“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.” – Saul Bellow.

When Nicole Russell, a conservative columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, wrote that two Christian Nationalist gubernatorial candidates who won their elections this fall showed the GOP how to win moving forward, she showed her need for illusion was deep.

When Ron DeSantis won Florida by 20% and Greg Abbott won Texas by 11%, Russell claimed their victory was due to allegiance to Christian Nationalists’ goals: a Christian authoritarian regime, indoctrinating school children to hate people of color and LGBTQ people, and teaching the mythology of a white Christian nation.

However, two liberal gubernatorial candidates won their elections with much greater margins. Wes Moore won Maryland by 33%, and Maura Healey won Massachusetts by 29%.

I find it odd that Russell, and other conservatives as well, attributed DeSantis and Abbott’s victories to doubling down on repressive policies that deny a woman the right to choose and ignored the overwhelming victories of candidates who won on policies that promote personal freedom. Ironically, Russell characterized the Christian Nationalist candidates as loving freedom even when they ran on policies denying people the freedom to make their own decisions. In a letter to the editor, one person asked why conservatives weren’t praising these candidates who won with much greater margins. His answer? “Likely because one is a gay woman and the other is a black man.”

When Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley gave a speech to the National Conservative Conference in Miami, he used the same rhetoric to promote the myth America was founded as a white Christian nation. Throughout Hawley’s rambling diatribe, he used the defense mechanism of projection, transferring one’s unacceptable thoughts, feelings, and action patterns onto someone else. Doing so absolves one, at least psychologically, from taking ownership of negative habits — and possibly learning from them.

Hawley consistently characterized those who defend one of our nation’s foundational principles — the separation of church and state — as people to whom “liberty means falling in line with the norms they prescribe. It means following the social rules they hand down. They will decide what speech is acceptable. They will decide which religious beliefs may be acted upon and how. They will determine what is true and what is not, what is fact and what is disinformation.”

Hawley closed this argument with they want to take us “backward, to an old age of darkness and hierarchy and repression.”

It’s astounding Hawley would project the Christian Nationalist’s goal of subverting the U.S. Constitution onto those who defend it. However, that has been their primary way of undermining democracy since the Christian Nationalist movement began in the 1980s.

Hawley defended his entire argument by referring to the last section of one line in John F. Kennedy’s1961 inaugural address, in italics, “And yet the same (1776) revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe — the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.”

Kennedy was right that the state does not grant human rights; they are innate in every human being. But he was wrong about where our forebears thought they came from. The Founding Fathers were deists who believed a god created the world but was indifferent to it. Therefore, the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution to establish a nation based on recognizing the innate human rights everyone is born with.

Unexplainably, Hawley ignored the main point of Kennedy’s speech: “We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place to friend and foe alike that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

“Let every nation (or domestic movement) know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, and oppose any foe to ensure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Christian Nationalists began the slow undoing of those human rights 50 years ago. The first to fall was a woman’s right to choose. It is up to the generation to which the torch has been passed to defend those rights.

Without them, there is no America.

Tom Waddell is president of the Maine Chapter of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. He welcomes comments at president@ffrfmaine.org and ffrfmaine.org.

 

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