I am enraged. The decision by the Supreme Court of the United States last week declining to hear the Center for Reproductive Rights’ challenge to the Texas “Heartbeat Act,” no less than the law itself, has left me apoplectic. The Texas law is the most egregious example of government overreach imaginable, perpetrated by political zealots who decry public health measures as tyranny, and abetted by five justices who claim to be originalists and who cleave to a strict construction of government power.

The hypocrisy is palpable and explicit, and mobilized in the service of a reactionary, misogynistic agenda that seeks to impose state authority over women’s bodies. And the justification for this unconscionable extension of state power is that the state claims to have “interests from the outset of a woman’s pregnancy in protecting… the life of the unborn child.”*

That should stop every American in their tracks. The state claims that there is a life, separate from the pregnant woman herself, in which it has an interest, and on behalf of which it will advocate. We have become so inured to the toxic rhetoric of the anti-choice movement over the last decades, with its accusations of murder and the bloody fetish objects its devotees brandish at their frenzied bacchanales outside reproductive health clinics that it is easy to overlook the enormity of that claim:

The human embryo – not even the fetus that it will become in the eleventh week of gestation – is a human life demanding of the state’s protection.

The anti-choice Bacchae have repeated this claim so loudly and so often, taking a page from Josef Gobbels’ große Lüge, that it has become a commonplace in American public discourse. Even many advocates of reproductive justice have ceded ground to their enemies on this question, arguing for priority of the welfare of one life, the pregnant woman’s, over another, the “unborn child.” This is ultimately a self-defeating position that concedes the repro-fascists’ main point, that an unviable embryo is, in fact, a “human life,” and therefore demanding of the state’s advocacy and protection.

Where did that idea even come from? In all of our speculations on when a human life begins, there is no objective rational consensus at all about what even constitutes “human life,” let alone when it begins. Indeed, the question of when human life begins is ultimately metaphysical and tied up with notions of the immortality of the soul, whether there is a soul, and whether it matters. Religion presumes to answer the questions that science cannot address and, for that reason, whether or not an embryo or a fetus is a human life – an “unborn child” in the language of the Texas statute – has always been a matter of faith.

Not surprisingly, given the vast range of the world’s religious beliefs, there is no agreement here, either. For many Hindus, a human life begins at conception, when the fertilized egg is instantly imbued with a reincarnated soul, for others, the soul does not come alive until after seven months. Muslim jurists, citing the Hadith, generally agree that human life begins when the soul enters the fetus at 120 days into the pregnancy. In the Jewish tradition, a human life begins only after a viable birth; prior to that, the fetus is considered an appendage of the mother.

These are important issues for religion because they are central to questions of moral obligation and ritual observance – the matters that faith and religion deal in. What are the moral issues when one must choose between the life of the mother and the “life of an unborn baby?” Muslims agree that the mother’s life always takes priority. Do you provide for a full funeral ritual and a period of mourning for a miscarried fetus or stillborn infant? Judaism says no.

The very notion that an embryo or fetus is an “unborn child” in whose life the state has an interest is a parochial Christian belief. For much of the history of Christianity this was a matter of debate, in fact, and not a done deal at all, and even then, there was little agreement on its implications. Part of this related to the fact that, although the connection between sex and babies had been common knowledge since as long as anyone can remember, exactly how that connection actually happens was something of a mystery until the 19th century.

Aristotle believed that it had something to do with the fusion of male and female fluids – he was, in that sense, at least partly right – but really didn’t have the rest of it figured out. How could he? Microscopes capable of rendering spermatozoa and ova wouldn’t be invented until the late-17th century. More often, even smartest people just threw up their hands and called it the “miracle of life.” Miracles, after all, are phenomena that defy rational explanation and are thus attributed to supernatural causes.

The question of fetal personhood, the answer to which is critical to the Texas statute’s claim of the state’s interest, was therefore still unsettled. It ultimately came down to the moment of “ensoulment,” and even then, no one could say for sure. Some authorities, like Pythagoras, believed that the embryo obtained a soul at the moment of conception – although it is worth noting that he didn’t really quite know what conception even was – and others, like the eminently-practical Stoics insisted that it happened only at birth.

For his part, Aristotle speculated that the fetus went through a series of different kinds of souls, only acquiring a human soul – and thus a human life – shortly before birth. None of these philosophers really had the faintest idea of course, and no one could really agree on what a soul actually was, anyway, but the Church fathers (and they were always men) pretty much picked one explanation or the other and argued about it from the days of the Council of Nicaea until long after the Protestant Reformation.

The Catholic Church did not even have a consistent policy on terminating a pregnancy until 1869, when Pope Pius IX finally declared that it was always a crime worthy of excommunication whether or not the fetus had been ensouled (and thus regardless of whether it was “murder”). The specifically-Christian idea of fetal personhood that we see today is based mostly on two passages in the Gospel of Luke. In the first (Luke 1:15) an angel tells the future John the Baptist’s parents that he will be “filled with the Holy Spirit even before he is born.” In the second (Luke 1:41-44) the infant John the Baptist “leaped” in his mother’s womb when she met Mary, the future mother of the Christian savior.

In the years since Roe v. Wade, opponents of reproductive justice have invariably cited these vague allusions from their own scriptures as incontrovertible evidence of fetal personhood in the contention that “abortion is murder,” and in their efforts, now successful in Texas, to enshrine that principle in secular law. Significantly, not even Pope Pius, who made his declaration in the Papal Bull Apostolicae Sedis, a statement of Catholic Church doctrine meant specifically for Catholics, presumed to make it a universal law to be imposed on non-Catholics. In any case, non-Catholics would not have been impressed by the ultimate penalty – excommunication.

Not so the Christian Nationalist movement that has been gaining momentum in the United States for the last four decades, and is finally in a position to implement its plans. Born in the conservative reaction that followed the social liberalization of the 1960s and the collapse of American prestige from the defeat in Vietnam, and the explosive growth of Christian media and celebrity culture in the 1970s, it became a political movement with a coherent philosophy by the 1980s.

While American politicians had courted Christian religious leaders like Billy Graham and affected a Christian performativity, most notably with President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s very public baptism in 1953, throughout the post-Second World War period, most devout white Christians abjured politics as a medium for their faith. The sexual revolution, civil rights, the economic enfranchisement of women and people from hitherto marginalized communities, and the apparent collapse of traditional structures of deference changed all that.

“The change has come because a handful of Christians have suddenly rediscovered the world,” the Presbyterian minister George Grant wrote in The Changing of the Guard: Biblical Blueprints for Political Action in 1987. “And we are not too terribly fond of what we have found there.” The Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion on the very secular grounds of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of due process, became a focal point. Political Christianity was mobilized among the righteous battalions bearing placards and plastic-fetus fetish objects, and shrieking about “murdered babies.”

Christian Nationalism drew together a bestiary of movements and ideologies that had lurked at the fringes of American life as long as white Christians were certain that the nominally-secular state was in the hands of people like them – hence President Eisenhower’s baptism – and what they regarded as eternal verities were embraced without amendment or protest. The apparent failure of the state to enforce Christian values was the signal for Christian Reconstructionism and Dominion Theology to move to the center of American political culture, riding on the coattails of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority.

“Our nation began as a Christian nation,” Gary DeMar wrote in The Ruler of Nations: Biblical Blueprints for Government, also from 1987. That fact, which he established in painstaking ahistorical detail, led to only one conclusion: “The reconstruction of civil government begins with the Bible. Jesus wants us to return to the standards of God’s law so the whole world will marvel and follow.”

Nor was it merely something to wish for; the whole thrust of Christian Nationalism, from the beginning, is that Christians have a divinely-sanctioned compulsion to take control of state power. Grant put it in the starkest possible terms. “Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ – to have dominion in the civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness,” he wrote. “But it is dominion that we are after. Not just a voice.”

“World conquest,” he continued, “That’s what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less.”

It would be comforting to believe that Grant and DeMar were outliers, reflecting the political insanity of a generation ago, but nothing could be further from the truth. Grant is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America, the second-largest Presbyterian church in the United States, which has almost 2,000 congregations and is experiencing a growth spurt, and he taught on the faculty of the Knox Theological Seminary. DeMar is a respected commentator in conservative circles, and his American Vision organization is one of the most prominent conservative Christian thinktanks in the United States.

While perhaps not yet the mainstream of white American Christianity, Christian Nationalism has made great political progress in recent years. President Donald Trump, who conspicuously had himself photographed receiving a laying-on of hands from a gaggle of Christian pastors, made it a point to embrace Christian Nationalists. The organizers of this summer’s Conservative Political Action Committee conference invited Father James Altman, a Catholic priest who condemned Democrats to “burn in Hell,” to give the gathering’s opening prayer. Senator Josh Hawley declared that “our rights come from God, not government” to a cheering CPAC audience the next day and, in case anyone missed the point, Senator Ted Cruz later reiterated it in his own speech.

Father Altman’s stature in the world of political Christianity reveals an additional dimension to the acceleration of the Christian Nationalist juggernaut: its alliance with reactionary Catholicism. For most of the last 400 years, the most devout American Protestants, who have characterized themselves as the “True Faith” at least since the Puritans sought to light a “beacon upon a hill” and build a Christian theocracy, have barely regarded Catholics as Christians, if at all.

More common was the kind of rhetoric we used to hear from Northern Ireland’s Presbyterian minister-cum sectarian hatemonger Ian Paisley, whose faith they share.† He denounced the Pope as “the scarlet whore” and Irish Catholics as “vermin.”

In 1921, a Southern Methodist pastor gunned down Father James Coyle as he sat on his porch in broad daylight in Birmingham, Alabama. Pastors across the country condemned the Catholic Democratic candidate Al Smith from the pulpit as a “tool of the Pope” in the 1928 presidential election. Even as late as 1960, John F. Kennedy was coerced to appear before an inquisition organized by the Greater Houston Ministerial Association to prove that he would govern independently of Papal decree should he win the presidency. It was a commonplace that, in America, Protestants and Catholics did not dance.

All that began to change at around the time the armies of Protestant Christian Nationalism began to mobilize in the 1980s. Conservative Catholics faced a crisis of their own in the early-1960s, when the Church committed itself in the Second Vatican Council to reform and liberalization. The Church that, under Pius IX and Pius X, had been committed to rigid hierarchy and ultramontane Papal infallibility began to change, jettisoned the Latin Mass in favor of vernacular liturgies and, worst of all, began a process of ecumenical dialogue with other Christian Churches, and even Muslims, Hindus, and Jews.

Some conservative Catholics found a home in reactionary movements like the Society of Pius X, that sought to preserve the rigid doctrines and Latin liturgy of the past. Others were attracted to militant orders like Opus Dei and interdenominational communities like People of Praise modeled on extreme Protestant sects. And even within the Catholic mainstream itself, the doctrine of Integralism – that civil society must be subordinated to Christianity wherever possible – experienced a startling revival.

By the beginning of the 21st century, a reactionary faction in the American Catholic community, motivated by its resistance to liberalization, institutionalized in Opus Dei, and tacitly promoted by Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, seized the moment and made common cause with the most radical parts of the Protestant Evangelical Church Militant to advance Christian Nationalism in America. In many ways, they have leveraged the recent sex abuse crises and the departure of so many of their more liberal coreligionists to attempt to move Integralism to the center of the Catholic agenda.

This has not gone unnoticed. In 2017, the Jesuit journal La Civittà Cattolica warned that “Evangelical and Catholic integralists condemn traditional ecumenism and yet promote an ecumenism of conflict that unites them in the nostalgic dream of a theocratic type of state.” The authors of the article, Marcelo Figueroa, and Father Antonio Spadaro, a close associate of Pope Francis, continued: “The most dangerous prospect for this strange ecumenism is attributable to its xenophobic and Islamophobic vision that wants walls and purifying deportations… The word ‘ecumenism’ transforms into a paradox, into an ‘ecumenism of hate.’”

Despite La Civittà Cattolica’s warning, the Christian Nationalist alliance founded on this “ecumenism of hate,” has gone from strength to strength, and success to success, evidenced by the Texas Heartbeat law, which was promoted by radical Evangelical Dominionists, and signed into law by the reactionary Catholic Texas governor Greg Abbott. Despite the fact that the law deploys a parochial Christian justification for a shocking and unprecedented government overreach into the most intimate aspects of citizens’ lives, plainly violating the 14th Amendment and the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment, the Supreme Court of the United States summarily declined to hear a legal challenge by a margin of 5-4. All of the votes to dismiss the Center for Reproductive Rights’ challenge were cast by justices raised as Catholics.‡

It shouldn’t matter. A person’s religious beliefs and affiliation are a private issue, or at least they should be. I am very openly a Jew but the fact of that is a matter for me and my family alone. That calculus changes when we make our personal beliefs, no matter how publicly expressed, into public policy and law. My Jewishness would be an issue of critical concern for my neighbors were I to successfully advocate for a national ban on pork, a complete prohibition of work and business on Saturdays, or the forced circumcision of my Gentile neighbors’ sons. This is the fundamental logic of the Social Contract: We may not impose our personal or parochial beliefs on others, no matter how passionately we hold them.

The Christian Nationalists in the Texas government and on the bench of the highest court of the land are clearly working according to DeMar’s “blueprint,” and he left little doubt about what its directions lead to. “We must elect public officials who say they will vote for Biblical laws,” he wrote at the inauguration of the contemporary Christian Nationalist movement. “First and foremost, this means voting to prohibit abortion. While few Christians are willing to go this far, the long-term goal should be the execution of abortionists and parents who hire them. If we argue that abortion is murder, then we must call for the death penalty. If abortionists are not supposed to be executed, then they are not murderers, and if they are not murderers, why do we want to abolish abortion?”

This is a threat that we must take to heart.

The State of Texas, abetted by five justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, have taken the first steps. They have legislated Christian “Biblical law” as the law of the land and, in so doing, they have signaled to non-believers, Muslims, Hindus, and Jews that we are not citizens of their Christian commonwealth built on their God’s law. It is anti-democratic and, by definition, egregiously anti-Hindu, Islamophobic, and antisemitic. Under these circumstances, we are not merely authorized, but obligated to ask about its agents’ religious motivations – and the answer to that should terrify us all.

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* The full sentence reads “Texas has compelling interests from the outset of a woman’s pregnancy in protecting the health of the woman and the life of the unborn child,” but let us be clear that the state’s touching concern for women’s health is little more than patronizing window-dressing for an explicit power-grab.

† British Prime Minister David Cameron elevated Rev. Paisley to the nobility in 2010 for his contributions to British society, creating him Baron Ian Paisley of Bannside.

‡ All of the current Justices of the Supreme Court, save Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer, are Catholics or, as in the case of Neil Gorsuch who joined his wife’s Episcopalian Church, raised Catholic. Kagan, Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor have all publicly condemned religiously-justified legal restrictions on reproductive rights.

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Photo © Elvert Barnes