By this point, we all should know, or at least believe or understand, that Marjorie Taylor Greene is an incompetent partisan hack. Even with that assessment, I am being highly generous. Words can barely describe the level of sheer stupidity she normalizes within America’s political discourse, constantly poisoning the well of information all Americans rely on. However, her latest prominent remarks are not just the usual laughable idiocy, but something far more insidious as well. She is now openly advocating for the Republican Party to become so-called Christian nationalists. This ideology believes Christianity to be the founding doctrine America was built upon, and sometimes even that only Christians should rule. This is far more harmful than any typical far-right lunacy, and there are many reasons why.

The first major issue with Christian nationalism is that the main point of their beliefs, that America’s government is based only on Christianity, is false. Sure, some of our so-called Founding Fathers believed in Christian governance, but many others did not. In fact, most Founding Fathers were ambivalent towards religion in govenrment, with Jefferson and Madison’s separation of church and state idea being only one of many on the table.  Surely, if America was founded as a Christian nation, then our founders would’ve agreed on this issue, at least. In reality, however, there was as bitter of a divide on this issue as there was on literally everything else our founders argued about. 

To keep harping on about America’s founding leaders not exactly wanting a religious state, we must look next into the Constitution and its First Amendment. This is most often interpreted as a condemnation of a unified church and state, meaning that religious tolerance as the Amendment requires would be law of the land. In other words, religion was not to interfere in state affairs. As I’m sure you could imagine, Christian nationalism blatantly ignores this. This, in turn, leaves democracy at risk, because if someone has to pray to a single particular version of a single particular God just to participate in political society, that is by definition not democracy. The name of that kind of government is theocracy, which is often very authoritarian. In real life, this not unlike the governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia are for their branches of Islam, and also not unlike the various kingdoms of Europe were for Christianity before our independence. In short, Christian nationalism would take America back to square one, the exact situation our Revolutionary War was fought over.

To anyone who is even remotely considering following Marjorie Taylor Greene’s word on this, I implore them to do their research on what this could become. I know a lot of Americans, myself included, who have a subconscious tendency to mock religious theocracies around the world. Why else does every President’s encounter with Saudi Arabia’s royals get so heavily scruntinzed? That said, America has to realize that if this wing of the Republican Party subsists and regains power, they will lead us down that exact same path. The rights of religious and ethnic minorities would be gone, and the LGBTQ+ would be in for a living hell. Women would be treated not as people, but as property. This kind of society is exactly what America must not be. We can do better than becoming the Christian Saudi Arabia. We can do better than that. We must if our democracy and way of life is to survive. To hell with Christian nationalism.