Republicans Are Working to Turn America Into a Christian Iran
Republicans love to condemn Iran’s theocratic fascism, but choose Christian nationalism over liberty and justice for all.
Republicans love to condemn Iran’s theocratic fascism, deeming it autocratic and iron-fisted.
Republicans love to decry how sadistic and tyrannical regimes like Iran are, but that appears to be pure hypocrisy considering how hard they’re working to usher in Christian nationalism, which they might accomplish if they take over Congress in 2022.
In June, in video obtained by Right Wing Watch, Georgia’s Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said that she supports Christian nationalism because Christian nationalism is “the only thing that can stop school shootings, crime, and sexual immorality.” She said anyone against Christian nationalism is a “domestic terrorist,” implying that being against Christian nationalism means enmity against America.
Interesting she said that in the face of Christians carrying crosses and nooses looking to hang Mike Pence on January 6. I guess her revisionist history doesn’t like that truth!
This is not surprising from the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene. She has been in favor of many outlandish and extremist ideas, from Q-Anon conspiracy to anti-Semitic fantasies of wildfires caused by space lasers.
While Republicans constantly attempt to dismiss Greene as a fringe member of their party, the truth is that Christian nationalism is not a bug with regards to the Republican Party.
It is the feature.
This is a truth supported by ample evidence, from Republicans taking legislative consultation from Christian nationalist hate groups, to 2022 midterm candidates supporting Christian nationalism, to extremists planning anti-LGBTQ attacks in the name of Christian nationalism.
Look no further than the campaigns of Doug Mastriano of Pennsylvania and Idaho’s Janice McGeachin, Republican candidates for governor in their respective states.
McGeachin delivered a speech in February to the America-First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) organized by white-nationalist live-streamer Nick Fuentes, who once described himself as being “like Hitler” and said he wanted a “total Aryan victory”. At the conference, McGeachin called on “freedom fighters willing to stand up and fight”, because in her eyes “too many Republicans don’t exhibit the courage today”.
This was after she waved waved a gun and a Bible in a 2020 attack ad against governor Brad Little’s Covid-19 safety measures. In footage obtained in May by Right Wing Watch, McGeachin said, “God calls us to pick up the sword and fight, and Christ will reign in the state of Idaho.”
Mastriano has called the separation of church and state a “myth.”
Mastriano, who sought to overturn Pennsylvania’s vote for Joe Biden in 2020, attended Former President Trump’s January 6 rally that precipitated the attack on the U.S. Capital. He chartered buses to bring others. He says he left when things turned violent, but video showed he passed through “breached barricades and police lines,” according to the Senate Judiciary Committee, reported by AP News.
Mastriano and McGeachin both symbolize the strong presence of Christian nationalism within the Republican Party
This presence is supported by texts unearthed during the January 6 insurrection. Donald Trump’s White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, exploring ways to overturn the 2020 election, reportedly texted Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginny Thomas: “This is a fight of good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs.”
* Pompeo (like Meadows) wishes to proselytize America forcefully under the guise of religious freedom. *
In Christianity, King of Kings refers to Jesus Christ. The triumph reference is from two passages in the Book of Revelation describing a final battle on earth in which Jesus slays his enemies.
These will wage war against the Lamb, and the Lamb will overcome them, because He is Lord of lords and King of kings, and those who are with Him are the called and chosen and faithful.
— Book of Revelation 17:14
The seven mountains of Dominionism
Meadows’ statement is a reference to a Christian nationalist doctrine known as Dominionism, a group of Christian political ideologies that call for a nation governed by Christians based on their understandings of biblical law. With Dominionism comes the Seven Mountains mandate, an ideology that believes that Christians need to (through force) take “dominion” over the seven mountains (or spheres) of culture:
- Education
- Religion
- Family
- Business
- Government
- Arts
- The Media
Dr. Lance Wallnau, a Christian nationalist and self-proclaimed “futurist” who was noted as being a spiritual advisor to Donald Trump during his term in the White House, described Seven Mountains Dominionism during a sermon on Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Channel, calling on Christians to (through force) take over America’s “mountains” to set up a Christian nation.
Seven Mountains Dominionism has strong ties to the Q-Anon conspiracy theory, and pastor Johnny Enlow even mentioned that in 2020.
Meadows believes in a nation ruled under the fist of God, instead of a nation of liberty and justice for all.
He is far from the only one, though.
When speaking on a podcast episode run by the Family Research Council, Mike Pompeo (Trump’s former Secretary of State) urged all listeners to run for school boards, in an attempt to take over school boards to help America “get back on the right track.” Pompeo also urged followers to proselytize in the workplace under the guise of religious freedom and then get elected to public office to “defend” it. Pompeo (like Meadows) wishes to proselytize America forcefully under the guise of religious freedom.
It is important to note the Family Research Council is the legislative wing of Focus on the Family, a fundamentalist group founded by James Dobson, Mike Pence’s “role model” and believer in the debunked practice of corporal punishment. The Family Research Council is deemed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, with its leader Tony Perkins being well-known for espousing anti-LGBTQ+ claims, including against the It Gets Better campaign that was started after Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers student, committed suicide in 2010 after his roommate secretly broadcasted him having sex with his partner.
I have an entire thread on the Family Research Council available to read below.
Republicans take legislative consultation from groups like the Family Research Council, as well as groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, another Christian nationalist organization designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Alliance Defending Freedom also runs the Blackstone Legal Group, a training camp of lawyers that has connections to the likes of Josh Hawley and Amy Coney Barrett.
The Alliance Defending Freedom touts the slogan “For Faith, For Justice”, but after removing the banana peel, it becomes emphatically clear that the Alliance Defending Freedom is about nothing more than forcing Christian supremacy onto the world, restricting the rights of its “enemies” (especially LGBTQ+ people).
The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has been found to be behind an array of anti-LGBTQ bills the Republican Party has introduced in the past decade.
Carlos Maza while at Media Matters did a video listing the hate bills the ADF had come up with, from the Don’t Serve the Gays law in Arizona to the 2016 bathroom bill in North Carolina that cost North Carolina the NBA All-Star Weekend.
The Alliance Defending Freedom wrote an amicus brief in 2003 in favor of sodomy laws, which would state that gay people should be criminalized and imprisoned for the crime of consensual sex.
They extended their hate internationally.
The Alliance Defending Freedom has been found to have written hate bills in other nations, including a bill to imprison gay people in Belize for a sentence up to ten years in prison. They also wrote briefs defending sodomy laws in Jamaica, despite human rights reports stating that LGBTQ+ people in Jamaica faced being “taunted, threatened, fired from their jobs, thrown out of their homes, or worse: beaten, stoned, raped, or killed.”
The Alliance Defending Freedom even in 2015 wrote a brief advocating for the sterilization of trans people in Europe, before the European Court of Human Rights.
Jessica Stern, Executive Director of OutRight Action International, commented on the Alliance Defending Freedom fighting for sterilizing trans individuals, saying this:
“Alliance Defending Freedom makes a mockery of the word freedom when they put religious dogma over the rights of individuals to be legally recognized.
In 2021, the Alliance Defending Freedom was found to be behind a bevy of anti-trans legislation, drafting model legislation for Republicans to use in order to introduce anti-trans bills in Republican legislatures. Bills were introduced in several states with language crafted by the Alliance Defending Freedom.
This included a bill in North Carolina that would force teachers to report any students who display “gender nonconforming behavior”, as well as block gender-affirming healthcare to anyone under 21.
According to Mark Joseph Stern of Slate, One school in Iowa attempting to implement an ADF-style bathroom policy sought to make trans students wear a bright green wristband so that school administrators could identify them and ensure they did not use the bathroom that corresponded to their gender identity.
(A federal appeals court found the school policy unconstitutional, and the school district settled for the case for $800,000.)
With Republicans taking bills created by Christian nationalist organizations, Republicans show they are the party of Christian nationalism, like Marjorie Taylor Greene desires.
Instead of having a nation of liberty and justice for all, Republicans would rather have one nation under God, eschewing the doctrine of separation of church and state altogether. Republicans have in the process shown that they no longer wish to live in an America that’s a melting pot of all faiths and religions, but instead now wish to live in a monolithic America in which all through capitulation must live according to Christian fundamentalist dogma, a la The Handmaid’s Tale.
Annika Brockschmidt, author of Amerikas Gotteskrieger: Wie die Religiöse Rechte die Demokratie gefährdet (America’s Holy Warrior: How the Religious Right Endangers Democracy, German translation) stated this with relation to Greene:
With all of the highlighted evidences mentioned in this article, it is abundantly clear that the Republican Party is the party of Christian nationalism.
It is no longer alarmist to say that the Republican Party desires a Christian version of Iran, where the pillar of separation of church and state is destroyed.
Rather, it is only precise.
