We Need A New American Identity to Fight Christian Nationalism, And It Starts With A Good Story

There's a clear narrative in our country's history that exemplifies the fight toward expanding civil rights and achieving equality for all in the face of religious oppression.

By Anthony Alaniz | October 25, 2024 | Nashville, Tennessee

There's a good chance the Trump administration will infuse our secular government with Christian nationalism, and we will see an alignment between law and brutal, anti-American theocracy rule unlike anything before in this country.

There will be a continuous use of Christianity to twist our laws to limit the civil liberties for groups these religious cults believe are not equal American citizens who don't deserve access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of one's happiness if they don’t appease their Middle Eastern deity.

Our country cannot exist under such rule or alongside such barbarism.

Robert G. Ingersoll, a radical Republican, wrote 140 years ago that no man is free when religion and government are one, calling Christianity incompatible with basic American values, and he remains right to this day.

But combating the narrative that conservatives, right-wingers, evangelicals, and the GOP have carefully crafted over decades to tie the American identity, our country's history, and Christianity into one perverse political package is nearly complete with Trump’s second term that'll take more than a list of good policies to fight and dislodge.

Democrats need to provide people with hope. That's why Barack Obama did so well the first time around—he had the vibes. But they didn't last through his administration because he played the political game by the rules while the GOP flipped over the board and clucked like a chicken before blaming Democrats for being extreme.

They need a story to sell, a history, and a vision that says our work toward making a more perfect union with liberty for all matters despite the losses. Evangelicals held the line on abortion for decades, racking up losses, but are reaping the rewards today because they had a story to tell themselves that they were right.

There is a long history of progressive activism in America that tells a gorgeous story of the slow and brutal expansion of civil liberties in this country—and every damn setback faced by those who had tirelessly worked and died to make this country live up to its long-missing promise.

Even before we became a country, we had citizens calling the Founding Fathers unchristian and traitors for their endorsement of slavery. Cassius M. Clay, a 19th-century diplomat and confidant to Lincoln, was so digested by Christian support for slavery during his time he declared he'd rather sit with Satan in hell than with God in heaven and be on the side of Christianity.

That's inspiring for a secular society.

Ingersoll wrote in the 1880s about the importance of a woman's right to choose, the necessity of access to birth control, and why women should have the right to vote. He also admonished the Bible for its violence, inconsistencies, its general lack of clear morality, and its treatment of women and children as property, as any good American should.

And that's just the very white tip of a very big iceberg of Americans who were right about things decades before anyone knew how important they would be, and that should give people hope today that working toward fighting racism, terroristic theocratic takeovers, and ancient religious hate isn't meaningless.

Hell, even Thomas Jefferson understood that the Christian Bible was a horrific work of violence and a threat to our liberty, editing his own version that has a non-supernatural Jesus who dies at the end. Maybe that's the Bible, written by an American, that Americans should follow instead of this Middle Eastern one.

It'd be a better start to a new, purely secular philosophy that centers liberty and the right to self-determination as its moral objective instead of sin, slavery, revenge, retribution, and the oppression of free expression offered in the Christian Bible.

“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half of the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.

— Thomas Paine, the Age of Reason, Part 1, 1794