Year in Roundup 2022: Part I

Interminable Rambling has been around, in various forms, since 2015. Over the course of these seven years, I’ve published about 715 posts, around 1,000 words per post. That means, I’ve written over 715,000 words during that period. That is hard for me to fathom. At the end of the year, I typically either do a most read posts roundup or a roundup of some of my favorite posts from the year. The last time I did this was 2020. I’m not sure why I didn’t do it last year. Today, I want to look at a few of my favorite pieces from 2022.

Why I Started Using Christian Fascism Instead of Christian Nationalism

Over the past couple of years, I have been looking at Christian nationalism and fascism separately, and as I delved more into each, I really started to see the overlap between Christian nationalism, “an ideology that,” as Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead define it, “idealizes a fusion of Christianity with American civic belonging and participation.” Jemar Tisby adds to Perry and Whitehead, noting that Christian nationalism works to uphold white supremacy.

As I read Robert Paxton, Jason Stanley, Timothy Snyder, and mores on fascim and its rise during the early 1900s and its continued impact today, I began to think about the intersections between Christian nationalism and fascism, particularly in the ways that Christian nationalism plays up the idea of victimhood and persecution. Candida Moss’s The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martydom helped me with this because she points out the historical trajectory of martyrdom and how that played a role throughout the ages but also continues to influence Christianity today.

Victimhood is not the only aspect of Christian fascism that we need to think about. We need to think about that ways that Christian fascism works to shape legislation that would oppress others simply because they do not adhere to the beliefs of Christian fascists. We see it in the ways that Christian fascists fight to teach the “true” history of the United States or society. One need only look at the American Patriot’s Bible: The Word of God and the…