Yet more on the Juneteenth holiday: against forgetting

Kevin Young self-describes as a post-evangelical pastor. Also a white guy and "a lifter." Not my instinctive go-to for theological or other insight. 

Yet, as belatedly and arduously the Juneteenth holdiay becomes more internalized as a national holiday, as well as a Black remembrance, he offers a perspective that I find compelling. He writes:

... The Hebrew scriptures are obsessed—I mean absolutely OBSESSED—with memory. 

The command to remember appears over 200 times in the Old Testament alone. “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt,” says Deuteronomy 5:15. God did not issue that command as a footnote but as the foundation of Israel’s entire ethical framework.

You were oppressed. 
You know what oppression feels like. 
Therefore, you do not oppress.
Remember!

To forget is not simply to be careless. In the theology of the Hebrew Bible, to forget is to sin.

When white people dismantle the legal protections of Black voters, erase Black history from classrooms, defund the celebrations of Black freedom, and quietly remove the holidays that honor Black lives from our national calendar, we are not just making administrative, fiscal, or even political decisions. 

No.

We are committing an act of spiritual forgetting. We are sinning against memory, and we are willfully sinning against the image-bearers we have chosen to forget. 

The alternative to forgetting is both pain admitting to horrors and joy in human liberation -- joy at the defeat of our particular American slavery, but also joy in in the possibility of wider community and a better future. This is a choice. "Let us march on til victory is won!"

White Christian Nationalists and an American soldier

Yesterday a young man wonderfully named Godspower Nwawuihe scored two touchdowns for the US Military Academy team in a rout of the University of Connecticut in the Fenway Bowl in Boston. The internet is not very forthcoming about his ancestry, but hints that his parents came from Lagos, Nigeria, before settling in Garland, Texas. 

The day before yesterday, Donald Trump ordered the US military to lob missiles at northwestern Nigeria. CNN reports that people on the ground in the target area were mystified. 

Abuja, Nigeria  — A day after part of a missile fired by the United States hit their village, landing just meters from its only medical facility, the people of Jabo in northwestern Nigeria are in a state of shock and confusion.

... Kagara did not realize it at the time, but what he was witnessing was part of a US strike that President Donald Trump would later refer to as a “Christmas present” for terrorists.

Not long after the impact in Jabo, Trump declared on Thursday that the US had carried out a “powerful and deadly strike” against ISIS militants in the region, who he accused of “targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even centuries!” 

According to US Africa Command, the operation neutralized multiple ISIS militants. 

But Trump’s explanation has left Kagara and his fellow villagers scratching their heads. 

While parts of Sokoto face challenges with banditry, kidnappings and attacks by armed groups including Lakurawa – which Nigeria classifies as a terrorist organization due to suspected affiliations with Islamic State – villagers say Jabo is not known for terrorist activity and that local Christians coexist peacefully with the Muslim majority.  

“In Jabo, we see Christians as our brothers. We don’t have religious conflicts, so we weren’t expecting this,” he said.

When local violence does break out in northwestern Nigeria, it seems often to involve conflicts between herders who are Muslims and settled farmers who are Christian. Such conflicts are thought to have been part of human history all over the world.

Should Mr. Nwawuihe complete his time at West Point and be commissioned as an Army officer, will he be sent to kill Nigerians? 

Mr. Trump seems to treat random strikes in Nigeria as a gift to white US Christians who probably couldn't find Nigeria on a map. These strikes are just one more crime against hard won civilization from our clownish grifter ...

• • •

The contemporary Republican base of white evangelicals is a morass of white Christian nationalism. They think God gave them this country and they have a right to rule us all -- and the world too.

 Historian of religion Jemar Tisby provides a succinct definition of the affliction. 

White Christian nationalism is an ethnocultural ideology that uses Christianity as a permission structure for the acquisition of political power and social control. 

It is characterized by beliefs such as a conviction that Christians have a mandate to exercise dominion over all segments of society, the notion that the United States was founded as an explicitly Christian nation, and the sense that they are under attack by anti-American and anti-Christian forces. ...

Jennifer Rubin at The Contrarian catalogues the fixations and crimes of the nationalist-deluded. 

... White Christian nationalists generally do not seem interested in good works, helping the most vulnerable, or personal character. This is a movement seeking power, not redemption. Its adherents are motivated to remake America into a white, Christian dominated nation. 

Lacking the votes to bring their goals about through democracy, they are all too willing to suppress voting and rely on other anti-democratic measures. Blowing up people on the high seas, separating children from parents, brutalizing Hispanics, and taking away SNAP benefits are features, not bugs for people lacking empathy who seek racial and religious dominance.

These people are a lot of us. Sociologist Robert P. Jones attempted last March to measure carefully the prevalence of this dangerous fantasy.

... three in ten Americans qualified as Christian nationalism Adherents (10%) or Sympathizers (20%), compared with two-thirds who qualify as Skeptics (37%) or Rejecters (29%). These percentages have remained stable since PRRI first asked these questions in late 2022. In other words, Christian nationalism supporters, while a sizable minority, are outnumbered by a margin of two to one among the general public.

... A majority of Republicans today qualify as either Christian nationalism Adherents (20%) or Sympathizers (33%), compared to less than one quarter of independents (6% Adherents and 16% Sympathizers) and less than one fifth of Democrats (5% Adherents and 11% Sympathizers). These views are reinforced by TV media outlets consumed disproportionately by Republicans, such as Fox News or far right TV news outlets such as OAN and Newsmax.

... As the US has become more racially and religiously diverse over the past few decades, our two major political parties have responded in dramatically different ways to these shifts. Today, only 41% of Americans identify as white and Christian. But today’s Republican Party is 70% white and Christian, a stark contrast from the Democratic Party, which is 25% white and Christian.

... We see the connection between Christian nationalism and support for political violence clearly in the data. Nearly four in ten Christian nationalism Adherents (38%) and nearly three in ten Sympathizers (28%) agree that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country,” compared with only 15% of Skeptics and 7% of Rejecters.

If these folks get their way, Mr. Nwawuihe may indeed find himself dispatched to attack people in the land of his ancestors. What a dangerous, ignorant world we are making ... 

She cries out against a corrupted faith

She's not pulling any punches. Anthea Butler chairs the Religious Studies department of the University of Pennsylvania. She begins her history and jeremiad White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America with this uncompromising declaration:

Evangelicals, you have a problem. That problem is racism. 

... why do people who identify as as evangelicals vote over and over again for political figures who in speech and deed do not evince the Christian qualities that evangelicalism espouses? 

My answer is that evangelicalism is not a simply religious group at all. Rather, it is a nationalistic political movement whose purpose is to support the hegemony of white Christian men over and against the flourishing of others. 

... evangelicalism is an Americanized Christianity born in the context of white Christian slaveholders. ... Racism in evangelicalism is not only about individual sin. It is about corporate sins of a religious movement that continues to believe itself good and that good is predicated on whiteness and the proximity to power. 

... As an African American woman who once trained in an evangelical seminary, I don't say these thing lightly... Whether ignoring race or hiding behind race, the evangelical whitewashing of race and racism does not work anymore.

This little book recounts the history which led to the evangelical "problem."

From the time that the first Africans were kidnapped to this country as slaves, enslavers sought to ensure the parts of the Christian bible to which they were exposed emphasized obedience to masters. 

... there was even a slave Bible produced in England that omitted passages about freedom.

In the 19th century abolitionists led by Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison repudiated and also reshaped American Christianity; after the Civil War freed the slaves, many Christian denominations split into northern and southern fractions over the continuing challenge of freed Black people in "their" society. The South got the KKK; in the immediate post war period, northern denominations aided education for the freed people. 

But by the early 20th century, Jim Crow segregation and repression were the rule most everywhere. White fundamentalists and Pentecostals created an extensive infrastructure in the interwar era; in the 1950s, Billy Graham became the archetypal white evangelist. Butler describes his uneven outreach to Christian formations of color. By the last decades of the 20th century, white evangelicals had become the base of the current right wing Republican party, organized by the Christian Coalition against abortion, feminism, desegregation of evangelical colleges, and gays. They were ripe for the picking by Donald Trump and MAGA.

Growing up Christian in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 90s, Anthea Butler thought she was part of this movement -- until she discovered she wasn't.

Once upon a time, I was an evangelical. A Pentecostal, to be exact. I was happily ensconced in the Church on the Way and preparing to start Fuller Seminary in the fall of 1992. That spring, the Rodney King verdict came down and the riots happened. I had a front row seat to one of the ways that evangelicals decided to deal with this traumatic event. Evangelical churches decided to come together under the aegis of Church on the Way's Pastor Hayford to hold what they called a "Love LA" service ... It was to be a healing celebration, a chance for racial reconciliation.  

For me, it was the moment I found out that despite my frenetic activity and full-steam participation in the church, I was invisible. For the service, I was sitting by Hayford's mother, who knew me from several other events. She turned to me at the greeting time and said, 'Welcome to Church on the Way.' At that moment, I knew that no matter how much I had worked or served or prayed with people, I was simply a Black person visiting the Church on the Way. Much like many evangelicals of color, I was just a Black person in this white woman's space. I was welcome due to the situation, but I could not possibly be a member of the church she belonged to. That moment encapsulated for me what evangelical attempts at interracial cooperation accomplished. Invisibility.

Butler goes on to ask, what went wrong in the evangelical movement?

... This is a movement that could have and should have moved on from its roots in nineteenth-century racism and slavery revealed in this book. Yet it has not. And that is due to the choices made by leaders and followers within the evangelical movement. 

Why have evangelicals and their leadership made choices over and over again to embrace racism? Because it is what has allowed them to attain and hold political power. ... 

... When evangelicals married their educational and religious institutions to nationalism and political power starting in the 1950s, they gained a foothold that has now become a stronghold. Evangelicals became well educated, and they shaped their historical narrative more around theology and esoteric boundaries, mostly white cultural boundaries, ignoring their social and historical connections to broader American life. ... Trump isn't the reason why evangelicals turned to racism. They were racist all along. 

... class and wealth have encouraged evangelicals to hold onto racism tightly as part of their belief about capitalism, God, and nation. ... 

... Access to power made evangelicalism brittle, and unforgiving. Ideology trumped the gospel. Loving your neighbor turned into loving only those who believe as you do. As a result, evangelicals live in silos to keep themselves pure. ... And, as a result, evangelicals are regarded with disdain by the broader public. Evangelicals wear this as a badge of honor and as a sign of persecution of Christians. Evangelicals are not being persecuted in America. They are being called to account.

Butler speaks directly to others with whom she has shared an evangelical Christian commitment:

... Ask yourself, What are you leaving as the posterity of American evangelicalism? What are the organizations you support leaving behind? Can you see past the individual sin of racism and understand that your votes, your choices, your actions participated in white supremacy and racist policies and policing? ... 

If you asked such questions, you would probably lose friends, and you might even lose your church. Yes, I am asking a lot of you. To step out of the comfortable place you reside in while the world burns is difficult. It is, however, worth it. If you feel one ounce of conviction, then there is hope for you. There may even be hope for our nation. 

I hope these words find root in you. I hope they trouble you. I hope they sear your soul. I hope they make you change. There is only a little time left, but there is time. The time is now.

When Donald Trump won a second term with evangelical acclamation, Butler wrote a preface to a second edition of her book -- a plea that is anguished but determined:

In this dangerous moment for American democracy, White Evangelical Racism continues to provide a concise history of the motivations and goals of evangelicals who seek to create a white Christian nation, where everyone, no matter what race, ethnicity, or creed, will have to live with their leadership and laws. It is not enough for them to have influence with politicians and legislatures, or schools teaching Christian texts. They want Jesus -- or more precisely their view of Jesus -- and by association themselves, to be the center and leaders of civic life in America. Their oft vaunted appeals to the founding of America as a Christian nation are not only a distortion of the nation's history. They are evangelicals' claim to rule and reign in the here and now. 

As you engage this history, think abut what will happen if the United States becomes a theocracy. Consider if you want to live with people who believe that whiteness is the framework, culture should be only "Anglo-Saxon," and religious freedom is only for people who think and believe as they do. 

These are the stakes.

Bizarre and hurt-filled: white evangelical culture lived

Louisiana's new law requiring all public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments reminded me of an anecdote from NPR reporter Sarah McCammon's The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church.

Raised in an insular mid-American white evangelical home and community, McCammon recounts a visit by a Holocaust survivor to her communications class at her Christian college.

Many of us in Dr. M's [Dr. Mendoza's] class were moved by [Felicia] Brenner's story of the horror her family endured after the Nazis marched into their home town in central Poland, forcing them into a ghetto. Near the end of the war, they were taken to Auschwitz, where her parents would die in the gas chambers. Out of a family of six brothers and sisters, only Brenner would survive the war ...

... Dr. M confided in me one day after class, some of her evangelical students seemed fixated on the fact that Brenner was Jewish and, therefore, according to our theology, not saved. Why invite her to speak to us as all, a student in one of the classes had later asked, if Jews were all going to Hell anyway? ... Dr. M watched in horror as other students chimed in to agree ...

... Brenner spent the last three decades of her life telling her story about the Holocaust and raising alarms about the dangers of antisemitism. In a grainy oral history video recorded in 1985, an interviewer asks her how she reflected on her experiences after many years. She's bitter, she says, not only at the Nazis but at the rest of the world who'd abandoned the Jewish people.

And she points to the Christians who've enabled and participated in those evils.

"We gave them the Ten Commandments. We gave them their Jesus. What do they want from us?" Brenner asks. "[They say], 'You killed Jesus,' which is wrong; we did not. But they crucify us and crucify us and crucify us, over and over again."

As Dr. M told me this story about my peers, I could feel that something had permanently shifted inside me. ...

Maybe force feeding kids the Ten Commandments might have, in a round about way, have taught this young evangelical some deep moral lessons, but this seems a vicious way to get there.

McCammon's Exvangelicals is a very intimate portrait of what it is like to grow up deep within the culture of white American evangelical Christianity. The author emerged to become a respected professional political and social journalist; she combines wide ranging interviews and sociological research with a memoir of her own experience of "unraveling." 

Her story is fascinating, as foreign to me as anthropologists' accounts of "primitive" cultures.

But, of course, the culture from which McCammon sprang is not at all foreign. It is very much a contemporary segment of this nation within which we live and in which we struggle to develop in competing directions.

Another anecdote from one of her interviewees:

Sheila Janca grew up as an "evangelical preacher's daughter" in what she describes as an abusive home in the Midwest in the 1960s and '70s. Any questions that bubbled up to the surface had to be quickly suppressed in favor of "blind faith." ... Janca remembers the humiliation of finally discovering, during a nursing school class, that men weren't actually missing a rib. Taking her cues from the creation story in Genesis, she'd believed that because God made Eve from Adam's rib, men had a different anatomy ...

That's pretty out there -- and still manifests itself all too often when red state legislators try to explain anything about female anatomy while prohibiting reproductive choice.

At once point, contemplating evangelicals' embrace of racism, Trump, and homophobia, McCammon finds herself wondering:

That made me think about my own parents, and [other] parents... How do you weigh someone's "good intentions" against the pain their actions cause? And when is it okay to be furious?

She sees child abuse in the strict parenting enjoined by evangelical leaders. She meets people who've left these faith byways -- the exvangelicals of the title -- who are recovering from religious trauma arising from apocalyptic vistas of Hell and a Last Judgment. Therapists report that an upbringing in this religious culture results in people who can never feel safe. However

... leaving conservative evangelicalism means giving up the security of silencing some of life's most vexing and anxiety-inducing questions with a set of "answers" -- about the purpose of life, human origins, and what happens after death. It means losing an entire community of people who could once be relied on to help celebrate weddings and new babies, organize meal trains when you're sick or bereaved, and provide a built-in network of support and socialization around a shared set of expectations and ideals.

It's often felt, for me, like a choice between denying my deepest instincts about truth and morality to preserve the community, or being honest with myself and the rest of the world.

In this "wilderness," she finds new community among other exvangelicals. She reports that many reach a sort of truce with parents and other relatives who think they are going to Hell: they just avoid conversation.

There's a lot my own parents and I don't talk about, that we can't talk about. When we have tried over the years, the conversations inevitably end in misunderstandings, tears, and an everwidening distance. They spent years building a world for me that was intended to protect my spiritual safety and warning me not to leave it, only for me to feel anything but safe inside.

She goes on:

... Like so many exvangelicals I've spent much of my adult life slowly crawling away, trying to hang on to something for dear life, often feeling like a wrecked -- or shipwrecked -- soul, swimming for solid ground. Even now in middle age, nearly two decades out of that world, the nightmares still haunt me, as they do so many others. ...

... the evangelical impulse -- the idea that "people need the Lord," that we have been given a unique understanding of the Truth about the most complex questions about reality, and which we must impose through persuasion or coercion -- has never made much sense to me when I survey the complexities of the world, and the diversity of experiences and points of view. Even worse, that way of thinking seems to be at the root of so many evils that have been perpetuated throughout human history by religious fundamentalists and other extremist ideologues. I fear the same impulse is currently laying the groundwork for irreparable harm in our country and the world, and I fear that some of the people I have known and loved, and who've loved me, are being persuaded to aid and abet that evil.

... what mission can I subscribe to in good conscience, as an exvangelical? ... Grandpa noted that the purpose of life was something Jesus had also worried about. His advice was simple, even biblical: help others.

I'll give a plot point away here: it helps to have a gay non-believing grandfather.

This is a complicated, horrifying, and impressive book; highly recommended.

On the well organized perversion of Christian attachments

For too long now America's Christian nationalist movement has been misunderstood and underestimated. Most Americans continue to see it as a cultural movement centered on a set of social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, preoccupied with symbolic conflicts over monuments and prayers. But the religious right has become more focused and powerful even as it is arguably less representative. It is not a social or cultural movement. It is a political movement, and its ultimate goal is power.

Five years ago, Katherine Stewart published her exploration of the movement infrastructure of Christian nationalist right, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.

The book is a tour of that infrastructure, built, in Stewart's telling, by power hungry political entrepreneurs out of a culturally narrow -- and very white -- religiosity.

The Christian nationalist movement is not a grassroots movement. Understanding its appeal to a broad mass of American voters is necessary in explaining its strength but it is not sufficient in explaining the movement's direction. It is a means through which a small number of people -- quite a few of them residing in the Washington, D.C., area -- harness the passions, resentments, and insecurities of a large and diverse population in their own quest for power. ... From the perspective of the movement's leadership, vast numbers of America's conservative churches have been converted into the loyal cells of a shadow political party ...

Stewart seems to have had little difficulty infiltrating and observing the components of the movement. She reports on clergy trainings where Protestant pastors are taught how to mobilize their flocks to vote and work for the most wackadoodle Republicans, those who seek to repel "the humanists" and "the homosexual agenda."  

She visits megachurch leaders who make a very good living out of preaching intolerance and organizing for their own power. 

She adopts Randall Balmer's thesis that outlawing abortion became a central issue for Christian nationalists because their real beef -- racially segregated schools denied federal funding -- didn't sell as well.

Stewart reports her own experience of heavy bleeding while pregnant with a wanted child, being transported to a Catholic hospital, being left to hemorrhage alone on a gurney until she went into shock, and only being given a necessary abortion to save her life when she had lost 40 percent of her blood. This was long before Dobbs -- Catholic doctrine has long readily dictated what became a pillar of a broader Christian nationalism.
 
She introduces readers to disciples of the fascist monarchist R.J. Rushdoony who gave the movement a pseudo-intellectual gloss.

Perhaps the most obvious paradox of Christian nationalism is that it preaches love but everywhere practices intolerance, even hate. Like Rushdoony the man, members of the movement are often kind in person. They love and care for their children, volunteer in their communities, and establish long friendships -- and then they seek to punish those who are different.

The Christian nationalist movement has made up and adopted a dense false story of the United States, propagated by an unqualified charlatan of history named David Barton. This fanciful hash undergirds their anti-democratic aspirations. Most likely our crackpot Supreme Court justices get their "originalist" notions of the American past from this current.

This is all convincingly reported, fluidly written journalism about some of the scariest people now in the MAGA fascist base.

I had issues with some of Stewart's framing. She treats the mechanics of how Christian nationalist leaders activate their followers as a kind of conspiracy. Trainings in messaging and how-tos for activism are always the stuff of getting groups of people moving for collective power. This is very American. As a community and electoral organizer myself, I see movement techniques as simply how you get a lot of people engaged and effectual. But for Stewart, as perhaps for most Americans, the process is novel. Since she loathes and fears Christian nationalist ends, she slides easily into seeing organizing methods as simply evil plots.

Some of this book feels a little dated after only five hard years of MAGA. But it is still a smart window into white Christian nationalism and we only need more such understanding today.

This is not a Christian nation

If it were, neither of these tidbits from mainstream media would have been considered necessary explanation by their editors. I trust my many Christian readers will find these as horrifying, yet also humorous, as I did.

A bipartisan push in Congress to enact a law cracking down on antisemitic speech on college campuses has prompted a backlash from far-right lawmakers and activists, who argue it could outlaw Christian biblical teachings. ...

... in trying to use the issue as a political cudgel against the left, Republicans also called attention to a rift on the right. Some G.O.P. members said they firmly believe that Jews killed Jesus Christ, and argued that the bill — which includes such claims in its definition of antisemitism — would outlaw parts of the Bible. 

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, said she opposed the bill because it “could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the Gospel that says Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews.” -- New York Times

This one is even more reflective of our times; TPM readers are -- correctly I think -- assumed to need cultural education to understand why many Christians might indulge in antisemitism. Hence these explanatory paragraphs:

Christ, who Christians revere as the son of God, was a Jewish religious figure who lived in the ancient Roman province of Judaea, which was largely located in what is currently Israel and the Palestinian territories. His teachings and growing following caused tensions with the established Roman and Jewish religious leaders in the province. Christ was ultimately crucified in the first century by the province’s Roman governor, Pontius Pilate.

While some Jewish religious leaders and people in the province urged on the crucifixion, it was ordered by the Roman leader. The Christian Bible also describes many Jews who were distressed by Christ’s execution. -- Talking Points Memo

This country has come a long way toward genuine pluralism. We Christians are some among many. It's on that basis that I can like this country. Antisemitic loosely Bible-derived beliefs are dangerous to humanity. It's part of our job to combat the wackadoodles in our own tribe.

Where is Christian nationalism?

The title here is really a secondary question. I should probably start from the framing question: "what is Christian nationalism?" 

The progressive side of our culture is amply supplied with sociological punditry,  historians of religion, and political scientists offering definitions of what has become a signal feature of our American times.

For today's purposes, I think I can go with a succinct definitoin from the (relatively) broad-minded U.S. evangelical publication, Christianity Today.

What is Christian nationalism?

Christian nationalism is the belief that the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way. Popularly, Christian nationalists assert that America is and must remain a “Christian nation”—not merely as an observation about American history, but as a prescriptive program for what America must continue to be in the future.

With that in mind,  I can go to the related question here: Where is Christian nationalism?

Click to enlarge.

The Public Religion Research Institute came up with some answers recently, mapped here. Yes, the darker greens look a lot like one of those red state/blue state maps, though with slight nuances -- who'd have thought New Mexico had more Christian nationalists than Utah? Still the general picture is familiar.

But Pastor Daniel Schultz -- a United Church of Christ minister -- who has been trying to explain religious peoples' engagement with politics for a couple of decades, has some interesting takes on this map: 

Christian nationalism should not be ignored or downplayed, but at the same time the segment of the population that embraces it is punching above its weight. Two states—Mississippi and North Dakota—reach 50% support, and only a handful land in the 40s. The rest of the nation ranges from the teens to the mid-30s. That’s a significant minority, to be sure, but a minority all the same. ...

That Christian nationalists are in a solid minority in places like Ohio, Texas, or Florida also demonstrates the perilous position of hard-right regimes in such states. Were it not for gerrymandering and other anti-democratic tactics, their agenda would be firmly rejected. To put things another way: there are a lot more places that could be opened up as swing states on the basis of rejecting Christian nationalism than the other way around.

... it may be the case that, much as it was before the Civil War, Americans are facing a theological reckoning as much as a political crisis. 

On the one side is an aging, dwindling group that asserts that its understanding of God blesses and endorses a traditionalist social order. 

On the other is a more diverse, more secular group suspicious of authoritarian faith and the ways in which invocations of religious values privilege inequality and repression.

The 2024 campaign will be finally [?] a decision about which of these views should dominate and which candidate gives the best expression to authentic American values.

Dan has always been in the optimism business. I find it hard to share his vision that a defeat for Christian nationalism in the 2024 campaign will get us over some kind of hump, but he's right to remind us we're up against a force that is dwindling.

We like IVF and many medical fertility interventions

It turns out that availability of In Vitro Fertility offerings is so popular that even Donald Trump is running away as fast as he can scamper from the decision by Alabama judicial theocrats that frozen 7-cell embryos are people.

Alabama U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville is merely confused. I suspect he's backtracked, but this was his first reaction.

“Yeah, I was all for it. We need to have more kids, we need to have an opportunity to do that, and I thought this was the right thing to do.”

All forms of medical assistance with fertility are very popular. In 2020, Republicans knew this:

The polling on IVF is such that even former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway advised Republicans to support the procedure. As Alice Ollstein wrote in Politico, polling from Conway’s firm found:

86 percent of all respondents supported access to IVF, with 78 percent support among self-identified “pro-life advocates” and 83 percent among Evangelical Christians.

According to Pew, a very substantial number of us have direct experience of or proximity to various fertility treatments. This is not rare. Or cheap as the data suggest.

Click to enlarge.

Research describes a general, global decline in fertility. 

Over the past half-century, the world has witnessed a steep decline in fertility rates in virtually every country on Earth. This universal decline in fertility is being driven by increasing prosperity largely through the mediation of social factors, the most powerful of which are the education of women and an accompanying shift in life’s purpose away from procreation.

In addition, it is clear that environmental and lifestyle factors are also having a profound impact on our reproductive competence particularly in the male where increasing prosperity is associated with a significant rise in the incidence of testicular cancer and a secular decline in semen quality and testosterone levels.

On a different timescale, we should also recognize that the increased prosperity associated with the demographic transition greatly reduces the selection pressure on high fertility genes by lowering the rates of infant and childhood mortality.

Whether this seems a good or bad thing often depends on whether you are or care about women in poor countries. 

In all this discussion of mediated fertility, something that gets lost is the role of medical interventions which enable LGBTQ+ folks to have children. It's substantial, as I know from living in my queer community. The judicial theocrats wouldn't like that either.