Donald Trump fuels the culture war by stoking panic over the 4 G’s: God, Gays, Gates, & Guns

Within the patriarchal, Christian, white supremacist structure that has perennially held power in the United States since colonial times, the issues that hold the highest sway among dominant group members in the 2024 election – even more than “it’s the economy stupid” – center on the so-called “cultural war” issues of God, Gays, Gates, and Guns (all connected to fears of invasion).

God: Christians as “Innocent” and “Pure”

The increasing numbers of school districts clamping down on students’ access to books and other resources on sexuality, gender identity, race, and the “hard” history of the United States conforms directly with major foundational principles of patriarchal Christian white supremacy.

Related:

The 2024 election is not just Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump. It’s democracy vs autocracy.

1932 marked the last democratically held election in Germany until after World War II. Let’s not make the same mistake.  

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At a December 2022 panel titled “Straight White American Jesus” on the topic of white Christian nationalism in the United States, speakers talked of major components of Christian nationalism, specifically the “innocence” in history, and the “purity culture.”

Sara Moslener, a lecturer in religion at Central Michigan University, asserted that concepts of “innocence” and “purity culture” are often located in white Christian nationalism, stemming from colonial history when whiteness was coupled with freedom and innocence.

“The innocence that is connected to white racial identity has been a… delusion that has worked really well in giving white people a sense of specialness, a sense of ‘we have something in common with one another’,” she said. “There is this sense that we are innocent of all of these things, and white Christian nationalism says: Well, this was all part of God’s plan.”

So, bringing up some of the “hard” history of the United States, like racism, challenges this notion of “white innocence,” while restricting or banning these discussions in schools and businesses theoretically avoids a potential narcissistic injury to white people.

Moslener continued by explaining the concept of “purity culture,” taken from conservative evangelical Christianity that opposes abortion rights, homosexuality, and transgender identities and adheres to traditional gender roles and sexual abstinence before marriage (for women). She claimed that this is also foundational to Christian nationalism. This “purity culture” is mainly about “evangelicals gaining political power.”

“White Christian Nationalism is steeped in myths of national innocence and this idea that the founding of the United States was a God-anointed beginning,” Moslener said. This is connected as a movement by a unified commitment to a social order of a shared theology of family and a shared perception of gender roles, sexuality, and gender expression.

Panelist Katherine Stewart, an investigative journalist and author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, said of Christian nationalism: “It’s not a single religion; it’s both an ideology, a set of ideas, and it’s also a political movement, an organized quest for power.”

Allowing free and age-appropriate discussions, however, of the “hard” history connected to race and racism unmasks this Christian nationalist myth of “white innocence.” And free and age-appropriate discussions of topics around sexuality and gender knock out of the water the propagation of their invention of some sort of Christian “purity culture” destined by God.

These laws are nothing less than the means to the goal of further establishing a patriarchal Christian white nationalist power structure in the United States.

Gays (Standing for all LGBTQ+ Folks)

What is patriarchy?

According to social scientist, Allan Johnson, “a society is patriarchal to the degree that it is male-dominated, male-identified, and male-centered. It also involves as one of its key aspects the oppression of women. Patriarchy is male-dominated in that positions of authority – political, economic, legal, religious, educational, military, domestic – are generally reserved for men.”

Cisgender, white, heterosexual, Christian males grow up in the United States with the understanding – consciously or not – that they hold the power and that they are entitled to maintain and restrict this power from others.

Atop this hierarchy we find the so-called “Alpha” male: the assumed “leader of the pack,” the dominant male, the independent self-sustaining male.

Below the Alpha sits the “Beta” male, seen as weaker in courage and independence, unremarkable, and careful to avoid risk and confrontation. Beta males lack the physical presence, charisma, and confidence of the Alpha male. They are seen as the followers.

“Omega” males are often loners who do not fit into the Alpha/Beta typology. They may be more introverted, shy, or socially uncomfortable.

Feminist theory teaches us that within a patriarchal society, males are awarded the powerful and colonizing male gaze: the act of viewing women as sexual objects for the edification of the heterosexual, cisgender male.  

Gay, bisexual, and pansexual men confound and challenge the direction of the male gaze, possibly back onto – and thereby threatening to – cisgender heterosexual males who sometimes react violently. Within the patriarchal power structure, gay, bisexual, and pansexual males are often understood as traitors or conspirators by turning the powerful gaze around and by abandoning their power to sexually objectify women.

While cisgender heterosexual males may fantasize about women engaging in sex acts with one another, lesbians, bisexual, and pansexual women also challenge the colonizing male gaze. Withholding sexual attraction from males does not add to their degree of self-worth and to their potential for partnership. In a sense, then, queer women are often understood as traitors or conspirators to the sex/gender status quo.

Feminists formed a new wave in the fight for women’s suffrage against a high tide of obstructionism within a patriarchal system of male domination and misogyny that perpetuated the idea that the enfranchisement of women would destroy Christianity and civilization itself.

History is replete with groups and individuals facing colossal odds for simply expressing their truth and being forced to pay the ultimate price for doing so. Governments and powerful individuals have devised ways of silencing opposition to maintain and extend their control and domination.

They commit genocide upon the true human liberators, the profits, the visionaries who advocate for a just and free world. These visionaries, who were persecuted in their own time, have achieved not only exoneration, but more importantly, have become venerated as the visionaries they truly are.

Trans people have exposed the truth regarding “gender” as a social construction. The process of “transitioning,” of confirming the gender you know to be yours, undermines the foundation of the patriarchy, which centers on the inimical notion of fixed, invariable, unalterable binary genders.

With the label “female” assigned at birth, society forces us to follow its “feminine script,” and with “male” assigned at birth, we are handed our “masculine” script to act out. As scripts are given to actors in a play, gender role scripts were also written long before any of us entered the stage of life. In fact, they have little connection with our nature, beliefs, interests, and values.

If we challenge the director by refusing to follow our lines, if we speak of this lie about fixed and unalterable genders, the director (patriarchy) doles out harsh, often fatal punishments.

Members of trans communities often suffer the same consequences as other truth-tellers have in the past. Nearly every two days, a person is killed somewhere in the world for expressing gender nonconformity. The vast majority of victims are trans women of color.

Murderers of trans people react in extreme and fanatical ways at the direction of the larger coercive societal battalions bent on destroying all signs of gender transgression in young and old alike in the maintenance of gender scripts.

Most of us function as conscious or unconscious co-directors in this drama each time we enforce gender-role conformity onto others and each time we relinquish our critical consciousness by failing to rewrite or destroy the scripts in ways that operate integrally for us.

Those who bully in society and filter into the schools often fulfill the social “function” of establishing and reinforcing the socially constructed scripts handed to them when they enter the performance.

Within a patriarchal society that transmits distorted gender extremes:

·       How dare gay men think of coming on to me, a cisgender heterosexual male?

·       How dare women demand their reproductive freedoms, which would reduce or even take away my ability to make the decision on whether to carry or abort my genetic offspring?

·       How dare trans men even think about taking the privileges I have “earned” from birth?

·       How dare trans women relinquish male privilege and betray both their gender and patriarchy itself?

In Wisconsin on April 4, Donald Trump lambasted President Biden for issuing a White House proclamation on Sunday, March 31 as the annual International Trans Day of Visibility, which coincidentally fell on Easter Sunday this year.

Though Biden has repeatedly issued this proclamation in each year of this presidency, Trump nonetheless claimed some sort of Christian persecution by protesting: “What the hell was Biden thinking when he declared Easter Sunday to be trans visibility day? Such total disrespect to Christians.”

Trump predicted he would win the presidential election and promised his acolytes that “November 5th [election day] is going to be called something else. Christian visibility day, when Christians turn out in numbers that nobody has ever seen before.” The crowd responded, of course, with wild applause.

Laws are built upon and reflect the society in which they are meant to affect. Our patriarchal Christian white supremacist individualistic society opposes and inhibits the development of universal health care, opposes women’s reproductive freedoms, encourages the inequities in salaries between men and women, establishes and maintains the massive development of wealth for the very few while encouraging the enormous financial disparities between the very rich and everyone else.

Throughout history, examples abound of male domination over the rights and lives of women and girls:

·       Men denied women the vote until women fought hard and demanded the right, though women in some countries today still are restricted from voting.

·       Strictly enforced gender-based social roles mandated without choice so that women’s only option was to remain in the home to undertake cleaning and childcare duties

·       Women were and continue to be by far the primary target of harassment, abuse, physical assault, and rape by men

· Women were and remain locked out of many professions

· Rules required that women teachers relinquish their jobs after marriage

· In fact, the institution of marriage itself was structured on a foundation of male domination, with men serving as the so-called “head of the household” and taking on sole ownership of all property thereby restricting these rights from women.

In other words, women and LGBTQ people have been relegated as second-class and even third-class citizens. Through it all, women and LGBTQ+ people, as individuals and groups, have challenged the inequities and have pushed back against patriarchal constraints.

Gates: Closed to Immigrants

From the time he first descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower to announce his presidential run in 2015, Donald Trump continually demeaned, stereotyped, and scapegoated immigrants, especially Muslims and Latinx people. He initially stated: “The US has become a dumping ground for everyone else’s problems. [Mexico is] sending people that have lots of problems, and they are bringing those problems to us. They are bringing drugs, and bringing crime, and they’re rapists.”

Not soon after his election, Trump ordered children of undocumented immigrants to be taken from their parents and placed into dehumanizing and horrifying cages

On June 26, 2018 – after two of Trump’s travel bans from majority Muslim countries were struck down in the courts – the Supreme Court approved Trump’s September 2017 travel ban into the U.S. directed at 5 majority Muslim countries: Somalia, Iran, Libya, Yemen, & Syria, plus North Korea and senior government officials from Venezuela.

In Trump, President of the United States, et al. v. Hawaii, et al., the Supreme Court ruled in a narrow 5-4 decision that “The [Trump] Proclamation is squarely within the scope of Presidential authority” on national security grounds.

In an Oval Office meeting on January 11, 2018, Trump became frustrated with legislators when they proposed restoring protections for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration plan. “Why are we having all these people from sh*thole countries come here?” Trump said, referring to African countries and Haiti. He then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries like Norway.

Trump eventually enlarged his dehumanizing representations to include all people of Latin America. In his January 19, 2019, White House speech on immigration, he continued attempting to metamorphose people desperate for a better way of life for themselves and their families into deranged and dangerous rapists, gang members, human traffickers, and drug smugglers out to subvert “good” Americans (read as white people).

The facts, though, contradict Trump’s hateful descriptions of immigrants in his divide and conquer strategy to instill fear in his supporters.

During his current campaign to recapture the White House, Trump asserted that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Actually, undocumented immigrants are filling many of the gaps in the economy by working jobs that U.S. citizens do not want to fill. They are paying taxes and raising children, and most believe in the American Dream and that they can build better lives for themselves and their families.

They are not “poisoning the blood of our country,” as Trump stated, echoing sentiments expressed by Hitler and Mussolini, but instead, they are risking their lives and spilling their blood to protect this country.

Guns

I understand why many people oppose and resist common sense firearms regulations.

Regulations on firearms challenge the hegemonic promises of a patriarchal system based on notions of Alpha male hypermasculinity with the qualities taken to the extreme of control, domination over others and the environment, competitiveness, autonomy, rugged individualism, strength, toughness, forcefulness, and decisiveness, and, of course, never having to ask for help or assistance.

Concepts of cooperation and community responsibility are pushed to the sidelines and discarded. Ultimately, unless we change from an Individualistic to a more cooperative society, the United States is destined to fail, not from external threats, but from within.

Forms of Alpha male hypermasculinity require the promotion and use of firearms to keep at bay the intensive psychosocial compulsive fear and dread of penetration from bullets, from the male homosexual gaze, from the female gaze since the patriarchy promises males the right to the aggressive outward gaze. Guns also help maintain the patriarchy’s self-granted right to the objectification and penetration of “others.”

Male dominance is maintained by its relative invisibility (though for many of us, it stands as blatantly obvious), and with this relative invisibility, privilege and power escape analysis, scrutiny, interrogation, and confrontation by many.

Cisgender, heterosexual, Christian, white male dominance is perceived as unremarkable or “normal,” and when anyone poses a challenge or attempts to reveal its true impact and significance, those in the dominant group brand them as “subversive” or even “accuse” them of “reverse discrimination.”

White cisgender heterosexual Christians are claiming they are the objects of oppression, an argument used by members of the dominant class to reverse civil rights gains from past decades, including Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs in educational and business institutions.

A poll from the Public Religion Research Institute found that “44% of Americans surveyed identify discrimination against whites as being just as big as bigotry aimed at blacks and other minorities. The poll found 61% of those identifying with the Tea Party held that view, as did 56% of Republicans and 57% of white evangelicals.”

Throughout this year and until the November 5, 2024, elections, watch how this discussion of anti-white oppression continues and expands under the political agenda of God, Gays, Gates, and Guns.