This article is long but in a nutshell shell, describes what is happening in a town called Battle Ground in Washington state.
Property is being purchased up for the expressed purpose of control. The folks behind it are trumpian-Project2025 uber xtian conservatives. Among other things, they think slavery was good, women shouldn’t vote, homosexuality should be illegal, the ten commandments should be law, and government should be xtian. They are driving toward a town that demonstrably welcomes only Xtians.
This isn’t the first town in the U.S. to do this. Given current circumstances, I’d bet it won’t be the last.
If a majority of people in this small town (~20k) think this is peachy and want a xtian only town, should it be left alone?
I think it should be opposed with every possible means at our disposal. It would violate any number of laws. Tie them up in court. That’s their playbook, after all.
“Live and let live” doesn’t work with these fuckers.
That depends. America already has one party enforcing morality. Do we need another?
I see this as two fold. One side is the physical manifestation of a mythology. I see these people as attempting a Disneyland for Great Replacement adherents. Fear of losing control of the larger arena of control forces them to retreat into smaller pockets, easier to manipulate and control.
The second motivator behind this activity is a “build it and they will come” mentality. No one sinks money into one horse towns, unless they expect more horses. There are enough paranoid white folks out there that if they market it through fear, they can clean up.
Within the G7, only Italy outstrips the United States in Christians by percentage. By population, America is the schiznitz for Christians. Honestly, I’m surprised it’s taken them this long to build little Jonestowns here…
It is one thing to let someone minding their own business have their kinks or whatever. I am not talking about that. This is someone trying to build an enclave for the systematic oppression of people below the top of their power structure (generally, patriarchy, so it involves women and children, some of whom WILL be sexually abused) and to marginalize, harass and persecute anyone not in their in-group until they leave. These are objective harms, and immoral, and no moral person should abide them. And they tend to metastasize to the rest of society.
We’ve already tolerated cults – as you alluded to, Jonestown, the Branch Davidians, and others. It is not like you can just leave them alone and they’ll leave you alone. Their ambitions aren’t to have little enclaves, it is to eat the whole world. And people are harmed, sometimes unto death, in the meantime, even if they don’t extend the reach of their influence.
I’ve heard of this preacher before, and I find his doctrine to be horrifying, and he makes my skin crawl.
Even so, I wonder what the difference is between his view of a “Christian” town and places that are exclusively Amish in states like Pennsylvania, or areas in New York that are exclusively Jewish and Chassidic?
For example, in Amish Country, kids don’t get educated past the eighth grade because they won court cases that allow them to curtail education (which is awful, and a profound waste of human intellect), and they’ve had laws passed to modify building and/or health codes to accommodate their rejection of modern technology.
What’s the difference between Amish towns and this business out in Oregon?
P.S. Just because I’m playing the Devil’s advocate doesn’t mean that I approve of a town being governed by Christian Nationalists.
I agree that there is more to this then meets the eye, yet I don’t want to become a conspiracy theorist over this.
A big concern that I have about a town governed by Christian nationalism has to do with healthcare.
Will birth control become de facto illegal? Will schools mandate prayer? And (perhaps most importantly) will domestic violence be tolerated and/or covered up, as is routine in Chassidic enclaves?
Also, will such places be reservoirs of disease when–for religious reasons–they reject vaccines. As an example, there have been many epidemics of measels, mumps, and chicken pox when parents refuse to get their kids vaccinated for religious reasons.
I also wonder if they would outlaw things like PReP meds (which prevent HIV), and the papilloma virus vaccine (which prevents cervical cancer).
I mentioned vaccines because that’s been one of the more obvious problems with Christian nationalism, but we also have to consider the hidden domestic violence that is part of a patriarchal society, we need to cosider the revocation of womens’ rights, and we need to consider how the environment will suffer when they roll back conservation laws because environmentalism is “atheistic.” Also, will LGBTQ people treated like pariahs?
The state and/or feds should step in and enforce vaccine mandates before previously eradicated diseases return with a vengeance and leak out of those communities into the general populace.
The same applies to other aspects of health care and sanitation, to educational standards etc.
I don’t think the Amish should have been exempted from fully educating their children. It has now set (in the minds of some anyway) a precedent that we have to follow because, IDK, the “hobgoblin of a foolish consistency” I guess.
Some of that has happened because fundamentalists are dominant in the US, and want their own religioiusly-mediated exemptions, e.g., home schooling, and accreditation of their church-run universities in theory while in practice being passive-aggressive about teaching things like evolution or being allowed to discriminate against gays and others.
Likely, these small fringe communities will pass whatever laws they feel they can get away with. If anyone passing through notices and decides to bring suit, it depends on the State they are formed in.
As long as Trumpism and MAGA are calling the shots and control the courts and state houses, no level of racism is off the table. No measure exists for how far their religious zeal will propel a quest to return to a time when systemic racism was just an academic term.
Honestly, the fact that they can only pull this shit off in communities under 15,000 tells me that any grand design is in their heads.
Then they pass a law banning vaccines. The one person dissenting forces legal action that potentially allows a stay. Regardless, the 19,999 will never get vaccinated, never vaccinate their children…and if history repeats, a portion of them will die of measles, or some other preventable disease.
The best I have to offer is what we used to say in IT. We can fix hardware, we can fix software…but we can’t fix stupid.