Stop Christian Nationalism

View Original

The Tyranny of Christian Fascism Over Your Family Life

Your browser doesn't support HTML5 audio

Christian Fascism and Your Family Life Clifford Cook

The America First Policy Institute declares that Americans’ families only exist in order to conform to the demands of God’s purpose, and the mission of Christian churches. They say that your body does not belong to you, but is the property of the Christian religion. The practical implications of these extremist fascist policies will be devastating to American families, because there is nothing more personal, and more important, than the freedom to choose when to make a family, how to make a family, and who to form a family with. The Christian Nationalist America First Agenda want to take that freedom away from you.


There has been an unfortunate distraction in coverage of this year's election that dismisses the threat of fascism under the pretense that there are practical things that voters should care about more. You'll hear reporters and commentators say that what people care about are issues that affect their families. Actually, there is nothing more that affects a family's day to day life than the inability to have any say in how society functions.

One of the things that impacts practical day to day family life most of all is control over the decision of whether to make a family, who to make a family with, how to make a family, and when you want to make a family, when the time is right. The America First Policy Institute is using its fascist Christian nationalist ideology to try to seize control of the decisions Americans make about their family lives, giving control of these matters to the anticipated second presidency of Donald Trump.

Let's listen to how the America First Policy Institute describes this agenda themselves.

“We were knit together in our mother’s wombs created for great works in him. Ephesians 210 declares For We are God's masterpiece, He has created us anew in Christ Jesus so we can do the good things He planned for us long ago. This divine design is at all levels of our lives, including our bodies and our health.”

The first thing that comes to mind reading these words are that they represent bad science. The America First Policy Institute expresses an ideology of creationism, which they like to call Intelligent Design. They claim that there is a divine design in our bodies, saying that we were created by God in the image of God in order to obey the will of God, to serve the purpose of God. Which is to say that we are not animals. We are not biological organisms that live on a planet, that has an ecosystem that has evolved over billions of years. And when you start from that premise, you start to move into some really bad medical decisions like what happened under Donald Trump in the year 2020.

People forget that Donald Trump was president for the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. They forget what a terrible job Trump did in leading the country through COVID because he did not understand or really even care about the basics of medical science. So he suggested that Americans take horse medications, and that people inject bleach into our blood vessels. When you don't have a government that is led by people who care to inform themselves about the basics of science, people get hurt. When we are looking at issues of family health, the policies of Christian Nationalist fascists are not based in reality.

What’s even more important is that under the fascist America First Agenda, there is no role for individual autonomy. Christian nationalist fascists throw around words like fear all too easily. They want us to believe that we are fearfully designed by their god, because fear is the dominant emotion that the America First Policy Institute wants people to feel. Christian Nationalists fear their own god, and they want Americans to fear their own government. Donald Trump’s fascists want us to recreate American society into a totalitarian religious regime under which the people down at the bottom exist only to serve the needs of the people at the top, who emulate the authoritarian domination by their own god.

The America First Policy Institute writes:

“The core mission of the health care system to improve the health of all Americans so they can best fulfill their God given purpose. First Corinthians 6:19 - “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?”

The America First Policy Institute, with their America First Agenda for American families, is declaring that there is just one model for family life because there is just one God, and that one God has made his decision about how people ought to live and everybody has to live that way. They want us all to accept that our job is not to fulfill any purposes we discover for ourselves, but to obey the purpose that has been given to us by their dictator in the sky.

This totalitarian mindset of the America First Policy Institute applied not just to family, but to health care. The America First Agenda describes policies in which leaders of Christian churches, rather than patients and their doctors. After all, under the American First Agenda, Americans' bodies do not belong to themselves, but to the Christian God. Under their fascist agenda, Americans would become the property of Christian churches, and all right to make health care decisions for themselves would be lost.