Report Their Violations

Christian Nationalists are accustomed to their privileged position in American society, and so expect not to be challenged when they violate the rules. We need to defy that expectation.

Our voices are the best tools of resistance to Christian Nationalism. We need to speak up and let other people know about what Christian Nationalists are up to. We also need to go further, and report Christian Nationalist activity, when it violates the laws or the rules of the platforms they’re using.

Last week, I came across an incitement to violent revolution issued by an account holder on Twitter under the username The Christian Crusader. The Christian Crusader’s real name is Briana Osborn. Briana lives in Long Beach, California.

In her profile, Briana Osborn urged Christians to “organize and put on the full armor of god to defeat the enemy and save America from secularization”

Briana used more inflammatory battle language in a post where she told Christians to begin physical attacks against their non-Christian neighbors. She wrote,

“We need to start a #ChristianCrusade & begin fighting this spiritual & physical war that satan through the democrats & other nonChristians is taking over this country!”

When I saw this message, I reported it to Twitter. In response, Twitter temporarily blocked Briana from accessing her account.

“We locked @BrianaOsborn13's account for breaking our hateful conduct rule. We found they broke our hateful conduct rule through different reports we received about their behavior. They can't Tweet, Retweet, or Like content, and we'll ask them to remove the reported content if they want to regain full access to their account. Your safety is important to us. If they break our rules again, we'll respond with a more severe action, like suspension.”

A further investigation found that Briana Osborn, The Christian Crusader, violated Twitter’s rules by displaying gratuitous gore. That’s the actual phrase the investigation used: “Gratuitous gore”.

Since that time, Briana Osborn has resumed her activity on Twitter as The Christian Crusader. She continues to post her call for physical violence against non-Christians. So, I’ve reported her activity to Twitter again.

We can’t respond to Christian Nationalist calls to genocide with violence of our own. Instead, we need to rely on legal and democratic means to restrain Christian Nationalists who are trying to provoke a new civil war.

In the United States, we have the right to free speech and freedom of assembly. Those freedoms do not extend, however, to a right to speak and assemble in the organization of a violent revolution to kill Americans and overthrow the government.

We shouldn’t passively accept threats of individual violence and collective bloody revolution by Christian Nationalists. These threats often cross the threshold into criminal activity, and even when they aren’t, they usually violate the terms of use that social media platforms and other digital communications services have established.

We have the right to physical safety. There is no right to threaten other people with violence. Christian Nationalists skirt the boundaries of the laws designed to protect us from physical threats by claiming that they aren’t the ones making the threats, because it’s just their god that wants to kill us and torture us by waging a holy war that will destroy the United States and replace it with a Kingdom of God.

Of course, their god never shows up. If a person started shouting at people that his invisible friend would torture and kill them, the police would soon show up and charge that person with making threats of physical violence. When Christians make the same threats against the rest of us, however, they’re given special protection because they can claim that it’s part of Christian religious practice to make threats of physical violence against non-Christians.

When Christian Nationalists say that threatening people with violence is part of their freedom of religion, we can respond by asking for protection from their threats, and by bringing attention to those threats. People are less likely to engage in acts of violence when they know that they’re being watched. People are also less likely to join the ranks of Christian Nationalists when they can see how crude and abusive Christian Nationalism really is.