Badass Conservative Quotes

Just as I had decided that hell didn’t exist, I also decided that the traditional interpretation of Christian doctrine was too staid and conservative. I started to think that Jesus was a badass, and I wanted to be one just like Him. I believed I was called by God to be an ordained minister to help change the systems of oppression in our world.

This, of course, is nothing new. Eurocentric Christianity, since the days of Constantine, has predominately served as an apologist for authoritarian regimes, be they emperors, kings, crusading popes, or military dictators. In the last century alone, Eurocentric Christian jargon sustained and supported brutal regimes guilty of unimaginable human rights violations. Think of how the Catholic Church, fearing the loss of power during Spain’s Second Republic, threw its support behind the right-wing politics of the usurper Francisco Franco, who cloaked himself as a defender of religious liberties. The church stood by him as he ignited a civil war against the seculariziation of society, turning a blind eye to the Spanish killing fields. Or recall how, earlier, the Catholic Church in Portugal supported the right-wing regime of Estado Novo, whose coup d’état against the democratic First Republic ushered in a reign of terror, again justified because he advocated family values. We also cannot forget that the rise of Hitler was aided by conservative Protestant Christians calling for Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. This is not to say all conservative Christians are fascists, nor that the left is innocent of harboring those who exploit secularism to impose intolerance. Multiple leftist dictatorships around the world are as oppressive as right-wing dictatorships. Still, the point is that conservative Christians have maintained a tolerance for family values promoted by authoritarian rulers who have engaged in all sorts of heinous injustices in Christ’s name. If indeed Christ is the head of the church, and man is the head of his wife, then why be surprised when Euro-American Christianity celebrates patriarchy? What many of us find damnable is that proclamations of “family values” become the basis for a populist movement that is defining its family values by separating Brown families at the border. White Christianity is now and has historically been an apologist for white nationalism.

On May 18, 1981, the Council for National Policy (CNP) was founded when 160 of the nation’s leading conservatives gathered in the backyard of Richard Viguerie. Viguerie previously was the CEO of a right-wing fundraising company that had secured millions for George Wallace’s failed race-based 1968 presidential bid.

Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan become case studies on how the foundations of democracies are shaken to their roots by elected officials, who establish themselves as czars, emperors, and sultans masquerading as democratic presidents. Yes, they continue to reign over countries that are democracies in name only. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people is weaponized against those who dare challenge the ruling establishment. The rise of white Christianity during the second half of the twentieth century was purposely designed to be nondemocratic. Paul Weyrich, known as the “founding father of the conservative movement,” the architect of the Heritage Foundation, and a leader of the Moral Majority, made it perfectly clear he was against the democratic principle of one person, one vote. During his address at the seminal Religious Right gathering in Dallas during the fall of 1980 he said, “I don’t want everybody to vote…. As a matter of fact, our leverage in elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”34 In other words, when nonwhites vote, white Christians lose, so we do not want those people voting.

during the sixty-eighth National Prayer Breakfast, Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, gave a moving tribute to Jesus’s entreaty to “love your enemies” in the midst of the current “crises of contempt and polarization.” Trump, speaking after Brooks, began his incendiary remarks by saying, “Arthur, I don’t know if I agree with you. But I don’t know if Arthur’s going to like what I’m going to say.”7 As some cheered and whistled, he proceeded to lambaste, defame, and threaten his enemies with retribution for supporting the impeachment procedures. Vengeance is mine, saith Trump. Not surprisingly, some of his most sycophantic allies, like the Reverend Robert Jeffress, embraced Trump’s tantrum. Rather than offering a humbled response on the difficulties of keeping Jesus’s command to love your enemies (something all of us can relate to), Trump went on to repudiate the central teaching of the Sermon on the Mount. So, when 89 percent of white Christians believe the Bible should influence the laws of this country,8 they are not referring to the Bible read by the disenfranchised, where the command to “love your enemies” is not up for negotiation. White Christian exegesis is instead based on a white, cisgender male perspective that constructs a religion ready and able to defend their unearned profit, privilege, and power. The domestication and domination of white Christianity by the Trump presidency did not come about ex nihilo. There is a history to how this country arrived at this juncture. Likewise, ignoring this history only ensures the eventual rise of some future Trumpish president. The triumph of white, conservative, so-called family-values Christianity did not come about coincidentally. We can trace the current Trump Christian Age back to the 1940s movement that developed as a response to the New Deal and Social Gospel. The white Christianity of the mid-twentieth century sought to move the needle from the Social Gospel (Christianizing a savage capitalism that was crushing humanity) to the prosperity gospel (blessed are the faithful because they will be given health and wealth).