I see the Christofascism as more a flavor of the month than a serious unifying ideology.
Religion has always been a tool used by those in power to gain favorability with people at scale. But history tells us it is easily manipulated and twisted to serve the needs of the powerful. (Crusades, Colonialism, Slavery, Conservatism)
Whatever Christofascism is today, will be boiled down to its fundamental components the moment it no longer serves the powerful so that it can be remade into whatever they need it to be. Think of it more as the rotting of one religion giving way to the fertile ground of new relgion.
> I see the Christofascism as more a flavor of the month than a serious unifying ideology.
I’ve joked occasionally we should just hand the zealots power as they’d quickly go back to just killing each other over theology.
Wouldn’t you know it all the smug religious revival accounts from unemployed zoomers that have recently flooded my social media seem
more interested in attacking different Christian sects. My Facebook has been looking like the 30 years war recently.
It has roots going all the way back to the founding of the country. The core of American culture and of many of its issues has always been the tension between the conflicting desires for a Puritan theocracy with a strict racial hierarchy and a secular progressive Republic.
Slavery was justified by Christian principles, and manifest destiny. Hitler was inspired by America's genocide of native Americans, racial segregation and eugenics (all of which were justified by Christianity.) And after the war, the US carried the torch of Nazism's racist ideas after the rest of the world tried to move beyond it.
Many conservative ideals are backed by Christian belief. They hate feminism because it undermines the tradition Christian ideal of gender hierarchy. They hate homosexuality because they believe the Bible says it's a sin. They hate communists because communism is atheist. And most of all they believe the US was founded as an explicitly Christian nation and should be governed only by Christian principles.
9/11 happens and Bush declares a new "Crusade" against the evildoers. That language wasn't accidental. The connections between the American military industrial complex and Evangelical Christianity run deep.
And now we have Trump, whom a significant number of Americans believe to have literally been sent by God to wage spiritual warfare against demonic forces within the government, citing Christianity explicitly as justification for his militarism.
And it's absolutely not a coincidence that we reached this inflection point and acceleration after electing a Black president. That broke America in ways that I don't think that it can ever recover from. It certainly isn't a flavor of the month. If anything it's the only truly unifying ideology America has ever had.
I think you're correct that religion can be used as a tool by the powerful, but the typical cynical assumption that no one in power actually believes any of it is I think a mistake. Maybe not Trump, I suspect he's too much of a narcissist to believe in anything but himself and is an example of what you're referring to, but I think the people around him whispering in his ear and many of his supporters are true believers.
> They hate communists because communism is atheist.
A few years ago before the election, a friend and I often joked that you could probably sell a sizable portion of American right on something of a “five year plan”
The MAGA communism meme was going around at the time too. Traditional Cold War era “better dead than red” conservatives I knew were suddenly posting about nationalizing companies that weren’t playing ball with Trump.
The other day, I saw an account rambling about “Anglo-Saxon victory over Judeo-Bolshevik Materialism”. I found that a bit odd. I’ve heard the “Judeo-Bolshevik” schtick, and there’s certainly endless negative aspects of communism, but materialism certainly is not one of them.
But your connection with Atheism ties things together in a way that makes sense.
Whatever Christofascism is today, will be boiled down to its fundamental components the moment it no longer serves the powerful so that it can be remade into whatever they need it to be. Think of it more as the rotting of one religion giving way to the fertile ground of new relgion.