As Trump proclaims, the separation of church and state is over ("forget the separation of church and state"), what takes its place in the White House? It appears it is White Christian Nationalism, if not in words, at least in deed. Its actions that clearly target cleansing the US of as many brown people as they can are clearly racist as well as political. Tactics used are not Christian, based upon hatred and fear of neighbors not like you, and treating people cruelly are not either. Trump is not noted for his devotion to the teachings of Christ, but his history of racism is a theme throughout his public life. The two, white Christian Nationalism and racism, have found a home in the White House. The shaper of the inhumane treatment of migrants from south of the border, the person setting the the goals for the warehousing of brown people caught in the dragnet of ICE (put them all in concentration camps if they look brown and speak Spanish, then figure out which ones get deported while depriving the imprisoned of legal representation), is looking more and more like Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff. His background also reeks of White Christian Nationalism.
From my prior posting on this blog:
The real shame is that so many Americans share or tolerate (Trump's)racism.
The other shame is that his racist whisperer is in his ear daily and given a permission slip to proceed. Stephen Miller, on his staff has a long history of white nationalism. If anything, Miller's contribution to the Trump regime is his anti-immigrant stance, including using the cruelty of family separation as a tool and in deporting immigrants without due process. He is viewed as an extremist in these sensitive matters. Given his anti-immigrant reputation, I doubt that the Bill of Rights and the civil rights-related amendments would be high on his required list of curriculum topics. The Southern Poverty Law Center tags him as an extremist.https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/stephen-miller/. Miller is in charge of this ICE project aimed at ridding the country of as many brown people as he can under the pretext that migrants are criminals when 70 percent of those they grab have no criminal record.. ..but are brown and are both American citizens and who only committed a misdemeanor of being undocumented. Miller's campaign involves eliminating the birthright citizenship of those born in the US and cleansing them from this country.
The irony is that not all Christians buy into this ideology of White Christian Nationalism, particularly the Catholic Church and the Council of Bishops. Almost all of those victims of ICE's dragnet and cruel warehousing are Catholics. In addition, a large array of Protestant churches that are not part of the "evangelical movement" have had members actively participating in opposing ICE actions, including Presbyterians, Methodists, Unitarians, and others. Their motivations are not legalistic, but moral, religious, and being humane to their neighbors. They have moved the more popular description of migrants promoted by Donald Trump himself from "murderers and rapists" to "neighbors" in the Biblical sense. Good Samaritans have taken the place of racists and nationalists in many minds.
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