Vern Evans
An article from a couple weeks ago in Mother Jones raised the alarm about the dangers of conservative Christians with weapons, complete with the usual specter of fascism being raised. But, anyone capable of just a little bit of critical thinking and armed even with cursory historical knowledge will see pretty quickly that there’s a serious flaw in the thinking.
Before I get started, I do want to point out that I’m not The Truth About Guns’ most staunch defender of traditional conservative values. Long-time readers will recall that I’m the odd one out defending the gun rights of LGBT people (including the supposedly oh-so-dangerous T), and that I’ve been critical of some of the MAGA crowd’s favorite politicians. I myself am a lesbian who drives an electric car. In other words, I’m the worst conservative ever, right?
So, if you’re not a regular reader and you’re thinking I’m some right-wing nut making spurious arguments with the aim of defending my own faith’s secret efforts to bring about The Fourth Reich, you might want to rethink that. If I’m guilty of anything, it’s that I want to give everyone a fair shake, and this time it’s conservative Christians’ turn to get that same fair shake I think everyone deserves.
While you can certainly find fringe figures who use Christianity as a cover for messages of hatred and authoritarian theocracy, the writer didn’t do a great job of making the case for the T.Rex Arms channel being one of those. Mother Jones could have certainly cherry-picked some much better examples from the YouTube channel to build the case of dangerous Christian extremism, but instead chose to criticize the idea that tyranny should be resisted first. I’ll come back to that in a minute.
After that, the article gets into beliefs that most Americans (including most conservative Christians I know and am friends with) would find to be a little extreme. But, as a country with religious freedom and freedom of speech, the Botkin family has a right to both hold such beliefs and to espouse them online. What we haven’t seen is any kind of call for armed revolution to institute a government that forces everyone to do things like keep adult daughters living at home until they’re married off. All they could come up with to criticize is that T.Rex Arms was instrumental in getting an ammunition tax repealed (the horrors!).
But, let’s ignore all of that and assume for the sake of argument that mainstream conservative Christians are arming themselves and preparing to install a fascist, theocratic dictatorship that will force women to be treated like breeding livestock, LGBT people to be thrown from rooftops and non-Christians to be converted by force. Wouldn’t that be exactly the kind of situation where you’d want to have guns and resist tyranny?
Mother Jones‘ writers can’t have it both ways. You can’t in good faith say in one breath that fascist doom is coming and then in the next breath rail against the alleged fascists for opposing gun control. I mean, if anything, people planning on installing fascism by force would want to collect up everyone’s guns to keep people from fighting back, right?
In the end, the authoritarian anti-gun left is making a confession when they throw these kinds of accusations around. They’re the ones who don’t want people like the Botkins to have religious liberty and freedom of speech because it gets in the way of taking guns away. They probably aren’t fascists, but authoritarianism is a lot like poop. It doesn’t matter what flavor the poop is, nobody wants to dine on it.
Read the full article here