The Christian Fascist majority on the Supreme Court is using religion as a weapon to rob people of basic rights -- and is backing up the fascist Donald Trump at every opportunity.
Too many do not understand this “unholy alliance” between Donald Trump and the Christian fascists. Share and spread the following excerpt from a talk given in 2017, during the first Trump fascist regime. This understanding is all the more crucial now, with the “second coming” of the Trump regime and this fascism now “on an unrestrained rampage.”
The “Unholy Alliance” Between Trump and Fundamentalist Christian Fascists: An Explainer.
Excerpt from the 2017 talk, The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America. A Better World IS Possible
One of the most distinguishing and significant features of this particularly American version of fascism is the “unholy alliance” between Trump and fundamentalist Christian Fascists. As I pointed out in another recent talk:
“Trump, I think it’s fair to say, could not have won the election if the Christian Fascists ... not only if they had opposed him, but if they’d been unenthusiastic about him ....And ... even when the ... pussy-grabbing thing came out, they didn’t turn against him (...Jerry Falwell, Jr. and all these others)—because they recognized: “Here is somebody who is going outside of the whole rules and the way this is done in the ‘swamp of Washington,’ who will actually carry through on this stuff [like outlawing abortion and suppressing gay people].”... And Trump, for his part, recognized that if he didn’t get this force behind him, he was not going to be able to do it....
“Pence is obviously a critical linchpin in this ... uniting of what’s represented by Trump ... and the Christian Fascists.... [T]he regular bourgeois institutions, ... like CNN, the Democratic Party and so on, ... they keep saying: ‘He can’t do that, that’s not the way things are done.’ But then [Trump] does it, because he’s not playing by those rules. He’s not working within the norms as they’ve been. He is going directly up against them, precisely as an important part of what he’s doing.”
And, while Pence plays a very important role in all this, he is far from the only Christian Fascist in this regime. Besides the appointment of Neil Gorsuch, who is himself a Christian Fascist, to the Supreme Court—re-establishing, after the death of Antonin Scalia, the right-wing majority on the Court—Trump’s cabinet is full of these Christian Fascists.
Perhaps it seems harsh, or even extreme, to refer to these fundamentalist Christians as fascists. Well, in Katherine Stewart’s book The Good News Club, The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, she cites these comments by Rich Lang, himself a former Christian fundamentalist, who broke with that and became a liberal Christian pastor:
“When I was born again [Lang recalls], faith was something inside of you, something you were supposed to reflect through your life. But in the 1980s, something happened. Fundamentalist Christianity jumped back into the public square with the intention to reshape the country as a Christian nation as defined by them....
“It’s no different than the Nazis wanting to start with the Hitler Youth. That is where you’d want to start if you were trying to build a fascist movement....
“That’s the word, ‘fascism.’ Nobody likes to use it in this country. But I believe that in this country, underneath the appearances, that is exactly the great temptation of our time. ...[A]nd you have to call it what it is—‘Christian Fascism.’”
Stewart further summarizes Lang’s views this way: “Modern fundamentalism, like fascism in earlier times, he says, involves a strong feeling of persecution, typically at the hands of godless liberals or a religious ‘other’; the belief that one belongs to a pure race or national group that is responsible for past greatness, suffers unjust oppression in the present, and is the rightful ruler of the world; the impulse to submit unquestioningly to absolute authority; and the relentless drive for power and control. It is, he says, a kind of supremacist movement, with religion rather than race at its core.”
And there is this chilling statement by Lang:
“People have no idea it’s going on....
“What does it mean that the conservative church that’s growing in America is an end-times church? What does it mean that we are raising a generation of children to believe that they are the last generation? What is going to happen if we keep on telling them, ‘Don’t care about the environment, and bring on the war, because we’re going to be lifted out of here, and you can forget about loving your neighbors, because they’re just going to get blown away?’”
So, that is the insight of someone very familiar with these Christian Fascists. And the fact is that, in this country, with its whole history of genocide, slavery and racism, any form of fascism, including one basing itself on “Christian supremacy”—any urge to “restore past greatness”—cannot help but be bound together with white supremacy.
The Republican Party has been moving in a fascist direction since the late 1960s, with further leaps since then to becoming more and more openly fascist.
In running for President in 1968, Richard Nixon adopted what has been called the “southern strategy,” which the Republican Party has followed ever since. This is a direct appeal to white supremacy—to the racism of white people, particularly (though not only) in the southern states, who are enraged that Black people are not “staying in their place.”
The Republican Party is not “the Party of Lincoln”—as it sometimes demagogically claims to be—it has become much more the Party of the Confederacy.
With Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party took another leap on the road of fascism. Reagan very deliberately began his campaign for president in 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where in 1964, three civil rights workers were kidnapped and brutally murdered by white supremacists. There, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, Reagan proclaimed his support for “states rights,” which, particularly in the South, have long been code words for white supremacist lynch-mobism.
And after George W. Bush took things still further in a fascist direction—including the open use of torture and the active promotion of Christian fundamentalism—the Trump/Pence regime has made the leap into all-out fascism.
There is a direct line from the Confederacy to the fascists of today, and a direct connection between their white supremacy, their open disgust and hatred for LGBT people as well as women, their willful rejection of science and the scientific method, their raw “American First” jingoism and trumpeting of “the superiority of western civilization” and their bellicose wielding of military power, including their expressed willingness and blatant threats to use nuclear weapons, to destroy countries.
The truth—another terrible truth that must be faced—is that, in the context of profound and acute contradictions that are asserting, or re-asserting, themselves in ways that are tearing at the very fabric and deepening cracks in the foundation of this country, at the same time as the American empire is facing serious challenges internationally, fascism is one possible resolution of this, on the terms of this system and its ruling class, even as this is a horror for humanity.
While the Constitution does establish the separation of church and state—and the Christian Fascists are wrong, or simply lying, when they insist that the founding documents of this country established it as a “Christian nation”—the reality is that Christianity has all along been the unofficial state religion of this country, and the country’s identity, throughout its history, has been as a “white Christian nation,” grounded in male supremacy as well as white supremacy and driven by a “manifest destiny” to dominate not only the continent of North America but ultimately the world as a whole. All this has been brought into question, and has become the focus of intense struggle, going back to the 1960s and, in some important ways, back to the Civil War. And while developments internationally, including the demise of the Soviet Union, have given further impetus to the globalization of the capitalist world economy, this very heightened globalization has propelled changes that have sharpened contradictions within the U.S. as well as on the world level, particularly with an emerging capitalist China mounting a challenge to U.S. global economic dominance, at the same time as this heightened globalization, under conditions of western imperialist domination, has wreaked havoc in countries throughout the Third World, including the Middle East (and other places where Islam is the prevailing religion), adding fuel to a virulent Islamic fundamentalism that has declared war on the “decadent West” and on “infidels” and others oriented toward the West and facilitating its imperial domination.
In order to bring about any positive resolution to all this, even short of abolishing and moving beyond this whole system, it is necessary and crucial to break with the “normal routine” and the “normal workings” of the political process.
Go HERE for a bibliography and timeline of Bob Avakian’s Work on Fascism: 1996-2025
Take up the Call initiated by RefuseFascism.org, and open to all, for the Fall of the Trump fascist regime, November 2025 -- for massive, nonviolent sustained mobilization of millions in Washington D.C. determined to drive out this fascist regime.
