I am sorry to have to acknowledge that Sinclair Lewis did not say—not in It Can’t Happen Here or in other works on similar themes—that “when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” He and others did express similar predictions, and the saying itself loses none of its prophetic value as an orphan. Our domestic variety of right-wing tyrannical impulses is inevitably associated with the fundamentalist and evangelical sects of Christianity, thanks to our long history, going back to the earliest days of British colonization, of that religion’s absolutists. The Puritans did not come here to practice religious freedom, but instead to be the persecutors, and their descendants have been with us ever since—at times, as now, in tension and coalition with what we today refer to as libertarians. Though contemporary libertarians have made peace with the fundamentalists by agreeing that government is a tool to repress the liberties of anyone who is not white, straight, gender-conforming, and capitalist.
As an illustration of what I am describing there, I submit for your consideration one Ben Zeisloft, formerly of The Daily Wire and current editor-in-chief of The Sentinel and contributor to other right-wing publications. In a tweet on the 9th of March, he declared, “I have no problem forcing my beliefs on others. Because I am a Christian.” He fills out the details of this by listing various freedoms that he would like to criminalize: abortion, “sodomy,” birth control and in vitro fertilization, no-fault divorce, and what he calls the “separation of God and state,” distinguishing that from a separation of church and state only because churches and governments have distinct duties to his particular god. He concludes this airing of grievances with a warning that “because I am a Christian, if you continue in your rebellion, I will love my neighbors and honor my God by calling on the state to protect their lives and our civilization from your madness.”
I do like it when my enemies choose not to obfuscate their positions. We may as well have our conflicts in the open—though I do not repudiate guerrilla tactics in the sort of war that he is calling for here. But at least there is no confusion about the two sides: I am against just about everything that he is for in that tweet. (I have reservations about in vitro fertilization, considering that eight billion of us largely through natural means is more than current technology on this planet can sustain, but his objection that this “disregard[s] the image of God in man” is not mine.)
In a following tweet, he explains that “By the way, all of civil government is about forcing beliefs about morality on others. I prefer true Christian morality over degenerate Pagan morality. There are no other options.”
As clarifying as binary choices are, that particular dichotomy is false. Yes, there are genuinely pagan moral systems, though since they are humanity’s original thoughts on the subject, being the moralities of the tribes who live close to the land, they are not degenerate—i.e., not a falling away from perfection, but instead a first flowering. But there has also been much polytheistic moral thought that was the resident of societies built around cities. On the subcontinent of India, the gods appear to be many, but they merge into a monist vision of God as the whole of reality, moral questions included. And then there are the secular moralities that have been the de facto standard in the West since the Enlightenment.
That latter fact is the primary source of my opposition to what Zeisloft advocates. We each ought to be free to practice whatever organizing principles work best in our individual understandings of the meaning of life, but as a community, we have to meet and interact on common ground. His goal is the conquest of the entirety. Mine is the freedom to live my life and the agreement to cooperate with others on achieving more than I can by myself.
There is no space between Zeisloft’s Christian Nationalism here and the fascism of the 1930s. He has not yet donned a uniform with a belt buckle that reads, “Gott mit uns,” and marched to civil war, but 1939 has the force of the preceding years pressing it into its chosen conclusion, and there are enough American fascists, enough of the cross-and-flag types, to be an existential threat to liberal democracy.
As I contemplate the firearms that I have acquired with my Curio and Relic license, including now a Walther P38 and a Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken Luger, I am reminded of how bad the world can get under the kind of regime that those pistols represent—though the Walther is a post-World War II model and the Luger was manufactured during the Weimar period. And a fascist government with nuclear weapons is exactly the kind of horror that spurred America to bring nuclear weapons into existence in the first place. A modern American fascism would be far more a danger to the people of this country and the world. I do fear that fascists like Zeisloft will require the United States to go through the sort of restructuring that Germany and Japan experience in the 1940s if we are ever to secure liberal democracy as the undisputed organizing principle of our society, but I would very much like to avoid that if possible.
The question before us all is how many will stand up against Christian Nationalists such as Zeisloft. If there are enough of us, we can smile at scared little boys of his type when they are merely obnoxious and lock them up when they venture into violence against their fellow human beings.
If there are not enough of us to stop the looming civil war, we had better be prepared to win it.
I live in an area of Virginia that is the birthplace of modern home schooling and has as a major Protestant church in town that is mega and also MAGA. I have neighbors that go to this church and home school their kids. They are truly nice people and neighbors who would not think twice about helping in an emergency or just as neighbors do. But I wonder ( and I'm sure you know what I wonder ) if our worst fears that our political division became active and violent, which side of the line they would choose to be on. I wonder if we are living in Bosnia in 1991. I can't think of anything worse short of an successful take over by a fascist dictatorship.