Christian Nationalism: Parallel Reality, Parallel Institutions
The March, 2007 issue of Freethought Today carries a speech from Michelle Goldberg delivered at the 29th annual convention of the Freedom From Religion Foundation:
Christian Nationalism has created a kind of parallel reality. While, say, the mainstream has the American Bar Association, Christian Nationalism has the Federalist Society. It has its version of the ACLU, and the Alliance Defence Fund and Liberty Legal. It has its own universities. It has its own medical institutions, such as the Medical Institute for Sexual Health which exists to promote the idea that abstinence education is the best way to prevent teenage pregnancies and STDs, and which claims that condoms promote promiscuity. It has the Discovery Institute, which promotes intelligent design and masquerades as a legitimate scientific organization. ...
All of this is very funny until you start seeing this parallel reality intruding on what we used to just call reality. Its important to note that the people behind this movement are not stupid, and they know what they're doing. They very much had an idea from the beginning of undermining the Enlightenment. What they're opposed to is not just the teaching of evolution, not just attempts to keep the Ten Commandments out of courthouses. What they're fundamentally opposed to is the idea that you can understand reality or make decisions about how to operate in a world without reference to divine revelation.
Michelle Goldberg is right to point out the importance of this phenomenon, but I wouldn't use the term "parallel reality." This term carries with it to me, at least the connotation that Christian Nationalists are trying to create an "alternate reality" in which the normal laws of nature aren't accepted or don't operate. To some extent this is arguably true because there are ways in which Christian Right organizations try to deny the genuine reality in favor of their ideology their insistence on "abstinence only" sex education is a prime example of this.
The problems and dangers here go much further than mere denial of reality, however. Studies of the history of fascist movements reveal that an important factor in their ability to assume control of society was their ability to first create parallel organizations and social structures. Mirroring other basic institutions which the rest of society took for granted meant that fascist movements were able to quickly replace people, offices, and even entire institutions with their own ideologically pure members without missing a beat. This ensured a minimal transition time from a liberal state into a repressive fascist state.
In The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert O. Paxton discusses this feature of successful fascist movements in the context of Nazi Germany:
One device used by fascist parties, but also by Marxist revolutionaries who have given serious thought to the conquest of power, was parallel structures. An outsider party that wants to claim power sets up organizations that replicate government agencies. The Nazi Party, for example, had its own foreign policy agency that, at first, soon after the party had achieved power, had to share power with the traditional Foreign Office.
After its head, Joachim von Ribbentrop, became foreign minister in 1938, the party's foreign policy office increasingly supplanted the professional diplomats of the Foreign Office. A particularly important fascist "parallel organization" was the party police. Fascist parties that aspired to power tended to use their party militias to challenge the state's monopoly of physical force.
The fascist parties' parallel structures challenged the liberal state by claiming that they were capable of doing some things better (bashing communists, for Instance). After achieving power, the party could substitute its parallel structures for those of the state.
It's certainly possible to create new institutions that represent legitimate alternatives to existing ones but for this to be the case, these new institutions would have to exist for the same basic purposes as the existing ones, even if they were created to make up for some perceived deficiencies. Key to understanding the nature of these parallel (as opposed to merely alternative) institutions is recognizing that their goals and methods are entirely driven by ideology, not neutral principles.
The police exist as a public institution for the neutral application of neutral laws; fascist party police existed to misuse police powers for the sake of enforcing party orthodoxy and repressing political opponents. Scientific foundations exist for the advancement of neutral scientific principles and research; organizations like the Discovery Institute exist for the sake of advancing religious and ideological goals in the guise of scientific language.
Although some might balk at direct comparisons between America's Christian Nationalists and the Nazi Party, we must remember that Christian Nationalist leaders have made it explicit that their ultimate goal is to dominate first America and then the entire planet. In the same speech as above, Michelle Goldberg quotes the book The Changing of the Guard: Biblical Principles for Political Action by George Grant:
Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ, to have dominion in civil structures just as in every other aspect of life and godliness. But it is dominion we are after, not just a voice. It is dominion we are after, not just influence. It is dominion we are after, not just equal time. It is dominion we are after. World conquest, that's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel, and we must never settle for anything less.
Thus Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land, of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the kingdom of Christ.
If any political party issued such a statement, they'd be widely denounced. If a Muslim group in America made such a statement, you can be that conservative pundits would be falling all over themselves to complain about Islam and the need for greater restrictions on Muslims in order to fight the "War on Terror." Because Christians are the ones advocating these totalitarian goals, though, no one seems to have anything negative to say. What isn't Fox "News" raising the alarm about Christo-Fascists?
What freethinkers and skeptics need to recognize here is not simply that some Christian Nationalists have what appear to be totalitarian goals nor that Christian Nationalism, as a movement, has developed parallel social institutions. What we need to do is stop looking at these facts in isolation and begin to put them together in order to understand what's ultimately going on in the background. It would be a mistake to assume that all of these facts are completely isolated and unconnected.
Dominion is what these Christian Nationalists are after, a concept which usually goes by the title "theocracy." The sort of dominion these Christian Nationalists are after would be quite similar to the sort of dominion which the Nazis established in Germany. Public institutions would become supplanted by the parallel organizations already up and running, thus providing the theocrats with the ability to quickly dominate broad sections of society. Courts, police, and civil bureaucracies would be redirected from enforcing neutral principles of law into the enforcement of Christian Nationalists' religious ideology.
Opponents and dissenters would be quickly silenced there's no sense in given them "equal time," after all. Christian Nationalists are convinced that they are "acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator," so what need is there to give any voice to those who oppose the Will of God? It's not just institutions which Christian Nationalists intend to conquer, but people as well all of us who dare to disagree.
Read more criticisms of theocracy and defenses of church/state separation at the Blog Against Theocracy.
Comments
Well put, Austin. One source of optimism, for me at least, has been that the Christian Nationalists are, while organized and dedicated, also generally prone to incompetence. Look at the Administration. They pack the desks with Regent grads, who lack a real grip of the world and when called out have no idea what to do when not protected by their cloister.
Not that I don’t think they want to eliminate a lifelong athiest like myself. This is a war on Christmas, all right.
Love the C.N. label. I’ll be using that one.
>>One device used by fascist parties, but also by Marxist revolutionaries who have given serious thought to the conquest of power, was parllel structures.
It is also a common feature of anarchist propaganda, even though anarchists seek the destruction of political power rather than its conquest. We call it ‘dual power’ or ‘building the new society in the shell of the old’.