As readers should know by now, I’m a life-long atheist. My lack of faith in a god or other supernatural things is not a hinderance to my ability to see what I see. Indeed, I’m convinced that my lack of faith helps me to see the truth of matters more clearly. I don’t have a dog in the hunt, so to speak; my bullshit detector is unencumbered by belief in mythologies. At any rate, I strive to detect mythologies and expose them.
This orientation towards material and objective truths of the world allows me to see very clearly what’s at the play today, where the same people who promote gender ideology, multiculturalism, and sharia supremacy are telling the public that the greatest threat to the American Republic is the patriotic Christian family. You can already see the game plan for the crazy season. In addition to the disinformation about Russian influencing the 2024 election, the lawfare being waged the leading presidential candidate, Donald Trump, the continuing suppression of speech and oppression of patriots by the national security apparatus, a new front has open in the war against the people: the specter of Christian Nationalism.
Although I have disagreements with Christian doctrine, I am not so blinded by fear and loathing of that faith to see that its head and shoulders better than the various ideologies that challenge it. This is true in several ways, but I want to emphasize here the single greatest thing recommending Christianity over other ideologies, namely its secularism. Before I get to that, I want to remind readers that at the end of last year, on December 23, 2023, I blew up the claims of the Christian extremist in my essay Rise of the Domestic Clerical Fascist and the Specter of Christian Nationalism. I’m not walking back any of that argument. The problem I am addressing today is the reduction of Christianity to its extremist variants and the failure to see that it was in major part the Christian worldview that moved men to found a free republic to safeguard citizens from the imposition of religious doctrine.
Corporate state operatives, represented by progressive Democrats, are engineering a moral panic over Christianity by informing the public that the imposition of a Christian worldview on the country would end democracy with a theocracy where everybody is forced to observe conservative Christian doctrine. But the reality is that the Christian worldview was in operation when the country was founded and those men did not create a theocracy but a secular republic that protected religious liberty—including the right to be an atheist. As I noted in that December essay, “most of the Founders were not only Christian, but that they went along with the establishment of a secular republic. There is an important lesson in all of this (and it would behoove the gender ideologues to pay attention here): one can enjoy his faith while leaving others out of it.”
What would be the story had the American Republic been founded by men with a Muslim worldview? Islamic doctrine does not observe separation of church and state. Islamic preachments insist on a close connection between religious and political aspects of life—not for the believer, but for everybody under the law, or sharia. Sharia is integral to Islamic governance. In an Islamic state, the legal and political systems are expected to be guided by Islamic principles as derived from the Quran and the teachings of Muhammad. Islamic law covers a wide range of aspects of life, including criminal justice, familial relations, and personal morality. Islamic societies thus combine and integrate political with religious authority. Leadership is represented by a caliph and clerics responsible for the spiritual and temporal well-being of the community. It is a totalitarian system.
These arrangements should terrify free-minded persons. Yet progressives in North America and social democrats in Europe have opened the gates for Islamists and other foreign culture bearers to flood in, changing the culture and law across the trans-Atlantic space. The West is being Islamized. Those who object are smeared as “bigots,” “Islamophobes,” “racists,” and “xenophobes.” The same people behind mass immigration are warning that Christians aim to establish in reality the fictional dystopia of Canadian author Margaret Atwood depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale. Under Trump, the public is told, Christian Nationalists will stand up something like the Republic of Gilead, a theocratic society operating on a strict interpretation of Christian theology, used to justify a totalitarian regime. The Gilead Republic is highly stratified and women subjected to severe restrictions on their liberties and rights. That will be our world if Trump is re-elected.
But the world Atwood built in her imagination—and that Rob Reiner imagines in his documentary God and Country, which hit US theaters on February 16 to corporate state media acclaim—is not any Christian society that has existed in the West for several centuries, but rather reflects the realities of the Islamic state that exists across the planet where that system prevails—the very system progressives defend and normalize with banners declaring “Queers for Palestinian.” Indeed, it was developments in Christendom in the Age of Reason that produced the Enlightenment, developments intrinsic to Christian doctrine unfolding in maturation. To be sure, there are Christian extremists (perhaps one in ten Christians in America identifies as a theocrat), but Christianity is not an extremist political ideology in the way Islam is. Not even close.
Or the way gender ideology is. Last summer, Newsweek reported that, according to the survey by Redfield and Wilton Strategies, 44 percent of those aged 25-34 think “referring to someone by the wrong gender pronoun (he/him, she/her) should be a criminal offense.” Only 31 percent of that cohort disagreed with the statement. This view remains popular for those aged 35-44, as well, with whom 38 percent reporting that they believe misgendering should be illegal, whilst 35 percent disagree and 26 percent either don’t know or didn’t express an opinion. In other words, referring in the third person to a man who says or thinks he is a woman by male pronouns, a part of speech used to convey reality—that is, correctly gendering the man—is “misgendering,” an offense for which the perpetrator should be adjudicated a criminal and punished. The public is being told that those who produced the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—Christians—represent a threat to the nation, that those who observe fundamental truths rooted in verifiable natural historical facts should be branded criminals for merely recognizing and stating those facts.
Today, in Spain, in 2024, a woman has been sentenced to a six-month term of imprisonment (suspended in exchange for attending a “re-education” course) and to pay a fine of €3850 (around 4,000 USD) for denying that a trans woman is female. Such developments correlate with the rise of Islamophilia in Europe. All this is antithetical to human freedom and dignity.
Who is the real threat to our liberty? The First Amendment to the United States Constitution ensures the right to freedom of speech, allowing individuals to express their thoughts and ideas without government interference. It safeguards the freedom of the press, enabling not just media organizations to report independently without censorship but everybody who publishes and disseminates their ideas to an interested public. The First Amendment protects the freedom of religion, allowing individuals to practice any religion or none at all, and prohibits the establishment of an official state religion. More broadly, religious liberty is rooted in freedom of conscience, which allows individuals to hold or reject any ideology. It guarantees the right of peaceful assembly, allowing people to gather for various purposes, including protests and public meetings. It grants the right to petition the government, enabling individuals to bring their concerns to the attention of the government. Embedded in these rights is the freedom of association.
Who is the real threat to our democracy? Those who uphold the principles articulated in the founding documents or those who oppose them? Those who uphold the principles are the men and women who defend the American Republic. Those are the patriots. Those who oppose those principles threaten the Republic. You’d have to be ignorant or ideological blind to not see the truth of the situation. It is not the populist-nationalists reclaiming classical liberal ethics and democratic republican governance—for the most part Christians—who threat the Republic. It’s those who have been working for generations to unravel the nation Christians and Deists founded. The real threat is progressivism, the ideas and practices that advance transnational corporate power and totalitarian state control. The threat is those who have thrown open the gates and invited the barbarians in explicitly to outnumber the citizens who would preserve the principles of individual freedom and limited government.
To be sure, we must criticize the Christian zealot. But we also must recognize that Christianity is not the enemy of America. Progressivism is.
freedom and reason 