The Patriot Post® · Leftist Christophobia
Islamofascist Hamas jihadists attacked Israel last month, killing 1,400, including 33 Americans. Anti-Semitism is rising around the world as Jew haters — including Democrat members of Congress — blame Israel for Hamas’s attack. Because of the noxious folks in their own midst, leftists from the media to the White House prefer to engage in moral equivalence, fretting about “Islamophobia” and now “Christian nationalism.”
We’ll just cut to the chase and call the latter Christophobia.
Whereas so-called Islamophobia typically manifests among people pointing out that Islamofascists are a real terror threat and we should be vigilant against attacks, Christophobia is the leftist affliction that equates adhering to Biblical Christianity while being a patriotic American to hate speech and violence.
The reason for the Left’s Christian nationalism terminology should be obvious: Their strong insinuation is that nationalists are like Nazis. Who wants to tell them that the anti-Semitic Nazis were National Socialists?
Christian nationalism is a deliberately nebulous term, though in the Left’s pejorative usage, there are always echoes of Charlottesville and “white supremacy.” But the truth is that neither word is inherently problematic.
In fact, as Michael Knowles once noted, “Liberals hate Christian nationalism, not because it is a departure from the American political tradition, but because it is the American political tradition, which the liberals do not like.” Most of our Founding Fathers were arguably Christian nationalists. All of them were Patriots.
Nevertheless, leftists have recently resurrected their slur to apply it to newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson. Johnson is a Christian, you see, and part of the GOP’s Freedom Caucus, which puts America First. His Biblically based faith leads him to believe things that are anathema to the Left — marriage is a union between one man and one woman, life begins at conception, and there are two sexes. The latter two also happen to be basic science, which the Left claims exclusive rights to worship. Johnson has put his faith into action by supporting policies that comport with it.
Naturally, then, numerous Leftmedia outlets attacked Johnson as a “Christian nationalist.”
His work with Alliance Defending Freedom is problematic, says an MSNBC scribe, because ADF wants to “eviscerate the separation of church and state.” Johnson wants “to make America a Christian theocracy,” gasped journalist Sarah Posner. Author Katherine Stewart added a list of horribles: “He’s not just a speaker. He’s a dictator. He’s an enemy. He’s an antichrist.”
“Mike Johnson is not just a politician,” cautioned Mark Potok, a former senior fellow at the hate-baiting Southern Poverty Law Center. “He’s a preacher. He’s a crusader. He’s a zealot. He’s on a mission from God to save America from itself.”
Bill Maher compared Johnson to the mass-murdering assailant in Maine. The Daily Beast likened him to the Iranian mullahs and the Taliban.
One Leftmedia rag claimed that “MAGA and Christian nationalism” are a “bigger threat to America than Hamas could ever be.” Another even called Johnson “the new face of Christofascism,” which is, frankly, a nonsensical oxymoron.
This heated and alarmist rhetoric is a reminder that leftists will try to terrify their fellow Americans regarding anyone to the right of Karl Marx.
Democrats joined in, too. In a hearing dealing with the subject the day Johnson was elected speaker, Democrat Representative Maxwell Frost warned, “Christian nationalism is a form of religious extremism making its way into our policies and undermining our democracy.”
In that hearing, Baptist Joint Committee Executive Amanda Tyler says she testified “about global religious freedom” by … demanding that it be curtailed if she can label it “Christian nationalism,” which she called “the single greatest threat to religious liberty in the United States today.”
Last we checked, Christians weren’t the ones forcing people of other religions to bake cakes and display rainbow colors and censoring speech — like intimidating Johnson’s wife into taking her Christian counseling website offline.
The truth about Johnson and other conservative Christians, of course, is a lot more palatable than leftists want you to think. As Johnson put it, “If you truly believe in the Bible’s commands, and you seek to follow those, it’s impossible to be a hateful person because the greatest command in the Bible is that you love God with everything you had, and you love your neighbor as yourself.”
“I’m not trying to establish Christianity as the national religion or something,” Johnson said. “That’s not what this is about at all.” Indeed, it’s not. It’s about living out his faith — and the faith of millions of Americans — freely in the public square.
He called the attacks “absurd” and “disgusting.” He added: “Our religion is based on love and acceptance. So, to compare that worldview with the Taliban, who seek to destroy their enemies, or with some deranged shooter who murders people is absolutely outrageous.”
What’s under attack is not really Johnson, though, and he knows it. Leftists are really leveling a broadside against our nation because, as Johnson put it, “our Judeo-Christian foundation is the heritage of our country.”