Demons, parasites, & the hubris of power

In a week of many jarring events, President Trump’s post below was one of the most ominous for me:

Yes, this is the logic of dictatorships. A quote from Napoleon, this is a sign that rather than wondering if the guardrails will hold, we should be asking whether there are meaningful guardrails anymore.

It can be hard for people to wrap their heads around how we have come to this point, but being above the law—or taking upon oneself to define what legitimate law is—has been the inner logic of the Christian Right for a very long time.

The desire to be above the law has also been a popular trope inside within the tech bro world. What unites both groups is the hubris that they are the deserving ones, the ones who have access to truth and ought to have the power to do what needs to be done. Everyone else is undeserving at best; at worst, everyone who is not with them is a threat to be destroyed.

Who are the undeserving ones? The takers, the woke, the parasites, lgbtq individuals, immigrants, and also—and this is important to grasp—anyone who supports or defends anyone on the enemy list. In the process of separating insiders from outsiders, the deserving from those who deserve what they have coming, dehumanization plays an essential role.

Dehumanization under the guise of spiritual language is par for the course inside Christian nationalist spaces. I know, because I experienced it first-hand. At first, I thought it was laughable to be described as a “child of the devil,” demonic, an “enemy of God,” and the like. But I quickly realized that such language wasn’t to be taken lightly. Having taught courses on the Holocaust and the history of genocide, I know that dehumanizing language is the first step on the road to violence. I began to note the frequency with which dehumanizing language was used, spiritualized or not, in political rhetoric. The extent to which this language has become normalized in the last handful of years is stunning. Like frogs in a pot of water, we can too easily fail to notice the way the norms have changed.

Demonizing one’s opponents goes hand in hand with conflating “the law” with one’s own agenda. Why give representatives of “evil” the power to limit the “good” they can do?

There is precedent for this, too, in the longer history of the Christian Right.

A year and a half ago, in the wake of Mike Johnson’s elevation to Speaker of the House, I gave an interview to Politico where I tried to articulate how the inner logic of Christian nationalism revolves around the idea of redefining the legitimacy of the nation’s laws in terms of their conception of “God’s law,” a conception that happens to overlap 100% with their own social, political, and religious agenda.

You can read the interview in its entirety here, but I’ll include the most relevant excerpts below:

Katelyn Fossett: I want to talk to you a little about Mike Johnson’s worldview and the belief system that has shaped him.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez: He is incredibly standard in terms of being a right-wing, white evangelical Christian nationalist.

Fossett: Tell me a little more about what makes someone a Christian nationalist. Does he use that phrase to describe himself?

Du Mez: I don’t know that he uses that. But I feel comfortable applying that; it’s not in a pejorative way. It’s simply descriptive.As he understands it, this country was founded as a Christian nation. And he stands in a long tradition of conservative white evangelicals, particularly inside the Southern Baptist Convention, who have a distinct understanding of what that means. And this is where evangelical author and activist David Barton comes in.

Johnson has said that Barton’s ideas and teachings have been extremely influential on him, and that is essentially rooting him in this longer tradition of Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism essentially posits the idea that America is founded on God’s laws, and that the Constitution is a reflection of God’s laws. Therefore, any interpretation of the Constitution must align with Christian nationalists’ understanding of God’s laws. Freedom for them means freedom to obey God’s law, not freedom to do what you want. So really, Christian supremacy and a particular type of conservative Christianity is at the heart of Johnson’s understanding of the Constitution and an understanding of our government.

You’ll see this in some of his speeches. In his speech on Wednesday, he incorporated a G.K. Chesterton quote about the U.S. being based on a creed. And he said the American creed is “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.”

But he goes much deeper than that, and really roots that in what he would call a biblical worldview: The core principles of our nation reflect these biblical truths and biblical principles. He has gone on record saying things like, for him, this biblical worldview means that all authority comes from God and that there are distinct realms of God-ordained authority, and that is the family, the church and the government.

Now, all this authority, of course, is under this broader understanding of God-given authority. So it’s not the right of any parents to decide what’s best for their kids; it’s the right of parents to decide what’s best for their kids in alignment with his understanding of biblical law. Same thing with the church’s role: It is to spread Christianity but also to care for the poor. That’s not the government’s job.

And then the government’s job is to support this understanding of authority and to align the country with God’s laws.

Fossett: I’ve heard this idea from reporters and analysts that Mike Johnson is sort of a throwback to an earlier era, mostly the George W. Bush era, when there was this split, and alliance, between the business establishment and the social conservatives, which included evangelicals. I’m wondering if Johnson is in fact an evangelical like those earlier ones, or if he represents something new in evangelical politics.

Du Mez: First, I would say that any kind of split between the business conservatives and the social conservatives is not so clear-cut. It’s important to realize that one of Johnson’s core principles of American conservatism — as he reiterated them in his speech on Wednesday — is free enterprise. For conservative evangelicals, they don’t really see much of a tension between these, whereas the pro-business, old-school conservatives certainly would.

So he’s very much rooted in this longer history of the Christian right, and his years working with the Alliance Defending Freedom, an American Christian legal advocacy group, certainly has placed him at the center of things. That’s an incredibly important organization and really a hub of the Christian right for decades now; it would have put him in close contact with the movers and the shakers of the Christian right for a long time. So he’s rooted there. And he also has this nice-guy persona. That may seem like a bit of a throwback in the era of Trump.

But he is very much of this political moment in terms of his level of commitment to democracy. He spearheaded the congressional efforts to overturn the election. He is on the record as an election denier. Some have suggested that’s why he got the votes to be elected speaker. He’s a Trump supporter and Trump supporter in this regard, specifically: election denial.

I’ve noticed also in listening to his speeches that he is explicit about describing this country as a republic and not as a democracy. Inside these conservative Christian nationalist spaces, that is par for the course: that this is a republic, and it is a republic, again, founded in this biblical worldview, and that it’s not a democratic free-for-all. And so again, this is Christian supremacy.

If you align with this value system, then yes, you have the authority to shape our laws. If you do not, you have no business shaping our laws. He once said: “We don’t live in a democracy, because democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what’s for dinner.” Meaning, the country is not just majority rule; it’s a constitutional republic. And the founders set that up because they followed the biblical admonition on what a civil society is supposed to look like.

I think that’s really important here: His commitment is not to democracy. He’s not committed to majority rule; he seems to be saying he’s committed to minority rule, if that’s what it takes to ensure that we stay on the Christian foundation that the founders have set up.

Now, he would say that there’s really no tension here — that, again, if the Constitution represents this kind of biblical worldview that he suggests the founders embraced, then there’s going to really be no conflict. But he’s on record repeatedly talking about our nation being a republic, and in one case explicitly saying this isn’t a democracy, and that also is a very common theme in Christian nationalist circles and in conservative evangelical circles generally.

Fossett: I want to make sure I understand; how do these Christian nationalists see the distinction between a democracy and a republic?

Du Mez: When you press them on it, you’ll get different answers. What they’re doing is suggesting that the authority of the people in a popular democracy is constrained by whether or not people’s views align with … they would say the Constitution, but what they mean is a particular interpretation of the Constitution — one that understands the Constitution as being written to defend a particular Christian understanding of this country.

If you want to see what this means … well, one of his core principles is human dignity. Well, does that extend to the dignity of gay citizens or trans citizens? No, absolutely not. His understanding of human dignity is rooted in his understanding of biblical law. One of his core principles is the rule of law. But clearly, he’s comfortable with election denialism. So all of these core principles — freedom, limited government, human dignity — are interpreted through a conservative Christian lens and his understanding of what the Bible says ought to happen and how people ought to behave.

One thing I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about is whether we’ve seen an anti-democratic turn among the Christian right or if it was always at the core of the movement. And certainly if you listen to the kind of rhetoric of what we call Christian nationalism today, it’s been around a long time; they always understood America to be a Christian republic.

But I think what has escalated things in the last decade or so is a growing alarm among conservative white Christians that they no longer have numbers on their side. So looking at the demographic change in this country, the quote-unquote “end of white Christian America” and there’s where you can see a growing willingness to blatantly abandon any commitment to democracy.

Fossett: If the long trend was away from democracy, it’s kind of an unusual convergence of interests that Trump — even though he is not a figure from the Christian right — is the one who actually ended up calling an election into question. He seems to represent an opportunity for the part of the movement that would like to water down democracy, even if he isn’t the preferred candidate of Christian conservatives in a lot of other ways.

Du Mez: Right. For Christian nationalists, this is God’s country, and all authority comes through God. And the only legitimate use of that authority is to further God’s plan for this country. So what that means is any of their political enemies are illegitimate in a sense, and those enemies’ power is illegitimate, and they need to be stripped of that power. And it’s really been kind of shocking for me to have observed these spaces in the last handful of years, where conservative evangelicals are much more comfortable in just making that plain and no longer feeling a need to pay lip service to democracy or voting rights or those sorts of things.

The disturbing thing to me is that I’m a Christian myself, and I understand how this language of God’s authority really does resonate with conservative Christians across the board.

When push comes to shove, is your allegiance to God or to democracy? I see people talking about democracy as an idol. Democracy is not biblical, you’re not going to find democracy in the Bible. At the end of the day, if you are a Christian, do you want to honor God first? Or some secular system? And the answer is kind of clear.

After this interview published, I received a note from a political scientist I hadn’t met before, thanking me for the piece and telling me it was the best introduction to the unwieldy “Christian nationalism” discourse he’d yet seen. If we just look at snapshots drawn from survey data, we can miss this inner logic, and fail to see the logical ends this logic is driving toward.

If you grew up Christian, you probably recognize that rhetoric of God’s law resonates with what many of us were taught, even if we understood such teachings to be compatible with living in a pluralist society and respecting (and even celebrating) the restraints of a Constitutional system.

More radical elements, however, have taken advantage of this common language while advancing a blatantly anti-democratic agenda. It is incumbent upon Christians who embrace a theology that claims “every square inch” for God or who celebrate obedience to God’s law to draw sharp distinctions between a vision of faithful politics that recognizes common grace and seeks the common good, and an authoritarian vision that divides the nation into friend and foe and seeks domination over any threat to their totalizing power.

Those advancing authoritarian tactics in the name of imposing “God’s law” claim that theirs is the only legitimate Christian approach, and that any who oppose them are cowards, lacking in faithfulness, or are not true Christians.

But their justification for seizing power ignores a fundamental Christian teaching: the sinfulness of every human heart.

In reflecting on this, the words of the classic Christian hymn “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” came to mind:

O to grace how great a debtor
daily I’m constrained to be!
Let that grace now, like a fetter,
bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love;
here’s my heart; O take and seal it;
seal it for thy courts above.

The pull to seek one’s own selfish ends over the wellbeing of others runs through every heart. If you read the Christian Scriptures, this is a recurring theme of the Old and the New Testament. Our hearts are prone to seek our own good over the good of others, and we love to call ourselves righteous while doing it.

Instead, the call to follow Christ calls us to love others as we love ourselves, to love our neighbors, and even—and especially—to love our enemies. And to be ever mindful of our own propensity to fall short of this call.

Our nation’s founders understood this aspect of human nature. They understood that even those with the best intentions needed checks on their power. Against the immediate backdrop of the bloody wars of religion that ravaged European populations, they also understood the temptation to conflate the rule of law with any faction’s understanding of “God’s law,” and they knew how easily that could be weaponized against others.

They understood that religious liberty—and liberty writ large—could only be maintained by restraining the power of those who believed they alone had a corner on God’s truth.