From “Defending Democracy from its Christian Enemies” by David P. Gushee
It is hard to overstate how widely shared the belief in left-liberal “illiberal” authoritarianism is on the right, and not just the religious right, and certainly not just in the United States. Consider this comment from Wall Street Journal writer Barton Swaim, made in passing in a book review:
Some liberals-typically the highly educated and privileged sort – tend to forget they are liberals and try to define righteousness for everybody. They do this by reallocating citizens’ wealth according to their own ideals, regulating private economic behavior, dictating to local communities how they should govern themselves, imposing protean codes of correct speech and behavior on everyone else, and so on.
And ponder this quote from Bret Stephens, one of the New York Times’s two resident conservative opinion writers:
Then came the great American cultural revolution of the 2010s, in which traditional practices and beliefs – regarding same-sex marriage, sex-segregated bathrooms, personal pronouns, meritocratic ideals, race-blind rules, reverse for patriotic symbols, the rules of romance, the presumption of innocence and the distinction between equality of opportunity and outcome – became, more and more, not just passe but taboo. It’s one thing for social mores to evolve over time, aided by respect for differences of opinion. It’s another for them to be abruptly imposed by one side on another, with little democratic input but a great deal of moral bullying.
Christian moral discomfort is sometimes motivated by the broad palette of mainstream conservative worries articulated by Swaim and Stephens. But as is to be expected, conservative Christians tend to have a specific focus on sex, gender, marriage, family, and children, that is, issues on which Christians believe they are adhering to authoritative and unchangeable religious convictions. The outrage level rises when Christians believe they are being belittled, intimidated, or governmentally coerced into sacrificing those convictions.
Meanwhile, among the conservative coalition are serious Christinas, nominal Christians, and the frankly “irreligious right.” For the latter, their version of conservative outrage is often redolent of antisemitism, xenophobia, and patent racism, that is, flat-out ethno-nationalism. They are not hindered by whatever constraints on prejudice Christian teaching might once have offered. We will see this phenomenon in several of our country studies.
My analysis in this book will be that there is a global phenomenon today that can be called “authoritarian reactionary Christian politics.” It is sourced by visceral and reactive discomfort against recent social changes as well as the perceived inability either to set the terms of their cultures or perhaps even to defend their way of life against cultural or governmental left-liberalism. Its strategies now frequently involve a pushing of democracy to or beyond its limits, a playing in (or beyond) the gray zone between legality and illegality, and a sliding toward autocracy and a sliding away from crucial democratic norms and practices.