The "Border Crisis" Is Not About Immigration

It's about Christian Nationalism

I saw something on Twitter that stopped me in my tracks…the folks who are currently involved in the convoys to the border are baptizing each other? What?

People who are headed to a border to keep out others in need of food, water, clothing, and asylum are being baptized in the name of someone who ordered them to feed, water, clothe, and provide asylum for others.

You may think the “border crisis” is about immigration, but you’re wrong. It’s about Christian Nationalism. And, so are the attacks on trans kids and the LGBTQ+ community, the privatization of public schools, the war on diversity, and abortion bans.

Christian nationalism is at the heart of much of the hate we see.

I grew up in a Fundamentalist religion…I was born and raised a Southern Baptist. I can say that I saw intolerance in the churches I attended, but nothing like I see being spewed by Christian nationalists today. I know social media makes it easier to see what folks are thinking, but what bigotry I was exposed to in churches during the 80s and 90s has been surpassed by leaps and bounds.

I was recently invited to an event at an evangelical church—it was a baby shower. I decided to attend. While the soft Christian music was playing in the background, and group of women gathered together in fellowship, it started to feel comfortable and like home. I saw women bringing in food, and drinks, and sweets and I settled in to the old familiar.

I was on a little bit of a high after the event, when I sidled up to a few women in hallway — I heard them speaking about Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. My ears perked up and I was about to gush about the program, when one said she wouldn’t allow any of those books in her home. “Dolly is an immoral woman.”

Wait. She’s been married to the same man for 50 years. She works to get free books to poor kids. She loves the LGBTQ+ community and she gives of her time to help others. Is she “immoral” because she has big boobs?

And, how is Dolly immoral, but Trump is their savior? Dolly is immoral, but razor wire is what Jesus would have wanted? Dolly is bad, but forcing children to bear children is good? This seems upside down, but it’s sewn together perfectly for Christian nationalism.

Remember: A Christian nationalist is not following their own Christ, and a nationalist by definition, is not a patriot.

Why do some Christians band together on topics that have no seeming similarity? What does an abortion ban have to do with school privatization or a border crisis? Everything, actually.

It’s a menacing collaboration.

The Christian nationalist/Libertarian/wealthy collaboration started way back in the 1970s. “Conservatives” hit on a few talking points to unite them: school choice, abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric, and immigration.

These seem like unrelated issues, but that’s not the point. In 1979, Jerry Falwell and his ilk founded the Moral Majority political organization and decided the fate of our country: It took them billions of dollars and decades to do it, but they succeeded in buying and capturing the Supreme Court with a long-term plan to clear the way for unlimited anonymous political spending through Citizens United. The collaboration is working.

Now they can sit back to watch the unraveling of our country from their front-row seats. The politicians and wealthy “conservatives” don’t actually care about education or abortion or border issues or the LGBTQ+ folks that were picked specifically to organize evangelical Christian nationalists with billionaires. It doesn’t have to make sense to work.

The point of the Christian nationalist movement was and is to create a base of working and middle-class folks who will fight FOR the billionaire class. They’ve been duped. It’s just that simple.

~Jess