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Arwa Mahdawi, an earthen vessel LARPing as one of The Guardian’s columnists and the author of Strong Female Lead, wrote about Christian nationalism on Saturday. She’s calling it “a threat to American democracy.”
Mahdawi is most famous on the internet for this:
That’s one of those eternal memes that will always be funny forever. She was actually at the front of the “headline screenshot as meme” meme genre.
She writes for The Guardian:
Forget everything you ever thought you knew about pregnancy: a 26-year-old congressman, who will never be pregnant himself, has helpfully stepped in to explain the process to everyone. A fetus is just like a photograph, according to Madison Cawthorn, a right-wing congressman from North Carolina. During an anti-abortion speech on the House floor last week, Cawthorn proclaimed that having an abortion is like snatching a half-developed photograph of a sunset out of someone’s hand and ripping it to shreds. (You could almost see his brain working as he spoke: a photo develops … an embryo develops … wow, I am very smart!)
I’m afraid it gets worse. Having delivered this torturous analogy, Cawthorn (who has been accused of sexually harassing college classmates and once advised mothers, “if you are raising a young man, please raise them to be a monster”), then switched to religious rhetoric. “Eternal souls woven into earthen vessels sanctified by almighty God and endowed with the miracle of life are denied their birth,” Cawthorn declared grandly. Weirdly, a lot of women weren’t too keen on being described as “earthern vessels,” and Cawthorn’s remarks quickly caused online outrage.
Truly one of the most disturbing things I’ve witnessed in a long time. A Congressman, in a bid to overturn Roe V Wade and deny American women reproductive rights. Publicly referred to them as “Earthen vessels, sanctified by Almighty God.” Give me strength. pic.twitter.com/LvYM46GRVN
— Dr. Jennifer Cassidy (@OxfordDiplomat) December 3, 2021
Whenever women get upset about their rights being taken away by misogynistic extremists, you can always rely on a Reasonable Man™ to swoop in and explain how everyone’s overreacting. This incident was no exception: Grayson Quay argued in the Week that the women getting angry on the internet had misunderstood the biblical passages to which Cawthorn was alluding. “[I]t seems Cawthorn, a vocal evangelical Christian, was using ‘earthen vessels’ to refer not to the mother’s body, but to the body of the unborn baby,” Quay wrote. Even if that is what Cawthorn was referring to, it’s not much better is it? The separation of church and state is supposed to be a pillar of US democracy: we should all be alarmed by politicians who seem to think they are actually preachers.
Cawthorn, after all, isn’t the only high-profile figure who seems to be trying to advance a Christian nationalist agenda. Josh Hawley, a pro-Trump senator from Missouri, has spoken about the need to “take the lordship of Christ, that message, into the public realm and to seek the obedience of the nations – of our nation… to influence our society, and even more than that, to transform our society to reflect the gospel truth and lordship of Jesus Christ.”
And then, of course, there’s Michael Flynn, who served as Donald Trump’s first national security adviser in 2017. Last month Flynn made headlines by calling for the establishment of “one religion” in the US. “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion,” Flynn told a crowd in San Antonio. “One nation under God and one religion under God.”
I could go on and on: there are endless examples of influential leaders in the US calling for the creation of a “Christ-centered republic” and for the bible to influence policy. But while that rhetoric is alarming, it’s not as alarming as what’s been happening behind the scenes. In 2018 the researcher Frederick Clarkson exposed the existence of a Christian supremacist initiative called Project Blitz, that aimed to flood state legislatures with bills undermining the separation of Church and State. A 116-page strategy manual laid out the plan. 1) They’d smuggle Christianity into policy with covert strategies that gave the appearance they respected religious pluralism. “The playbooks advise legislators to cloak their religious mission in the guise of more secular intentions and they’ve renamed several bills to make them sound more appealing,” Clarkson reported. 2) They’d overwhelm state legislatures with so many bills that trying to fight them would be like a game of “whack-a-mole”. 3) They’d start with less controversial bills, such as those requiring or allowing the display of “In God We Trust” in public schools, and establish small victories first. Then they’d escalate.
Clarkson’s reporting on Project Blitz, and the various exposes that followed, forced the project’s organizers into stealth mode, but they haven’t disappeared. Far from it: radicalized Christian nationalism is a growing threat to American democracy, as a relatively small but incredibly organized faction working to turn the country into something resembling a theocracy. Indeed, if the insurrection on 6 January had gone ever so slightly differently, people like Flynn might be turning their dreams of “one nation under God” into a reality at this very moment.
I assume Mahdawi is Pakistani.
It’s funny that she’s allowed to behave like this and none of her cousins or brothers… you know the thing.
The most obvious explanation for that is that they can’t be bothered to read her arduous 500-word dumps, and don’t know what she’s saying.
