What Would Nellis Say?

Theocracy in America

By Rick Stiller

 

Millions of devout people of faith live their religions every day, treat neighbor and stranger with kindness and empathy, and value and protect the blessings of this Earth. Those of you, who adhere to that form of religion, do not condone or participate in the bigotry and hate that are the foundations of the MAGA fake-“Christian” cult about which I write in this article.

 

It isn’t often that MAGA Republicans utter truths but when they do, Americans should pay attention because they are broadcasting their intention to dismantle our democracy and replace it with an extreme white “Christian” nationalist dictatorship.

 

Jack Posobiec is an alt-right anti-Semitic white-supremist, a former correspondent for One America News, and a rabid and outspoken Trump supporter. He is also a propagator of the infamous “Pizzagate” conspiracy that claimed that Hillary Clinton and Democratic Party officials were involved in a child-sex trafficking ring with youngsters being held in the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor. One MAGA moron believed the hype and invaded the restaurant brandishing an automatic weapon to “save the children” but found no basement, no children, and no conspiracy. 

 

That ‘Jack Posobiec’ declared from the stage at this year’s CPAC gathering, “Welcome to the end of democracy! We’re here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6th, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this here.” He held a crucifix in the air, “That’s right, because all glory is not to government, all glory to God.”

 

The MAGA crowd clapped and cheered before he continued, “We are here in the swamp, to drain the swamp and eventually to raze the swamp to the ground and create the new American republic on its ashes!”

 

What he and many other speakers at this year’s meeting were talking about is the implementation of what they believe to be God’s mandate that white conservative “Christians” take stewardship of the nation to incorporate Biblical laws into all political, judicial, and cultural institutions (based on a fragment of Genesis 1:28 where God grants humanity dominion over the Earth).

 

By instituting a Theocratic state through Christian reconstruction, ancient Biblical laws would reform and replace our democratic institutions, our educational systems, and our social hierarchy and interactions.

 

Christian reconstructionist Rousas Rushdoony, who espouses social order based on archaic laws that governed the Israelites in the Old Testament, wrote, “Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies” and “Christianity is completely and radially anti-democratic, it is committed to spiritual aristocracy.”

 

According to Dominion Theology’s Seven Mountains Mandate, Christians must occupy and control every secular institution including government, education, media, arts and entertainment, religion, family, and business. It seeks to place Christians and only Christians into all the influential positions in our society.

 

Journalist Frederick Clarkson wrote, “The distinguishing mark of a Dominionist is a commitment to penetrating and transforming public life by defining and carrying out an approach to building a society that is self-consciously defined as exclusively Christian, and dependent specifically on the work of Christians, rather than based on a broader consensus.”

 

We are seeing evidence of their efforts to dominate every facet of our lives in the cascading fallout from the Dobbs Decision by a Supreme Court packed with “Christian” extremists, granting individual states the right to pass draconian legislation outlawing abortion with few if any exceptions, including rape, incest, or saving the life of the mother. Courts are considering employing the Comstock Act of 1873 to restrict transporting abortion medications across state lines (and you know birth control will be included in that mandate after the 2024 elections). 

 

Chief Justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court and radical “Christian”, Tom Parker wrote that, “Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His images as an affront to Himself,” in ruling that life begins at the moment of conception when two cells join to form an embryo whether in the mother’s womb or in a petri dish. That decision ended the hope of in vitro fertilization for thousands of families in the state. 

 

Missouri, a state with an absolute ban on abortion, recently passed a law that prevents a pregnant woman from getting a divorce. Current bills being considered in Arkansas, Texas, Kentucky, and South Carolina specifically reference homicide charges for abortion. The right to agency over your own body and the decision to have or not have children will soon be replaced by the vote of your “Christian” legislature or a decision by a radically “Christian” judge.

 

Public education curriculum is being fundamentally transformed to exclude scientific theories like how the universe developed over the past 13.5 billion years (some “Christians” insist that it is only 12,000 years old) and Darwin’s theory of evolution. History books are being re-written to hide historical facts that might make white children uncomfortable about the sins of their ancestors (i.e. the Civil War, the Trail of Tears, or confining every Japanese-American in concentration camps during World War II). Truth is being replaced by idolizing the accomplishments of white men and diminishing or ignoring the contributions of minorities and immigrants. Classic and controversial books are being banned and publicly burned and librarians are being terrorized for sharing knowledge by tiny groups of self-appointed “Christian” censors. 

 

We should mention the radicalization of millions of Americans who have been brainwashed by the lies and misinformation being transmitted by Fox and all the other extreme media networks every hour of every day. (Please don’t call them news networks. They aren’t.) 

 

That propaganda includes an ongoing campaign to demonize LGBTQ citizens (Tennessee’s Republican Governor Lee recently signed a bill allowing public officials to refuse to perform same-sex marriages) and specifically Transgender people, supporting legislation to outlaw access to medical treatment and therapy, and defending violent attacks against individuals for being who they are. After sixteen-year old non-binary student Nex Benedict died after a brutal attack in a high school bathroom, Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s State Superintendent of Education said, without sympathy or condolences, “There’s not multiple genders, there’s two. That’s how God created us.” 

 

The First Amendment to the Constitution reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” But one of the pillars of Dominionism is that it is exclusively “Christianity” for white people and dedicated to basing our government and legal system on tenets from the Old Testament, which would require the establishment of a supreme national religion and the disenfranchisement of all other faiths. 

 

Members of the tiny minority of radical conservatives, who are blocking all legislation in the House of Representatives, all claim to be devout “Christians”. Speaker Mike Johnson espouses his belief that women should be subservient to white men and says that anyone who wants to understand his motivations should refer to the Bible. His rationale in blocking any and all legislation is not solely based on his religious beliefs but rather his slavish devotion to Donald Trump, who is being touted as the second coming of Christ by the “Christian” right, despite convictions of rape and illegal business practices, and trying to overthrow a free and fair election that he lost.

 

While incarcerated for his first attempt to overthrow the German government, Adolf Hitler wrote and published Mein Kampf, the first edition of his dark vision for the future of Germany, blaming the Jews, Communists, and Social Democrats for the economic collapse that the nation endured after losing World War One. His autobiography is packed with grievances against the Parliamentary system of the Weimar Republic (which he literally had burned to the ground) and he accused Jews of undermining the German state and polluting the blood of the Aryan race, which justified the eventual systematic extermination of millions.

 

After Trump lost the election in 2020, the Koch Brothers cabal invested more than twenty million dollars in the Heritage Foundation production of a thousand page playbook that lays out each step to institute Dominionism as the philosophical basis for replacing our democratic government. They published Project 2025 online and it only takes a few pages to realize how terrifying their intentions are. This is Mein Kampf on steroids and the MAGA-Koch conspiracists are publicly committed to fulfilling those plans.

 

Starting in the late 1950s, the audacious tyranny of a tiny hateful affluent American minority financed a relentless campaign to install the “Laws of God” in place of democracy. They have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams and the future of real “freedom of religion” and the nation could well be determined in the coming election.

 

The only problem with all of this is that less than twenty percent of American citizens actually share these extreme beliefs. Which means that the rest of us adhere to other belief systems based on something more substantial than cherry-picked slivers of Biblical writings that support the skewed detestable moral agenda of bigots and racists.

 

We have the power to change the course of history, to defend our democracy for future generations, to put the genie back in the bottle before it has a chance to thoroughly overwhelm and subjugate our society with hate and division. That will only happen if moderates from both parties join together to end this siege on our history and our future by defending all that we, as a people united, stand for.