Today’s white Christian nationalists are looking more and more like Nazis

The Supreme Court disregarded the issue of precedent when it overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) in 2022. In its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, the court unraveled the legal right to abortion that had been enshrined for nearly 50 years. The court left it to the states to decide whether they would legalize reproductive rights.

Since Dobbs, many state legislatures have banned reproductive healthcare for pregnant people and those who wish to become pregnant, as well as mifepristone and misoprostol, the safe and effective drugs used in medication abortions. The national drugstore chain Walgreens was the first to ban the drugs even in states where abortion remains legal.

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Donald Trump’s fascist quest for power is steeped in age-old antisemitic & xenophobic tropes

At a recent campaign rally, Trump’s words echoed sentiments once spewed by Hitler and Mussolini.

Several organizations sued the government for access to reproductive care, including abortion. Some Jewish and Muslim groups sued on religious grounds since their respective faith communities allow abortion.

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A press release from Muslim Advocates stated: “The Supreme Court’s radical decision to overturn Roe v. Wade represents a dangerous Christian nationalization of American law and kicks open the door to future reversals of the right to contraception, the right to marry whomever you want and even the right to teach your children a language of your choice. By upholding a law that defines life as beginning at conception, the U.S. Supreme Court has enshrined the religious doctrine of one minority religious community into law — violating the First Amendment principle of religious freedom…”

Anti-abortion advocates have worked tirelessly to lobby the Supreme Court to bring us to this dystopian post-Roe society whereby more and more states are placing strict and impenetrable restraints on reproductive healthcare.

A recent high-profile attempt came from ultra-MAGA authoritarian Attorney General of Texas, Ken Paxton. He intervened in the case of Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two who was pregnant and looking forward to having her third child until her doctors informed her that her fetus was non-viable and had very little chance of surviving. In addition, carrying the fetus to term could medically compromise her ability to become pregnant again and could even jeopardize her own life.

On advice from her doctors, Cox and her husband came to the difficult decision to petition the District Court in Texas to grant her an emergency exemption to the state’s near-total abortion ban, which the Court agreed to allow.

But Attorney General Paxton threatened the Cox family and her doctors with serious jail time if they carried through with an abortion in the state of Texas.

Paxton petitioned the Texas state Supreme Court to take up the case, asking the court to place a stay on the lower court decision. All of this even though Cox was currently in her 20^th week of pregnancy, and time was of the essence.

The Supreme Court was handed the case on Friday, December 8, 2023. No decision came on Saturday in this emergency case. No decision came on Sunday. When no decision came on Monday, Cox and her husband took back control of her body and reproductive future by leaving Texas to have a safe and supportive procedure in a neighboring state with reproductive healthcare freedom.

Even knowing that the family had gone elsewhere for the procedure, the Texas Supreme Court ultimately voted to reject Cox’s request for an emergency abortion. The vote highlighted the state’s totalitarian agenda on other pregnant people, especially those without the resources and support network to flee. In reality, Texas has no “emergency medical exemptions” to its draconian reproductive healthcare laws.

This is one of the major agenda items of the patriarchal white Christian nationalist platform. We have seen throughout recent history the connective strand in which tyrannical, dictatorial regimes, in their attempts to control people’s minds, strip away many protections that would have ensured their bodily autonomy.

It is no mere coincidence that state legislatures, in addition to banning reproductive healthcare, are banning gender-affirming transition procedures for trans people, working to revoke the legal status of marriage equality for same-sex couples, banning classroom discussions of race, gender, and sexuality in the public schools and libraries, and criminalizing drag story hour for children. In addition, many Republican-dominated state governments are limiting access to the ballot box for marginalized populations to ensure continued Republican control of power.

Historian Amanda Tyler defines Christian nationalism as “a political ideology and cultural framework that seeks to merge American and Christian identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s promise of religious freedom.” Christian nationalism relies on the mythological founding of the United States as a “Christian nation,” singled out for God’s providence in order to fulfill God’s purpose on earth. Christian nationalism demands a privileged place for Christianity in public life, buttressed by the active support of government at all levels.

Anthea Butler distinguishes, more specifically, the definition of white Christian nationalism: “Simply put, it is the belief that America’s founding is based on Christian principles, white protestant Christianity is the operational religion of the land, and that Christianity should be the foundation of how the nation develops its laws, principles and policies.”

Though I rarely offer comparisons between the German Third Reich’s ascension to power and the contemporary United States – since to do so could trivialize one of the most horrific episodes in human history – I am nonetheless haunted by certain parallels that demand voicing.

I am troubled by multiple similarities between that time not so very long ago and the events transpiring today. I highlight in particular the parallels in Nazi portrayals and understandings of sex, sexuality, and gender with white Christian nationalism’s divisive and brutal agenda that is anti-feminist, anti-reproductive freedom, anti-lesbian, anti-gay, anti-bisexual, anti-transgender, anti-gender nonconforming, and anti-sexuality education in schools.

“I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator.” – Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1 Chapter 2

The Nazis on homosexuality

The Nazis ruthlessly enforced and eventually extended Paragraph 175, the section of the German Penal Code dating back to 1871 with the unification of Germany: “Unnatural vice committed by two persons of the male sex or by people with animals is to be punished by imprisonment; the verdict may also include the loss of civil rights.”

Nazi ideology rested on the assessment that homosexual males lowered the German birth rate and endangered, recruited, enticed, and corrupted youth. They believed a possible homosexual epidemic could spread; that homosexuals are “potential oppositionists” and enemies of respectable society; and that sexual relations between people of the same sex impairs their “sense of shame” and undermines morality, which inevitably will bring about the “decline of social community.”

Even before taking power, the Nazi party argued on May 14 1928 in its daily newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter:

Anyone who thinks of homosexual love is our enemy. We reject anything which emasculates our people and makes it a plaything for our enemies, for we know that life is a fight, and it is madness to think that men will ever embrace fraternally. Natural history teaches us the opposite. Might makes right. The strong will always win over the weak. Let us see to it that we once again become the strong. But this we can achieve only in one way — the German people must once again learn how to exercise discipline. We, therefore, reject any sexual deviation, particularly between man and man, because it robs us of the last possibility of freeing our people from the slave-chains in which it is now forced to toil.

While Nazis rejected lesbianism as well, they did not criminalize same-sex sexuality between women because they believed that so-called “Aryan” lesbians could at least birth children for the “New Germany.”

On the other hand, Heinrich Himmler, Gestapo head and chief architect of the Reich’s anti-homosexual campaign, justified his actions by arguing that male homosexuals were “like women” and therefore could not fight in any German war effort.

Subsequently, he conducted surveillance operations on an estimated 90,000 suspected homosexuals. He arrested approximately 50,000 and transported somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 to a number of concentration camps throughout the Nazi dominion. Very few survived.

Upon coming to power in 1933 under Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach, the Nazis took over all youth groups and converted them into Hitler Youth groups. One action taken following consolidation was to eliminate all signs of “homosexual corrosion” because it allegedly posed a threat to state control by “fostering political conspiracies.”

Nazi leaders purged all boys suspected of “homosexual tendencies.” Between 1933 and 1943, they tried and convicted an estimated 6,000 youth under Paragraph 175.

Hitler also proposed eliminating all sex education from the German school system and encouraged parents to take on the primary responsibilities for sexuality instruction.

While the Catholic Church spoke out against homosexuality, its own policies boomeranged and hit them in their own faces. Used primarily to silence any potential resistance from the Church, the Nazis conducted their so-called “Cloister Trials” in which they dissolved Catholic youth fraternities and incarcerated large numbers of priests, religious brothers, and Catholic laity in prisons and concentration camps, accusing them of being “threats to the state” on fabricated charges of homosexuality. Prison guards at Dachau concentration camp murdered a Catholic priest, Fr. Alois Abdritzki, one of a number of fatalities as a result of the “Cloister Trials.”

The Nazis on women

Alfred Rosenberg, one of the Nazi’s chief ideologues, expressed his misogynistic outrage against women: “The emancipation of women from the women’s emancipation movement is the first demand of a female generation trying to rescue nation and race, the eternally unconscious, the foundation of all civilization, from decline… A woman should have every opportunity to realize her potential, but one thing must be made clear: Only a man must be and remain judge, soldier, and politician.”

Englebert Huber, a Nazi propagandist, dictated the “proper” place of women in the Third Reich as figuratively (and literally) beneath men: “In the ideology of National Socialism, there is no room for the political woman… [Our] movement places woman in her natural sphere of the family and stresses her duties as wife and mother. The political, that post-war creature, who rarely ‘cut a good figure’ in parliamentary debates, represents the denigration of women. The German uprising is a male phenomenon.”

The Nazis added Paragraph 218 of the German Penal Code to outlaw abortions and establish a national file on women who had undergone them and doctors who had performed them.

The Nazis on “indecency”

In their increasing obsession with “purifying” the social sphere, Nazi leadership enacted the “Decree for Combating Public Indecency,” which included such provisions as working to eliminate prostitution; closing all bars and clubs that “are misused for the furtherance of public indecency” including “public houses solely or mainly frequented by persons engaging in unnatural sex acts” (a.k.a. homosexuals); closing kiosks and magazine stands in libraries and bookshops “whether because they include nude illustrations or because of their title or contents, are liable to produce erotic effects in the beholder.”

Though Pope Pius XII maintained a position of neutrality and rarely spoke out against the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi regime (for which he was roundly criticized in some circles) the Vatican praised the Reich in 1933 on this policy: 

The Vatican welcomes the struggle of National Germany against obscene material. The strong measures that Prussia’s Minister of the Interior Göring has ordered for the combating of obscene writings and pictures… have received serious attention in Vatican circles. It will be recalled that Pius XII, in his recent encyclicals, has repeatedly and vigorously stressed that defensive actions against obscene material are of fundamental importance for the bodily and spiritual health of family and nation, and he most warmly welcomes the type and manner… with which this struggle has been undertaken in the new Germany.

Today’s patriarchal white Christian nationalists

The Nazi regime connected multiple forms of oppression when Heinrich Himmler reorganized the Reich Criminal Police Bureau to centralize operations by creating a national file on male homosexuals, transgender people, what they referred to as “wage abortionists” (women and their doctors), and to monitor the production and ban the use of contraceptives to “Aryan” women.

Within this Bureau, the Nazis established The Reich Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion, which in 1938 alone, conducted 28,366 arrests for abortion, and 28, 882 arrests of male homosexuals.

The common thread running through Nazi ideology regarding gender, gender expression, and sexuality was an intensive campaign to control individuals’ bodies and the bodies of members of entire communities in an attempt to control their minds. 

Women and LGBTQ+ people have been constructed as second-class and even third-class citizens not merely in Nazi Germany, but today.

But women and LGBTQ+ folks are certainly not victims. Through it all, they have resisted and challenged the inequities and have pushed back against patriarchal white Christian nationalist constraints.

I hope, though, that we as a society can learn from the tyranny of the past.