The Power Worshippers

by Katherine Stewart

  Fox then invited Dan Hall to defend the bill. “There’s no cost to it; the cost would come from the community,” Hall told the TV host. “My whole premise was: How about bringing respect back into the schools? We’ve lost a whole lot of respect for those things in life that we should be respecting.”

  “Why is God, the mention of God in our schools controversial on the left today?” asked the Fox newscaster incredulously.

  “There seems to be an anti-faith movement in the country, to suppress anything that is religious in any way and wipe it out of government,” said Hall. “I’m here to tell you we need to bring respect back to our country.”9

  If it felt as though the event had been staged to evoke the grievances of a population steeped in its own feelings of persecution, that’s because it was. On Fox News, Dan Hall told the host with a wide-eyed expression, “I just figured the opposition would be really short, there wouldn’t be a whole lot.” That sounded like a whopper. The documentation of Project Blitz makes clear that a principal purpose of the “In God We Trust” legislation is to force the opposition to take unpopular stands on seemingly symbolic issues. In fact, the authors specifically seemed to envision using the bills to catch opposition lawmakers on video saying things that can later be used against them.

  Dan Hall should have known that, of course: he is cochair of the state legislative prayer caucus, a state wing of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, the organizational sponsor of Project Blitz.10

  The documentation of the Blitz is particularly valuable in that it shows that Christian nationalists have self-consciously embraced a strategy of advancing their goals through deception and indirection. For many years critics have warned that concessions to the Christian right on “symbolic” issues—erecting religious monuments and emblazoning religious mottos on state property, for example—would set the nation on a course leading to the establishment of religion. We now know that the critics were right—because pushing the states down a slippery slope to a more “bibically based” society is precisely what the authors of Project Blitz propose to accomplish. In multiple states, including Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, South Dakota, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Florida, prominently placed “In God We Trust” signs in every public school building are now mandatory.11

  As Dan Hall also would likely have known, the “In God We Trust” brouhaha was only phase one of Project Blitz. The architects of the Blitz have helpfully grouped their model legislation into three categories or phases.12 The first consists of symbolic or ceremonial gestures that will receive “some opposition but not hard to beat,” according to David Barton. Some, like the Minnesota bill, focus on placing mottos in schools. Others aim to place “In God We Trust” placards and stickers in statehouses, federal buildings, libraries, post offices—even police cars. Still other bills include “Civic Literacy” initiatives that involve the display of other kinds of historical and religious documents favored by movement leaders.

  But the point of phase I is just to clear the path for phase II, which consists of bills that propose to inject Christian nationalist ideas more directly into schools and other government entities. Some phase II bills are intended to promote the teaching and celebration of Christianity in public schools, including support for sectarian “Bible literacy” curricula, particularly those that include hefty servings of Christian nationalist history and the declaration of a “Christian Heritage Week.”13 They are a means of spreading the message, among children especially, that conservative Christians are the real Americans and everybody else is here by invitation only. According to Barton, these laws “will also be pretty easy to pass,” but the opposition is “going to be a lot more virulent and mean in their attacks.” The point of phase II, of course, is to make room for phase III, which legalizes discrimination against those whose actions (or very being) offends the sensibilities of conservative Christians.

  While Project Blitz seems to promote the religious right’s proverbial Santa’s list of culture war issues, one key topic is missing, and that is abortion. The documentation for Project Blitz does not include proposed legislation relating to women’s reproductive rights—apart from a model bill advancing the rights of providers to deny services to women on grounds of religious conscience—but this is not the result of any oversight. Project Blitz does not address the topic because it does not need to; the abortion issue is already being handled, with stunning effectiveness, by other entities.

  Under the leadership of organizations including Americans United for Life, the Susan B. Anthony List, and National Right to Life, different groups with varying strategies united by common political goals, antiabortion activists have in the past few years pushed more than four hundred bills to restrict reproductive freedom through state legislatures.

  This was the blitz before the Blitz, in a manner of speaking. Both the antiabortion and the “religious freedom” prongs of this assault on state capitols consciously intend to emulate the strategy of “bill mills” like the American Legislative Exchange Council, the corporate-funded outfit that has pushed many hundreds of hard-right economic bills through state legislatures.

  Women in America have a constitutionally guaranteed right to have an abortion through the right to make decisions about family as well as the principle of bodily integrity. So much was established by Roe v. Wade. Yet that has not stopped antiabortion activists from using the coercive power of government to deprive as many women as possible of that right. The first and most obvious strategy is to use the government’s power of the purse to go after women who might otherwise rely on public assistance to cover the cost of the procedure. Leading the way in this new strategy was the Hyde Amendment, a legislative provision barring the use of certain federal funds to pay for most abortions. Passed in 1976, the Hyde Amendment was a rider to annual appropriations bills. Because the Hyde Amendment primarily affects Medicaid, it has substantially impacted poor women and families. Subsequent initiatives have targeted this vulnerable population disproportionately.

  The Republican Party now has at its disposal a variety of tools to be used in the assault on women’s ability to access abortion as well as certain forms of contraception. Six-week abortion restrictions—before many women realize they are pregnant—are just the latest effort in a multipronged strategy. Forced ultrasounds, for instance, compel women to undergo needless expensive and invasive medical procedures. Sham “crisis pregnancy centers,” which exist to dissuade women from obtaining abortions, are now receiving unprecedented amounts of state funding; in 2018 more than a dozen states earmarked an estimated $40.5 million in taxpayer funds for these centers.14 Various methods of birth control, such as emergency contraception and IUDs, have been wrongly labeled “abortion,” a designation that defies science and reason and paves the way for onerous regulation or limited access.15 “Waiting periods” of up to seventy-two hours substantially burden patients, who may be compelled to take time off from work, arrange child care, and pay for hotel accommodations in faraway cities. Laws known as “targeted regulation of abortion providers” (or TRAP laws) encumber the medical practices of abortion providers in the name of “safety,” with stunning consequences: From 2011 to 2016, more than 160 abortion clinics in the country closed or stopped performing abortions, and only 21 new ones opened to replace them.16

  The religious right is quick to extol the principle of free speech when it comes to, say, public school officials preaching to children in their care or shouting at women through bullhorns outside of reproductive health clinics. And yet they are eager to regulate and restrict the speech of medical professionals delivering reproductive health services. In some states doctors are now required to lie to their patients by giving them false or incomplete information about their legal options in pregnancy, or are compelled to make inaccurate statements about a disproven link between abortion and cancer or mental health. And a rule governing Title X, the federal program that finances reproductive health services for low-income women, censors the speech of healthcare
workers by prohibiting them from referring patients to abortion clinics.

  According to Elizabeth Nash, senior state issues manager at the Guttmacher Institute, a leading reproductive research and policy organization, 231 abortion restrictions were enacted between 2011 and 2014—almost 20 percent more restrictions than the number enacted in the entire preceding decade. Nearly two hundred antiabortion bills were introduced in 2015. In 2016, eighteen states enacted fifty new abortion restrictions. In 2018, fifty states adopted twenty-seven new restrictions.

  Considered individually, the hundreds of bills making their way through dozens of state legislatures appear to have a scattershot quality. In reality they are components of a coordinated, overarching strategy that, like Project Blitz, aims to overwhelm state legislatures. The end goal is to create a new reality on the ground in which women have no real ability to exercise a right that they are supposedly guaranteed.

  While the right continues to grandstand on the abortion issue, the abortion rate in the United States is in decline for reasons that have much to do with innovations in long-acting birth control. Access is key, however. Multiple studies show that increased contraceptive access, including better insurance coverage policies, over-the-counter availability, and comprehensive sex education, dramatically reduces rates of both unintended pregnancy and abortion. If antiabortion activists were truly interested in lowering abortion rates, they would champion such measures. Instead, they support measures that interfere with access.

  That’s because the real aim is to cast birth control—and the activity that creates a need for it, particularly among women—as unhealthy and immoral. The 2019 Students for Life conference held a workshop titled “Green Sex.” “Many women are already throwing away their birth control pills to join this green sex movement,” according to the workshop description. “Join us to find out why!”17 At the 2018 Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., speaking on a panel titled “Restoring a Generation’s Identity,” Chelsea Patterson Sobolik, a policy director for the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, laid the blame for “gender confusion” squarely at the feet of family planning. “I want to dial back about one hundred years ago, to when birth control and the pill were introduced,” she said. “What that did is that’s the very beginning of breaking down marriage and divorcing intimacy and sex from consequences.”

  Like the sponsors of Americans United for Life legislative initiatives, the leaders behind Project Blitz are playing a long and ambitious game. They have invested their deepest hopes in the third and most contentious category of model legislation. Recognizing that the initiatives will be unpopular, Project Blitz advises its troops against framing them in religious terms, recommending instead that they “begin a public discourse on these important topics grounded in the language that the opponents themselves use.”

  For the Blitzers, the dream bill is something that participants in a conference call referred to in awed tones as the “Mississippi Missile.” The “missile” is the state’s HB 1523, a 2016 law that allows individuals, nonprofits, private businesses, and government agencies to discriminate against targeted groups with impunity (and above all without losing their tax-advantaged status), provided that they do so in accordance with “sincerely held religious beliefs.”

  Introduced into the Mississippi legislature and signed into law by Governor Phil Bryant in 2016, HB 1523 was one of the most sweeping of the nation’s “religious liberty” bills making the rounds in red-state capitals that year. In the press they were and are often referred to as “anti-LGBT bills,” because they would give legal cover to those who want to discriminate against LGBT people. Ben Needham, Director of Strategic Initiatives in the Policy and Political Affairs Department at the Human Rights Campaign, has said the legislation is “probably the worst religious freedom bill to date.”18

  The public perception of these bills, often abetted by Christian nationalists themselves, is that they concern only the religious feelings of homophobic cake bakers and florists. But there is an even more radical agenda behind the bills, and depriving LGBT Americans of their right to obtain goods and services on an equal basis is only a part of it. Consider the law’s provisions regarding foster care services. The government, we are told, will no longer be allowed to take action against any foster parent that “guides, instructs, or raises a child … in a manner consistent with a sincerely held religious belief.”

  It is worth remembering in this context that the culture of the religious right often favors corporal punishment as a form of discipline in child-rearing. Focus on the Family, the Christian right advocacy group, offers handy tips on “Five Biblical Principles for Spanking.” Indeed, in his many books on child-rearing, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson emphasizes the message that children must be brought under a strict form of parental authority and taught to fear God. Children, Dobson insists, “are naturally inclined toward rebellion, selfishness, dishonesty, aggression, exploitation, and greed.”19 Even infants may be “defiant upon exit from the womb.” But “a well-deserved spanking,” he advises his followers, turns “a sullen little troublemaker into a sweet and loving angel.”20 If a toddler disobeys, he once told a live audience, the parent should grab hold of the child’s trapezius muscle. “You squeeze that little muscle,” he said, and “he goes down to the ground.” The audience laughed.21

  Of course, it’s all part of the child’s training in submission to an authoritarian form of religion. As Dobson explains, “We should teach our children to submit to our loving leadership as preparation for their later life of obedience to God.”22

  Or, as Ralph Drollinger puts it, “The rod, according to the Bible, is the specific means of dealing with, and is the remedy for, foolishness in the heart of a child. Yes, effective verbal communication is necessary too, but when rebellion is present to speak without spanking is woefully inadequate.” Drollinger chides parents who have qualms about striking their children. It “matters little what we might think about spanking. The issue is this: will we obey God on this matter? Will we follow His methods for childrearing or not?” Drollinger goes on to advise, “Think of spanking in this way: as hard as it is for you to spank your child, his or her obedience to God in the future is directly related to yours in the present.”23

  In one of the model bills that picks up where the Mississippi Missile leaves off, the Blitzers intend to get state legislatures to resolve that “this state supports and encourages marriage between one man and one woman and the desirability that intimate sexual relations only take place between such couples.” What is perhaps more striking than the direct attempt to legislate against intimacy between consenting adults is the cruelty with which the argument is advanced. In that piece of proposed lawmaking, states are asked to affirm that people who have sexual intimacy outside of a monogamous, heterosexual marriage have a “higher instance of serious disease.” It would be touching to think that the leaders of America’s latest religious revival have at last turned their attention to health care, but no: their concern here is that all of this sex is costing taxpayers lots of money—“estimated to be in the billions of dollars.”

  The emotional impact of bills like these really has two sides: It singles out a target population as worthy of state-sanctioned contempt, and it identifies another group as worthy of state-sanctioned respect. That privileged group consists of those who adhere not to any religion but to a specific variety of religion, just as the despised group consists of those that offend the privileged group. In HB 1523, as in the Blitzers’ model bills, the variety of religion is indicated with some precision as that which involves a belief in the primacy of heterosexual relationships and the fixity of gender. Those whose religion might sanction a different or more complicated set of beliefs will find no representation in these bills.

  Apart from consolidating the privileges of conservative Christians to impose their beliefs on others, the point of bills like HB 1523 has a lot to do with money. A helpful clue can be
found in a letter that the American Family Association sent out in support of the Mississippi bill before it was passed. The bill, said the AFA, is crucial because it protects the AFA and groups like it from the “governmental threat of losing their tax exempt status.”24

  There is a revealing irony in that statement. Tax exemption is a kind of gift from the government: a privilege. It is an indirect way of funneling money from taxpayers to groups that engage in certain kinds of activities (like charity work or nonprofit education) and not other kinds of activities (like business and political activism). In articulating their concern for potential threats to their governmental subsidy, the AFA implicitly recognizes that if our society decides that it no longer wishes to subsidize groups that preach homophobia and promote discrimination, the justification for continued subsidies and privileges from the government will evaporate.

  The people who drafted the bill on behalf of the Mississippi legislators get it. This is why the very first “discriminatory action” by the government that the law prohibits is “to alter in any way the tax treatment” of any person or organization that abides by the newly sanctioned religious beliefs.

  In 2016 a federal district court struck down HB 1523 for the obvious reason that it favored one set of religious beliefs over others. In 2018, however, an appeals court set aside that decision on the grounds that the plaintiffs did not have standing to bring the case, so the law remains in force until some individuals suitably harmed by its manifestly discriminatory intent, and in possession of the bottomless resources that will be required for the inevitable battle with deep-pocketed Christian right legal groups like Alliance Defending Freedom, decide to come forward to oppose it.