I’m not playing around anymore. I’m not sitting idly by and watching right-winged fascism take over our country, my home state of Texas, and local communities. I will not go down without a fight. Do you want to know how I know this? Come join me for a day in the parent LGBTQ+ community. I am losing a tremendous amount of patience for churches and other Christians who sit idly by and not say anything about an authoritarian right-winged regime taking over, hurting mass numbers of people, and even killing a good number. Churches don’t have to get themselves arrested for civil disobedience, but choosing to sit quietly and not say anything at a time like this is complicity.
Sadly, I have found the opposite to be true with a number of white churches and other white Christians in America. They have a long history of speaking so strongly against the abortion issue and abusing their congregants to get their political leaders and strongman Trump elected, but they don’t speak against the growing threat of right-winged fascism which has almost completely taken over. To the American White Church, where is your moral courage? What are you doing if you sit by as the Religious Right marches in like the Nazi Germany Army?
As a parent of multiple LGBTQ+ kids and being actively involved with the parent LGBTQ+ community since 2021, I’m going to tell you why so many former Christian families with LGBTQ+ kids have lost their faith in the American Church and even in God Himself. It’s not the secular left. It’s other Christians (mostly white) and the Church itself who are either in louder support of right-winged Christofascist power than they are of the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed, the exact people who Jesus came to serve and liberate.
To the American Trump-supporting White Church, Trump wouldn’t be in office right now if it were not for you. The Trump/Musk administration is destroying the foundations of our democracy, gutting our government, stripping millions of Americans of basic necessities, human dignity, and life, aligning with dictators and our adversaries, and betraying our allies. The American White Church, you are largely responsible for this because Trump would not be in office right now if it were not for you.
I am wiling to take some ownership for not understanding my own complicity with this. I didn’t start waking up to this threat until 2016 when the social justice arm of the American Church woke up much sooner than I did starting in the Reagan era. When I became fully awake to the threat of fascism about 2018, I totally denounced it and united with other religious and non-religious progressives. This not only took bravery but sacrifice. The amount of backlash I received and continue to receive from the Religious Right has consisted of death threats, threats of sexual assault, and other sorts of threats and harm. I have lost both family and friends. Are you willing to give up your comforts and even lose some people in your life to denounce Trump and the current state of events? Any person of goodwill and basic moral character should be doing so whether they are Christians or not. But I believe Christians have an extra unique responsibility to stand up to this because it is other Christians who have caused this.
Jesus flipped tables on the religious elite and liberated the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed. All Christians, particularly white Christians, I challenge you to be like Jesus, not a significant portion of the American White Church aligning with the MAGA movement. Right-winged fascism should be completely intolerable to any person of goodwill but especially a Christian who actually follows the life and ministry of Christ. I want the Real Jesus, not the GOP Jesus.
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