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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   4351 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 26, 2024

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I have a lot of (new, not classical) liberal friends and tend to trawl liberal and progressive-adjacent spaces on the internet. I’ve seen and heard an uptick in references to electing Trump leading to “white Christian fascism” or a “Christian fascist dictatorship”. It is those exact phrases.

I’ve tried to google the phrases and where this line of thought originated but the internet is awash in fascism-related commentary on Trump in general, none of it which specifically utilizes the exact phrase “white Christian fascism” or “Christian fascist dictatorship”. Would any of you have an idea of where this began?

In case you just hand wave to general news coverage, I should note that I do not read or watch mainstream news. I work in a policy-related position and tend to read (almost never watch) primarily trade-related publications with WSJ, FT, The Motte, and StupidPol forming the bulk of my general news sources.

I agree with the other commenters saying this is basically a left wing bogeyman, but I will say that Christian fascists absolutely do exist, see Stone Choir, Corey J. Mahler's substack and Twitter, and this one guy duking it out with the Lutheran Church Missouri-Synod (though he's more just Christian nationalist instead of dipping into the Hitler-was-right sort of thing). Obviously not huge, and if I didn't have a relative throwing this crap in my face, I would laugh at them and move on. Trump is pretty far from this kind of thing.

The steel-manned case is a telephoned pickup of "Christian nationalism," a small dissident-right movement that a lot of progressive and anti-right-wing media have picked up on as a major enemy du jour.

If you're looking for more in that vein, try searching for "Christian Dominionism" or "Dominion Theology". My impression is that this is a thing that only a handful of people actually believe in, but that it's been picked up by the left as a catchall umbrella term for many unrelated movements, to claim that everything involved is as extreme as this particular worst case scenario. (The parallels to "woke" are there, but it's not a precise match, as my impression is that most people whom the right calls "woke" will, if pushed, refuse to publicly denounce people and policies associated with "woke", but that this isn't the case for people whom the left calls "dominionist".)

"Christian fascism" with or without racial undertones is a perpetual progressive bogeyman and was thrown at George W. Bush as well. The gist of the idea, as far as I can tell, is that the republican party is running cover for some kind of weird hybrid of the KKK and Christian theocracy that's going to implement some kind of sharia-law-esque system with precursors disguised as your local evangelical megachurch. Older versions of the fever dream tended to have fantasias about this theocracy turning against Catholics, Jews, and sometimes completely random other groups, but that idea seems to have fallen out of favor recently with right-wing Catholics being integral to Trump's staffing plans and Jews turning towards the right with recent events.

Of course in reality the Christian right has functionally no religious test, anyone can visit an evangelical megachurch and report back that sharia law doesn't seem in development, and religious conservatism understands full well it's a junior partner to whatever the dominant faction in the republican coalition is at any given moment.

Why this idea is flaring up now is some combination of dobbs derangement and Trump looking extremely likely to win; historically the "Republicans are going to usher in a white supremacist fascist (often specifically evangelical protestant)Christian theocracy" rhetoric has been a response to an ascendant right wing.

I don’t know if I’ve come across that specific phrasing before, but the concept dates back to the 2016 campaign. You can, for example, find any number of ridiculous articles from 2016–2017 that compared Trump’s policy goals to The Handmaid’s Tale, several of which are linked to in the Wikipedia article on the show.

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