What does government oppression really look like?
You don't have to look far.
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One of the most popular and profitable grifts in the world of the religious right and MAGA is the production of propaganda to convince Christians that they are horribly discriminated against, or even oppressed, by the government and government funded entities.
Perhaps the best known example of this is the “God’s Not Dead” series of movies, and the latest instance is the movie “By Dawn’s Early Light,” which promotes the findings of Trump’s Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias.
The central narrative of these white (frequently southern) Christians is that they are the real victims in the story of American history. This builds on their belief that their ancestors were the victims of the Civil War, rather than the people they enslaved and fought to keep enslaved.
This victimhood narrative is central to their identity. But it also raises the question: would they recognize what actual oppression looks like?
History has some awful examples of governmental oppression of groups before the victims of it are carted off to “re-education” centers, labor camps, or simply dragged into a field and shot. Let’s take those historic examples and imagine them happening to Christians, and see if they line up with anything happening in the US today.
“End Christian insanity forever”
Let’s start with universities and schools eliminating all material relating to Christians and Christianity.
Christian teachers and professors would be forced out of their positions by a variety of means, and at a minimum are barred from even alluding to their faith, including the wearing of crosses. Laws banning Christians from using public facilities used by non-Christians means that a Christian teacher has to leave campus to go to the bathroom, effectively forcing them out of the profession. Parents’ groups and social media influencers storm school board meetings and send constant death threats to push Christian instructors out of classrooms.
At the same time, the government passes laws that would prohibit any federal funding from schools and universities that allow any mention of the Bible or Christianity on campus, including banning students from receiving loans to attend institutions that violate this edict. Christian students are banned from meeting on campus, and school officials are prohibited from taking action when Christian students are harassed or beaten, because the position of the government is that there is no such thing as a Christian student.
Christians would also largely be forced out of the workplace, by laws declaring that the comfort of non-Christians outweighs the needs of Christians (who don’t exist as citizens). Thus, Christians are banned from using bathrooms, pools, and any other facility that might be used by non-Christians, and employers are not required to provide alternate facilities for a group of people that does not exist, per government policy. The result is that most Christians are forced to work from home, or only for themselves.
The government isn’t subtle about their intent to eradicate Christianity either. The self-proclaimed dictator promises to “end Christian insanity forever.” Government aligned actors tell cheering audiences that they will eradicate Christian ideology from public life. Government officials make banning circumcision their number one talking point and accuse every Christian of mutilating children and conspiring to rape “good” non-Christian women.
The incumbent party uses Christians as a rhetorical device: a symbol of everything wrong with the country, that can only be fixed by elimination of them and their beliefs. Christians themselves are portrayed as disgusting, weak, but dangerous perverts who will destroy the nation and the people if they are not eradicated first.
The courts would strip Christians of even their most basic protections, ruling that Christianity is a choice and not protected by the first amendment, and therefore subject to only rational basis scrutiny. This allows the government to implement virtually any law or policy targeting Christians to pass constitutional muster, so long as it can offer an excuse of any sort. Laws and policies targeting Christians would pass at the state and federal level by the hundreds at a rate that would make post-Reconstruction Jim Crow laws look slow.
The government would declare that “Christian ideology” is one of the most dangerous terrorism threats facing the country, and use this excuse for enhanced surveillance. It begins raiding churches and using the courts to subpoena all their records to build government lists of known Christians. Every time a Christian commits a crime it is national news, and government media runs stories on it every hour for days. Calls for disarming Christians grow. There are also increasing demands to declare them mentally incompetent and dangerous for believing in supernatural beings that control everything.
Christians are banned from the military under the auspices of keeping “mental defectives” out. They are ruthlessly hunted down using government lists, and discharged with papers that ensure they will never hold a job in national security ever again. The hearings for Christian troops are a sham where no one is allowed to challenge the legality of the order, the evidence against them, call witnesses, or conduct cross-examinations. There is only one possible outcome, despite many of the troops having fought and bled for their country. The Overcommander of the Military constantly makes speeches mocking and deriding the Christians he is kicking out, but the courts do not consider this obvious animus relevant: the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment is effectively a dead letter for Christians.
The media dog-piles on Christians and Christianity as well. Nearly every mainstream media outlet runs hundreds of fear-mongering anti-Christian articles per year, because they generate clicks and the government grants them increased access as a perk for siding with them on the “Christian question.” Actual Christians are almost never interviewed for any of these articles, and pro-Christian materials that speak with self-identified Christians are limited to low budget Christian outlets that have very little reach and are banned at most libraries and universities anyway.
Christians would be cut off from medical care too. The government declares that no doctor, facility, or hospital will be eligible to receive federal funds if they treat Christians, leading to a “no Christians policy” with many medical providers and hospitals. Those few that still do will segregate Christian patients from the rest of the population. They are often treated with contempt, disgust, and outright neglect by staff.
Even entertainment is affected. Christians are banned from sports at all levels, all the way down to kindergartners and chess tournaments. (The government graciously allows them to have their own inferior leagues, however.) Christian content is deemed adult content or offensive and is largely banned from broadcast. Anything containing Christian content must carry a warning, and Christian performers are largely blacklisted. Media companies that violate this are threatened and punished economically by The Leader.
As conditions worsen and the government solidifies absolute power, Christians grow increasingly anxious. Many of them try to either move to friendlier areas of the country or flee abroad. But the governors of the friendlier areas of the country are largely unwilling to enforce laws protecting Christians. Nor are they interested in fighting a federal court system that has been effectively rigged.
Escaping the country is deliberately made more difficult. The government changes passport rules such that Christians are required to either legally renounce their faith or submit to having a “special” passport that identifies them as Christian. This rule comes at a time when most countries are unwilling to grant Christians asylum or refugee status, much less let them emigrate. For Christians, there is no escape from this new Reich: they can only pray that it expires before it makes them expire instead.
It’s happening here
None of it is happening to Christians in the United States. Nor is there any danger whatsoever of it happening in the United States ... to Christians. It is simply a paranoid fantasy that facilitates a victimhood mindset.
But all of this has happened before, in Germany between 1933 and 1938, and is happening right now. Every single action described above has been taken against transgender people in the United States and the UK. And who are the loudest, most influential voices supporting this actual oppression and discrimination? These same Christians who are convinced it being done to them.
It’s often written that straight men are afraid of gay men because they are afraid of being treated the way they treat women. Similarly, it seems that most American Christians are afraid of transgender people because they’re afraid of being treated they way they treated African Americans decades ago, and transgender people today.
That’s it for today
We’ll be back this afternoon with a new episode of the rebranded PN Pod (featuring co-cost Paul Waldman), and then tomorrow with a special Saturday edition of the newsletter.
Thanks for reading, and for your support.
 | A guest post by
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The victimhood grift has a better ROI than most venture portfolios. “God’s Not Dead” returned 30x on a $2 million budget. Someone is getting very rich selling white Southern Christians the feeling of being a Coptic Christian in Egypt, and they’re laughing all the way to a second beach house next to Trump’s Russian corrupt whore house in Florida.
The projection is the tell. Oppressors have never believed themselves the villain. The Confederacy didn’t think it was fighting for slavery, it thought it was fighting for survival. The through-line from 1861 to the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias isn’t hatred. It’s the unbroken narrative of besiegement, now with a federal imprimatur.
Tannehill’s checklist, banned from bathrooms, erased from curricula, stripped of legal personhood, medically abandoned, passport-marked, isn’t hypothetical. It’s a Tuesday. And the loudest voices warning about fascism in the abstract are building it in the specific, for a constituency so marinated in manufactured martyrdom it can’t see itself in the thing it’s constructing.
The cross was always a symbol of state execution. That it became the mascot for state power is either the darkest joke in Western history or the most predictable one.
Let’s face it, the USA looks completely and utterly F’ed!! It’s disgusting and my grandparents who all fought in WW2 against fascism would not recognize this freak show.
Johan 🐌
Chef’s kiss.