The reactionary Christian ideology that’s driving support for the U.S.-Israel imperialist alliance, and that’s facilitating a campaign of internal inquisition against the opponents of capitalism and colonialism, is based on an utterly nihilistic view of social and economic systems. Just look at the Christian argument for why the Israeli occupation of Palestine should continue. Halfof evangelicals support Israel mainly because they believe the existence of a Zionist state is crucial to fulfilling the Bliblical end times prophecy, where an apocalyptic war gets started which prompts Jesus Christ to return and bring the worthy up to Heaven.
The human costs of Washington’s propping up this state — which for the last century has been forcibly displacing the Arabs, carrying out campaigns of deliberate starvation to make way for Zionist settlements, and wantonly brutalizing unarmed Palestinian demonstrators for terroristic purposes — are all negated under this rationale. As is all the other death and destruction that Zionism’s Washington imperialist backers are facilitating.
Christian nationalist hypocrisy on economic injustice & human rights
Among these evangelicals, support for capitalism is viewed as just as crucial for the advancement of Christ. In One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, Kevin Kruse lays outhow since the middle of the last century, bourgeois propagandists have been promoting the idea that deference to private industry is a vital part of being Christian. This narrative about God wanting “free enterprise” to succeed continues to be proliferated by preachers like Joel Osteen, who promotes the “Prosperity Gospel” with its claim that God wants the rich to be rich.
The catastrophic consequences of neoliberal policies, which have needlessly caused well over 100 million people worldwide to be pushed into extreme poverty during the pandemic alone and have made it so that 200 million more will soon join them, are also disregarded under this reasoning. The only thing that matters to this ideology is the advancement of what’s claimed to be God’s will, which always aligns with what benefits capital and empire.
These demands to blindly support the existing social and economic order in the name of “freedom” aren’t even supported by the Catechisms of Catholicism, the main strain within this reactionary religious sphere. The Catechisms state that:
The exercise of freedom does not imply a right to say or do everything. It is false to maintain that man, “the subject of this freedom,” is “an individual who is fully self-sufficient and whose finality is the satisfaction of his own interests in the enjoyment of earthly goods.” Moreover, the economic, social, political, and cultural conditions that are needed for a just exercise of freedom are too often disregarded or violated. Such situations of blindness and injustice injure the moral life and involve the strong as well as the weak in the temptation to sin against charity. By deviating from the moral law man violates his own freedom, becomes imprisoned within himself, disrupts neighborly fellowship, and rebels against divine truth.
Aside from the language about these moral tenets stemming from something “divine,” this passage might as well have come from Lenin, who wrote: “Let us consider the position of an oppressor nation. Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot.” Or Stalin, who wrote: “It is difficult for me to imagine what ‘personal liberty’ is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment. Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.”
This is a very simple concept: that humanity can’t be truly free for as long as the rights of some are being violated, and that doing away with unjust social structures is necessary for upholding these rights. Yet the figures who are most fanatically committed to proliferating Catholicism — including the dominant leaders of the Catholic Church itself — are ironically the biggest violators of this idea’s call for fighting systemic injustice.
Two years ago in Bolivia, with the direct backing of the CIA and the Organization of American States, right-wing Catholics used paramilitary tactics and incitements towards violence over fabricated “election fraud” claims to force out the democratically re-elected indigenous socialist president Evo Morales. In his place they installed Jeanine Áñez, a far-right Catholic whose genocidal motivations had been clarified in an old tweet which declared: “I dream of a Bolivia without satanic indigenous rituals, the city isn’t made for indians, they need to go back to the countryside!”
Áñez and the other members of the junta delayed elections, censoredthe media, tortured journalists, created masked and heavily armed death squads to terrorize the citizenry, did all they could to reverse the working class gains that Morales had made (which they ironically justified by claiming that they were merely trying to “dismantle the apparatus of the dictatorial regime of Evo Morales”), neglectedindigenous peoples during the pandemic, and repeatedly massacredunarmed indigenous pro-democracy demonstrators. Fitting with Christian Zionism, Bolivia’s coup regime also brought in the Israelis to assist the security forces with crushing dissent.
Yet after Bolivia’s people have elected the party of Morales back into power, allowing Áñez to be brought to justice through arrest, the Catholic Church has called for Áñez to be released. As Morales has said, the Church has chosen to “side with the oppressor, forget the humble and ask for freedom of the coup plotters subjected to justice when they never claimed or mentioned the victims of the Senkata and Sacaba massacres.”
Expanding corporate domination & paramilitarism under an agenda of genocide denial
This effort by the Church to legitimize the atrocities of the coupists is a bitter reaction to the fact that the coup in Bolivia has been reversed, which diminishes the reach of capital and empire and forces them to turn inwards. They’re doing this in part by militarizing society for the sake of profit, which has entailed the proliferation of private military contractors both within U.S. wars abroad and within internal repressive paramilitary operations. Erik Prince, the hard-right Catholic who changed his mercenary company’s name from Blackwater to Academi after Blackwater was found guilty of numerous war crimes, is one of the military contractor CEOs who’s benefiting from Biden’s current underhanded effort to privatize the Afghanistan war.
It was Prince’s aggressive expansions of the role of mercenaries in the military during the War on Terror that paved the way for additional mercenary companies, like TigerSwan, to assist the U.S. police state with domestic repressive actions like TigerSwan’s infiltration of the protests at Standing Rock. Last year, another mercenary group took the inquisition against opposition towards Christian nationalism a step further by hiring personnel to monitor polling places, likely for pro-Trump partisan purposes. Eventually, these for-profit paramilitaries may well take on the same role within the U.S. that they already have in South Africa, where private police forces have been replicatingapartheid-style inequalities. Biden is certainly enabling this insidious rise of paramilitarism, with Biden still not calling for UN sanctions against Prince following revelations about Prince violatinginternational law by going against an embargo on arms sales to Libya.
Behind all of these steps towards apartheid and unprecedented corporate domination within American society is Prince’s agenda of codifying free market fanaticism into the policies of a theocratic state. Mandatory prayer in schools, the banning of same-sex marriage, the abolition of reproductive rights, the intensified persecution of marginalized groups, the censorship of anti-Zionist sentiments, the state promotion of a narrative about a “Christian nation,” and funding for pseudoscience are all part of how Christian nationalists aim to fortify settler-colonial rule. The Biden administration’s facilitation of a key part of this agenda through its conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism shows how far they’re likely to get during the coming decades of escalating social crises. And as Mike Kuhlenbeck of The Humanist has written, it’s families like Prince’s that are at the forefront of this Christian authoritarian push:
Surrounded by those who share their belief in Christian-based politics, the Prince family has used its fortune to help build the conservative Christian movement. Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and Richard Nixon’s disgraced former special counsel Charles Colson (who became a born-again Christian after serving seven months in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal) were family friends. Edgar and Elsa Prince were major contributors to the Family Research Council and founded the nonprofit Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation in 1979, substantial funds from which have gone toward the effort to abolish the legal wall separating church and state.
These nationalists don’t just want to make the church synonymous with the state; they want to bury the historical atrocities that the settler-colonial state was founded upon, and which therefore call this state’s legitimacy into question. Last year, major far-right and pro-Zionist commentator Ben Shapiro claimed that “the United States did not commit genocide against Native Americans. That’s a lie. The notion that the United States committed genocide against Native Americans is based on a false equivalence between disease spreading across the United States, decimating the Native American population — which is not a genocide — and an actual forcible genocide.”
These and similar statements ignore how the colonists deliberatelyspread disease to the Natives via smallpox blankets, how forced relocations, slavery, and concentration camps were the approaches used for making room for white settlements, and how the U.S. has set fire to the homes of Natives and destroyed their crops in parallel to how Israel has demolished Palestinians homes and deprived Palestinians of water to sabotage their agriculture.
This kind of casual disregard for the evils settler-colonialism has committed against indigenous peoples is naturally reflected in how these types of reactionaries portray the colonization of Palestine. Montana Secretary of State Corey Stapleton has rationalized the occupations of both this continent and of Palestine by arguing that “might makes right” supersedes the very concept of land sovereignty:
“We were here first” often has a strong legal foundation in civilized courts and governments. But not always. Just because a tribe or nation occupies a certain plot of land hasn’t historically assured its future ownership…I was in Israel. And wouldn’t you know it — they’re dealing with the same thing! Kinda. Several other Secretaries of State, and myself, spent the better part of a week learning about the small nation of Israel and all the nuances of living in a region where different tribes and nations really don’t like each other. Trying to allocate land and property based upon who was there ‘first’ doesn’t always work very well, to say the least.
This is the narrative on which the tightening of Christian nationalist control is taking place, and which is being used to justify the parallel colonial warfare and discrimination against Palestinians. A narrative which erases the indigenous nations by claiming that they either don’t exist, or might as well accept their subjugation due to already being weakened so much. When these nations are believed to not even be real anymore, the idea of anti-colonial revolution within both Palestine and the land the U.S. exists upon gets to be far removed from the cultural consciousness, letting fascism fill the void.
It’s the same tactic that Ukraine’s U.S.-installed fascists have used to justify their war buildup against Russia, pogroms against Jews and Romas, persecution of the LGBT community, and suppression of class struggle: erase key historical atrocities so that a legitimizing national myth can be manufactured. The Ukrainian fascists uphold the country’s World War II-era Nazi collaborators, who directly participated in the Holocaust, as the country’s heroic founding fathers who “liberated” Ukraine from communism. It’s so important for this myth to be propagated within Ukrainian culture that the fascists have banned the act of publicly challenging the government’s account about who these Nazi collaborators were. The equivalent may one day be done in the U.S. when it comes to the slave owners and indigenous genocide perpetrators who are upheld as our “Founding Fathers.”
Pushing towards an evangelical-backed Israeli nuclear war with Iran
At the same time that Christian nationalism expands its control, the range within which it can exercise this control is shrinking. Since Washington’s reckless invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. military and economic primacy have been dwindling, a fact that even the Pentagon recognized in 2017. The empire’s decline has grown so serious that Dr. Eran Lerman, a prominent Israeli conservative defense thinker, stated last year that “American hegemony is crumbling before our eyes,” and that this fact should motivate Israel to annex the West Bank to secure its existence in a near future where Washington has been forced to retreat from the region.
Because the perceived legitimacy of the Zionist state is also crumbling, Israel hasn’t been able to carry out its West Bank annexation plans. It also hasn’t been able to pacify the Palestinian population amid its recent siege against Gaza, or to stop the negotiations towards restoring the Iran nuclear deal the Join Comprehensive Plan of Action; as the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists concluded this week, “As long as the United States continues to fully implement its commitments under the JCPOA, the next Iranian administration, regardless of its political affiliation, is likely to abide by the terms of the agreement. Joe Biden need not lose any sleep over this in the coming weeks.” As Mehrnaz Shahabi of Consortiumnews wrote last month, Israel’s escalatory reactions to this threat of further losing their strategic interests could produce a nuclear war:
On April 28, Israel’s intelligence minister, Eli Cohen, repeated the Israeli threat that should the U.S. re-enter the JCPOA and remove the sanctions on Iran, Israel would hit Iran’s nuclear plants with long range missiles. This threat too was met with silent acquiescence on the part of the U.S. and its Western allies, the same kind of silence that has met. Israel’s continued acts of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, house demolitions, settlement building, administrative detention of children, Gaza blockade, use of phosphorous bombs, flooding and contamination of agricultural land, raiding Al-Aqsa Mosque in the holy month of Ramadan, torching trees and agricultural crops and bombarding residential apartment blocks in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Israel’s free license to act with impunity is fast sliding into war. Only fools would believe that attacking Iran’s enrichment plants, its critical infrastructure, shipping, and scientific and military personnel, would remain unanswered, and could not spill over into a destructive regional war with global consequences, from which use of nuclear weapons can not be excluded.
This would be the war that the evangelicals have long been praying for. John Hagee, the lobbyist whose organization has close ties to Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence, has predicted that Israeli nuclear missiles are going to make it so that “inferno will explode across the Middle East, plunging the world toward Armageddon.” Now that Biden is deviating in the slightest from this camp’s policy by bringing back the Iran deal — which is itself designed to fortify imperialist influence over Iran by constraining its actions under threat of continuing Trump’s genocidal sanctions — the Zionists are racing to make Hagee’s murderous vision a reality. Iran isn’t the rogue state in the region, Israel is.
If this rogue state carries out a nuclear attack, or if it ignites a conflict even more destructive than the Iraq War, the Biden administration is no doubt going to enable it and whitewash its crimes — just like how Biden has been continuing military aid and rhetorical protections for Israel despite its world-shocking recent atrocities. At the center of mass backing for this omnicidal war will be the religious death cult that colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism have cultivated.
This is a cult that disregards its own doctrines about helping the poor and the oppressed in favor of a fascistic allegiance with capital and empire. That rewrites history, to the point of whitewashing coup regime atrocities and denying a genocide many times larger than the Holocaust, so that its repressive policies can be rationalized. That proliferates paramilitary violence from unaccountable mercenaries, whether for the sake of profit or for the perpetuation of the colonial genocide. That’s even eager to cheer on a potential nuclear rampage from a genocidal settler-colonial regime because it expects this to bring a moment where the cult’s believers have their conviction in a doomsday prophecy vindicated.
Whether or not the evangelicals get their war with Iran, they may soon get a version of their anticipated existential war within U.S. borders. Sociologist Temitope Oriola recently predicted that the country’s social crises, particularly the intensifying effective military occupation of the African community via increasingly militarized police, is going to bring an insurgency from the colonized peoples within our generation. When these victims of settler-colonialism start to rise up in this way, it will be the Christian reactionaries who provide the state with on-the-ground aid towards trying to crush the liberation movement.
The churches, right-wing prepper groups, and private armies that American Christianity’s wealthy and petty-bourgeois facets have built up will serve as fortifications for this near-future fascist terror campaign. If the anti-colonial proletarian movement organizes sufficiently, it will be able to overcome this cult like how it was overcome in Bolivia.
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