Theocracy
Be careful what you wish for.
From a Google Image Search - Columbus Underground
Evangelicals played a big role in getting Trump elected and enabling Republicans in their mission to turn America into a White Christian Nationalist autocratic empire. Although lining the pockets of the wealthiest Americans and cutting benefits for the poorest Americans doesn’t seem to align well with Christianity, the Republicans decided to reward the “makers” and strip funding from the “takers.” When Trump was reelected in 2024 with a playbook written by conservatives as Project 2025, Trump put key authors in his administration as cabinet members. Elon Musk apparently offered to find all the fraud those takers were perpetrating on American taxpayers, so Trump invited DOGE along for what has been a wild ride. Sadly DOGE, like Donald, doesn’t like to move slowly to avoid mistakes. He is impetuous and he cut programs willy-nilly, while his guys stole all our data.
What we haven’t seen or heard much about during this first year of the regime of 47 is the Christian part of the title of our new government model. We haven’t turned into a theocracy yet. ICE and DHS are working furiously and brutally on the White Nationalist goals of our corrupt government.
It turns out, though, that conservative Christian moms are on the case. They are working on changing the culture of America.
“In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many American mothers like Moran began to question the institutions they had once trusted to uphold their lives. Into that vacuum stepped conservative Christian women influencers — like political commentator Allie Beth Stuckey, Make America Healthy Again pioneer Alex Clark, and anti-trans activist Riley Gaines Barker — who blend religion, polished aesthetics and personal stories to build trust on issues from food dyes and vaccines to transgender athletes and immigration. By appealing to maternal concerns about what kids eat or learn and offering a sense of clarity, community and stability, they’re creating an on-ramp for conservative political engagement that many of them frame as part of a spiritual war.” So says Kathryn Post writing in RNS, Religious News Service
At events like Share the Arrows Women’s Conference in Allen, Texas conservative women gather. In this case 6700 women went to hear Allie Beth Stuckey. These women “became skeptical of the pharmaceutical industry, rigid school curriculums, and gender as a construct.” They grow or at least buy organic foods to feed their families, they homeschool their offspring, they work on anti-trans committees. Allie Beth is a political commentator, Alex Clark works on making a healthy America (MAHA), and Riley Gaines Barder is an anti-trans activist. These women are working at the grassroots level for “a godly male headship.”
While Trump has ICE rapidly deporting non-Christians (and quite a few Christians) these women have busy lives and they are succeeding at giving Christian conservative women a sense of belonging and mission.
Book
Esther’s Army: The Christian Women Who Power the Right by Katie Gaddini
Article
“The Perfect Smiling Wives of the Christian Right”, The Nation
The problem is that theocracies haven’t worked very well. Think of poor Iran at this moment. There are a lot of rules and sometimes, when there is a lull in power, people try to overthrow the religious strictures that control their behaviors and their lives.
You remember when Henry VIII wanted a divorce and the Catholic pope would not allow it. He passed the Act of Supremacy in 1534 and between 1536 and 1541 he oversaw the dissolution of over 800 monasteries, convents and friaries. Still, the church in England did not become a Protestant church but retained the doctrines of the Catholic Church. He split from the pope in Rome. These changes in the religion of England led to many deaths, imprisonments, and people who secretly clung to the old religious ways. Eventually the Church of England (the Anglican Church) was accepted but England is hardly a theocracy.
The Spanish Inquisition was a holy terror. It began in the reign of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella (the same royals who sent Columbus off the sail the Atlantic. The Inquisition began in 1478 and lasted 350 years with varying degrees of activity, until it was abolished in 1834. Those were not pleasant years to live in Spain if you tended towards sin or heresy. Neighbors might turn in neighbors. The accused were tortured using an inventive array of torture machines.
Combining church and state can make life quite precarious. In the American colony of Massachusetts, the Puritans (who combined church and state) killed at least 25 people in the Salem Witch trials between February 1692 and May 1963. Two hundred colonists were accused.
History teaches us, and our founders knew from experience, that theocracies go off the rails even more easily than democracies/republics. They said, “we give you a republic if you can keep it.” They put freedom of religion in the First Amendment. They did not say that they were giving us a theocracy.
Clearly the right and the left in America have different views about what the Christian Bible teaches us. Where is the part of the Bible that says that helping the less fortunate institutionalizes dependent behavior? Do we really want our schools to run by religious laws? Will it mitigate the effects of inequality and disability? Will it make things like food stamps and healthcare assistance and childcare unnecessary? How will it make these things unnecessary. Trump was bemoaning the loss of insane asylums the other day. Do we really want some agency of the federal government to turn America into Iran?
Conservative women are on the case. Perhaps we had better keep an eye on what they’re up to.