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Twice this week now I have run across columns from anti-Trump Republican Christians who are doing their darnedest to disavow the role that the Christian Right they were involved in has played in getting us to our current fascist regime. One is a sample, two is approaching a pattern. Let’s review.

First up

Example 1 comes from Jake Meador over at Mere Orthodoxy. In his essay titled “Evangelical Political Life after the Religious Right”, Jake boldly claims that “the religious right is dead”. To those of us who look around and see an evangelical Speaker of the House, a conservative Catholic VP, a President who claims Christianity, and an Attorney General who is running a task force to root out “anti-Christian bias” whose first witness is Michael Farris from Patrick Henry College and Scott Hicks from Liberty University might be surprised at Jake’s claim. Turns out that there are only two Religious Right life signs that Jake is looking for: abortion ban language in the Republican platform, and language in favor of “natural marriage”, by which he means opposition to anything LGBTQ+.

Jake says that the “understandable” conclusion that the new Christian Nationalist movement is a successor and continuation of the Religious Right is wrong, but his only apparent support for that assertion is that lack of explicit platform language against abortion and gay people. (We’ll ignore for the moment the fact that the entire Republican Party platform back in 2020 was just “whatever Trump wants”.) He then says that “the Christian influence on actual Republican policy items… is going to be exceedingly negligible going forward”. Again I would like to inquire what reality Mr. Meador is living in.

When you have people like Speaker Johnson and Christopher Rufo driving Republican political approaches, to make Meador’s statement true, you either need to redefine “Christian” or redefine “negligible”. Clearly there are Christians influencing Republican politics these days. A lot of them. Many of them largely ideologically aligned with positions Meador and Mere O have historically taken. That Meador now wants to disavow it is farcical. I’ll stop there for now.

Batting second…

Example 2 comes today from David French in the New York Times. In his column “The Anti-Woke Right Has a Lot to Answer For”, French recounts his initial support and hopes for “the Anti-Woke Right” - that they would contend for broader freedom of speech and expression and combat what he saw were the anti-liberal tendencies of Left-leaning ideology. But then he sounds completely surprised about where the Republican Party has landed:

It turns out that when they said, “Let us speak,” they weren’t embracing free speech as a universal value, but rather as an instrumental value — free speech is important only so long as they get to say what they think. The left? It’s too dangerous to be heard.

Throughout the column French wants to continue to blame this move on something he calls “the authoritarian right”. Again, this appears to be a convenient way to distance himself from a movement that he strongly supported for the past two decades. French has consistently championed Christian religious liberty and free speech, but apparently let his optimism blind him to the warning signs of impending authoritarianism. The same powers at play in the Republican Party were also at play in the conservative resurgence in the Baptist and Presbyterian churches that French has associated with. It’s all the same game. So he can claim to be surprised and disappointed now that we’re here, but God forbid he acknowledge any of his own responsibility.

There is a profound difference between liberty and power. When you have power, you certainly experience it as freedom. You can do what you want to do. Liberty, by contrast, protects people against power. Liberty is what grants you freedom of action even when you are not in control. The anti-woke right spoke the language of liberty when its freedom was under threat, but now we know the terrible truth: The movement was about power all along.

Let me find my shocked face.

Is Anybody Actually Responsible?

On one hand I am happy to see David French use his NYT platform to acknowledge that the right wing is just after power and willing to trample all our liberties to get it and keep it. And I’m happy to see Jake Meador acknowledge that the current regime is Christian Nationalist. But when Jake’s solution is that we need a slightly different flavor of Christianity to influence government, and David’s is just to say they’ve got some explaining to do, it all falls short.

If members of the Religious Right have a change of heart and want to help improve things, it has to start by acknowledging their own complicity in how we got here. And some introspection to realize that preferring and embedding specifically Christian tenets into our laws will inevitably again march us toward either oppressive, government-enforced religious fundamentalism (think Iran) or Christian Nationalist fascism.

Tim Walz recently put it this way: “If you say you love freedom, but you don’t believe it is for everyone, the thing you love is not freedom, it’s privilege.” Myself, I want freedom. I think David French does, but he hasn’t found the right direction yet. To read Meador, I suspect he really wants privilege. For those who want freedom, we must be willing to understand and acknowledge the ways we (and the systems we supported) contributed to us getting to this point. And then we need to change.