The GQP Is A Dangerous Anti-Democratic White Christian Nationalist Cult

Frank Schaeffer is the son of theologian and author Francis Schaeffer, and working with his father as a young man, was responsible for laying the foundation of the radical Christian Right movement.

In 2007 Schaeffer published his autobiography, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back, in which he goes into much more detail regarding what it was like to grow up in the Schaeffer family and around L’Abri. In 2011, he published another memoir, called Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics–and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, in which he discusses growing up with his parents and their role in the rise of the American religious right and argues that the root of the “insanity and corruption” of this force in US politics, and specifically of the religious right’s position on abortion, is a fear of female sexuality.

Frank Schaeffer has spent most of his adult life regretting his role in the Christian Right movement, and as he says “repenting” for his actions by exposing the threat to America from the Christian Right movement.

I’ve posted about Frank Schaeffer previously, in September 2021. Frank Schaeffer Warns About The ‘American Taliban’ (white Christian nationalism).

I happened to catch an interview of Frank Schaeffer on MSNBC’s The Reidout with Joy Reid on Friday. Oddly enough, I do not find the interview posted on The Reidout, MSNBC, or You Tube. I did find this tweet from The Reidout which contains Schaeffer’s comments.

.@Frank_Schaeffer: "The NRA is a gun-worshipping cult that sacrifices American children to the God of gun ownership. They are about as evil as anything that has happened in this country. They must be replaced." #TheReidOut pic.twitter.com/i50htVQPoI

— The ReidOut (@thereidout) May 28, 2022

Where I did find “reporting” on Schaeffer’s interview is at Fox News, where associate editor Gabriel Hayes clearly wants to discredit Schaeffer for exposing the truth about Fox News’ white Christian Nationalist viewership. This punk wasn’t even born yet when Frank Schaeffer and his father were laying the foundation of the radical Christian Right in the 1970s, so what the fuck does he know about it? Not a damn thing.

Anyway, here’s his “reporting.” Reacting to Texas school shooting, MSNBC guest claims GOP sacrifices children to ‘the god of gun ownership’:

On MSNBC’s The ReidOut Friday night, author and critic of Christian fundamentalism Frank Schaeffer used the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas to rip apart the GOP as a party dominated by evangelicals who sacrifice children to “Moloch” like the pagan religions of the Old Testament.

Host Joy Reid prompted her guest by mentioning the “contradiction” she claimed is displayed when conservatives advocate for abortion restrictions but refuse to pursue gun restrictions.

Reid stated, “You know, the thing is that there’s a strange mix of fatalism, right, when it comes to things like abortion, of saying, ‘Well, you know, if you get raped and pregnant, that’s just God putting baby in the world and you can’t have an abortion,’ and, by the way, believing the laws can stop abortions somehow.”

She claimed, “When it comes to guns, ‘Well, you know, if that happens, that just happens. It is what it is, but you can’t have any laws.’ They had a contradiction for me.”

Schaeffer responded by saying that this is what happens “once you’re in the grip of the conspiracy theory and somehow the world is against you, then consistency is not your strong suit.”

Describing evangelical Christians in the U.S., and touting his book, he continued, “What you see is a group of people who claim family values. You were talking about my new book, ‘Fall in Love, Have Children, Stay Put, Save the Planet, Be Happy,’ well, that is what evangelicals say they are selling, but they are not.”

Schaeffer continued, blasting evangelicals as “misogynistic” and claiming they run the Republican Party: “They are a misogynistic group of people who are completely anti-family. These are the people – the Republican Party – now controlled by the evangelical Christian nationalist movement, it’s not — it is not a democratically elected party anymore in the sense of being committed to democracy.”

“It is a Christian nationalist movement, a white Christian nationalist movement,” he restated, adding, “These folks really are inconsistent on purpose, so they will not vote for something as simple as baby formula being given by the government. They will not vote for paid parental leave. They will not vote for the child tax credit being extended that lifted millions of kids out of poverty.”

Schaeffer then plunged right into the deep end, equating evangelical Christians with the child-sacrificing cultures of old. “So, the fact of the matter is they are now the equivalent of the pagan religions that supposedly in Biblical times, the Hebrew faith obliterated and made war on because they sacrificed children to Moloch and to others,” he declared.

He wasn’t done there. He added, “The NRA is a gun-worshipping cult that sacrifices American children to the god of gun ownership. They are about as evil as anything that has ever happened in this country, and they must be replaced.”

We just had a Republican primary for governor in Georgia in which one of the candidates campaigned on a platform of “Jesus Guns Babies.” No, it’s not a parody.

Noah Berlatsky writes, Georgia candidate’s ‘Jesus Guns Babies’ tagline is a Christian nationalist parody — but it’s real:

[A]head of her GOP primary race on Tuesday, rabid Trumpist and Georgia gubernatorial candidate Kandiss Taylor was filmed giving a confused but fiery speech. She claimed that the Constitution states that traitors must be put to death by firing squad (which it very much does not.) She also said she is ready to “handcuff” local sheriffs who are insufficiently conservative or betray the Constitution. As she delivered her spiel, Taylor stood in front of a van emblazoned with the words “Jesus Guns Babies.”

The “Jesus Guns Babies” slogan provoked a good bit of mockery, for obvious reasons. The whole thing seems like a ludicrous parody.

Taylor’s message is grotesque, but it’s not original, contradictory, or very surprising. As Thomas Lecaque, a professor of history at Grand View University, said on Twitter, Taylor’s message is “just incredibly overt, loud, and clear Christian nationalism.”

In mainstream discourse, there’s a tendency to frame white Christian nationalism as an outlier, or a puzzle: Christianity is a religion of love and humility, so how can Christians see guns as a sacrament or Trump as a savior? Elizabeth Bruenig (a former evangelical convert to Catholicism) summed up the perceived contradiction when she noted that “Trump’s less-than-Christian behavior seemed, paradoxically, to make him a more appealing candidate to beleaguered, aggravated Christians.”

But is Trump’s behavior really “less-than-Christian”? That depends. Christianity in many places throughout history, and certainly in the U.S., has been used as an instrument of violence and dominion, rather than as a force for liberation and healing.

* * *

In another campaign speech, she claimed that the Founding Fathers took Native American land and destroyed Native American homes in order to grant people (i.e. Christians) the right to “worship Jesus freely.” Genocide is framed here as a necessary Christian process; Native American “sacrifice” is a blood offering. There is no contradiction between “Jesus” and “Guns” when genocide is a holy origin myth.

The Christian worship of “Babies” also has an ugly legacy. Evangelical right-wing Christian identity in the U.S. is today closely tied to opposition to abortion. But historians have documented that when Roe was passed in 1973, conservative white Christians weren’t especially mobilized around abortion. The issue that really fired them up was school segregation.

At the time, the government was threatening to strip tax-exempt status from segregated religious schools like Bob Jones University. They saw government integration as an attack on religious liberty, just as conservative evangelicals today claim that baking cakes for a gay wedding is an attack on their “freedoms.”

But an open Christian fight for segregation was viewed as too unpopular and ugly in the mid-70s. So instead conservative Christian nationalists decided to organize around the “right to life” to build a voting bloc. [See Francis Schaeffer and his son Frank.] Saving fetuses via abortion was seen as a more acceptable way of keeping white children safe from contamination. “Babies,” as a white Christian nationalist principle, is inseparable from racist purity.

Christianity and white nationalism remain intertwined in the current conservative movement’s politics of childhood. On the one hand, conservatives celebrate the imminent end of abortion rights and the chance to force pregnant people to carry to term under penalty of law.  On the other hand, conservatives like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green have been attacking the Biden administration for daring to provide baby formula to immigrant children detained at the border.

This is not how you show your love for all God’s children. It’s a white Christian nationalist philosophy of eugenic dominance.

Wajahat Ali warns, We Mock ‘Jesus Guns Babies’ Platform at Our Own Peri:

“Jesus, Guns, Babies” are the three words you need to know if you want to understand the ideology and rationalizations of the modern GOP, which is now a radicalized and weaponized movement seeking to create and impose a white Christian utopia in America and abroad.

“Jesus Guns Babies” is the campaign slogan of Kandiss Taylor, a Republican candidate for Governor in Georgia, who was also an educator for over two decades and doesn’t believe in commas. In fact, the ethos of “Jesus Guns Babies” was recently further expanded upon by Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who is running the National Republican Senatorial Committee, in his publicly derided 11-point plan to “save America.” His brilliant vision devotes separate bullet points for God, guns (the second amendment), and, of course, babies and the promotion of a nuclear, heterosexual family, which he believes is “crucial to civilization.” Apparently, he also believes in hurting those very same families with increased taxes and killing off Medicare and Social Security, which explains why his plan was greeted like a wet fart in the wind.

Taylor’s three-word campaign slogan went viral last week on Twitter and was the subject of much well-earned mockery. However, it’s unwise for the majority to simply ignore it and Scott’s plan as a silly punchline of the week and an example of the right-wing fringe. Instead, they efficiently and exquisitely capture the motivations of white Christian nationalism, which according to the contributors of a blistering and important new report released in February, was used to “bolster, justify and intensify the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol” and is a portent of future violence and political unrest.

You have to understand Christian nationalism to both understand the modern right-wing movement and their admiration for brutal authoritarian Russian leader Vladimir Putin. When Lauren Witzke, the Delaware GOP’s candidate for Senate in 2020, says, “I identify more with Putin’s Christian values than I do with Joe Biden,” and praises “his Christian nationalist nation” during the week where Russia illegally invaded Ukraine, it behooves us to take these statements literally and seriously.

Let’s break down each part of the three-word slogan to see how it connected the modern conservative movement and its embrace of a zero-sum power struggle to replace a multiracial democracy with a romanticized white Christian utopia that exists in their fevered imagination.

You might know him as the Messiah, the son of God, a prophet of God, or an enlightened and selfless radical who defied the oppressive powers of his time to champion the rights and dignity of the poor and marginalized. For the right-wing, he’s the ideal mascot for their political movement and forever culture war, a hype man sent from the Heavens who rubber stamps their ensuing cruelty, which is justified as necessary to save them, the real victims, from the oppressive secular “Deep State” which seeks to replace them.

This is manifested clearly in Rick Scott’s 11-point plan to “save America,” where he promises that when Republicans regain power, “Americans will be free to welcome God into all aspects of our lives,” and they will fight back against the “new religion of wokeness that is increasingly hostile toward of people of faith, particularly Christians and Jews.” There is no mention of Muslims, who endured a literal ban during Trump, or other religious minority groups, which means only some Americans “will be free” in this utopia.

However, that’s all part of the plan. According to Christian nationalism, America is a “Christian nation,” divinely favored by God, and whose enduring success is due to white, Christian men like Rick Santorum and his ancestors who “birthed this nation from nothing” and brought forth civilization, progress, and freedom as part of their Manifest Destiny. The rest of us, apparently, are tenants, who should be grateful we’ve been given some living space and super-sized menu options.

Unfortunately, this increasingly radicalized movement is mobilized to use violence to impose their perverse vision on the majority according to the report “Christian Nationalism and the January 6 Insurrection,” which documents how Christian nationalist symbols and references were ubiquitous at the [January 6] insurrection. In fact, two-thirds of white Americans who strongly support Christian ideology believe the big lie, and 40 percent of them believe that violence might be necessary to save the country.

By using Jesus and God, white Christian nationalists have rationalized every perversity and sin, such as slavery, which explicitly runs afoul of Jesus’ teachings and conduct. This also explains their fervent support for Donald Trump, a corrupt vulgarian who has probably read Mein Kampfmore than the Bible. That doesn’t bother MAGA, because to them Trump is a “modern-day Cyrus,” the flawed Persian pagan king, whom God nonetheless used as an instrument to fulfill his Divine will and fight against his enemies.

Similarly, Putin of Russia is also a “lion of Christianity,” which is how Bryan Fischer, a former spokesman of the American Family Association, once described the brutal murderer who poisons his critics and steals his country’s wealth. Evangelical leader Franklin Graham met with Putin in 2017 and praised him for protecting traditional Christianity. Putin is doing that by cracking down on LGTBQ rights, defending traditional marriage, promoting gun rights, and protecting Western civilization from Islam. During a discussion on Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, Steve Bannon and Blackwater founder Erik Prince praised Putin’s homophobic policies, saying, “Putin ain’t woke. He is anti-woke.”

In order to save Western Christian civilization, you need a political movement, but you also need a weapon.

The Pope is Catholic. Water is wet. Republicans love their guns, and the Second Amendment is apparently the 11th Commandment. We don’t need to belabor the obvious. Even though Jesus wasn’t known to open carry, guns have historically been the weapon of choice for white Christian men to maintain their vicious, brutal supremacy over Black and indigenous people in America. Every election, GOP politicians scare their base into thinking liberals will take away their guns, and by extension their freedoms, when the majority simply attempts to introduce common-sense gun reform in a country where school shooting drills are normalized due to the prevalence of mass shootings. Naturally, Scott devoted one of his 11 points to reiterate that any “attempt to deny our 2nd Amendment freedoms” would be rejected by the GOP and he ominously concluded, the GOP “will defend our gun rights always, at all costs.”

Voting rights, however, can be sacrificed.

Guns also allow the GOP’s base, which is still suffering from massive “economic anxiety,” to stand their ground against liberals and people of color who are apparently taking over the suburbs and invading the border. This explains the adulation of Mark McCloskey, who along with his wife, illegally brandished weapons against peaceful BLM supporters and was rewarded with a pardon and an invitation to address the RNC in 2020. He is now running to be a Senator. This explains the elevation of Kyle Rittenhouse, who brought a gun to a BLM protest, killed two people, was acquitted, and is now free to live his life as a modern-day conservative hero and sue Lebron James.

Putin understands the conservative gun obsession and exploits it for his anti-American purposes. That’s why top officials from the NRA traveled to Moscow in 2015 at the invitation of Russian agent Marina Butina and her handler Alexander Torshin, where the NRA’s top members met with Putin’s government. According to a 2019 Senate Report, the NRA ended up acting as a “foreign asset” for Russia leading up to the 2016 election, in which Russia interfered to help Trump become President.

But, all these sins are forgiven, because Republicans are trying to protect babies from sex-trafficking Democrats who bear the mark of the beast.

Republicans really care about babies, specifically those that are still in the womb. However, based on their policies, it’s clear that once the baby is born, it’s “fuck them kids.” This explains their attacks on masks and vaccine mandates at schools during a pandemic, their opposition to gun control despite numerous school shootings, and their refusal to support the child tax credit which briefly lifted millions of children out of poverty. However, to protect an unborn baby, they are perfectly fine supporting a draconian bill in Texas that essentially kills Roe v. Wade, takes women’s rights back fifty years, and empowers vigilantes to threaten and intimidate anyone helping facilitate an abortion.

Protecting babies is also a major flashpoint in the culture wars and fuels conspiracy theories like QAnon. It helps mobilize the right-wing and portrays all liberals as literal “baby killers,” even as Trump and Mike Pompeo praise Putin’s savviness, which will result in dead Ukrainian kids and orphans. As Scott said in his plan, “The nuclear family is crucial to civilization, it is God’s design for humanity, and it must be protected and celebrated. To say otherwise is to deny science… Men are men, women are women, and unborn babies are babies.”

I mean, who can argue with that sound logic, except scientists, non-traditional families, women who demand autonomy and freedom over their bodies and lives, and those who identify as transgender and non-binary?

But, they are not important, because they don’t belong in a white Christian nationalist utopia. At best, they are sidekicks or useful villains to be tolerated. Or, they’ll be banned or oppressed to the point where they’ll pack up and leave, and then they can simply exist as a footnote.

And so will you, unless you subscribe to “Jesus Guns Babies,” which is why a ridiculous slogan should not be ignored when it’s clearly a terrifying roadmap for an America in which Republicans gain power in 2024 and finally implement their vision for a white Christian America.

Ending American democracy would be met with massive resistance which would tear the country apart. The best choice is to never put these power-hungry white Christian Nationalist Republicans, the American Taliban, in power over your lives. Republicans must be rejected and repudiated en masse by voters in this election, and every election for a generation or two.