I’m not sure Americans really understand what we’re facing right now. I do.
I’ve spent most of the last thirty years as a local church pastor, much of that in megachurches in the Bible Belt. I’ve been shoulder to shoulder in ministry and in life with white Evangelicals; I’ve sat in Bible studies with them, served alongside them in staff meetings, attended hundreds of pastoral gatherings, eavesdropped on their conversations, and heard how they think and what drives them.
I need you to understand something:
Conservative white Evangelicals need to be stopped.
You might agree with me as a simple emotional reflex, but I want you to know precisely why; to comprehend the specific danger they present and the historic urgency of the moment.
The wholesale moral failure white Evangelicals have been guilty of over the past decades has been alarming, but you haven’t seen anything yet. It will get exponentially worse now that they have this unprecedented opportunity. As far as religious extremists go, they’re unmatched in their fervor, ferocity, and organization.
In vast numbers, in churches all over the country, these people have gradually but now completely lost the plot of their faith tradition, to the point that they now pose a human rights emergency to the rest of us.
They’ve long ago abandoned Jesus, discarded his compassion, and feel no obligation whatsoever to love their neighbors. Their Jesus-less Christianity runs entirely on malice, exclusion, and cruelty.
If allowed to continue to hold their death grip on all three branches of Government, Conservative Christians will render this nation unrecognizable. LGBTQ people, Muslims, women, people of color, immigrants, and non-Christians will never have equality under the law again.
This is not alarmist, sky-is-falling histrionics, or hyperbolic exaggeration; it is the clear and sober forecast from someone who knows these people better than anyone because he’s been on the inside.
Full-blown theocracy is the plan, and trust me when I tell you that we won’t recover from it if they are given greater power or prolonged influence. If we fail in opposing their Christo-fascist agenda both in the streets and at the polls, they will have a political power that will render every election null and void, and we will never have a voice again in our lifetimes.
Women will permanently lose autonomy over their own bodies and the right to vote.
LGBTQ people will have the right to marry and adopt taken away for good.
People of color will be fully squeezed out of the electoral process.
Immigrants will be denied access to opportunity and refuge here.
These are not creative projections; they are precisely what Evangelicals have repeatedly stated as their intentions, and they’re closer than they’ve ever been to having a rubber stamp.
We can still stop it, though.
We just need a unity and coordination that transcends theirs.
We need a sustained, passionate, dedicated defense of humanity that rivals their relentless assaults on it.
The sole option we have to save ourselves and generations of human beings is for all of us to move in concert, locally, on a state level, and nationally: Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, progressive Christians and humanists and Muslims and Atheists and Jews and Agnostics. We need to stop staying in our silos of individual activism and isolated impact and to nurture creative partnerships, build broad coalitions, and link arms with our disparate neighbors.
We’ve seen this play out throughout history, and we know how it ends. We know the horrors unchecked religious extremism can birth, and we know the cost of the silence and inaction of good people. We also know what human beings are capable of when they refuse to accept fascism and white supremacy cloaked in the Bible and wrapped in the flag, when they move en masse.
As someone who knows just how much these Christians have veered from their religion’s namesake, believe me when I tell you that they cannot be allowed to steer this nation any longer. It will not end well for the people who call it home or who one day wish to. It is unsustainable.
I wish more decent people in America remembered they are among the vast majority instead of acting as if they are helpless victims of Republican Christians. We could defeat them, we need to defeat them, and we will defeat them. We just need to stop lamenting how much damage they are doing and do something together to oppose them.
This is about the country we leave our children. It’s about our Constitution. It’s about the health of the planet. It’s about every cause you hold dear. It’s about the most elemental freedoms we have and deserve to keep.
These days are a pivot point in our history, and the Religious Right cannot be allowed to determine the path we take forward. These cultists are sold out for their hateful messiah of imagined grievance. They are experts at consolidating their power, and they will not allow morality or decency to restrict them.
As a former pastor and a father and a Christian and a citizen of the planet and a lover of humanity, I can’t make this any clearer:
White Evangelical Christians are the source of everything afflicting our nation: all of this violence, chaos, dehumanization, and suffering.
If you want the beautiful, expansive humanity of this world to be equally protected, respected, and cared for, they need to be stopped.
And we can stop them, together.
They must be confronted, opposed, resisted, shouted down, outworked, outnumbered, and outvoted.
America is not in a Civil War; we’re in White Christian Nationalists’ grim and loveless holy war.
All people of faith, morality, and conscience need to stand together and push them back into the hell they came from.
