The Christian Nationalist Hydra (TPM)

The Christian Nationalist Hydra: In Era of Trump, Christian Nationalism Has Many Faces

 From traditional Christian-right figures to secret societies envisioning a ‘national divorce,’ a growing contingent of radical activists is planning for Christian supremacy.

By Sarah Posner     April 12, 2024 9:54 a.m.

I am a journalist who has covered the Christian right for two decades. Over the past three years, I began to more frequently use the term “Christian nationalism” to describe the movement I cover. But I did not start using a new term to suggest its proponents’ ideology had changed. Instead, the term had come into more common usage in the Trump era, now regularly used by academics, journalists, and pro-democracy activists to describe a movement that insists America is a “Christian nation” — that is, an illiberal, nominally democratic theocracy, rather than a pluralistic secular democracy.

To me, the phrase was highly descriptive of the movement I’ve dedicated my career to covering, and neatly encapsulates the core threat the Christian right poses to freedom and equality. From its top leaders and influencers down to the grassroots — politically mobilized white evangelicals, the foot soldiers of the Christian right — its proponents believe that God divinely ordained America to be a Christian nation; that this Christian nation has come under attack by liberals and secularists; and that patriotic Christians must engage in spiritual warfare to rid America of demonic forces, and in political action to restore its Christian heritage. That includes taking political steps — as a voter, as an elected official, as a lawyer, as a judge — to ensure that America is governed according to a “biblical worldview.”

If you want to see that definition in action, look no further than the career of House Speaker Mike Johnson. Seventeen years ago, when I interviewed Johnson, then a lawyer with the Christian right legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom, I would have labeled him a loyal soldier in the Christian right’s legal army trying to bring down the separation of church and state. He is a product of and a participant in a sprawling religious and political infrastructure that has made the movement’s successes possible, from politically active megachurches, to culture-shaping organizations like Focus on the Family, to political players like the Family Research Council, to the legal force in his former employer ADF. 

In today’s parlance, Johnson is a Christian nationalist — although he, like most of his compatriots, has certainly not embraced the label. But Mike Johnson the House Speaker is still Mike Johnson the lawyer I interviewed all those years ago: an evangelical called to politics to be a “servant leader” to a Christian nation, dedicated to its governance according to a biblical worldview: against church-state separation, for expanded rights for conservative Christians, adamantly against abortion and LGBTQ rights, and especially, currently, trans rights.

That mindset is still the beating heart of the Christian right, even as the movement, and other movements in the far-right space, have radicalized in the Trump era, taking on new forms and embracing a range of solutions to the apocalyptic trajectory they see America to be on. Different movements imagining a version of Christian supremacy exist side by side — different strains that often borrow ideas from one another, and that fit comfortably under the banner of Christian nationalism.  

The term “Christian nationalism” became popularized during Trump’s presidency for a few reasons. First, Trump, who first ran in 2016 on a nativist platform with the nationalist slogan “Make America Great Again,” was and still is dependent on white evangelicals to win elections and maintain a hold on power. He is consequently willing to carry out their goals, bringing their ambitions closer to fruition than they’ve ever been in their 45-year marriage to the Republican Party. They have been clear, for example, in crediting him for the downfall of Roe v. Wade, among other assaults on other peoples’ rights.

Second, the prominence of Christian iconography at the January 6 insurrection, and the support for Trump’s stolen election lie before, during, and after January 6 by both Christian right influencers and the grassroots, brought into stark relief that Christian nationalist motivations helped fuel his attempted coup.  

Finally, sociologists studying the belief systems of Christian nationalists pushed the term into public usage, as did anti-nationalist Christians, especially after January 6, in order to elevate awareness of the threats Christian nationalism poses to democracy. (The paperback edition of my book, Unholy, which was published in mid-2021 and included a post-January 6 afterword, reflected the increasing usage of the term Christian nationalists by including the term in a fresh subtitle.)

The Trump era, along with the rise of openly Christian nationalist social media sites like Gab, and Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, have given space for otherwise unknown figures, like the rabidly antisemitic Gab founder Andrew Torba, co-author of the book Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide For Taking Dominion And Discipling Nations, and Stephen Wolfe, author of the racist book The Case for Christian Nationalism, to enter the Christian nationalism discourse. Although Torba and Wolfe have made waves online, and extremism watchers are rightly alarmed that their tracts could prove influential and radicalizing, they remain distinct from the Christian right. Torba’s antisemitism is so extreme, for example, that Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano — himself extreme — was forced to create some daylight between himself and his supporter Torba in his 2022 run. Torba’s site platformed the antisemitic rantings of the shooter in the 2018 massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, and Torba himself has said Jews aren’t welcome in his envisioned Christian nation. The Republican Jewish Coalition called Gab “a cesspool of bigotry and antisemitism.” Mastriano’s move seemed motivated more by self-preservation than contrition (and he lost the race anyway). 

That’s not to say, of course, that the Christian right and the conservative movement more broadly haven’t tolerated racists and other extremists in their midst — Trump’s endurance as their savior itself proves just how much that tolerance persists. Their entire alliance with Trump is one of sharing political and ideological space with the overtly antisemitic, racist, Islamophobic, nativist extremists he elevated to mainstream status in the GOP. But the Christian right is also committed to Christian Zionism, an ideology that claims to love the state of Israel while imagining it as the locus of Jesus’s violent return, and which is, in its philosemitism and bloody apocalyptic fantasies, antisemitic. Still, it would make it difficult for them to form explicit alliances with someone like Torba, a self-described Christian nationalist who repeatedly and unabashedly promotes some of the world’s oldest and ugliest antisemitic tropes like the Jews killed Jesus and secretly control the world. 

What’s more, Torba advocates for a “parallel society” for Christians to escape the supposedly debauched America he deplores. This is not unlike the Benedict Option advocated by conservative Christian (and Viktor Orbán admirer) Rod Dreher, or the secret, hyper-patriarchal Society for Civic American Renewal exposed by TPM’s Josh Kovensky, which is recruiting “unhyphenated” men of only certain denominations to run a Christian government after an anticipated “national divorce.” The language of SACR’s internal documents, to me, as a student of evangelicalism, is quite distinct from the sort of statement of faith you’d see from a church or evangelical organization, which would emphasize one’s salvation in Jesus Christ, commitment to the Bible as the literal, inerrant word of God, and the imperative for Christians to preach the gospel around the world.

The conventional Christian right does not want a parallel society or a divorce. They believe they are restoring, and will run, the Christian nation God intended America to be — from the inside. They will do that, in their view, through faith (evangelizing others and bringing them to salvation through Jesus Christ); through spiritual warfare (using prayer to battle satanic enemies of Christian America); and through politics and the law (governing and lawmaking from a “biblical worldview” after eviscerating church-state separation). Changes in the evangelical world, particularly the emphasis in the growing charismatic movement on prophecy, signs and wonders, spiritual warfare, the prosperity gospel, and Trumpism, has intensified the prominence of the supernatural in their politics, giving their Christian nationalism its own unmistakable brand.

For decades, Christian right has been completely open about their beliefs and goals. Their quest to take dominion over American institutions by openly evangelizing and instituting Christian supremacist policies sets the Christian right apart from other types of Christian nationalists who might operate in secret, or imagine utopian communities as the ideal way to save themselves from a secular, debauched nation. 

The fact that far-right extremists like Torba or Wolfe embrace the Christian nationalist label gives the more conventional Christian right leaders and organizations space to disassociate themselves from it. Some also berate journalists who use it to describe them, accusing them of hurling a left-wing slur at Christians. 

The bottom line is that Christian nationalism takes on different forms, and despite organizational or even ideological differences, ideas can penetrate the often porous borders between different camps. Someone who receives the daily email blast from the Family Research Council might also be drawn to Wolfe’s book, for example. On a more unnerving, macro level, major right-wing and GOP figures, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and the CEO of the Daily Wire, the podcast consortium run by conservative influencer Ben Shapiro, have embraced the rabidly antisemitic, Hitler-admiring antagonist Nick Fuentes, who is Catholic but also is accurately described as a Christian nationalist. The increasingly influential Catholic integralist movement, which seeks a Catholic-inflected replacement for the “liberal order,” is yet another unique form of Christian nationalism.

Christian nationalism is a serious threat to democracy, because it is premised on the supremacy of Christianity and rejects the democratic values of freedom and equality for all. It is crucial to understand that it takes various forms, how its numerous proponents differ, and how they intersect. Some pose a threat because of their proximity to political and legal power; others because they accelerate racist and antisemitic rhetoric; and still others because they might incite violence. These distinctions show how Christian nationalism is varied, very combustible, and critical to combat.

A Taste of Normal

 Last night I worked as a valet. 

It was wonderful. 

After four months of being away, I felt like I was in a place I belonged. I knew what I was doing. I was relaxed and confident. I was content.

It's been four months since my heart attack, and I had eleven weeks off from work. I didn't go back to valet right away because the hotel was worried that if I lifted a suitcase I would die. My doctor had actually cleared me to work after seven weeks off, but the hotel didn't quite know what to do with me. Eventually we came to an agreement that I would work the night audit shift at the front desk.

I was not happy about going back to working nights. I had worked the overnight shift for thirteen years at this hotel, and before that, four years at another. When the pandemic began, the valet department had a six month vacation. When we came back, the overnight shift was dispensed with, and I was moved to the early morning shift, and then later, the mid shift during the week, and closing shift on the weekends. I liked the new schedule. I got to spend time with Gaby and with friends and family. I had time and daylight to work on projects. It was nice. 

The fellow they had (have) training me is Matt, and he's one of those people who is just good at everything, which kinda worries me. We had a fellow that was good at everything - EV ER Y THING -  a few years ago.by the name of Justin. I could say that Justin got burned out, but it would be more accurate to say that, because he was reliable and phenomenally skilled, the hotel actively burned him out. Justin had enough going on in his personal life and he didn't need to be treated like that. I liked Justin. A lot. I like Matt. A lot. I don't want to see the same thing happen to Matt.

Matt got a promotion, and is now one of our front office managers, which means he would be moving to daytime, so the race was on to get me trained. Problem is, I have no talent for computer stuff. I mean, if you show me which buttons I need to push, I can get the job done and eventually I will figure out what it all means, but you can't rush me. Matt began my training by teaching me how to do the audit. I took copious step-by-step notes, and referred to them constantly, adding to them as needed. At first the only part I was good at was the valet audit, which, y'know, of course, because I already understood it. Eventually I got to the point where all I needed was the checklist.

The deficiency in my training had to do with guest services. 

Now, I love working with the guests. I can eventually figure out the computer. But working with a guest AND a computer? That's a bad combination. There's a lot of pressure to do the job quickly and correctly. My GM asked me one morning how I was doing, and I expressed these fears. He said that the key was to act confidently like I knew what I was doing. My whole schtick has been to gain the sympathy of the guest by being the nervous new guy. 

They had scheduled me to work a couple of afternoon shifts in order to train me how to check in a guest, etc. Unfortunately, those two shifts happened to be on days when we had, like, twelve arrivals at 3:00 in the afternoon. Me being there was robbing the young ladies who were working that shift of the only thing they had to do all evening, so I got sent home early both times.

During one of those shifts, I was made an offer I couldn't refuse. If you've seen The Godfather, you know what I mean. The AFOM told me that the GM was asking about my intentions. I reiterated that valet was my first love, and that I was expecting to go back to it fully some time in early to mid summer. He didn't put it in so many words, but he basically told me that my return to valet was unlikely, and that if I didn't agree to stay on as night auditor, the hotel might not have a position for me at all. I told him that I was available to do whatever I was needed to do, but that night and the next day, the more I thought about it the more demoralized I became.  Still, as I told one of my other coworkers, it's only three years. I reach my 20 years, with all the lifetime benefits, two days before I reach retirement age. I can hang on till then.

Eventually, Matt left me. I was supposed to start flying solo on the 22nd of March (Friday!?! Are you freakin' serious?!), but Matt stayed that night just to make sure I didn't get overwhelmed. The following Wednesday I really was alone.

Once upon a time, it was normal to have two or three people working the front desk overnight, especially on the weekends. New management has decided that that is unnecessary, which Matt has accurately described as "bullshit." My first week (my permanent schedule is Wednesday through Friday, 10pm to 8am) went okay. I figured out a system for making sure I got everything done, and knew what to talk to the FOM about in the morning after she and the rest of the morning crew arrive an hour late. I might have given away some free rooms, but nobody complained. But this week has been rough, and not just for me. My counterpart, Sheila, had such a bad time Saturday night that Matt, who has been sick the last few days, was worried that she would not come in last night and he'd have to work a double.

And Sheila knows what she's doing. Me? I'm on the phone with a woman I can't hear because a) it's a bad connection, and b) the music in the bar and the crowd in the lobby is too loud, and she's wanting to know if I can get her into two rooms on a particular date that the app has already told her is not available. I don't know how to do that. This while I've got two parties trying to check in, and I need to move a VIP out of a room where someone has been smoking without him being charged extra for the upgrade. Who knew that the audit would be the easy part.

I should have just transferred her to reservations. Hindsight.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...
I've been going to a cardio rehab class for the last couple of months. It's basically a gym class where they monitor your blood pressure and teach you to exercise for your heart health. I graduated last Monday. That made me available for a mid or evening shift in valet, aside from my duties at the front desk. I had been discussing my return with my bell captain, and we decided on Sunday night as a good night for me. It's not terribly busy, so I don't have to exert myself too much right away, and nobody else on staff is going to miss working that night.

Last night I got to visit with guests as they came in. I didn't have to use a computer. I made a little bit of money. And as a bonus, the weather was wonderful. I was very happy.

Sunday nights are going to be my island of sanity in a world of chaos.

Fascist Stuff My Friends Post on Facebook

 

Mountain Climbing

 

Just Another Fake News Meme

So, the above meme was posted on Facebook by a friend of mine. My first reaction to it was, That makes no sense. Why would a black man be complaining that a company he's worked with for years wasn't racist enough? The meme came with a link to an article from Esspots, which, according to their "about us" page, is "your one-stop destination for satirical news and commentary about the United States of America. Our team of writers and editors is dedicated to bringing you the latest and greatest in fake news and absurdity, all with a healthy dose of humor and satire."

I found that out after I had already I googled "Michael Jordan Nike." One of the first things that popped up in the Google search was a fact-check article from the AP explaining that this was indeed fake news, detailing the origin, and explaining that the impetus for the article was transphobic backlash (not racism) after a popular transgender TicTok influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, promoted Nike products on her Instagram.

My incurious friend posted the meme with the caption, "Good for him". 

 

Support System

 I don't remember getting from the wheelchair to the operating table. I do remember that there was a gurney involved, because I remember being asked to move from one flat surface to another. "Mr. Savage, can you you move your butt over just a little bit more... That's good." A nurse took my pants and underwear off. I don't remember the removal of my shirt, nor being dressed in a hospital gown.

What I remember more than anything else was how bright the lights were. I entertained myself by watching the floaters in both eyes dance around against a white background -- not the usual milky orange that I would normally see when my eyes were closed. And then the clouds rolling in from the outside edges, battleship grey and swirling around my field of vision. Was this death? If the clouds completely occluded my vision, would that mean I had died? I wasn't afraid, just curious. Was this the great mystery that only the dying understood? But the cloud cover was never complete. The white always peeked through, with those damn floaters, which I get more and more of as I age, still dancing.

It seems odd to me that I thought so little about my own death when for everyone around me that was the first thing on their minds. For me, the whole ordeal was about the discomfort and inconvenience. The plan, for a while now, is that I will be taking care of my surviving parent when the time came. If I'm not there, who would do that for me? My kids? Gaby? Gaby has his citizenship interview and test on Thursday. He'd have to reschedule. And I've got Etsy orders to ship. Would anyone even think about closing my shop?

The surgery was done a couple of hours after we arrived at the hospital about 5:30 Wednesday morning. A little after 5am, I had awakened sweating and unable to catch my breath. My old plumber, Big John, had retired after a heart attack. He described feeling as if an elephant was standing on his chest. For me, it was more like I had spandex tightly wrapped around my upper torso, which prevented my rib cage from expanding the way I needed it to. Also there was a small intense pain in my solar plexus that felt like I really, really needed to burp. So I took a couple of Tums. They didn't help. All this woke Gaby up, who asked if he should take me to the ER. We got dressed (ish), and Gaby ran a few red lights on the way there. My GP works for Integris, so they already had all my medical and insurance information. The put me in a wheelchair and whisked me right in. They put three stents into the arteries around my heart, pushing them into my body through the radial artery from my right wrist. (That was actually very painful, and apparently I flinched because I was told to lie still.) Afterwards I was moved to a room in the ICU (ICU7). 

I slept most of the day, but was aware of my family arriving and being in the room. My mother, a retired RN, was very interested in looking at my vitals on the monitoring screen next to the bed, and explaining what it all meant to everyone else. This annoyed my daughter, who didn't want to think about any of that stuff. (When Sarah told me about that a day or two later, I reminded her that her grandmother was fascinated by those things because of her old profession, but also it was a coping mechanism. She said she knew that.) 

My favorite part of that day was listening to my kids' conversation, though I had to have them move their chairs closer so that I could hear better. McCauley had gone on a first date with a girl that he met via a dating ap, and he liked her right off. Sarah said she was glad for him.
My least favorite part of the day was when they turned off Survivor. Seems they assumed I wasn't watching it just because I was asleep. 
Later in the evening, our good friends Zach and Frank came by, having driven all the way from Mustang for a ten minute visit. We love these guys.  
Gaby took the opportunity to go home to check on the dogs and shower. It was the only time he left my side.

Gaby. Gaby called my family. He called my boss. He texted and Facebooked with friends. He ordered my meals,  fed me, helped me pee. He scratched my forehead and did a lot of other trivial things because the IVs in both arms prevented me from bending my arms. He got me blankets and pillows, and straightened them for me and helped me adjust the bed when I couldn't get comfortable. He slept when he could, which was not much, in the recliner in ICU7, and on the uncomfortable couch in room 517 after I had been moved. He only left the room to go eat and go to the restroom, and usually then only when other family was there for me.
When we finally got home on Friday night, He laid down next to me in our bed, buried his face in my shoulder and started to cry. Which made me cry. It was the first time I had really felt the emotion of what had happened, but not for me. For him. But I wasn't actually physically strong enough to cry, so I had to stop.

The next time was because of McCauley. It's been handy having a minion living next door after he moved in last summer. This weekend he took care of the dogs, and made deliveries, and just stayed. I had made a date with him to go to dinner and shopping for his birthday, which was on Friday, but now we we're all joking that I had to cancel because something had come up. I didn't know how he was feeling until I saw his Facebook post. Again, a big sob, not for me, for him. But I don't have the strength, so I just had to deal with the tennis ball in my throat.

One of the things he delivered was my phone, which had been left on the drafting table in the studio. Gaby had been telling me about some of the good wishes I had been receiving, but that was my first chance to see it for myself. I have friends. I have people who love me. I called our best friend Charla via Facetime, and we chatted for a while. I wanted to do the same with other friends: Ted, Brian, Melody, but I didn't have the strength to hold up the phone.

Besides not being able to use my arms, the lack of strength was what bothered me most. I would get winded just trying to straighten my blanket. The first night I was home I slept fourteen hours. I told my mom about how exhausting it was just trying to take a shower, and she said that the first time she took a shower after a surgery she had had recently, she felt like she had climbed a mountain. But it's been getting better. I've been taking a lot of naps. The minion and the man-spouse have been doing the lifting and the driving. I'm watching a lot of TV. McCauley drove me to the post office and the grocery store. Gaby drove me back to the post office to mail a couple of Etsy orders -- one of which was sold while I was in the hospital.

Main thing now is figuring out the diet. I hardly ate anything in the hospital. Most of that was because my mouth was so dry that nothing but fruit and salads sounded good. Our friend Michael brought a care package with a lot of snacks that I couldn't eat. S'alright, Gaby needs to eat too. In fact he's taken it upon himself to eat all the salt-filled foods we have in our cabinets and fridge. Once that's done, he'll join me on my diet.
He fixed me an egg white omelet Saturday morning, with spinach and string cheese. It was really good. Sunday morning I was feeling well enough to cook my own omelet. It wasn't as pretty as his, but still good. I looked up what a heart healthy diet was supposed to be. Discussing it with Gaby, we figured out that most of the problem with the diet are just simple fixable things. We buy ingredients at the grocery store that are healthy, but we also buy chips, cookies, and ice cream. And when we are (I am) in a hurry, it's too easy to stop off at a fast food place and pick up something to eat in the car. From now on, it's more meal planning, watching the salt and fat intake.

So that's the project for the next year. Just learning how to live healthier.

Thank you, my friends, for your support.

Three Cheers for Socialism - Christian Love and Political Practice

Commonweal
March 2020
by David Bentley Hart

Persons of a reflective bent all too often underestimate the enormous strength that truly abysmal ignorance can bring. Knowledge is power, of course, but—measured by a purely Darwinian calculus—too much knowledge can be a dangerous weakness. At the level of the social phenotype (so to speak), the qualities often most conducive to survival are prejudice, simplemindedness, blind loyalty, and a militant want of curiosity. These are the virtues that fortify us against doubt or fatal hesitation in moments of crisis. Subtlety and imagination, by contrast, often enfeeble the will; ambiguities dull the instincts. So while it is true that American political thought in the main encompasses a ludicrously minuscule range of live options and consists principally in slogans rather than ideas, this is not necessarily a defect. In a nation’s struggle to endure and thrive, unthinking obduracy can be a precious advantage.

Even so, I think we occasionally take it all a little too far.

Not long ago, in an op-ed column for the New York Times, I observed that it is foolish to equate (as certain American political commentators frequently do) the sort of “democratic socialism” currently becoming fashionable in some quarters of this country with the totalitarian state ideologies of the twentieth century, whose chief accomplishments were ruined societies and mountains of corpses. For one thing, “socialism” is far from a univocal term, and much further from a uniform philosophy. I, for instance, have a deep affection for the tradition of British Christian socialism, which was shaped by such figures as F. D. Maurice (1805–1872), John Ruskin (1819–1900), Charles Kingsley (1819–1875), Thomas Hughes (1822–1896), F. J. Furnivall (1825–1910), William Morris (1834–1896), and R. H. Tawney (1880–1962), though I have also been influenced by such non-British social thinkers as Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), Dorothy Day (1897–1980), and E. F. Schumacher (1911–1977). None of these espoused any kind of statist, technocratic, secular, authoritarian version of socialist economics, and none of them was what we today think of as “liberal.” And yet their “socialist” leanings were unmistakable.

Moreover, just because a totalitarian regime happens to call itself socialist—or, for that matter, a republic, or a union of republics, or a people’s republic, or a people’s democratic republic—we are under no obligation to take it at its word. What we call “democratic socialism” in the United States is difficult to distinguish from the social-democratic traditions of post-war Western Europe, and there we find little evidence that a democracy becomes a dictatorship simply by providing such staples of basic social welfare as universal health care. At least, it is hard not to notice that the social-democratic governments of Europe have always gained power only by being voted into office, and have always relinquished it peacefully when voted out again. None of them has ever made war on free markets, even in attempting (often all too hesitantly) to impose prudent and ethically salutary regulations on business. Rather than gulags, death camps, secret police, arrests without warrant, summary executions, enormous propaganda machines, killing fields, and the like, their political achievements have been more in the line of the milk-allowances given to British children in the post-war years, various national health services, free eyeglasses and orthodonture for children, school lunches, public pensions for the elderly and the disabled, humane public housing, adequate unemployment insurance, sane labor protections, and so forth, all of which have been accomplished without irreparable harm to economies or treasuries.

I suppose a social-democratic state could begin to gravitate toward true authoritarianism, in the way that any political arrangement can lead to just about any other. The Third Reich, after all, was born out of a functioning parliamentary democracy. The 2016 U.S. election proved that, even in a long-established democratic republic, just about anyone or anything, no matter how preposterously foul, can achieve political power if enough citizens are sufficiently credulous, cowardly, and vicious. In just the past few years, we have seen bland American neoconservatism rapidly evolving into populist, racist, openly fascist, mystical nationalism. Anything is possible. But to this point, it seems fair to say, the Western European democracies—as well as the Oceanian states and Canada—have all acquitted themselves fairly well on the civil liberties and “rule of law” fronts. And surely no one would deny that, approve of them or not, eyeglasses and milk are not gulags and summary executions.

Or so you would think. Judging from some of the negative reactions to my Times column, there are a good many persons to whom this is not at all obvious. The most lunatic response I read came from some fellow whom some jurisdiction of the Orthodox Church has injudiciously consecrated as a priest. His attack on my column was published in a forum associated with the Acton Institute (a sort of toxic-waste site for the disposal of emotionally arrested and intellectually abridged reactionaries). For this fellow, there are no differences here worth noting: children’s milk subsidies, concentration camps, modern Denmark and Canada, the USSR, the New Deal, the Cultural Revolution, public subsidies for healthcare or railroads, the execution of dissidents, Victorian Christian socialism, twentieth-century Soviet communism, present-day Venezuela, present-day Britain, industry partly governed by labor, industry wholly seized by the state—somehow, in his mind, it is all one and the same thing, a single historical phenomenon inexorably leading to the same mass graves. Any day now in Sweden, it seems, free dentistry will mutate into a secret state-police apparatus and a sprawling archipelago of reeducation camps.

Just as absurd in its way, though perhaps more morally distasteful, was a column by Tom Rogan in the Washington Examiner repeating certain fashionable neoliberal lies about European, Canadian, and Oceanian health care—long delays in triage, shortages, lack of choice among physicians, and so forth. I have received medical attention in any number of countries over the years and, while no nation’s system is perfect, I can assure anyone curious on the matter that, if you are in real need of medical attention, in almost all cases you would be far better off in France, Canada, Germany, or Italy than you are here. Certainly we Americans—routinely running the gauntlet of finding an “in-network” primary-care physician, securing an “establish-care” appointment (usually months away), waiting upon referrals and insurance approvals, choosing among expensive tests, and so on—endure “triage” processes of an especially byzantine complexity. Choice of health-care provision is far freer in most other countries, in fact, simply because insurance companies cannot limit one’s decisions, while costs are either minimal or nonexistent, even though the care is as good or better. As it happens, the only economically advanced nation in the world today where someone is likely to be denied access to necessary care or affordable pharmaceuticals is the United States. Only here, for instance, can a poor person die for want of the money needed to buy insulin or undergo dialysis.

 

Our insurance premiums already cost most of us more than we would be taxed for a health system like the one in Canada or in Sweden.

Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?

Our cruel, inefficient, and monstrously expensive health system makes this obvious. Nations that provide either single-payer healthcare (like the UK) or a well-administered public option (like Germany) do indeed tax their populations for the purpose. But this is hardly a gross imposition on their citizens. For one thing, they distribute tax liability far more equally across income brackets than we do. For another, they strictly regulate the prices providers may charge. The result is that the cost of health care in these countries is roughly half what it is here per capita, and the actual cost for individuals (especially those who are not extravagantly rich) is only a fraction of what we are expected to pay for the same services. The relative pittance most of us would be taxed to sustain a real public option or national health service would be—so long as our legislators were willing simultaneously to regulate pharmaceutical and other medical providers humanely and sensibly—as nothing compared to what we actually pay right now for the privilege of discovering, when the next shockingly unexpected medical bill arrives, that we still have far more to pay.

Consider: our insurance premiums already cost most of us more than we would be taxed for a health system like the one in Canada or in Sweden. Even if our employers pay most of the putative bill, this results in considerably lower real wages for us than our European counterparts receive. If we are so unlucky as to have to buy our coverage directly, the cost is invariably exorbitant while the benefits are meager and grudging. And at that point our financial liabilities have only just begun. Quite often, deductibles alone far exceed any debts the average European or Canadian or Australian need ever discharge for medical care. Then there are, for no particular reason, the copays we have to add to what we have already paid our insurers. Then there are the absurd prices our bought-and-sold political class permits pharmaceutical firms to charge and insurance companies only partly to cover. The price of insulin alone, for example, here as nowhere else in the civilized world, is a crime against humanity—one, in fact, that actually kills a substantial number of American diabetics each year. If we need to use the emergency room, and especially if we must call for an ambulance, the costs are almost unimaginably multiplied. Then, of course, when truly serious illnesses arrive, insurance companies deploy battalions of adjusters to deny us the very coverage we thought we were purchasing with our atrociously excessive premiums. These vigilant souls will do all they can to abbreviate our treatments, curtail our hospital stays, deny us as many therapies as possible, refuse approval of the newest therapies or drugs, or at least delay approval until (ideally) we have died. If we fall terminally ill, we will spend our last days fighting for every penny of coverage at each discrete stage of our illness. And then, in all likelihood, our families will go deeply into debt anyway. Of course, even all of this is true only if we are among those fortunate enough to have any coverage at all.

 

Without the support of an omnicompetent, vastly prosperous, orderly, and violent state, global corporate capitalism could not thrive.

Is this freedom? From what, exactly? Certainly not from the state. The heavy hand of centralized government is no lighter—its proprietary power over its citizens is no smaller—here than anywhere else in the developed world. Quite the reverse. Certainly, where taxes are concerned, no government in the developed world is any more rapacious and no legal authority any more draconian. Here, moreover, no less than anywhere else, the state governs trade, makes war, passes laws, delivers mail, does all the most basic things the modern state does; but here also, to a greater degree than in any other advanced economy, the government raises its revenues for the express purpose of transferring as much wealth as possible from the working and middle classes to corporations and plutocrats. It really would be hard to imagine a democracy whose state wields greater power over the lives of average persons. To me, at least, it seems obvious that, where health care in particular is concerned, Americans are slaves thrice-bound: wholly at the mercy of a government that despoils them for the sake of the rich, as well as of employers from whom they will receive only such benefits as the law absolutely requires, as well as of insurance companies that can rob them of the care for which they have paid.

All this being true, the classical social democrat or democratic socialist might be forgiven for thinking that Americans are curiously deluded regarding their own supposed inalienable liberties. He or she might contend, at any rate, that a state that uses its power chiefly to dilute consumer and environmental protections in the interests of large corporations and private investors, while withholding even the most basic civil goods that taxpayers have a right to expect (such as a well-maintained infrastructure or decent public transport), is no smaller—and certainly no less invasive and dictatorial—than one that is actually obliged by the popular will and the social contract to deliver services in exchange for the taxes it collects. He or she might think that a government whose engorged military budget is squandered on wasteful (because profitable) redundancy, but whose public services are minimal at best, presides over a far more controlled economy—and a far more coercive redistribution of wealth—than does a government forced to return public funds to its citizens in the forms of substantial civic benefits. He or she might even have the temerity to see social democracy, properly practiced, not as an enlargement of the state’s prerogatives, but quite the opposite: a democratic seizure of power from both state and corporate entities, as well as a greater democratic control over public policy, taxation, production, and trade.

After all, though we often speak as if the centralized state and corporate “free” enterprise were antagonists, they are in fact mutually sustaining. Global capital depends upon the state’s power, its diplomatic access to other nations and markets, the trade treaties it negotiates, and (if needed) its judicious deployments of terror. States depend upon capital for revenues, material goods, and political patronage. Without the support of an omnicompetent, vastly prosperous, orderly, and violent state, global corporate capitalism could not thrive. Without corporations, the modern state would lack the resources necessary to perpetuate its supremacy over every sphere of life. Over against the twin colossi of state and capital, a truly functioning form of social democracy might well be viewed as an incomplete but still benign devolution of sovereignty, away from capital to labor, away from the state to the public. It might even be seen as a feeble gesture toward a society based on some kind of real subsidiarity. At least, this scarcely seems an implausible view of the matter.

 

It should be obvious that certain moral ends can be accomplished only by a society as a whole, employing instruments of governance, distribution, and support that private citizens alone cannot command.

Whether that is achievable, however—or as achievable as it should be—I am not prepared to opine. In America, even democratic socialists often have only a very hazy notion of what the full spectrum of socialist thought has been in the past, and what it might be in the future. There is always the likelihood that much of the mainstream of American democratic socialism will ultimately turn into just another form of classically liberal social philosophy. I have, in an inconstant and largely flirtatious way, been a member of the Democratic Socialists of America over the years. I admit, however, that certain recent tendencies of the DSA make me suspect that, as time passes, it will look less and less like the kind of pro-labor, anti-capitalist organization it purports to be, and more and more like simply another incarnation of sanctimonious, ethically voluntarist, pro-choice American liberalism (with all its bourgeois narcissisms, morbid psychological fragilities, and lovingly cultivated neuroses), which I like no better than sanctimonious, ethically voluntarist, libertarian American conservatism (with all its bourgeois narcissisms, morbid psychological fragilities, and lovingly cultivated resentments). Just as we Americans have succeeded in turning “Christianity” into another name for a system of values almost totally antithetical to those of the Gospel, I have every confidence that we will find a way to turn “socialism” into just another name for late-modern liberal individualism. I still support most of the genuinely communitarian aims of the democratic-socialist movement. But, in the end, it is that tradition of Christian socialism mentioned above to which I remain loyal. And I do not know if it could now flourish here.

As I have already noted, that tradition was never, especially in the Anglophone world, a centralizing philosophy. It was friendly neither to the absolute state nor to ungoverned business. Neither was it even a form of political “leftism” (however one might define that term). It emanates from a time when the political leanings we think of as right or left, conservative or progressive, had not yet coalesced into anything like the present arrangement of ideological or class allegiances. At times, its tacit social vision could be positively quaint. Thomas Hughes seemed convinced that social amelioration could be achieved only by new generations of Christian gentlemen devoted to the common good out of, in part, a sense of noblesse oblige. The single most influential figure in the British tradition of Christian socialism (though he himself never settled on a single official term for his political and economic philosophy) was John Ruskin, who was a convinced Tory monarchist. As far as he was concerned, a principled Christian “communism”—by which he meant not state ownership of property, but a prior communal claim upon the goods of the earth and upon excess resources by those in need—was the only possible civilized and truly charitable alternative to modern liberalism, whether fiscal or social. He opposed classical liberalism for the simple reason that he thought it created social injustices of a kind clearly contrary to the explicit dictates of Christian conscience.

Inasmuch as the two major political parties in America are both “liberal” in the classical sense—the one devoted a bit more to something like John Stuart Mill’s economic philosophy, the other a bit more to something like his social philosophy, and neither of them to the communal ethics of Christian tradition—it is hard for most Americans to make sense of such views. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Christianity has never really taken deep root in America or had any success in forming American consciousness; in its place, we have invented a kind of Orphic mystery religion of personal liberation, fecundated and sustained by a cult of Mammon.

Even so, anyone familiar with the oldest and richest stream of real socialism in the Anglophone world understands that it was in large part a Romantic rebellion against modernity, a longing for a truly Christian understanding of community, an essentially nostalgic belief in the hierarchy of those subsidiary estates and institutions that naturally evolve out of religious, communal, and social life. At times, it proved susceptible to a mistily idealized view of the past—the Middle Ages especially—but it was essentially a Christian-humanist protest against the inhuman scale of both government and industry in the late modern age. It was not a rejection of free enterprise, but rather a critique of a system of enterprise that had destroyed the free guilds of late medieval Europe, disenfranchised individual craftsmen, produced a system of wage slavery, allowed the large-scale division of labor to disenfranchise workers, turned labor into a commodity to be traded or a natural resource to be exploited, accepted the gross superstition of the “iron law of wages,” eliminated the common lands and goods once recognized as the universal patrimony of free citizens so as to make state and capital the sole proprietors of civic wealth, radically reduced legally recognized community usufructs, removed both the means and the profits of production from the possession of laborers and yielded them over to an investment class of owners, enlarged the central state and its power of taxation, displaced the center of society from the realm of the sacred to that of commercial consumption, and created a rapacious debt-and-credit system that is little more than the chronic legal spoilation of the poor by private lenders.

This kind of socialism proposed a use of civic wealth for common human ends precisely in order to restore the Christian order of values—the Christian law of love of neighbor and faith in God’s charity—that modernity has displaced by its reliance instead on the forces of self-interest. In fact, it presumed the radical notion that charity is a more original and fertile impulse of the human soul than greed is. It was an attempt to preserve the best of the moral inheritance of Christian ethical beliefs in an age when Christian civilization had been—so the proponents of the movement believed—eclipsed by an ethos that prizes personal acquisition over communal love. It was, in short, a deeply Christian revolt against those tendencies of post-Christian modern liberal economics and social philosophy that tend toward the destruction of landscapes and cityscapes and inscapes, by reducing or subordinating everything to the impersonal mechanisms of production and consumption.

What remains of that tradition now I cannot say with any certainty. To some extent, it was always a dream of an impossible future sustained by fantasies of a nonexistent past. And some of its aspects, however well-intended—those overly rosy views of class distinction, for instance, or that gauzily gleaming pre-Raphaelite medievalism—are not worth preserving or reviving, except perhaps in radically qualified form. But I honestly cannot imagine how anyone who takes the teachings of Christ seriously, and who is willing to listen to those teachings with a good will and an open mind, can fail to see that in the late modern world something like such socialism is the only possible way of embodying Christian love in concrete political practices. I have heard American Christians claim (based on a distinction unknown in the New Testament) that Christ calls his followers only to acts of private largesse, not to support for public policies that provide for the common welfare. What they imagine Christ was doing in publicly denouncing the unjust economic and social practice of his day I cannot guess. But it should be obvious that certain moral ends can be accomplished only by a society as a whole, employing instruments of governance, distribution, and support that private citizens alone cannot command. We, as individuals, can often aid our brothers and sisters only by acting through collective social and political structures. I admit that the New Testament makes still more radical demands upon Christians (Matthew 5:42; 6:3; 6:19–20; Luke 6:24–25; 12:33; 14:33; 16:25; Acts 2:43–46; 4:32; 4:35), and I would certainly agree that it is just as bad to relinquish all one’s moral responsibilities to the state as it is to promote policies that do not oblige human government to obey the laws of divine charity. I know that Christ in the Gospels calls his followers to a different kind of “politics” altogether—for want of a better term, the politics of the Kingdom. Of this, even the wisest, most compassionate, and most provident form of democratic socialism could never be anything more than a faint premonitory shadow.

Even so, a shadow is not nothing.