Patriarchal Christian White Nationalists Target the Transgender Community
In some states, patriarchal Chrisian white nationalists are passing laws barring students from discussing this history in the schools.
Tucker Carlson, on his Fox “News” program on the evening of March 28, argued that transgender people are Christians’ “natural enemies.”
His accusation stemmed from his discussion of the mass shooting at a Nashville, Tennessee Presbyterian elementary school by a lone perpetrator police described as transgender who had previously attended the school. The shooting resulted in the death of three nine-year-old students and three adult employees, including the head administrator.
In this, the 130th mass shooting in less than three months into the year according to the Gun Violence Archive, virtually all were committed by cisgender people.
Carlson painted “good Christians” with a broad brush as very modest and humble people while categorizing transgender people as arrogant and audacious:
“In Christianity, the price of admission is admitting that you’re not God,” Carlson said. “Christians openly can see they have no real power over anything and, for that matter, very little personal virtue. They will tell you to your face if they are sinful and helpless and basically absurd. They are not embarrassed about any of this, they brag about it.”
Comparing trans people, Carlson claimed:
“The trans movement takes the opposite view,” he continued. “Trans ideology claims dominion over nature itself. ‘We can change the identity we are born with,’ they will tell you with wild-eyed certainty.”
Christians, he continued, are very different from trans people because Christians believe that “these are powers…God alone possesses. That unwillingness to agree, that failure to acknowledge a trans person’s dominion over nature incites and enrages some in the trans community.”
Carlson then accused transgender people of thinking that “they’re God.”
“People who believe they’re God can’t stand to be reminded that they are not,” he said. “So, Christianity and transgender orthodoxy are wholly incompatible theologies. They can never be reconciled. They are on a collision course with each other. One side is likely to draw blood before the other side.”
Tucker Carlson is a very powerful person. Not only does he host the most watched cable evening program, but his influence extends to being the virtual leader, next to Donald Trump, of the Republican Party.
So, why is the Republican Party targeting trans people? Simple: To divert attention away from the fact that the Party lacks a clear political agenda for governing.
Carlson does a great disservice to Christians by assuming they represent a monolith regarding thought, behavior, and belief. While the Vatican certainly slanders transgender people in its representation and actions toward them, not all denominations follow suit such as some American Baptist, Episcopal, and Methodist churches, and others.
The Vatican hierarchy, however, fenced off Alex Salinas, a 21-year-old transman from Cadiz, Spain, by informing him that it had denied his request to become the godparent of his nephew because being transgender is incongruent with Catholic teaching. According to the Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, its doctrine-enforcing agency:
Transgender status “reveals in a public way an attitude opposite to the moral imperative of solving the problem of sexual identity according to the truth of one’s own sexuality. Therefore, it is evident that this person does not possess the requirement of leading a life according to the faith and in the position of godfather and is therefore unable to be admitted to the position of godfather or godmother.”
Far prior to this statement, Joan of Arc, the teenager who helped defeat the English in her native France, became one of the greatest war heroes in French history. Despite this, the Roman Catholic Church tried and convicted Joan on the charge of heresy in rejecting Church authority in preference for direct inspiration from God, but most importantly, by donning men’s clothing. Joan died by burning at the stake at the hands of the Church.
Pope Francis, the so-called “progressive” Pope, further trashed trans people in a speech to the Pontifical Academy for Life’s general assembly in which he labeled gender confirmation surgery as “manipulation” and a “choice.”
“The biological and physical manipulation of sexual difference, which biomedical technology allows us to perceive as completely available to free choice — which it is not! — thus risks dismantling the source of energy that nurtures the alliance between man and woman and which renders it creative and fruitful.”
Tucker Carlson, in his on-air tirade, also twisted history into a pretzel by distorting and revising the facts. However, there may be a kernel of truth in something he asserted, but opposite in what he blurted out:
“So, Christianity and transgender orthodoxy are wholly incompatible theologies. They can never be reconciled.”
In fact, history records that it was Christian nationalists who believed they were God, or at least, that God spoke to them and, therefore, gave them justification to commit some of the vilest atrocities ever to fall upon the Earth: colonization.
Christian Colonialism
Though the official terms “colonization,” “colonizer,” and “colonized” may have changed somewhat, nowhere in the world have we experienced a truly post-colonial society. Imperialism remains, though at times possibly in less visible forms.
March 30, 2023, the Vatican finally repudiated its so-called “Doctrine of Discovery,” but this will never begin to atone for the land theft, cultural decimation, forced Christian conversion, and genocide committed as justification for white expansionism extending around the globe, and in what today is referred to as the “United States of America,” from the Atlantic to Pacific in the name of a Christian god. And now in some states, patriarchal Chrisian white nationalists are passing laws barring students from discussing this history in the schools.
From a series of papal bulls (decrees or edicts) beginning of the 1100s, began sanctions, enforcements, authorizations, expulsions, excommunications, denunciations, and, in particular, expressions of territorial sovereignty for Christian monarchs supported by the Catholic Church.
These bulls established what would come to be known as the “Doctrine of Discovery”: a spiritual, political, and legal justification for colonization and seizure of territories not already inhabited by Christians.
Two of these papal bulls particularly stand out:
Pope Nicholas V issued his “Romanus Pontifex” in 1455 granted Portugal a monopoly trading status with African and authorizing the enslavement of indigenous populations.
In 1455, Pope Nicholas V called his Christian followers to “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans,” take their possessions, and “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”
And Pope Alexander VI issued “Inter Caetera” in 1493 to justify Christian European explorers’ claims on land and waterways they “discovered,” and to promote Christian domination in Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and the Americans.
The United States justified its “Monroe Doctrine” in the 1880s by declaring U.S. dominion over the Western Hemisphere, and its claim of “Manifest Destiny” of expansionism westward as its destiny to control all land from the Atlantic to the Pacific and beyond.
In 1823, in the Supreme Court case, Johnson v. M’Intosh, the Doctrine of Discovery became part of U.S. federal law used to dispossess Native peoples of their lands.
In a unanimous decision, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote, “that the principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to New World lands” and Native peoples certain rights of occupancy.
This edict known as the Doctrine of Discovery gives license to genocide of black, brown, Asian, and non-Christians across the world. It was the stimulus for Columbus’ travels and is based on patriarchal Christian white supremacy.
The good people of the United States will stand firm and not allow the latest incarnation of patriarchal Christian white nationalism to colonize the transgender community or any other community. For all the vile conspiracy theorists, their reign of fear and terror will soon be over.
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The story was previously published on The Good Men Project.
About Warren Blumenfeld
Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld is author of God, Guns, Capitalism, and Hypermasculinity: Commentaries on the Culture of Firearms in the United States(Peter Lang Publishers), The What, the So What, and the Now What of Social Justice Education (Peter Lang Publishers), Warren’s Words: Smart Commentary on Social Justice (Purple Press); editor of Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price (Beacon Press), and co-editor of Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (Routledge) and Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States (Sense), and co-author of Looking at Gay and Lesbian Life (Beacon Press).