Be ye forewarned
I mentioned Frank Schaeffer’s Friday appearance with Joy Reid on Saturday but could not find the video. Here it is.
Christian nationalists, Schaeffer strenuously argues, “are authoritarian. They fear democracy. They want to overturn elections. The Christian nationalist movement is a halfway point to a kind of authoritarian fascism.”
He was pulling no punches. My inner ear told me my normally even keel was heeling to starboard. Schaeffer sounded more emphatic than I expect to see on TV, and it was unsettling. But he knows whereof he speaks. I found his rant alarming.
Ordinary American voters, he says, “had damned well stand up and be counted in the next few elections, or we’re going to see these people turn our country into an evangelical Christian version of Iran.”
To repeat: The problem for the left is that too few of us lack the zealot right’s conviction and commitment. Our deer in the headlights approach will end only one way.
Take Schaeffer’s warning seriously. Even David French is unnerved.
One of the people Schaeffer warned about announced Saturday that he’s running for governor in North Carolina. “Christian patriots will own and rule this nation,” North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson declared in 2021. He announced before about 1,000 supporters in Alamance county. My local Democratic delegation warned me just weeks earlier that this guy is popular around the state capitol.
A former factory worker and daycare operator, Robinson gained public attention from a viral video of a 2018 anti-gun control speech. His critics have pointed to speeches in churches and on radio shows that touched on his antipathy toward LGBTQ+ activism and support for banning abortion.
Trump may be fading, but not Trumpism. Ironically, it could be his own movement’s momentum that carries him back to the White House.