Back in 2019, I spoke about Forced Birth Extremists and how their war on women was the result of the adoption of an outdated view of science in which everything was broken down into its constituent parts, leading to ignoring vital relationships that exist, for example, the symbiotic relationship between a mother and a fetus. A woman is not a box into which a child is placed, she is not a vessel for carrying another independent life form. The issue of bodily autonomy is not, I explained, that she is free to do with her body as she wishes, which would not be a Jewish position, but that she and the child are one and therefore only she can determine what is best. I shared then that Judaism also says that the life of the pregnant woman takes precedence because the fetus is not considered to have a nefesh, a soul, a being, until it has emerged from her. I also said in that sermon that stating that an independent life begins at conception is a dispassionate attempt to separate a part of a woman’s body from her. In my conclusion to that sermon, I said that “the war on women must not be separated from the war against nature, against the poor or against people of color.” In the three years since that sermon, my thoughts on that sentence have developed, and this evening, I will explain more clearly what I meant by that, and what that war means to us.
In 1971, 1974 and 1976 - after Roe v Wade was passed - the Southern Baptist Convention passed resolutions affirming that women should have access to abortion for a variety of reasons. It was desegregation that started evangelical communities getting involved in politics because they wanted their own segregated schools while desegregation was happening in public schools. The loss of white-only spaces threatened the white evangelical leaders. They then started to become more politically involved in favor of the Republican Party to try to defend their white-only spaces. But involvement in politics still remained limited in that evangelical community until Republican political activist Paul Weyrich realized that race wasn’t enough to bring sufficient people to the polls, and so instead he started to amplify the anti-abortion message as a religious message. The Moral Majority was then formed partially on the back of this new cause. Through the rhetoric of returning to so-called traditional values and saving innocent unborn babies, instead of the actual reason of preserving segregation in private spaces, the evangelical community was driven to the polls en masse for the Republican Party. I had this verified for me recently by someone formerly from a deeply evangelical Christian background, who told me what was underlying the drive to end abortion. He said it wasn’t to save unborn lives and that’s just what’s spun to the public. He said that around evangelical dining room tables, in the home away from the media, the conversation is always the same – that in their minds, restricting abortion is about stopping the socio-economic advancement of the African American community. According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, nearly three-quarters (74%) of white evangelical Protestants today believe abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. However, almost two-thirds of black Protestants believe that the procedure should be legal in all or most cases. That disparity in belief is important. 49% of women in the US who have had an abortion are below the poverty level. (Guttmacher Institute, Abortion Patient Survey 2014) and one in five African Americans live below the poverty line, as opposed to fewer than one in ten non-Hispanic whites. Black women have abortions at roughly four times the rate of white women in this country (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7436774/). Banning abortion means, amongst other things, keeping African American women out of the workplace. Without openly saying it, the anti-abortion movement is, at least in part, based in a deeply racist ideology. That doesn’t mean that everyone opposed to abortion is racist, of course not, but anyone who fights to restrict abortion access is definitely negatively affecting the African American community.
This most recent Supreme Court ruling is not just about women’s rights and white supremacy, though. In March 1980, the same evangelical Christian leaders who wanted their own segregated colleges and who were becoming motivated over abortion because they thought that might help their segregation cause, wrote a petition to President Jimmy Carter saying that “God’s judgment is going to fall on America as on other societies that allowed homosexuality to become a protected way of life.” Two years later, Larry Speakes, the press secretary for Ronald Reagan whom the so-called Moral Majority had catapulted into power, laughed off the developing AIDS crisis as a “gay plague.” It would be three more years before Reagan would even say the word “AIDS” in public. Today, Justice Clarence Thomas clearly stated that the Supreme Court should now reassess whether there is a right for married couples to obtain contraceptives, whether there is the right to engage in private sexual acts, and whether there is the right to same-sex marriage. And this week, the new Republican Party platform in Texas stated that homosexuality was an “abnormal lifestyle choice.” These things are all related.
The Crusades, a holy war waged by the Latin Church, are said to have lasted from the years 1095 to 1291. They were originally a series of violent wars raged by Christians to secure particular sites for Christian worship. On the way to the Holy Land, the Crusaders marched through Europe and slaughtered anyone they found who did not advance their cause, particularly Jews. Those Jews who survived the pogroms were often told to convert by force, and many stood in protest and took their own lives instead of accepting this perverse violent form of Christianity. The Crusades were a war with the backing of leading Christian figures on those who thought, looked and behaved differently to them. The Crusades did not actually end in 1291 with the fall of Acre. The Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula from 1123 to 1492 was also called a crusade. In 1147, pagan tribes throughout Europe were attacked in what was called a crusade. In 1199, a crusade was launched against Christian heretics. The Cathars were subject to a crusade in the 13th century, the Hussites in the 15th century and even the Protestants were subject to a crusade in the 16th century. If, as I said, the Crusades were a war with the backing of leading Christian figures on those who thought, looked and behaved differently to them, then I think we can say that we are seeing a 21st century crusade in this country. That contemporary crusade is a war on women, on people of color, on the LGBTQ+ community, and on the poor, with a war on nature as a natural offshoot of that ideology. It is a war in which these crusaders invade the private sphere of doctor-patient confidentiality, and now even look to expand the field of battle to the private realm of the bedroom. It may not be open warfare with swords and siege engines, but yesterday’s deliberate flooding of guns into the streets as a new constitutional right will absolutely cause more bloodshed. The immediate restriction of healthcare access to women in around half the states in this country absolutely will cause more death.
The crusaders believed that they were doing God’s will, even as they killed countless innocent others, but what they did was profoundly evil. The same must be said of today’s American Crusaders. They declare anyone who doesn’t look like them or love like them or pray like them or think like them to be untraditional, ungodly, abnormal, even abhorrent. Just like the Crusaders rampaging through Europe believing that God was on their side, these people don’t care about innocent people, they want a white, straight, sexist, and Christian country and they will excuse any blood spilled to get it. They fight against higher educational establishments for their multiculturalism because they cannot escape their segregationist origins and because they must restrict any learning that counters their own. They are not fighting for freedom - they are fighting to limit freedom because they consider human beings to be deviant sinners who need to be protected from their own evil urges. They are not fighting for life – they are an open death cult that hates life in this world and only truly considers life in the world to come. They tolerate extreme violence against women, saying that the child that comes from rape “is something that God intended to happen.” (Richard Mourdock, www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/october-web-only/are-pregnancies-even-from-rape-gift-from-god.html). In her extraordinary article “Jesus was a Rape Baby,” (https://artscisarah.medium.com/jesus-was-a-rape-baby-98e652f2d8f8) Sarah McDavitt Woods argues that a religion that is based on the nonconsensual impregnation of a young girl can easily lead to “submission to and obedience of an anti-democratic, exploitative, abusive, authoritarian God whom his base wants to reign over the entire world, beginning with our wombs, expanding to our sexual and gender expression, and culminating in total control of our personal autonomy.”
These people not only tolerate but embrace suffering – the regular slaughter of children in schools, the state-sanctioned police brutality against minorities, the poisoning of African and Native Americans in this country and worldwide by pollution – all the while giving their thoughts and prayers to those afflicted, because to them that is the Divine way. The former President said of today’s verdict that “God made the decision.” That is crusader mentality. The ultimate role of the crusader is dominion. “Dominionism is the theocratic idea that regardless of theological camp, means, or timetable, God has called conservative Christians to exercise dominion over society by taking control of political and cultural institutions.” (https://politicalresearch.org/2016/08/18/dominionism-rising-a-theocratic-movement-hiding-in-plain-sight#sthash.bUGC0hy6.dpbs) The American dominionist movement has been growing openly for fifty years in this country but American liberals have been too convinced of the power and inevitability of liberalism to see dominionists as the very real threat to democracy that they are. Not for nothing was there a riot on January 6th 2021 to try to overturn the democratic election process in this country fuelled by a President who had been specifically groomed by dominionists.
A hundred years ago, European liberals stood idly by (Lev. 19:16) as another racist death cult started describing some of its citizens as untraditional, ungodly, abnormal, and abhorrent. Believing that liberalism would somehow magically save everyone from democracy-hating fascists who restricted the rights of their own citizens, believing that common sense would prevail and that the Enlightenment proved that human beings always worked towards liberty and equality, liberals around the world shook their heads but did nothing as violent speech turned into violent action. That death cult wasn’t specifically religious, but it certainly had the silent consent of the Church at the time for its torture and murder of Jews, of gays, of Romani people, of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and of people with disabilities, and all the while liberals around the world stood by doing nothing because they couldn’t believe something like this had built up on their watch because for years they hadn’t paid attention and hadn’t cared because it wasn’t them being targeted.
Backing the now 50-year shift in this country in evangelical responses to abortion that I mentioned earlier were the writings of Francis Schaeffer who sold three million books on the importance of dominionism. His writings led to the “creeping theocratization of the Republican Party.” (https://politicalresearch.org/2016/08/18/dominionism-rising-a-theocratic-movement-hiding-in-plain-sight#sthash.bUGC0hy6.dpbs) Dominionism is, in its own words, bringing the perceived values of Heaven and making them manifest on earth, turning everywhere into a Christian theocratic society, just like the crusaders tried. Today, that means infiltrating political institutions and turning those institutions into tools of religious oppression, even by violence if necessary, as some dominionist authors claim. Dominionism, in their own words, means ending the separation of church and state. It means shunning places of higher learning for teaching the message of liberalism and multiculturalism, and instead promoting religious homeschooling as valid education because that is the only way that their perverse religious doctrine could be presented to children as fact. That turn from education to indoctrination led inevitably to tens of thousands of avoidable American deaths in the last two years as vaccination was openly called the work of the Devil and of untrustworthy science led by a secret cabal of Jews. And who in this country died most from COVID? People of color. All of this is deliberate, and all of it is connected.
After today, let no-one be in any doubt that we are in a culture war the likes of which Western society has not faced for a hundred years. We are facing the obliteration of human rights, the eradication of privacy, the deliberate systemic deaths and repression of people of color, and the vile demonization and likely imprisonment of LGBTQ+ citizens, all from the legal institutions that are meant to protect us but are instead now controlled by dominionist crusaders who will stop at nothing to force their perverse vision of Christian society onto everyone for the sake of heaven.
Of course, there are people who support today’s restriction of women’s rights who are not racist and who are not dominionists. Of course there are. Of course there are people who see this as an isolated moral or philosophical question and not part of a larger culture war. I believe that such people are now demonstrably mistaken and that they have unwittingly allied themselves with terrible people who ultimately seek to overturn not only their rights but the rights of their loved ones as well.
I end with this thought. The first seven Crusades contained some very real victories for the dominionist crusaders, but ultimate victory was not theirs. Without question, they extended their power and influence through their outrageous evil acts, but they did not ultimately succeed. Similarly, these contemporary crusaders will not win ultimate victory if we stand up against them, if we refuse to accept their perverse, violent and oppressive version of Christianity. If we flee to safer shores, then what happens next is on us. We have to stay, we have to speak up, we have to fight this contemporary crusade. History cannot be allowed to repeat itself. A fascist death cult claiming to act for God cannot be allowed to win. For God’s sake, we cannot let it win. We will stand up against the crusaders without weapons of war, as our people did a thousand years ago. We must oppose them and everything they stand for and only by doing that we will thwart their evil ways. May such be God’s will, and let us say, Amen.
