Fighting Flesh and Blood

Christian rhetoric and escalating threats of violence

On Thursday, Ricky Shiffer brought an AR-15-style rifle to the Cincinnati field office of the FBI. Filled with what no doubt to him felt like righteous anger over the FBI search of former President Trump’s private residence, Shiffer attempted to breach the visitor screening facility. When he failed, he fled. He was then engaged in a lengthy standoff with law enforcement, firing at officers multiple times before being shot to death.

This hadn’t come without warning. “Violence is not (all) terrorism,” Shiffer had posted on Trump’s Truth Social app. “Kill the F.B.I. on sight.”

As Alan Feuer reports in the New York Times, this has not been the only episode of right-wing political violence in recent months:

In the year and a half since a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, threats of political violence and actual attacks have become a steady reality of American life, affecting school board officials, election workers, flight attendants, librarians and even members of Congress, often with few headlines and little reaction from politicians.

In late June, a former Marine stepped down as the grand marshal of a July 4 parade in Houston after a deluge of threats that focused on her support of transgender rights. A few weeks later, the gay mayor of an Oklahoma city quit his job after what he described as a series of “threats and attacks bordering on violence.”

Even the federal judge who authorized the warrant to search for classified material at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s beachfront home and club, became a target. On pro-Trump message boards, several threats were issued against him and his family, with one person writing, “I see a rope around his neck.”

As Feuer suggests, what is rather remarkable about this situation is how apparently unremarkable it strikes many of us. “Few headlines and little reaction from politicians,” and, I would add, from many American citizens.

Scholars of authoritarianism and political violence, however, have been tracking these trends and raising the alarm for years. They know that what we’re seeing unfold and escalate is following predictable patterns. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, explained to the Washington Post:

“There is a vast right-wing media and messaging universe, from Fox News to Breitbart to former president Trump to sitting GOP lawmakers like Marjorie Taylor Greene,” Ben-Ghiat said, “that traffics in conspiracy theories and seeks to keep people in a state of agitation and fear sufficient to lead some people to make recourse to violence.”

And, as Feuer pointed out:

While this welter of events may feel disparate, occurring at different times and places and to different types of people, scholars who study political violence point to a common thread: the heightened use of bellicose, dehumanizing and apocalyptic language, particularly by prominent figures in right-wing politics and media.

“Bellicose, dehumanizing and apocalyptic language.”

If you spend much time in conservative evangelical spaces, these words should give you pause.

Let me go back a few years, to January 17, 2017. That’s the day my first article on what would become Jesus and John Wayne published, three days before Donald Trump’s inauguration. It presented my thesis in a nutshell:

The truth is, many evangelicals long ago replaced the suffering servant of Christ with an image that more closely resembles Donald Trump than many would care to admit. They’ve traded a faith that privileges humility and elevates the least of these for one that derides gentleness as the province of wusses. Having replaced the Jesus of the gospels with an idol of machismo, it’s no wonder many have come to think of Trump himself as the nation’s savior.

Indeed, white evangelical support for Trump can be seen as the culmination of a decades-long embrace of militant masculinity, a masculinity that has enshrined patriarchal authority, condoned a callous display of power at home and abroad, and functioned as a linchpin in the political and social worldviews of conservative white evangelicals. In the end, many evangelicals did not vote for Trump despite their beliefs, but because of them.

The next day, I received an email from Michael Lackey, author of The Modernist God State: A Literary Study of the Nazis’ Christian Reich. He had read my article, which was filled with quotes from popular evangelical books decrying the “feminization” of the church and the nation, insisting on the need for warriors to rise up, to protect faith, family, and nation, to develop “a theology of fist fighting,” to train young boys to use firearms, and of the innate need for men to have “a battle to fight,” and the conviction that “God is Pro-War.” Lackey got right to the point: “As a Holocaust scholar, I noticed that this same shift happened at the beginning of the twentieth century, and I claim that it set the stage for the version of Christianity that Hitler and the Nazis ultimately adopted.”

When I replied to Lackey, I told him that yes, I was indeed aware of these connections. Although my primary training was in US religious history, my outside field of study in graduate school was 20th-century Germany.

As a high school student, I had spent a year as an exchange student in Germany with the Congress-Budestag program. While there, I was welcomed by two host families that included two grandfathers, both of whom had served as Nazi soldiers. One had spent years in a Russian POW camp and returned home a different man. The other, who was captured by Americans (and remembered fondly being introduced to eating corn while in their custody), was the kindest, most loving grandpa you could imagine. Over the course of my time there, I became not only deeply curious about German history and culture, but also increasingly curious about the history and culture of my own country.

While applying to graduate school four years later, I applied to programs in both American and German history. In the end, I chose the American concentration, but while at Notre Dame I also had the opportunity to work closely with Doris Bergen, author of Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich. At that time, she was writing War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. I served both as her teaching assistant and research assistant, and remember well how important to her it was to situate the horrors of the Holocaust within the broader political, cultural, and military contexts. The war was an ever-present backdrop to the pursuit of genocide, and frequently its justification.

Under Bergen’s direction, I read books like Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, struggling to comprehend how “good people” could perpetrate horrific evil. With students, I read Art Spiegelman’s Maus, wrestling with how his use of animals both revealed and critiqued the dehumanization at the heart of genocide. I took courses like “The History and Historiography of Evil” and plunged into historiographical debates trying to get to the bottom of the question of whether there was something distinctive to Germans that set them on this path, or whether this was simply a reflection of the human condition, going unchecked.

All of which is to say, when I began my research on white evangelical masculinity and militarism, the similarities between the rhetoric I was reading in popular evangelical books on Christian manhood and the rhetoric of the German Christians that Lackey pointed me to were already apparent to me.

Now is probably a good time to say that Trump is not Hitler, and (the vast majority of) Trump’s supporters are not Nazis. Not even close.

But there are lessons that history offers us:

Words matter.

Dehumanizing rhetoric precedes acts of political violence.

Promoting false claims like the “stolen election” has very real consequences.

Stoking fear to promote your own power, using language of us vs. them, talking in terms of an epic battle for truth and righteousness, claiming that God is on your side against the forces of darkness—all of this has consequences.

When attempting to understand what is unfolding around us, I keep coming back to a recent survey that shows that 60% of white evangelical Protestants believe the election was stolen from Trump (far more than any other demographic), and that 26% of white evangelical Protestants (also more than any other demographic) believe that “true American patriots might have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

In light of this, history offers us another lesson, one that we should all give some thought to. What allows rhetoric to devolve into violence is when too many people say nothing. When people shrug their shoulders at escalating rhetoric and threats of violence. When they respond to incidents like the January 6 attack on the Capitol with phrases like, “Well I don’t condone violence, but…” When they prefer to keep their heads down and stay quiet to avoid potential conflict. When they deny the seriousness of the situation, until it’s too late.

Over this past year, I’ve taken some heat from a few conservative white evangelical leaders. When their criticisms are substantive, I’ve engaged directly. When they are personal—snide comments, smear tactics, ad hominem, and the like, I sometimes engage but often I just brush it off. But when I see dehumanizing language weaponized against me—when I’ve been called the devil, or the child of the devil, or (frequently) a “wolf,” I’ve pushed back, privately and publicly. I call out those using this language and those liking and sharing posts that do. I’ve reminded Christian pastors and professors that words have consequences.

Despite my efforts, I do not believe that a single one has recanted or apologized, and the attacks continue.

This isn’t about me any more than it is about all of us, though.

Wherever we find ourselves, we have choices to make. Will we resort to “bellicose, dehumanizing, and apocalyptic language”? Will we allow others to do so, without calling them out? If and when we ourselves are targeted with such language, or God forbid with actual threats, how will we respond?

Scholars who study political violence often identify a period where resistance is possible, but too often during those periods, people perceive the risks as too great and end up going quiet when it matters most.