McConnell, Young Earthers, Flat Earthers, Cube-shape Earthers, etc.).

The take home lesson here: With few exceptions, humans are going to be human, especially powerful and/or wealthy humans, no matter how often or self-righteously they deny it. Or as federal court judge Richard Posner once astutely quipped: I do not myself believe that many people do things because they think they are the right thing to do . . . . I do not think that knowledge of what is morally right is motivational in any serious sense for anyone except a handful of saints.

Jeez, not even all the saints can break away from what they are by their evolutionary heritage and biology.

Campaign season heats up and probably lots of folks are going to be uncomfortable

The scrappy challenger: Gary Chambers Jr.

The unbeatable incumbent: Senator John Kennedy

In a cannon blast at the status quo, Louisiana resident Gary Chambers Jr. has started his campaign for US Senate, in the feeble hope of unseating the unseatable Republican Sen. John Kennedy. At least the campaign will be interesting. This 1 minute video gives the flavor that Chambers brings to the race.

A Rolling Stone article discusses the Chambers campaign:

Gary Chambers Jr.’s first campaign ad was short and simple: The Louisiana Senate Candidate alone, in a park in New Orleans, sitting in a leather armchair, smoking a massive blunt. The ad landed him a wave of press, all of which, he told Rolling Stone, were part of an attempt to prove that the race to unseat incumbent Republican Sen. John Kennedy was “winnable.”

Now, Chambers is back with more fuel for the viral-marketing fire. In a new ad titled “Scars and Bars,” a first look at which was provided exclusively to Rolling Stone, he douses a Confederate battle flag in gasoline before lighting it on fire. The gesture makes for a striking image on its own, but like the first ad’s stark shots of Chambers smoking in New Orleans City Park, it’s accompanied by a voiceover monologue that pulls no punches.

“Here in Louisiana and all over the South, Jim Crow never really left,” Chambers says, before rattling off statistics about the inequities Black Americans face in his state and across the country. “Our system isn’t broken — it’s designed to do what it’s doing: produce measurable inequity.”

Chambers is no stranger to pushing back against the legacy of the Confederacy. One of his first brushes with public activism — and viral fame — came in 2020 when he delivered a fiery speech at a Baton Rouge school board meeting, castigating public officials who resisted changing the name of the former Robert E. Lee High School.

“I’m from North Baton Rouge, born and raised. It’s the majority Black side of town. I grew up middle class Black, and as I got older I started watching my community be divested in,” Chambers told Rolling Stone last month, describing his turn to social activism and politics.

One can see where a lot of psychological discomfort and fear will be coming from in this campaign. 

Cult vs. Belief System… your analysis

cult

-a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.

-a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister.

Definitions from Oxford Languages

 

belief system

-a set of principles or tenets which together form the basis of a religion, philosophy, or moral code.

Definitions from Oxford Languages

 

Lots of difficult questions today:

Question 1. 

Based on the above definitions, what would you say is the difference between a “cult mindset” and a “belief system mindset”?  

For example, does the difference involve notions like: indoctrination, religious affiliation, central figurehead(s), size of membership, greater societal acceptance, group agendas, other, etc.?

Question 2. 

If indoctrination is a necessary part of cult activity, but not of belief systems, what about the fact that virtually all parents (caretakers) indoctrinate their innocent children with the parent’s own religious, as well as secular, belief systems? Are not both (religious and non-religious) a form of indoctrination?  Which begs a follow-up question:

Question 3. 

What’s the difference between indoctrinating and teaching?

Question4.

Is the following statement true or false?

“A cult has a belief system but having a belief system does not necessarily make an organization a cult.”  Explain your answer. 

Question 5.

a) Are the Christian Nationalists a cult or a belief system?

b) Are The Branch Davidians a cult or a belief system?

c) Are the politically oriented Oath Keepers a cult or a belief system?

d) Are the Democratic and Republican Parties a cult or a belief system?

Question 6.

Do you still stand by your original “difference” definitions?  Do you wish to revise them in any way?

Thanks for posting and recommending.

 

SECULARISM IN THE US IS LARGER, MORE DIVERSE AND MORE DYNAMIC THAN EVER, BUT YOU WOULDN’T KNOW IT FROM THE MEDIA

 Earlier today I promised Germaine that I would post a "unique" perspective about our religious dialogue, from an article I found very interesting.

A bit hyperbolic and uses some questionable "catchphrases" BUT aren't we all guilty of that anyways, when discussing the effects and influence of religion on our politics and civil discourse?

So read the following with an open mind, and see if you find some of the perspectives refreshing, or just another slanted view.

Warning, the following is a long read and a bit verbose, just sayin'

“I’m done waiting for mainstream media to cover nonreligious people and secular issues fairly and accurately,” says Sarah Levin, a woman who wears a number of hats in the institutional secular world. “I’m done waiting for them to stop reinforcing the Christian Right’s framing on issues and failing to challenge religious privilege. And I am absolutely done waiting for them to start seeing nonreligious people as their whole selves, beyond our orientation around religion,” Levin goes on, speaking with RD in her role as director of advocacy for OnlySky Media, a new outlet focused on “exploring the post-religious perspective.” In addition to publishing content aimed at secular readers broadly, OnlySky will be conducting its own research on secular Americans, so it will no longer be necessary to “rely solely on research produced by institutions that do not, either by way of their mission or their funding sources, have an explicit interest in serving the nonreligious,” Levin explains. 

On the issue of media representation of secularism and secular Americans, Levin, the founder and head of Secular Strategies and co-chair of the Democratic National Committee’s Interfaith Council, has a point. Nonreligious Americans are generally a pro-social bunch, and overwhelmingly in favor of the very rights the anti-social, anti-democratic Christian Right is actively working to take away, like voting rights, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ rights. Yet, according to the legacy media’s punditocracy, America’s rapid secularization is something we should all be terrified of. 

Starting from the demonstrably false assumption that religion is essentially the only source of social cohesion, philanthropy, and pro-social behavior, prominent pundits and religion journalists (who should know much better) continually insinuate that secularization is somehow destroying the fabric of American civil society, and that the nonreligious are somehow to blame for American polarization. How, exactly, is unclear, and it could hardly be otherwise, given that both of these premises are entirely without factual basis.

Think pieces—and often even supposedly “straight” reporting—tend to ignore the empirically demonstrated fact that the social and political polarization that pervades these not-so-United States is asymmetric and significantly worse on the political Right. Not coincidentally, that side of the proverbial aisle consists largely of the conservative, mostly white Christians from whom the newly nonreligious are fleeing. These same conservative Christians, directly encouraged by their defeated president and a host of powerful Republican leaders, attempted to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by means that included a violent Christian nationalist insurrection in which people were injured and killed, very nearly destroying what was left of American democracy, such as it is. But, you know, there are problems with liberals and progressives too, so…

If elite pundits and journalists won’t even grapple with the basic fact of asymmetric polarization, instead falling back on a lazy “bothsidesism” that must be comforting to people of immense privilege, I suppose it’s far too much to ask for most of them to pay attention to the numerous peer-reviewed studies demonstrating that it’s precisely the Christian Right’s authoritarian culture-warring—the very dynamic that led to Donald Trump’s 2016 election with enthusiastic Christian Right backing—that has driven many to empty the pews. But even when journalists acknowledge this fact, there’s often a subtext of paternalism and victim blaming, the not-so-subtle message that these whippersnappers ought to stay in their churches and work to make them better, instead of leaving the churches to become ever more radical in their absence.

Spoiler alert: exvangelicals like myself have often spent years, even decades, trying to push evangelical Protestantism in a more humane direction from the inside, only to conclude that evangelical institutions and norms are unreformable. Journalists would know this if they considered us sources worth consulting. On a related note, Levin is far from alone in her concerns about misrepresentation of secular Americans by the press, though you would hardly know this from watching cable news or reading the legacy media, because journalists and pundits have a habit of talking over and about the religiously unaffiliated, exvangelicals, atheists, and secular advocates, rather than talking to us. 

If they were to start talking to us, treating us as valuable sources and stakeholders in the national discussion around religion and politics, civil society, and pluralism, they would of course have to grapple with a very different viewpoint on American secularization than the “Chicken Little” story they insist on purveying, as if they all nodded along with Dostoevsky’s understanding that if there is no God, everything is permitted when they were undergraduates and never revisited that proposition with a more mature, critical eye, and an awareness of the great Russian novelist’s reactionary politics, Russian nationalism, and antisemitism.

Levin’s frustration with the press is thus entirely valid. The legacy media’s approach to American secularization and secularism, frankly, constitutes journalistic malpractice.

To take a recent (admittedly far from the worst) example, many secular Americans were dismayed by Michelle Boorstein’s January 14 Washington Post report on secularization and the secular movement in America. The report failed to quote a single religiously unaffiliated young American or secular advocate. Instead, it gave pride of place to observers like Georgetown University sociologist Jacques Berlinerblau—who claims that American secularism is lacking in innovation, leadership, and movement coherence—and political scientist and Baptist pastor Ryan Burge, who contends that the secular movement is “out of step” with the country and the religiously-ambivalent nones.

Kevin Bolling, executive director of the Secular Student alliance, an organization with chapters on college campuses throughout the US, told RD that reading Boorstein’s report was “disheartening,” particularly given her record as “an accomplished religion reporter with a vast catalog of well-written articles.” He continued, “Boorstein has written about numerous topics of prime interest to secular people; follows multiple leaders in the secular movement on Twitter; is an alumnus of UW Madison [which has] a large and active Secular Student Alliance chapter; and could have easily directly reached any of the twenty national nonprofits in the secular movement for comment.”

Boorstein’s article is also typical in going to great lengths to distinguish the religiously unaffiliated, aka “nones,” from atheists, agnostics, humanists, and similar self-defined nonbelievers, painting the typical “none” as someone who is basically religious but alienated from “organized religion” as they’ve known it—someone with plenty of spiritual beliefs who could, it’s implied, perhaps adopt religious affiliation again under the right conditions (something that the American elite public sphere represents as a good thing, full stop). In the case of Boorstein’s article, the implication lingers, intentionally or not, in the way she ends the piece with Burge’s assessment of the nones as “ambivalent” toward religion as a result of “polarization.” Should American society return to a less polarized state, this framing implies, perhaps religious affiliation would start to recover as well. Such thinking inevitably casts the nones in an unserious light, as if our often painful and protracted decisions to disaffiliate from religion were not thoroughly thought through.

In fact, data now show that religiously unaffiliated youth are generally no longer returning to religion as adults, as was common in the past. While it would be equally unfair and inaccurate to portray the nones as mostly atheists and agnostics when they clearly are not (although the numbers of atheists and agnostics are rising as well), the subtext that the nones haven’t fully thought through their choice to disaffiliate from religion is offensive—and it’s a prime example of how journalists talk over nones instead of to us.

Bolling, by contrast, works directly with students, which gives him valuable insight into their mindset and decision making. “Some of our students have experienced significant religion-based harm, been financially cut off, rejected by family, ostracized in their communities, kicked out of fraternities, and verbally and physically harassed,” he explains. Seeing the harm many religious believers perpetrate by acting on their religious beliefs has a powerful impact on young people, according to Bolling. 

While it’s true that “there are differences and distinctions in the spectrum of spiritual, but not religious to atheist that comprises the nones,” Bolling observes, “they are rejecting religion, to some degree. Politicians, community leaders, celebrities, and corporations need to understand this younger generation doesn’t want religion pushed in their faces, won’t stand for religious nationalism, and doesn’t want one person’s freedoms to diminish their own.”

Secular community leaders also take issue with Berlinerblau’s assertion that “There has been no innovation in secular thought in 50 years,” as well as his description of the current “third wave” of secularism as lacking in leadership. Bolling pointed to the “big three” advocacy organizations—the Freedom from Religion Foundation, American Atheists, and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State—and commented on the increasing diversification of the secular movement, as a result of which “the movement has seen a more intersectional approach.”

To be sure, movement atheism has long been dominated by cisgender white men, and much work remains to be done both in terms of diversifying leadership and in terms of fully rejecting the misogyny, racism, Islamophobia, and anti-LGBTQ—especially anti-transgender—animus that characterize New Atheism. But by the same token, organized movement secularism has made significant strides in addressing both lack of diversity in leadership and bigotry in the movement, and that should be acknowledged.

Asked what she makes of the suggestion raised in Boorstein’s article that we’re in a “third wave” of secular organizing, Mandisa Thomas, the founder and president of Black Nonbelievers, told RD, “If this is a comparison to ‘third wave feminism,’ in some ways, that could be true. There is now more of a focus on the voices of women, cis and trans alike; our concerns are being taken more seriously; and we are asserting ourselves through our content and events.” 

Thomas also called Berlinerblau’s assertion of a lack of leadership in movement secularism “poorly researched,” noting that it “ignores the work of organizations like American Atheists, the American Humanist Association, and Black Nonbelievers. What does Berlinerblau, and even Boorstein, consider to be leadership, and how narrow-minded is their view?” I, too, would like to know the answer to this question.

Thomas began her organizing work in 2011 because, while data indicated that more and more young African Americans were questioning and disaffiliating from religion, there was a lack of resources available to bring them together and address their needs. Black Nonbelievers, which now has affiliates in seven cities across the United States, became a 501(c)3 nonprofit in 2014. Like the other secular leaders who spoke to RD, Thomas is frustrated with poor media representation of secular Americans and the secular movement. Her frustration extends to the paucity of coverage of BIPOC secular organizing relative to the (still sparse and often poor) coverage that majority white secular organizations and the (dead or aging and problematic) New Atheist leaders get. Despite improvement, Thomas agrees that the secular movement itself still has a diversity and inclusion problem, and maintains that the best way to address it would be for “‘allies’ to highlight the work of organizations like BN and encourage more support for us.”

Since the removal of David Silverman as its president amid allegations of financial conflicts of interest and sexual misconduct in 2018, American Atheists has also been at the forefront of diversifying the secular movement in practicing and promoting a broader, more intersectional approach to secular advocacy. The organization’s staff includes queer people, women, and African Americans in prominent roles. And, as it’s shifted away from Silverman’s “firebrand” approach to anti-religious messaging, American Atheists has begun to robustly and frequently make the case that anti-racist, feminist, and LGBTQ concerns are key church-state separation issues and should be an integral part of secular advocacy.

American Atheists’ current president, Nick Fish, told RD, “I view American Atheists’ role as providing opportunities for members of our community to more fully participate in American society, whether that be in politics, cultural institutions, or any number of other areas of life. That means doing more than simply being right about this one thing: the nonexistence of gods. It means finding partners who share our values and interests and working together to make this world a better place to live.” Clarifying that latter point, Fish noted, “Our advocacy is going to continue working to find areas of common ground with partners, regardless of their religious beliefs, while holding true to our own values around equality for all.”

Asked for his take on Berlinerblau’s comment about secularism’s lack of leadership, Fish asserted that it’s “unfair” to say “there’s no coherence or collaboration within the secular movement, which is advocating on behalf of the nonreligious.” He admitted, however, that the lack of centralization and hierarchy means that secular organizers face “challenges that simply aren’t present for religious groups.” He knowingly adds, “There are certain things that we wouldn’t want to replicate from the Religious Right even if it were structurally possible to do so because they run counter to our values as atheists and humanists.” Perhaps critics of the secular movement’s less centralized approach to leadership lack the imagination to conceive of models of leadership that differ from those employed by many religious institutions.

Regarding media representation, Fish lamented the tendency of the media to focus on New Atheist leaders and their angry, often bigoted style of atheist advocacy, when journalists should be looking to “actual policy advocates, community leaders, and grassroots activists.” Says Fish, “It’s certainly easier to always go back to the same people, but this does a tremendous disservice to promoting understanding of this community as it exists today.” As Fish sees it, journalists “don’t quite know how to talk about this elephant in the room: the fact that almost a third of Americans are no longer part of an organized religious tradition,” and no legacy media outlet does a particularly good job.

To speak of this significant percentage of the population as merely having lost something, or lacking something is at once offensive and ignorant. And so long as the legacy media continue to portray the nones in this way without actually talking to us, their reporting will inevitably imply that the nonreligious do not deserve to be taken seriously.

This brings us back to the new secular media project, OnlySky. Founded by Silicon Valley tech veteran Shawn Hardin, who now acts as its CEO, OnlySky already boasts an impressive group of contributors who are well known in secular circles. These include Pitzer College Professor Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist whose books on lived secularism are highly valued in the atheist and humanist communities. 

Speaking to RD as a columnist, feature writer, and editor for OnlySky, Zuckerman explained that the outlet, which was in development from early 2020, quickly became a haven for popular atheist bloggers, including Hemant Mehta and Captain Cassidy, who were pushed out of the blogging site Patheos by onerous new guidelines requiring bloggers “to avoid politics and criticism of other worldviews, two things increasingly important to our writers since the merging of evangelicalism and conservative politics in 2016.” 

But while “Patheos Nonreligious was focused tightly on the self-declared atheist and humanist demographic, OnlySky aims to serve a much broader audience—the 1 in 3 Americans who identify as having no religion,” says Zuckerman.“The hope is that OnlySky will be the main go-to media hub for secular, post-religious Americans—or for people simply interested in a secular slant on the world and on current events.”

Zuckerman and Levin, OnlySky’s director of advocacy, both share the general frustration with media misrepresentation of secularism that RD found among secular advocates. But is a secular media outlet the best way to address that issue, given that American atheist and humanist thought already exists largely in a silo, exerting little influence on anyone not already in the club? 

Asked this very pointed question, Levin was ready with a powerful answer. “If we reach even a quarter of the 29% of unaffiliated [in the American population], our reach will certainly match if not exceed that of many mainstream publications.”

Marketing, too, will play an important role in getting the public to understand that the nonreligious constitute a relatively cohesive demographic worthy of attention from both advertisers and politicians. “We are often dismissed as this nebulous, loosely connected group of people that can’t possibly be reached in a targeted way that would meaningfully impact, for example, a candidate’s election prospects or a business’s bottom line,” says Levin.

OnlySky is taking on the ambitious task of changing this perception, and I can only wish them godspeed, so to speak. “The nones are not the only large and complex demographic out there,” Levin observes. “Complexity hasn’t stopped politicians or advertisers from targeting the Latino community, for example. But unlike Latinos, the nones are not generally treated as a group worth researching and targeting.” Levin’s a smart strategist, and her enthusiasm for the project is contagious. “In success,” she maintains, “OnlySky will prove that nonreligious Americans are a cultural, political and economic force to be fully reckoned with.” Given the disproportionate political power of the Christian Right and the progressive and pluralistic tendencies of the nones, let’s hope she’s right.

Chrissy Stroop

A prominent ex-evangelical writer, speaker, and advocate. 

Christian nationalist poison continues to flow into American society

One of the tenets of Christian nationalist (CN) fundamentalism is hate and intolerance of non-heterosexuality. CNs tends to be intensely focused on the sex lives of other people and making sure sex is done properly according to their version of God. 

 

A LGBTQ Nation article, GOP bill would ban teachers from talking about LGBTQ people because it “offends Christian values”, reports on a pending law in Tennessee that reflects the hatred that intolerant CN ideology has toward non-heterosexuals and their sexual behaviors: 

Critics say the bill would lead to more bullying. Proponents say that their religious values are more important.

Republicans in Tennessee have introduced a new bill that would prohibit any mentioning of LGBTQ history or teaching of any LGBTQ issues in school during the 1st legislative session.

Introduced by Tennessee Rep. Bruce Griffey (R), Tennessee H.B. 800 is the latest bill targeting the LGBTQ community brought forth by Republicans in early 2022.

This bill sponsored by Griffey would ban textbooks and other instructional materials in public schools that “promote, normalize, support or address LGBT issues or lifestyle.”

The reason behind this? It is because it would offend those with “Christian values.”

This is what Griffey wrote in the bill, spelling out the raison d’être behind his bill in plain English:

WHEREAS, the promotion of LGBT issues and lifestyles in public schools offends a significant portion of students, parents, and Tennessee residents with Christian values;

Griffey’s bill would forcibly restrict the discussion of LGBTQ issues by subjecting them to the same restrictions and limitations placed on the teaching of religion in public schools.

This idea was not lost on critics, who see this bill as an attempt at bullying LGBTQ people. 

In 2021, Tennessee passed a bill that would require a school district to notify parents before “providing a sexual orientation curriculum or gender identity curriculum” in any kind of instruction, including but not limited to education on sexuality. Tennessee’s legislature also voted to ban trans children from playing sports on teams that match their gender identity (Lambda Legal & the ACLU among others have brought a lawsuit against this bill).

Tennessee in 2021 also passed a bill that would force any businesses in Tennessee to place a gender neutral sign in order to allow trans individuals to use the bathroom (though an injunction has been granted against this bill), and subsequently the Volunteer State banned doctors from providing life-saving gender affirming care to trans youth.

That says a lot about intolerant, cruel, hypocritical, anti-secular, anti-democratic and authoritarian theocratic CN ideology. Most CN fundamentalist elites want biblical Christian Sharia law to be the supreme law of the land, above even the US Constitution.[1] These radical anti-democratic theocrats deploy sophisticated propaganda that intentionally conflates teaching of religion with teaching of secular topics. Human sex is not a religion. Self-centered CN radical elites care only about what offends them and what they demand from everyone else. What other people might think or want are irrelevant at most, evil at worst. 

Footnote: 

1. It's not clear what most of the rank and file think or even know about CN and its inherently anti-secular, pro-theocracy ideology. The elites funding and running the CN political movement, like the modern GOP, is disciplined, expert at propaganda and prefers to operate with as much secrecy and plausible deniability as it can. That effectively hides the real intentions and goals from most average people who are not paying that much attention and/or are trapped in propaganda echo chambers that have mislead them into a raft of false beliefs and acceptance of crackpottery. It is possible that most rank and file supporters do not know what CN ideology is or that they are supporting it with their donations and/or votes for CN politicians. Public knowledge and understanding of the CN political theocratic movement is abysmal.