orchestrated erosion

It is not a dif­fer­ence of opin­ion when an opin­ion is root­ed in the faith of the per­son who holds that opin­ion. It’s also not even an opin­ion. It is a belief.

Too few peo­ple un­der­stand this im­por­tant dif­fer­ence, but it is one that has been in­ten­tion­al­ly ob­scured by the peo­ple who stand to ben­e­fit from the dis­tinc­tion be­ing lost entirely.

The Bill of Rights com­pris­es the first ten amend­ments to the Con­sti­tu­tion. The first clause – known as the Es­tab­lish­ment Clause – works in con­junc­tion with the Ex­er­cise Clause to make the be­gin­ning of the First Amend­ment, which states that “Con­gress shall make no law re­spect­ing an es­tab­lish­ment of re­li­gion, or pro­hibit­ing the free ex­er­cise thereof….”

The Found­ing Fa­thers in­tend­ed for this to cre­ate a sep­a­ra­tion of church and state.

This isn’t re­al­ly ne­go­tiable or up for de­bate, no mat­ter who tries to tell you oth­er­wise and no mat­ter who has tried to wa­ter it down over the cen­turies. Those peo­ple are ei­ther the dic­tio­nary de­f­i­n­i­tion of ig­no­rant, or they are not act­ing in good faith at all and their mo­tives are not to be trusted.
 

This couldn’t pos­si­bly be clear­er than when Col­orado Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Lau­ren Boe­bert said last Sun­day, “I’m tired of this sep­a­ra­tion of church and state junk.”

She ac­knowl­edges that the phrase was writ­ten in a let­ter Thomas Jef­fer­son penned to the Dan­bury Bap­tists, but doesn’t ac­knowl­edge that the dis­cus­sion did not end there – that the founder of Rhode Is­land, Roger Williams, agreed with him and found­ed Rhode Is­land for that very pur­pose, or that James Madi­son also agreed with Jef­fer­son, or that they had the sup­port of var­i­ous An­gli­can faiths who want­ed their free­dom se­cured as much as sec­u­lar peo­ple. This (among oth­er things) is also an im­por­tant part of why church­es do not pay tax­es. This is all well doc­u­ment­ed.

White su­prema­cist ideas in the Unit­ed States have their roots in Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty. This, too, is well doc­u­ment­ed.

The Civ­il Rights Acts that were passed through­out the six­ties forced con­ser­v­a­tive politi­cians to shift their fo­cus to some­thing else in the sev­en­ties, oth­er­wise they would start to lose pow­er and be­come obsolete. 

Af­ter 1973, that fo­cus be­came mak­ing abor­tion il­le­gal, and they en­list­ed evan­gel­i­cal white Chris­tians to make it happen.

Over the past week, Roe has been over­turned be­cause ex­treme Chris­t­ian zealotry has seeped into every as­pect of Amer­i­can life and is forc­ing those who are not Chris­t­ian to live ac­cord­ing to Chris­t­ian beliefs. 

SCO­TUS also ruled 6–3 that a foot­ball coach had the right to have his en­tire team take a knee on the field af­ter a game and pray. At a pub­lic school fund­ed by fed­er­al dollars. 

If the coach had been Mus­lim and put down a prayer rug in the cen­ter of the field, Chris­tians would have lost their fuck­ing minds and the rul­ing would have gone the oth­er way, if it even made it to SCO­TUS at all.

How would any of the team­mates who did not wish to take a knee and pray to the Chris­t­ian god be treat­ed by the coach? The rest of the team? The com­mu­ni­ty? These are oth­er people’s chil­dren. We all know the an­swers to those questions. 

Our democ­ra­cy has slow­ly crum­bled over the past five decades and pro­gres­sives have lost the abil­i­ty to wield pow­er due to ger­ry­man­der­ing, vot­er dis­en­fran­chise­ment, ne­olib­er­al­ism gain­ing a foothold, the rise of evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty, and the GOP play­ing the long game.

A very im­por­tant com­po­nent of that long game was en­sur­ing that the right peo­ple would be put in pow­er and chip away at the wall of sep­a­ra­tion SO grad­u­al­ly, that by the time it was com­plete­ly torn down, it would be too late. 

And it is re­al­ly feel­ing like the wall is com­plete­ly gone and it is way, way too fuck­ing late.

 

—emi­ly duchaine

Flom­mist Emi­ly Duchaine lives in the Pa­cif­ic North­west. She likes to drink mead, learn about sharks, and lis­ten to the Talk­ing Heads. She pre­tends to be a pro­fes­sion­al busi­ness­woman most days. Copy­right © 2022 Emi­ly Duchaine.

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