The Quiet Redirection of America

It’s interesting to me how something that once served one purpose, or meant something to one group of people, can later come to mean something else for others, especially symbols. Take the swastika. It shows up among unrelated cultures going back thousands of years to Neolithic times. Its name comes from Sanskrit and means good fortune. It’s been used in Buddhism and Hinduism for at least 3,000 years to represent the cycle of creation. Today, though, we recognize it as a symbol of hate.

How did that happen? The Nazis viewed the swastika as a symbol of the Aryan race. They did not borrow it. They hijacked it and claimed it as ancestral property. While the symbol had drifted over the millennia, having various meanings in different cultures, when it came to the Nazis, it was like cultural misappropriation.

Once you recognize that symbols, language, and music can be destroyed, appropriated, and misappropriated over time, you’ll begin to notice some interesting patterns.

And that’s just what happened in our book study this week when we discussed Chapter 6 of Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers.

Our discussion started with a conversation about a former Michigan state representative saying one of his favorite songs is “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Earlier this year, while writing some social media content, I dug into the history of the song. It was written one night by Sabine Baring-Gould, an Anglican priest in Yorkshire, England, in 1865. Originally called “Hymn for Procession with Cross and Banners,” the idea was that children could sing during a processional as a cross was being moved between churches during Pentecost.

The song, based on a verse in 2 Timothy, was never meant to be used beyond the festival; however, history shows it was printed in a publication and later found its way into hymnals. It wasn’t until 1871 that it was set to music by Arthur Sullivan of the famous Gilbert and Sullivan. Some have speculated that it became popular in the United States because it appeared shortly after the Civil War and the words resonated with them.

“Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus, going on before.”

One of our study members has led historical tours at a lighthouse for years. He made the point that a chant like is genuinely useful for keeping children moving, but this song, as he put it, “turned into something completely else.”

It was never meant to be a song to comfort American Civil War soldiers, nor was it meant to be a rallying cry for Christian nationalists, like we read about in this chapter. One member of the book study shared that she’s spent months now unable to sing hymns she loves without hearing the theology underneath them differently. “That’s bad theology,” she kept catching herself thinking, mid-song.

Stewart used the phrase “laboratories of democracy” in this chapter. The phrase was coined in 1932 by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in his dissenting opinion on New Ice State Co. vs. Liebmann. He wrote, “a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”

Brandeis meant that a state may test a policy, perhaps in agriculture or education. Other states or the federal government may watch to see how it works or doesn’t work. If it works well, other states, or even if the federal government may copy it. If it fails, only that state has to deal with it.

Stewart pointed out that states are now using “laboratories of democracy” to test theocratic policy at the state level, where there is less scrutiny and far less media coverage than in Washington.

I invited the group to share examples of something built for one purpose getting quietly redirected to another. One member told us about Texas’s Bluebonnet curriculum. State education officials made this Bible-infused reading curriculum inexpensive enough that most Texas school districts felt pressured to adopt it. Rather than make laws requiring that the Bible is taught in schools, biblical stories were simply woven into reading books.

A member from Maryland talked about volunteering at food banks and watching well-meaning people slip religious tracts into the bags. The food is free, but some people take the opportunity to evangelize. She called it mission creep, one kind act at a time.

I noted that during a recent legislative session in Indiana, the state’s school voucher program was expanded to every family, marketed as “school choice.” That clever phrase hides the fact that $500 million in taxpayer money was moved from public to private schools last year. Only 10 percent of Indiana’s K-12 students benefited from that money. And private schools that accept voucher money don’t have to complete state testing, and they can decline students with special needs or discipline issues.

The book describes how model legislation lets the same bill appear in a dozen statehouses with different local sponsors’ names attached. A policy that looks homegrown is actually coming out of a small number of conservative think tanks, who find “stable” legislators in each state and hand them a bill to introduce.

I told the group that the man credited as the author of Indiana’s redistricting bill lives less than a mile from my house. I ran into him at the grocery store the week the story broke. He said hello. I said hello back and kept walking, because I had nothing else to say. My son noticed that I’m not usually like that with people. But as another group member pointed out, being a vehicle for someone else’s agenda doesn’t make you innocent, it makes you culpable.

Another member connected this to the first days of the second Trump administration. The president had a stack of executive orders ready to sign before he’d finished the inauguration lunch. Another member named the strategy directly: flood the field with so many changes at once that people can’t choose their battles, and things slip through the cracks while everyone’s attention is scattered. Whack-a-mole, as the book calls it. I vote to give Steve Bannon the credit.

One member raised a question: how do you draw the line between religious freedom and using religious freedom as cover for discrimination? He was honest that he was “that guy” 30 years ago … the one who used belief as a reason to withhold basic decency from people he’d decided were sinners. His read now: evangelicalism, structurally, carries the idea that believers have a God-given responsibility to tell other people what to do, and that stopping them from doing so is itself framed as an infringement on their rights.

Another member talked about the distinction between religious rights vs. religious civility. You don’t have to agree with someone to owe them basic decency, and those two things get conflated on purpose. She brought up John Fugelsang’s approach of meeting cherry-picked scripture with more scripture. For example, Matthew 25’s instructions on how nations are judged by how they treat the stranger and the vulnerable, aimed squarely at the people using the Bible to justify cruelty.

A member from California asked, “How do you have a conversation with someone whose belief system denies your humanity … Someone who thinks you, or someone you love, is going to hell?” She doesn’t always trust her own family to hold her spiritual life with respect.

One member said that she doesn’t go deep with people she knows disagree with her, but she’s made sure both sides know the relationship holds anyway. She believes that respect and disagreement can coexist even when policy views don’t overlap.

I told the group about my neighbor, who brings us banana bread, volunteers at the food pantry, is extremely evangelical, and told me flatly she doesn’t believe homosexuality is real after she saw a pride flag in my yard. In the same breath, she told me she’d never treat anyone differently for it. I don’t know that “never” survives every test. But it gave us a place to keep talking instead of a door slammed shut. Another member said that having these conversations takes bravery. The willingness to go one step past the conversation-stopper and say, I disagree, and I’d like to hear more.

By September, we’ll be finished with The Power Worshippers, and I asked the group where they want to go next. I’ve noticed, going all the way back to some eugenics research I did this spring, that the racist infrastructure underneath Christian nationalism keeps surfacing, not as the whole story, but as a load-bearing wall inside it. One member said it better than I could, “if you’re a white supremacist looking for a political home, conservative politics, which right now means Christian nationalism, is the only house with the lights on.”

That’s likely pointing us toward Fever in the Heartland, about the KKK’s resurgence in the 1920s, which, it turns out, had one of its biggest strongholds right here in Indiana. More on that when we pick it up. For now: D.C. Stephenson built the Klan here into a quarter-million members, one in three white Hoosier men. An Indianapolis Times reporter won a Pulitzer for exposing it in 1925. Stephenson brought down his own empire, and half the Indiana Republican Party with it, after a murder conviction and a very ill-advised assumption that the governor he’d helped elect would let him walk. There’s a lot more to that story, and we’ll get to it.

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