Thread by @eaton

One of the interesting things about the @CRightcast podcast has been realizing just how interconnected many right-wing fundamentalist groups are with white supremacist and even white nationalist groups.

https://twitter.com/idsgpod/status/1427693379601801217

In most cases (IMO) it isn't a dark conspiracy: rather a natural consequence of the psychological building blocks that both movements share: authoritarian power structures, fixation on rigid gender roles, terror at outside corruption, and yearning for an ideal (imagined) past.

Modern American fundamentalism was a backlash against developments like "studying the Bible as literature" and "the theory of evolution" and "ecumenical movements in mainline Protestant churches." Over the course of a century, it's merged with reactionary-right politics.

The slow merger has affected both the political right —pushing the 'secular intellectual right' out of the limelight in favor of moralism, and the religious — turning pro-war and corporate/market-centric economics into articles of religious faith.

There have always been profoundly racist movements inside of the religious right (reconstructionism's close connection with antisemitism and Civil War revisionism is one example). However…

…this vigorous co-mingling of movements and "religious anointing of reactionary politics" has produced a much more explicit Christian Nationalism, eclipsing the lip-service respect for pluralism that liberalism saw as central to the American Identity.

Now, "rank and file" Christians on the right who consider themselves Not At All Racist find themselves aligned with violent fringes of the political right: reactionary "shock troops" like the Proud Boys marching with Charismatic antivaxxers at a Newsom Recall Rally, for example.

A lifetime of indoctrination about impure outsiders, the importance importance of deference to strong, God-ordained leaders, and so on have primed them for receptivity to other authoritarian movements, even if they were not already on-board with racist and antidemocratic ideas.

That's why monitoring these kinds of intersections matters, and why it's important that folks looking at them (and warning others) dig into the nuances of the various groups that make up these no-longer-fringe movements.

And — just as important — that study can help us understand where underlying strains of white supremacy (and open, naked racism) have hidden under the umbrella of Christian Respectability in our country, laying the groundwork for a new wave of "mainstream" white supremacy.