Laws that turn bodies into prisons
Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America.
Today an excerpt from the forthcoming book Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America. It was sent out as a part of today's full Hell World newsletter which you can read here:
Luke O’Neil
Also today for paid subscribers three new pieces of fiction by me about bulls on parade, the invention of Hell, and putting a loved one out of its misery. You can read it here:
Luke O’Neil
by Talia Lavin
As a Jew I've spent my whole life in a more or less unwilling study of American Christianity, which permeates and dominates every sphere of public life in this country, particularly its politics. Anyone looking over the bloody trail of overtly Christian laws causing women to die of sepsis in parking lots can no longer maintain the fiction that this country has much if any separation between church and state. So I wrote a book about the theocrats and would-be theocrats of this country, their painful and absolutist vision for all of us, and how, over the past fifty years, this movement mutated from school segregationists to sexual inquisitors, panty-sniffing their way through the country, always with the goal of stripping women and children of their freedoms. It's been a strange journey full of demons and deliverance, arson and absolution. The book, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America, comes out next month, and I hope you will preorder it!
Let the fire make you pure
It’s a constant in this country that the people who make the laws love to talk about God when they take things from you. One example is Senate Bill 129, introduced in the Oklahoma Legislature in February 2023 by State Senator David Bullard, a church deacon and board member of a Christian organization called Patriots Ministries . According to an Oklahoma Senate press release, the bill would “prohibit Oklahoma doctors from providing gender transition procedures or referral services relating to such procedures to anyone under the age of twenty-six. The bill would further authorize the state’s attorney general to enforce the act and those found guilty of violating it would be guilty of a felony and subject to license revocation.”
The nickname Bullard coined for his bill—the “Millstone Act”—hints at darker penalties. “The Millstone Act,” the press release continues, “was named in reference to Matthew 18:6, ‘but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it is better for him that a heavy millstone be hung around his neck, and that he be drowned in the depths of the sea.’”
Medical care for trans youth, in other words, is a mortal sin—one whose penalty ought to be death, though a felony conviction will do in the interim. The bill passed both chambers of the Oklahoma Legislature.
Christian nationalism requires imposing a particular view of sex, sexuality, and gender on the public at large regardless of any individual’s faith or lack thereof. In the case of gay and transgender people, this mandate is guided by bigotry and Leviticus; in the case of women in particular, it’s guided by misogyny and Leviticus again, with its death penalties for fornication. Purity culture—the Christian Right staple that in lieu of sex education provides endless fire-and-brimstone mandates about chastity, particularly in women—transmits the idea that seeking sexual pleasure is an inherent evil. As such, the mainstream belief of the Christian Right is that sex is God’s domain, and it is his prerogative to make it result in death, if he so chooses. This may be odious to outsiders, but within evangelical theology, it is a culturally coherent conclusion.
Women steeped in purity culture—particularly during its peak in the 1990s—endured an education that postulated that their moral center lay between their thighs. “Call them evangelical, fundamentalist, or radicalized, over the past few decades, the more extreme adherents have leveraged an obsession with virginity (especially female virginity) into a purity movement with impacts that extend beyond their stained-glass windows,” Melissa Mayer put it in a 2019 Bitch Magazine article. “For fundamentalist youth, purity culture means virginity pledges, comparing women who aren’t virgins to already-chewed gum, novelty underwear coyly prompting from a nubile pelvis ‘stop because my father is watching,’ and lavish balls where young women date their dads."
In 1996, a reverend in Yuma, Arizona, named Denny Pattyn began selling silver “purity rings” engraved with 1 Thessalonians 4:3—“For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication”—which inspired countless imitators and were often gifted to purity ball pledgers and Christian teen girls. (1 Thessalonians 4:6 elaborates on the consequences of fornication: “Because that the Lord is the avenger of all such, as we also have forewarned you and testified.”) Not incidentally, the rings were often gifted by their fathers, whose property they would remain until marriage, which, in the evangelical view, is more or less a transfer of property. James Dobson of Focus on the Family encouraged “daddy-daughter dances” and even “dates” between daughters and fathers to drive home the point. At the same time that the purity movement was driving chastity fever into the hearts of evangelical teens, abstinence-only sex education was receiving federal funding and becoming the law of the land in dozens of states—despite its documented failure at preventing teen pregnancy or STDs. It was yet another confluence between church and state, a tacit agreement between legislative authorities and Bible-thumping ones, and the many individuals who make up the overlap, that young people as well as adults must avoid fornicating at all costs or be forced to pay a price in blood.
In 1997, a twenty-one-year-old evangelical and popular homeschool circuit speaker, Joshua Harris, published a book entitled I Kissed Dating Goodbye, advocating that young Christians abandon the secular model of dating for a chaste and godly vision of courtship, with the theological flair of a bargain-basement St. Augustine. The book became not just a bestseller but a phenomenon, an immediate evangelical classic that crested the wave of the 1990s purity movement. A few years earlier, Christian teens had begun making “True Love Waits” pledges, in which they had signed three-by-five cards that declared, “Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, those I date, my future mate and my future children to be sexually pure until the day I enter a covenant marriage relationship.”
In 1998, a year after the smash success of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, a field director for the Christian Right Family Research Council named Randy Wilson came up with another way for teens to publicly pledge their commitment to abstinence. Utilizing “dramatic imagery,” as the New York Times put it, Wilson’s “purity balls” featured young girls performing ballet, placing roses before a cross, and ballroom dancing in gowns with their fathers. Their fathers, in turn, committed to guarding their daughters’ purity until marriage. Photos of purity balls around the United States are full of girls as young as seven in full faces of makeup, clasping their fathers’ hands. The “couples” are attired as if for prom or a date, and the girls smile in frenetic rictus.
In her memoir Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free, Linda Kay Klein listed a dizzying array of metaphors for the non-virginal female body, employed routinely in evangelical education. Women who had had sex were compared to already chewed gum; an Oreo that has been bitten and spat upon; a licked lollipop; a piece of tape that has lost its stickiness from overuse; a derelict car; a used tissue; and grimy, adulterated water. So many of the metaphors focus on food, she noted, conveying a message that female sexuality is something to be devoured by others. “Based on our nightmares, panic attacks, and paranoia, one might think my childhood friends and I had been to war,” she wrote. “In fact, we had. We went to war with ourselves, our own bodies, and our own sexual natures, all under the strict commandment of the church.” In evangelical societies, an impure woman is a plague bacillus, with the potential to infect the godly men whose righteousness upholds the church.
The small, godly men in good suits who work at organizations such as the Alliance Defending Freedom (whose chief interest appears to be curtailing freedom for anyone who isn’t a white Christian man), the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Family Research Council, and other organizations with carefully bland names and very long documents give model laws—fill in your state here!—to other small men in usually worse suits who sit on state legislatures in Montana and Arizona and Nebraska, Idaho and West Virginia and Missouri. The Republicans who sponsor these bills represent themselves as small-businessmen, ranchers, churchgoers, salt-of-the-earth men unsullied by politics, such as Barry Crago of Wyoming, who serves on the board of a private evangelical Christian academy and recently sponsored a ban on trans athletes participating in interscholastic sports. Or Adam Thomas of Kansas, the chair of a committee that sponsored a bill that would force trans children to sleep “according to biological sex” on overnight school trips, regardless of their presentation; he spends his weekends as a member of the Lenexa Baptist Church praise band.
They call their acts by names such as SAFE—Saving Adolescents from Experimentation—and ban trans care; they ban abortion as early as they can, as often as they can, and their goals are limitless. They meet in quiet rooms with catering platter sandwiches on the table and their busy little clerks are everywhere, and it’s only the public faces that bother with the invective, bringing a bit of fire and brimstone to the chambers of the law. Everything else is dry and quiet and done in a very civilized fashion. Without raising their voices, they condemn children to die of despair and women to bleed to death or face choices no person should have to make. They make laws that turn bodies into prisons and women into less than people, because people who don’t own their bodies aren’t really people at all. Perhaps they smile, if they can fit it into their busy schedules—there are always more laws to be written. Presumably they find time to pray.
Part of the reason for the slate of laws being drafted and passed, the lawyers who argue for them in court, and the judges who uphold them, is the process, begun in the 1980s, of the Christian Right capture of the US judiciary. A great deal of its power—and the reason that in the case of a Trump election win, any illegalities will be swept smoothly aside—has been accrued in the judicial branch of the government. The central figure behind this slow-motion coup is an ultraconservative Catholic named Leonard Leo, who co-founded an organization called the Federalist Society, whose branches, with two thousand chapters in law schools and member judges in courtrooms across the country, comprise some seventy-five thousand members. Founded in 1982, three years after the Moral Majority, the group has since aimed to destroy the “liberal orthodoxy” of the legal profession.
Over the past forty years, the Federalist Society has established a coterie of committed hard-right judges and lawyers, often in prominent positions, and a close, cozy relationship with the Christian Right. It was a Federalist Society member, serving as chief counsel for the Christian Right organization Alliance Defending Freedom, that argued the Dobbs case that felled Roe v. Wade—before a Supreme Court of whom six of the nine justices were current or former Federalist Society members. Roe never stood a chance; it was the culmination of a half-century project of incursion into and capture of the nation’s legal institutions that had scaled the ladder of ambition to the very top of the US judiciary. The Trump administration in its first term accordingly appointed judges, many of them youthful, extreme members of the Christian Right, to lifetime judicial appointments at record speed—234 judges in total, three of them members of the Supreme Court. These judges have gone on to uphold countless decisions that curtail the rights of women and children in the name of “religious freedom.”
Meanwhile, abortion-clinic arsons and fire bombings have risen, and remained high, an extralegal complement to this theocratic, femicidal agenda.
Religious freedom, for the GOP, means the ability to impose grotesque levels of control on bodies capable of pregnancy. Here are some things that can happen to the body in a normal and uncomplicated pregnancy: swelling of the face and extremities, nausea and vomiting, pelvic bone separation, frequent nosebleeds, increased hair growth, urinary leakage, loosened teeth, impaired memory and concentration. Complex pregnancies can be fatal, the associated illnesses often protracted and even grotesque.
Moreover, in states with restrictive abortion laws, it is not only pregnant women who fall under a vicious regime of state surveillance; any woman with the potential for bearing a child potentially faces restrictions on her medical care, including women of childbearing age who require cancer treatment that may be teratogenic and legions of autoimmune patients, particularly those with lupus, whose best treatment, methotrexate, is also an abortifacient. Thousands of patients have had their medical care disrupted because they were pregnant.
There’s a certain vigilante aspect to many abortion laws that seems rooted in antiabortion terrorism arising from the Christian Right: in Texas, private citizens can report abortion providers or those who aid people seeking abortions and in the process collect a $10,000 bounty. In Oklahoma, people are encouraged to sue anyone who pays for an abortion. As red states have continued to curtail women’s reproductive rights two years after the fall of Roe, these legal fetters have become ever weightier and more complex. The fight purportedly against abortion and for “religious freedom” has turned American women’s lives into legal minefields; having a uterus is functionally not unlike possessing a controlled substance.
A 2024 report released by reproductive-rights organization Lift Louisiana revealed the extraordinary degradation of women’s healthcare under the state’s draconian abortion ban laws. The fear of criminal liability among medical providers has led to catastrophic consequences – some patients report delays in receiving prenatal care in the first trimester, when miscarriages are more likely, leading to potential complications later in the pregnancy. The laws have severely limited clinicians’ options to effectively manage pregnancy loss, because many of the same procedures and medications are used for abortion. In other cases, patients were denied abortion care despite life-threatening conditions, such as cardiac disease exacerbated by pregnancy, or receiving advanced cancer diagnoses while pregnant. According to researchers’ conversations with patients and doctors, patients with severe or fatal fetal diagnoses were forced to remain pregnant, and, when a pregnancy could not result in a viable outcome, clinicians felt pressured to perform invasive procedures, such as C-section, to end the pregnancy, or put patients at risk for infection by delaying delivery. One emergency medicine physician described a colleague “having to take [a patient] for c-section to preserve the appearance of not doing an abortion, even though this is not a viable pregnancy… subjecting the patient to unnecessary abdominal surgery.” The abortion bans create both danger for patients and moral injury for doctors, who are torn between obeying the law and providing evidence-based medical care that would keep their patients safe. It’s a pattern being repeated in numerous states– and, if the Christian Right has its way, one that will soon engulf the entire country.
Trigger laws—laws already on the books but illegitimate under Roe—were immediately enacted in thirteen states where the Christian Right and its willing legislative partners had spent decades chipping away at access to care. The extremity of this legal bonanza is in part explained by the deep roots of the antiabortion movement and the rhizomatic network of motivations and neuroses it taps into. Understanding the Christian Right’s fixation on pleasure having deadly consequences; its obsession with the chaste, pure female body; the militant upholding of gender roles; and a half century of propaganda about an unborn holocaust explains in part why holy warriors are avidly pursuing several legislative paths to a total national ban on abortion. The Christian Right’s obsession with controlling sex is why providers of birth control anticipate a campaign to eliminate the public availability of contraception and why the Trump administration rolled back access to birth control. A movement motivated by virulent antifeminism and obsessed with wifely submission can do much to roll back a few decades of tenuous progress. It’s why there are increasing rumbles about dismantling gay rights in every possible fashion. Consider what Reverend Mark Creech, Executive Director of the Christian Action League, had to say the day Roe fell: “God gave the gift of sex to strengthen the marriage relationship. Sex is restricted to marriage and meant to bless the home with children. To seek the pleasures of sex without viewing it as a sacred responsibility to God and the possibility of a priceless child from the union is the chief reason behind the practice of abortion.” But sex is and has always been messy and ungovernable, ill-suited to puritanical restriction, a titanic drive that manifests in each of us differently; it’s dangerous, ecstatic, part of being alive.
The specter of femicide haunts American political rhetoric from campaign stops to megachurches to school board meetings to social media posts. Republican presidential candidates proudly tout their Christian values and the need for the United States to get back to its Christian roots, a time before women had even nominal bodily autonomy. Even when God isn’t directly invoked, he—it’s inevitably a he, a specific he to boot, usually the Jesus with ultramarine blue eyes and the soft, curling shoulder-length hair of an ancient-times shampoo model—hovers above the proceedings, and the subtext in the room is the kind that comes in chapter and verse from Acts or Proverbs or Philippians or some other sacred plural noun. Christian dominionism, Christian nationalism, and simple zealotry stand at the epicenter of US politics. When culture war, spiritual warfare, and public policy intermix in the minds of legislators, the results are inevitably corrosive to those who don’t share their faith.
They’re coming for all of it: everything outside of the framework of a submissive wife and a patriarchal husband and a Cheaper By the Dozen-style fleet of children. And like the family structure blessed by the Almighty, the headship of this society is male, Christian, and white. A zealously policed theocratic society is the goal, and it’s not one the Right bothers to conceal, as the stakes are high and it is not a fight it is prepared to lose. There is a well-financed armature behind these laws, the result of a font of small-dollar donors and deep-pocketed megachurch impresarios; that’s how they crop up in different states. The Right has a holistic vision—a kingdom to win—and it is pursuing it, and it is winning.
It’s well and good to look piecemeal at each element of the destruction and what is being built in its place. It is also necessary to look at the whole picture and to recognize that what is being waged is a holy war. What does the GOP want? A Kingdom of Christ on Earth ruled by his elect. In practice: to impose a nationally unpopular set of principles, many of them theocratic, and seal them into law; to purge the nation of undesirables; and to utterly dominate their inferiors. Accordingly, the GOP utilizes internally consistent logic, rooted in the ideals of the Christian Right, that advocates for the total elimination of a governmental social safety net for mothers, children, families, and the elderly – to be replaced with privatized, church-based charity, with all the god-drenched bigotry and exclusion this implies, and the inevitable hunger and houselessness caused by the inevitable shortfall be damned.
If control is the aim, it does not matter if there is a double standard or a flaw that can be highlighted. The more arrant the hypocrisy, the more brazen the contradiction, the stronger the party that continues to advocate those policies grows. Any flaw is null because the people pointing it out mean nothing; they’re sinners, fallen from the grace of the one true burning path. Only the unborn, floating and hypothetical in their sacs, are sacred; the born are inconveniences; let them break, like earthen vessels, into shards.
They have so much in common, the arsonists and the lawmakers. For one thing, the threat of the former helps the latter ensure that they will be obeyed. They are as akin as the torch and the hand that wields it, akin as the witch finder and the crowd gathered around the heap of straw. If you listen, you can hear the flames rising, reaching for a pair of bare feet belonging to a woman who didn’t obey her betters. As they always have. As they always will—absent the thunder and the flood of opposition that ought by all standards of justice to oppose it.
Excerpted from the book WILD FAITH: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America by Talia Lavin. Copyright © 2024 by Talia Lavin. Reprinted with permission of Legacy Lit, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.