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Texas lawmaker: I want Christian chaplains in schools to "put God back in government"
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this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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If blatantly forcing religion on people was bad for religious movements they would have all died out by now.
Forcing a specific religion on people does destabiize the state, especially if the state religion is at risk of changing every time the regent monarch changes.
Republicans who want to instill a state religion cannot stop at Christianity, but will have to narrow it down to a specific ministry criminalizing the rest.
If their effort doesn't drive the nation to bloody social unrest, the purges of heretics will be even bloodier.
That said, in the aftermath of the Christian Nationalist movement in the US, Evangelist Christians will be regarded much like nazis in the 1950s. And those eager to hunt will be glad to confuse other Christians for nationalists if they're desperate for game.
Take a look at this pie chart.
https://www.prri.org/research/2020-census-of-american-religion/
The fascists get to pick the in and out groups. They can broadly say that the US is a Christian nation first and not solve the specifics of which christian denomination until later. They can choose white Christian as the in group and then non-Chrisitain, non-whites as the out group. Genociding and/or ethnically cleansing each group of this 56% of the population could easily take decades. But perhaps US Nazis will be more efficient and manage it in under a decade.
Assuming we are a christofascist dictatorship all that time and 56% of the population is either killed, removed or indoctrinated, the fascists will again have an obvious choice to make assuming things are roughly the same. Currently, 30% of the population is white christian protestant. That non-protestant 14% percent of the population will be killed, removed or indoctrinated.
If the US hasn't collapsed at this point or been invaded by another country after losing 70% of its population then the collapse will not be far of. At this point if only white mainline and white evangelicals protestants are left I'm sure the evangelicals will have plenty of clever ways to dissect the mainline population until they are all gone as well.
If the US is still somehow around at this point with only 14% of the population left, then the fascists will finally have to answer the question of which evangelical protestant denomination gets to be the new in group. I suspect whoever is in control of the US government at that point will bring up a colorful pie chart as I have done and plan out how to divide up this 14% of the population by denomination.
I'm going to fast forward a bit because they have to do it again once they are down to one denomination and then for a more specific denomination and then a for a specific sect and so on. Finally at long last, after somehow surviving this long, perhaps with the threat of blowing up the world with nuclear weapons, I'm not sure, the US will be down to a single Christian religion with a very specific set of beliefs.
I'm still fast forwarding slightly here. They will then proceed to kill each over eugenics. Once that is done and everyone looks basically the same, they will move on to a word I have just made up called imagenics. This is where you see who can bullshit the hardest about made up differences to reduce the population even further.
If anyone is still left in the US at this point, perhaps in an underground bunker, they will all drink the Kool-Aid and die.
What we are seeing isn't the death throes of Christianity as there will be Christians elsewhere in the world. If not stopped, this is the death throes of America.
We're already seeing the white power / Christian nationalist movement carve out its out groups, with anti-trans laws and anti-abortion efforts before and since the Dobbs decision. I am not a CIA analyst but I'd anticipate they'll continue to carve out new out groups through rhetoric, through legislation and judicial rulings meant to target specific out groups.
We're unlikely to see the movement specifically criminalize a religious movement the way that Mormons were identified and chased out in the 19th century, rather we're going to see the state assert specific values, much the way the Holistic Health and Fitness initiative in the US Army asserted belief in a god (and more ambiguously in Evangelical Christianity) was a requirement for spiritual readiness. Non-Christian soldiers would have their readiness downgraded, and they'd be obligated to attend Christian focused lectures and services in an effort to treat their spiritual readiness deficiency.
So early on in an autocratic US we might see prayer mandates return to schools, and then schools would have to select among a set of (say) three standard prayers, which would not only plebianize non-Christians, but any whose articles of faith are mismatched with those prayers.
I don't think the transition is going to be quick or directly towards a specific ministry. Firstly, because the enforced doctrine won't be chosen to specifically conform with a given ministry, rather in the purpose of consolidating power, whether by defining more out groups, or by adhering to an issue that is popular among the movement base (abortion is a big one. Few Christians seem to care for honoring and providing comfort for immigrants. No one wants to turn the other cheek.), or to affirm populist sentiments, such as affirming racist ideology, sexist ideology, hyper-conformity, violence in service of the movement, and so on.
Also, unlike the German Reich, the US is huge and crosses a lot of regions and cultures that have conflicting interests, and so it is going to be prone to the chaos of complexity. Resistance efforts will watch for opportunities within this chaos, and will operate much the way dinosaur clones escaped Isla Nublar, were able to breed despite having no males, and were able to overcome a lysine dependency and migrate deep into South America. We may not be able to stop the US transition to autocracy, or to the establishment of a state religion (and state religious doctrine) but we will be able to slow it down and raise questions to the public regarding how it will affect the public. We can make sure everyone knows its a mess, that our governors and ministers are all corrupt and greedy for power, and this will weaken the legitimacy of such a regime once it is in place.
I agree with most of this. I love the Jurassic Park comparison.
Although it was mostly blocked by courts, we had a Muslim travel ban under Trump. Now Trump is threatening mass deportations of millions of immigrants and migrants from Latin America. The proposed strategy will first involve rounding up people into camps so they can be processed for deportation. Even if no one dies in this process, I think that it would still qualify as a form of ethnic cleansing. So I think we should not underestimate what the fascists are willing to do when it comes to targeting entire groups of people. Especially when they explicitly tell us what they are going to do.
People tend to assume that will be some kind of resistance movement. If people aren't willing to vote against fascism, I find it hard to believe they will be willing to speak out against fascism let alone fight it directly. Hopefully, in such a scenario, I am proven wrong.
Our best strategy to prevent a fascist takeover is to Vote Blue this November. It's a direct, nonviolent way to reach a better outcome for our country. I fully believe that the American people will choose democracy over fascism this year. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't put in the work this year. Anything we could do as part of a nonviolent resistance or as part of an awareness campaign in the event of a fascist takeover can and should be done now. This is the year where winning over the public is going to have the most impact.
Oh we're highly likely to see non-Christian faiths and organizations directly criminalized, which will not only be used to prosecute them, but perceived enemies of state that can be accused of being Islam / Hindu / Atheist / Satanist, whatever. But when it comes to Christian denominations, they'll be more inclined first to nudge by erecting policy that enforces specific issues. Then later on, if a given group remains to deviant, they'll be declared not really Christians much the way LDS, Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses were regarded throughout much of the 20th century. (Curiously, Catholicism is also an issue, what with even Biden fielding challenges to his loyalty to the nation, and not the Holy See.)
Voting blue is the least any one of us can do, and is a necessity just to slow the advancement of the Christian nationalist takeover. The Republican party and the Heretage Foundation are actively and openly working to neuter the democratic elements of the US and to secure Republican domination, which means they don't even have to compete with Democrats, or justify their policy to their followers anymore. They're looking to make us a one-party state.
What we have to do is look into informing independents why they should be voting blue, as well as otherwise disenfranchised groups who still act under the notion we vote for policy rather than against it. (Election reform changing away from FPTP structures is on our wishlist, but unlikely since it diffuses power, and officials are motivated to consolidate power. Until we make such a change, we'll be stuck in a two party system voting against the greater evil by voting for the next most popular guy.)
As for resistance movements, they occur quite naturally, if the history of La Résistance informs. In Paris, the German garrisons couldn't help themselves but be abusive (despite efforts by the Militärverwaltung in Frankreich to discourage brutality) and actually drove independent mischief makers to organizing. It started with tearing down propaganda, cutting phone lines and slashing tires, but it was only a matter of a couple of years before the La Résistance became a formidable organized intelligence and fighting force.
The question is not whether a resistance will form, but if it will be organized before the collapse of democracy or will have to rise up naturally. Since we see what is happening, counter-movements already exists whether anti-fascist groups looking to counter militants whenever they appear to Evangelical Christian sociologist groups (not to be confused with socialist groups) looking to salvage Evangelical Christianity from the anti-communist, pro-capitalist, nationalist monstrosity that is preached in dozens of ministries today.
Germany had its own resistance movements like The White Rose, most of which went underground or were captured and executed as the German Reich took power, though the July 20 plot (and thirty-odd other attempts to assassinate Hitler) show us that resistance within Germany existed late into the war, and likely lingered underground to the bitter end.