The left increasingly considers conservative Christians with a mixture of fear and disgust. If these crosses that strike the Bible succeed, leftists warn, women will lose the right to vote, to work, to own property. Powerful men will force fertile women to become “handmaids,” systematically raping them in order to have children.
Sounds crazy, right? Yet this is exactly the argument that abortion fanatics use to demonize attempts to protect life in the womb, and President Joe Biden’s campaign recently used this argument against the threat of “Christian nationalism” supposedly infiltrating former President Donald Trump’s campaign.
Biden campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt drew absurd conclusions when commenting on a Politico report about “Trump allies” working to “infuse ‘Christian nationalism'” into a hypothetical second Trump administration.
“It’s straight out of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,'” Hitt said in a statement on Tuesday. “Nationwide abortion bans, attacks on same-sex marriage and restrictions on contraception – this is the horrific reality that the Trump team and the likely architects of his second-term agenda are talking about openly. »
Hitt had responded to a lengthy report on Russell Vought, former director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump. Politico claims to have discovered a paper written by staff at the Vought-led nonprofit, the Center for Renewing America. The document “includes a list of the CRA’s top priorities for a second Trump term,” write Politico’s Alexander Ward and Heidi Przybyla. They say the document has a few bullet points, including one titled “Christian Nationalism.”
Ward and Przybyla cite two anonymous sources to assert that “Vought hopes that its proximity and regular contact with the former president… raise Christian nationalism as the focal point of a second Trump term.
Ward and Przybyla have not revealed the documents they allegedly obtained, and they say that apart from one point, the documents “do not describe specific Christian nationalist policies.” Yet they delve deeper into what they say is Vought’s Christian nationalist agenda, from immigration restrictions to limits to abortion and reduced access to contraceptives.
“Politico’s so-called reporting is false and we’ve told them that repeatedly,” said Rachel Cauley, communications director at the Center for Renewing America. The daily signal when asked about the report.
The Politico report presents many conservative policies as elements of Christian nationalism and omits key context on conservative issues.
He quotes Trump out of context, highlighting a campaign speech in which the former president deplored attacks on Catholics and pledged to combat “anti-Christian bias” at the Justice Department, but without mentioning that Trump responded to FBI Trust on the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center for demonizing “radical and mainstream Catholic hate groups.”
The report also discredits the natural law tradition, omitting the fact that it heavily influenced America’s founding documents. “Natural law is the belief that there are universal rules derived from God that cannot be overridden by government or judges,” write Ward and Przybyla. “While a core pillar of Catholicism, it has been used in recent decades to oppose abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and contraception. »
Ward and Przybyla also note that Vought “clearly refers to human rights defined by God and not by man.”
It appears that none of these veteran journalists have read the Declaration of Independence, which also bases rights on “the laws of nature and nature’s God.”
However, these insinuations apparently had the desired effect. The Biden campaign followed the misleading framing of the Politico article by going too far in condemning Trump — and specifically Vought, the man Politico portrays as the former president’s top adviser.
Many on the left have compared the pro-life movement to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” but it bears repeating how absurd this rhetorical attack is.
The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian novel written by Margaret Atwood and adapted into a Hulu series a few years ago, depicts a Christian movement known as “Gilead” taking over America following a calamity that renders most sterile women. Gilead takes away women’s property, fires them from their jobs, and forces them into a stratified society based extremely loosely on a particular biblical passage.
The government assigns fertile women to the position of “handmaids,” silent servants who are systematically raped in order to have children.
Gilead finds justification for this in Genesis 30, where Rachel, anxious to have children, tells her husband Jacob to have sex with her maid Bilhah. In response, Jacob’s other wife, Leah, tells Jacob to have sex with her servant Zilpah.
The Bible does not praise this marital rivalry as a good thing, and God’s ability to bring good things out of evil acts is a major theme in Genesis. Biblical passages from Genesis to Revelation state that men and women were designed for each other in the covenant of marriage, between one man and one woman. Many Christians read Genesis 30 as a warning against polygamy, not as an instruction manual on how to compete with your sister for more children.
Margaret Atwood, not a fan of Trump or pro-life policies, rightly so scolded an Esquire reporter which prompted Atwood to compare the Trump administration to Gilead.
“People say Trump is remaking Gilead. That’s not true,” Atwood said in 2019. “If it were, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. »
The Trump administration did not give birth to Gilead, and conservative Christians have no desire to create Atwood’s dystopian vision. Allowing Catholic nuns to opt out of funding for contraceptives and protecting babies in the womb has nothing to do with systems of female slavery and forced rape.
Comparing Christians to Gilead fuels the irrational hatred against Jesus’ followers that some sociologists have called it “Christianophobia”.»
Biden, who campaigned restore the soul of America in 2020, it is best not to spread such malicious lies.
Tyler O’Neil is editor-in-chief of the Daily Signal, the news outlet of the Heritage Foundation, and author of “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center.” The Heritage Foundation is listed for identification purposes only. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect any institutional position of the Heritage Foundation, the Daily Signal, or the Heritage Board of Trustees.
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