Op-Ed: We Need to Talk About Christian Supremacists

Not All Christians – but Christian Extremists – Are Distorting Christianity and Putting Us All in Danger

The fight for Christian supremacy is going to kill us all. 

More specifically, white, Evangelical, Christian supremacy. 

Think back to our country’s founding and every major progressive – or regressive – event since then. Slavery. Women’s Suffrage. Prohibition. Jim Crow. Reproductive Rights. LGBTQ rights. Healthcare. Behind every battle fought – whether it was won or lost – there were Evangelical Christian supremacists fighting to ensure their religious beliefs were held high and more prominent than any others.  

It’s nothing new – the Holy Roman Empire, the Crusades, the Inquisition, and Colonialism were all variations on the same theme: “Our” approach to the world is the only one worth protecting, and everything “you” believe is disgusting and should be banned. It’s all a variation on Christian supremacy. 

Whether they be called Evangelical, Orthodox, or simply devout, Christian supremacists hold a near-universal inability to separate their theological beliefs from their beliefs on civil governance. They can’t tell the difference between the government and their religion, because in their minds, the role of the government is to act as an instrument of their spiritual and moral philosophy.  

I was once told by a real live person that Jesus had a hand in writing the Declaration of Independence and Alabama’s Bigot-in-Chief Roy Moore once said the First Amendment doesn’t apply to non-Christian religions because America is a Christian nation. 

While both of those examples are extreme, we see more moderate versions of the same ideology every day. Anytime you hear someone say “America was founded on Biblical principles” or invoke the phrase “Judeo-Christian,” what they’re really saying is, “Christianity is the one true theology, and you don’t belong here if you disagree.”

(For the record there’s no such thing as Judeo-Christian anything. It’s a meaningless phrase that rose to popularity in the 1940s so Evangelical Christians – Christian supremacists – could try to gain cover from Jews for their racism and false morality. It didn’t work, and it’s considered anti-Semitic today.)

And the fight for Christian supremacy is showing its ugly face this week in the fight to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare and the push for the much-rumored “religious liberty” executive order.  

Each of these actions can be boiled down to the fight Christian supremacy. They’re both ways of saying that only those who adhere to a specific set of values deserve to live in freedom.  

If you believe you have a right to control your own body – you’re not welcome here. 

If you believe you have a right to live in peace and security with the person you love or as the person you are – you’re not welcome here.

And if you believe that religious institutions are not arms of the government, this is the wrong country for you.

These initiatives, whether they’re about healthcare or religious refusal are about elevating their version of Christianity above all other religions. And this week’s latest act, which will effectively turn churches into PACs, will give them political power unlike anything we’ve seen since this country’s founding.  

Evangelical Christians can’t fathom a world in which their spiritual, moral, and religious beliefs aren’t the most important and safeguarded values. They can’t imagine living in a society in which people of all belief systems are equally valued and all values are safeguarded. They truly believe, with all of their heart, that their beliefs are superior to all others, and for that and that alone, they should be protected to a higher degree than everyone else. For Evangelical Christians, the mere fact that someone has an opposing thought is an intrusion on their freedom. 

Evangelical Christian supremacists have been the single most dangerous threat to our democracy – and it looks like they’re not stopping any time soon. 

Follow Robbie Medwed on Twitter: @rjmedwed

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Image by Art4TheGlryOfGod by Sharon via Flickr and a CC license