I can hear my mother’s voice: “You shouldn’t say things like that.” Nancy Salter, who died 16 years ago, was a brilliant writer and editor, a social worker, and an activist committed to social justice and the project of making the world a better place. She was also a much better person than me, a woman of extraordinary decency who always tried to see the best in people, even when she disagreed with them passionately.
But it was easier for her; she lived in a different time and place. It was possible to believe that a plural, diverse secular society was possible, and even maybe to delude herself that we had attained it. The big questions of parochial morality in a secular democracy had been settled. In Canada, where she lived, the Supreme Court decriminalized abortion by a 5-2 majority in Crown v. Morgentaler in 1988. There has never been a credible push to criminalize the procedure since, and any effort to do so would be political suicide in a country where 70 percent of the Canadians are satisfied will unrestricted abortion access.
My mother had a sunnier opinion of humanity than I can muster, and she truly believed that we lived in a society governed by reason and a shared commitment to humanity, even if there were occasional detours and setbacks along the way. Most people, she said, were good, caring, and decent and she was convinced, as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” King was one of my mother’s heroes, and even though it pained her that the long campaigns against racism, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism, and all other forms of discrimination and hate were yet incomplete, she did not doubt that we would get “to the promised land.”
So, I know what she would say if I were to shout from the rooftops what I really want to say in the wake of the revelation of the Supreme Court of the United States’ provisional majority opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade. I want to scream, in a voice that will carry for miles:
“I HATE…” But then I can hear my mother’s voice. “That’s not fair Matt,” she would say, and point out that I was tarring a great many people with too broad a brush. Besides, she would add, “hate is a strong and ugly word, are you really sure that that is what you mean?” Although, to be fair, I remember that time when, watching a report on the news about some piously stupid thing that then-president George W. Bush said, she looked up from her knitting and said “I just hate that man.” (She didn’t have much love for his father, Ronald Reagan, or Brian Mulroney, either, to be honest.)
She might be right. Hate is neither particularly nuanced nor fair. But here’s the thing: I am feeling neither nuanced nor fair, right now; I am feeling rage – and particularly rage against the reactionary judicial activists on the Supreme Court, and everyone who agrees with them. The draft opinion released this week is a bald statement of Christian nationalism, and I cannot summon anything other than revulsion for that kind of religious bigotry.
It is of course true that denying women the right to the personal and bodily autonomy that should be guaranteed for every citizen (and was the principal rationale, under the 14th Amendment, for the Roe v. Wade decision) is a big conservative cause. The conservative movement of the 1970s was a response to feminism,as much as anything. Anti-choice only became a rallying cry on the political right at an anti-feminist convention in Houston in 1977. Organized by Phyllis Schlafly, the reactionary provocateur fresh from her campaign against the ERA, it was meant to be “the death knell of the women’s liberation movement.” Schlafly just added reproductive rights to the laundry list of things for which feminists advocated, and thus which she opposed.
“The rally’s participants, most of them white and well‐dressed, unanimously passed resolutions against abortion, the proposed equal rights amendment and lesbian rights, three issues that will also be debated at the women’s conference,” then being held across town in Houston, the New York Times reported on 20 November 1977.
Since then, abortion has been the vanguard issue for the conservative war on women, gaining in ever-shriller intensity after the bizarre 1984 gorefest The Silent Scream (which shared the title of a 1979 slasher film, no less) made the rounds of the conservative home-movie scene. The anti-abortion foot soldiers kept turning up in ever greater numbers waving their artfully-bloodied plastic fetus tchotchkes at women’s health clinics across the country.
But, at a much more profound level, anti-choice is a Christian issue, the principal pitch of a Christian nationalist movement whose influence and power has grown exponentially since Bob Jones University (a Christian college) lost its tax-exempt status for violating civil rights law in 1983. At first, “the Party of Reagan” used Christian outrage over the government’s audacity of denying their religious right to be racist to build its constituency, but it has gone far beyond that.
Conservatives believed that they had drafted a vast army of crusaders who would march behind the Republican Party banner to advance their traditional values of capitalism, bigotry, and white male privilege. Running for president in 2000, paleoconservative Pat Buchanan made a direct appeal to mobilize these religious warriors to support his candidacy warning that the liberal “drive to de-Christianize America, to purge Christianity from the public square from public schools, and from public life, will prove culturally and socially suicidal for the nation.”
It might have been rhetorical position for Buchanan whose political philosophy, up to that moment, consisted mostly of virulent racism, antisemitism, and Holocaust denial rather than ostentatious displays of Christian faith. Many of the Christian nationalists who answered the call certainly agreed that American was a “Christian nation,” but they were not content to just support conservatism; mobilized by the teachings of ideologues like George Grant and Gary DeMar, their goal was to capture the GOP and use it as an instrument to advance the dominion of Christ on Earth.
Grant had laid the agenda out in explicit terms in The Changing of the Guard: Biblical Blueprints for Political Action in 1987: “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. But it is dominion that we are after. Not just a voice.”
This is abundantly evident in the contemporary conservative movement which seeks, above all, to enshrine Christian beliefs and morality in law and government. The Republican Party is now a Christian nationalist party more than even a conservative party in any sense that Edmund Burke might recognize. Its legislative agenda seeks to delegitimize the very possibility of any idea that does not strictly conform to parochial Christian values, for example, by denying the very possibility that school children might encounter non-traditional families, sexualities, and gender identities at some point in their lives. Christian nationalists will assault young students with horrific images of bloody fetuses, but learning about the experience of non-Christian Jews from a graphic novel is just “too traumatic.”
And setting aside an hour a week for a women’s only swim at a Baltimore pool to accommodate Muslim women is “the beginning of shariah law in America,” while imposing the explicitly Christian notion of fetal personhood that makes the termination of a pregnancy “murder” is just traditional American values. To be clear, there are many notions of when a human life begins. There is no scientific agreement on what a “human life” is, let alone when it starts, and non-believers and other non-Christian traditions have their own ideas. In the Jewish tradition, there is a strong consensus that human life begins with a viable birth, so a miscarried or aborted fetus should not be mourned with a shivah or buried with religious funeral rights.
Christians, however (though not all of them), believe that a couple of ambiguous passages from the Gospel of Luke are proof that “life begins at conception.” The weird thing is that this wasn’t even a big deal for most Christians throughout most of their history. Not even that most hardline of anti-choice institutions, the Catholic Church even had a consistent position until 1869, when Pope Pius IX finally declared that abortion was a crime punishable by excommunication – and this regardless of whether or not a fetus is a “human life” (Rome is uncharacteristically agnostic on that, in fact).
The shibboleth that a fetus is “a human life” has become an article of Christian, including Catholic, faith in the United States, and the a priori premise of the anti-choice movement and its acolytes (who whine mindlessly about “the poor baybeeeeeez!” at every demonstration). Opposing reproductive rights is the Christian nationalists’ primary stratagem in its effort to create a Christian theocracy.
“First and foremost, this means voting to prohibit abortion,” DeMar wrote in The Ruler of Nations: Biblical Blueprints for Government, the dominionist movement’s handbook. “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.”
Make no mistake; it is not the “conservative majority” of the Supreme Court that is about to strike down the legal cornerstone of reproductive rights in the United States – after its three newest members lied under oath to the American people that they regarded Roe v. Wade as “settled law,” no less – but the Christian majority. And this majority wants to make it abundantly clear that America is, or at least will soon become, the Christian commonwealth that Christian nationalists have been campaigning to create for the last four decades.
Justice Samuel Alito’s draft majority opinion makes for bracing reading. Indeed, he goes out of his way to dismiss and delegitimize any competing ideas about when a “human life begins” with a contemptuous sweep of his pen. Science doesn’t matter… Non-Christian beliefs don’t matter. Despite two millennia of scholarship, debate, and jurisprudence, he flatly rejects the traditional Jewish view of viability. “And if viability is meant to mark a line having universal moral significance,” he argues with incomprehensible reasoning, “can it be that a fetus that is viable in a big city in the United States has a privileged moral status not enjoyed by an identical fetus in a remote area of a poor country?”
“Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views,” Justice Alito notes in the opening line of his opinion before taking almost 100 pages to explain that the only solution is to impose the morality of America’s Christian majority, in the process enthusiastically abrogating civil rights founded in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. You see, civil rights don’t matter a whit in the Christian States of America.
Justice Alito arrogates the language of democracy to deny the universality of rights, explicitly arguing that the majority can, and should, impose its will on any minority. “Abortion presents a profound moral question,” he repeats for emphasis in his conclusion, insisting that the popular must take will precedent over the rights. “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion… We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.” This is a plain re-statement of the doctrine of “popular sovereignty” that was so favored by the slaveocracy and turned out so well in Kansas in the 1850s, incidentally.
Given that this “moral question” is one answered solely by religious belief, that Justice Alito explicitly denies the legitimacy of non-Christian (specifically Jewish) moral reasoning, and that Christians make up 75 percent of the population of the United States with absolute majorities in every region and electoral district in the country, he is saying that parochial Christian belief must be the law of the land. Rights are irrelevant in the face of the moral standards of the Christian majority; the minority rights of skeptics, dissenters, non-believers, Jews, Muslims, and all others be damned.
This should worry us all because the draft opinion is a roadmap to the legal imposition of Christian morality on all Americans. If questions of civil rights founded on the 14th Amendment’s guarantee that no state “shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor… deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” are to be answered by the moral judgments of the Christian majority, then the advent of their dominion is only a matter of time.
Christian nationalists in Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Michigan, Arizona, and elsewhere have already shown an eagerness to enshrine parochial Christian values in law and an enthusiasm to limit the franchise and subvert democratic institutions to ensure their power. They have banned books, restricted or annulled rights in the interests of Christian religious domination, condemned young people and threatened the medical professionals who want to help them – they have gone so far as to outlaw the mere mention of knowledge that contradicts their narrow religious beliefs.
Armed with the Supreme Court Christian majority’s coming ruling and Justice Alito’s reasoning, it is only a matter of time before the majority of state houses that will terminate reproductive rights within minutes of the ruling go after free access to contraception, marriage equality, homosexuality, and non-missionary sex. Obergefell v. Hodges, Lawrence v. Texas, even Loving v. Virginia, the decision that prohibited racist state miscegenation laws, were all based on the same reading of the 14th Amendment that Justice Alito calls “exceptionally weak,” making them all “egregiously wrong from the start.”
I can sit here at my desk in liberal, enlightened Massachusetts, confident that the judicial activism of Justice Alito and his confederates will never reach me. But that does not help my friends and family in places like Florida and Tennessee. Moreover, it would take only a quirk of electoral fortune to overturn the liberal state governments in New York, California and, yes, Massachusetts, and bring Christian nationalist Republicans to power that they might never relinquish. I know my neighbors, and I know that there is no guarantee that states which have elected Patakis, Romneys, and Schwarzeneggers to the governor’s mansion in the past, won’t flip completely red sometime in the future.
What I see is a tide of Christian nationalism creeping across the map of the United States, from the South to the Midwest, like a dark ink stain, accelerated by the Christian bigots on the Supreme Court, and applauded by my Christian neighbors so secure in the righteousness of their crusading morality. And all I can say is: “I HATE CHRISTIANS!”*
No… It is not fair, nor is it nuanced. It is an extreme emotion and, given that there are 250 million Christians in the United States, it would probably be fair to add #NotAllChristians. Besides, I have to acknowledge that most of my friends and some of my family – people whom I do not actually hate – are Christians, and that there are champions of civil rights and common decency in all faith communities who will speak truth to power.
Yet there are the others, sitting on the Supreme Court, making laws in state legislatures, the people who vote for them, and the ones who just shrug and passively go along because that is the convenient thing to do, who are spreading that blot of Christian domination and religious intolerance across the country. Those are the ones whom I hate… And there are so many of them.
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* I am well-aware this this is the only thing that some readers are going to take away from this essay. So be it.