Rescinding Roe isn’t the end of its labors
Katherine Stewart, author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism,” warns that seeing the end of women’s right to control their reproduction is just the beginning. “Breaking American democracy isn’t an unintended side effect of Christian nationalism. It is the point of the project,” she explains.
At the annual Road to Majority Policy Conference last month in Nashville, the activists were giddy over the expected overturning of Roe, she writes in the New York Times.
“The greatest danger to America is the destruction of our nation from the people from within. And you know the people I’m talking about,” former President Donald Trump said in his keynote address.
He’s talking about Democrats, whom various speakers described as “evil,” “tyrannical” and “the enemy within.” Senator Rick Scott of Florida and Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina invoked the imagery of war.
The intensification of verbal warfare is connected to shifts in the Christian nationalist movement’s messaging and outreach, which were very much in evidence at the Nashville conference. Seven Mountains Dominionism — the belief that “biblical” Christians should seek to dominate the seven key “mountains” or “molders” of American society, including the government — was once considered a fringe doctrine, even among representatives of the religious right. At last year’s Road to Majority conference, however, there was a breakout session devoted to the topic. This year, there were two sessions, and the once arcane language of the Seven Mountains creed was on multiple speakers’ lips.
The hunger for dominion that appears to motivate the leadership of the movement is the essential context for making sense of its strategy and intentions in the post-Roe world. The end of abortion rights is the beginning of a new and much more personal attack on individual rights.
And indeed it is personal. Much of the rhetoric on the right invokes visions of vigilante justice. This is about “good guys with guns” — or neighbors with good eavesdropping skills — heroically taking on the pernicious behavior of their fellow citizens. Among the principal battlefields will be the fallopian tubes and uteruses of women.
They want a federal ban on abortion but will work on state-level bans for now, and on punishing “abortion trafficking.” Women who cross state lines in search of legal abortion services are their targets “along with people who provide those women with services or support, like cars and taxis.”
Stewart advises:
Americans who stand outside the movement have consistently underestimated its radicalism. But this movement has been explicitly antidemocratic and anti-American for a long time.
[…]
Christian nationalism isn’t a route to the future. Its purpose is to hollow out democracy until nothing is left but a thin cover for rule by a supposedly right-thinking elite, bubble-wrapped in sanctimony and insulated from any real democratic check on its power.
This is not new information. Not at this blog, anyway. Digby has written about theocrats’ intentions for well over a decade. The whole point of the doctrine is that their God has promised them dominion — control — over the entire world. Democracy is a convenient means to that end and to fulfillment of God’s purpose for them. The last shall be first, every knee shall bow, etc. Meaning you to them. Jesus was Machiavellian before Machiavelli.
They don’t want to govern. They want to rule … you. In Jesus’ name.
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