As Christian nationalists intensify their war on non-believers, a growing number of Americans are fighting back against the erosion of religious freedom and the imposition of so-called “Christian values” on diverse beliefs and identities.

I’ve had people tell me I “shouldn’t talk badly about Christianity because I’m not a Christian.”

I’m technically an ex-Christian because I was raised in The Church (despite always being a non-believer). However, since Christianity was forced upon me at a young age and presented as the only option I had growing up (other than hell), I feel entitled (obligated) to speak up about the harm and dangers that can result from having one’s choice to worship (or not worship) be taken away from them.

The following video is based on a Substack post that was shared with my Founding members on June 14th.

Patreon members, Facebook Subscribers, YouTube channel members, and Substack Subscribers all had access to this video on Tuesday, November 12, 2024. The video’s public release will be Friday, November 15, 2024.

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ID: Lyric, a pale skinned nonbinary person with black hair hair with dark green ends and shaved sides, is sitting in a room with a white wall behind them. They have their hair down and are wearing a green leather jacket and black under shirt.

The thumbnail is pink and purple with a still from the video and text that reads “America is NOT a Christian Nation… yet. Project 2025.”

Links mentioned in this video:

The Child Abuse People Don’t Talk About: Religious Indoctrination – The Trauma of Childhood Brainwashing – https://neurodivergentrebel.substack.com/p/the-child-abuse-people-dont-talk 

On ABA’s ties to Christian Nationalism: https://neurodivergentrebel.substack.com/p/the-history-of-the-puzzle-piece-a?utm_source=publication-search 

My ABA Master Post: https://neurodivergentrebel.substack.com/p/neurodivergent-rebels-neurodivergent

Transcript:

Hi everyone, Lyric here, and I am the author of the best selling business ethics book, Workplace Neurodiversity Rising. You can get that on my website at neurodivergentrebel. com if you’re interested.

Today I am going to be shifting topics away from autism and neurodiversity to something that is relevant to all of us, regardless of neurotype.

 I’m going to be talking about something that is a danger to all of us in the United States and possibly beyond, and that is Christian nationalism. And if you would like to know more, I would ask you to please stay tuned.

 Intro Music,

Lyric: Okay. First, this might offend some people and if this offends you, I really don’t care. Just going to put that out there. So go ahead and leave your comments. If you’re offended, it’s fine with me, but I’m going to say this first and foremost, America is not, and never was a Christian nation, and I am tired of having other people’s religious values forced upon me.

By the morals police.

As Christian nationalists have been intensifying their war on nonbelievers, a growing number of us are starting to fight back.

Content warning for this video, we will be discussing Christianity, religious violence, and potentially religious trauma and things of that nature, so this could be triggering for some viewers.

This video is based on a Substack post that was originally released to my founding members on June 14th, 2024.

 Christianity is our country’s dominant religion. One that is still forced on many people, against their will, every day.

This isn’t always forcing people to go to church. This is things like legislation, abortion access, not being available to us because it offends someone else’s morals.

The definition of marriage.

For many years, gay people could not get married. So there are a lot of things this falls into other than just forcing people to go to church.

In the past, I’ve had people tell me that “I shouldn’t talk badly about Christianity because I’m not a Christian.”

I am technically an ex Christian, because I was raised in the church, despite always being a non believer. However, since Christianity was forced upon me at a young age, and presented it as the only option I had growing up, besides going to hell- a literal place of fire, brimstones, and torture. I feel entitled, possibly obligated, to speak up about the harms, and the dangers, that can result from having one’s choice of worship, or not worship, taken away from them.

I’m from Texas. Growing up in a state that is run by Christians meant for me, Christianity was very hard to escape.

Texas is a Bible belt state, and while I was not raised in a fundamentalist Christian family, many of the kids around me growing up were fundies or fundamentalist Christians.

Their parents did everything. everything they could to shelter their children, and other people’s children, from the evils of the world, like fantasy books, celebratory events, and holidays, like Halloween.

If I wanted to have friends, and socialize growing up, I had to attend church, because most kids were forced to spend their Sundays, and sometimes Saturday nights, at church.

If you spoke against the church, or expressed that you had doubts, your friend’s parents wouldn’t let their kids spend time with you.

Being that I was a very logical thinker, and I had a lot of doubts from a young age, I learned really quickly to keep those doubts to myself, and not speak those doubts out loud.

But now that I’m an adult, I’m no longer afraid to publicly scream my critiques of the church All over the world via the ,internet and any means necessary… so I’ll say it again:

America is not, and never was, a Christian nation.

It’s important we learn to recognize and respect the diversity of beliefs, and morals, within this country.

The US Constitution enshrines the principles of separation of church and state through the establishment clause, or the first amendment. This clause prohibits the United States government from officially establishing a national religion, or favoring one religion over the other.

By separating church and state, the Constitution promotes religious pluralism, and prevents the dominance of a single faith. It’s supposed to ensure the government remains neutral on religious beliefs, safeguarding individual freedom of conscience and belief.

Although historically, this hasn’t always been true for various marginalized groups of people.

A shift towards secularism is reshaping America’s culture.

According to a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center, 29 percent of Americans identify as religiously unaffiliated, or “nones,” making them the second largest religious, or non religious, demographic in this country- after Christians, which make up 63 percent of the population, according to the same survey.

This trend of being non religious is most noticeable among younger generations, with 35 percent of Millennials, born 1981 to 1996 , and, 48 percent of Gen Z adults, born 1997 to 2012, identifying as religiously unaffiliated.

Christians, as a majority, have held a lot of power in this country, for many years, influencing and ruling over many aspects of American society. However, it seems like this power may finally be diminishing, leading those nationalists in power to fight back, in a final desperate attempt to maintain their remaining power and influence.

Christians wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t try to force their beliefs on everyone. However, many people, who call themselves Christians also feel this need to spread the gospel, and their Christian values, to unsuspecting victims who never asked to be saved.

Christian values are often assumed to be the norm in American society, leading to a dominant culture narrative, that marginalizes those with different beliefs.

For example, the widespread use of Christian holidays and symbols in public, can make non Christians feel excluded.

Laws like the, in God we trust legislation, in Arkansas, for example, which forces businesses to display the phrase perpetuates this dominance.

Similarly, efforts to restrict access to abortion, and reproductive care, rooted in Christian doctrine, disregard the beliefs and values of those who do not share those same values.

It’s help the rest of us didn’t want or ask for.

Imagine if you’re going for a swim, and we’re going to pretend you’re a good swimmer, and swimming is something you’re good at, and it’s not something you need help with, even though it can be dangerous to swim sometimes, depending on the water… but as you’re going for your swim, enjoying yourself, minding your own business, someone decides that you “need to be saved,” and despite your objections, pulls you out of the pool, or the water, or the lake, “saving you” without your consent every time you try to go swimming, because “it’s dangerous.”

I would assume you’d be annoyed, because I would be really frickin’ annoyed.

That’s how I see missionary work and all of those Christians, my entire life, who’ve been very determined to “save me,” when I never asked to be saved.

I don’t understand why they can’t just worry about themselves, and leave the rest of us alone, and stop trying to force their religion, and “appropriate behaviors,” based on their religion, which I don’t follow, on us.

Then again, if you’ve followed me for a while, you probably already know, and have read, About the ties that Christian nationalism has to behaviorism and behavior modification, and even ABA, Applied Behavior Analysis, or what I call Autistic Conversion Therapy, Neurodivergent Conversion Therapy.

It’s a behavioral modification program that is frequently recommended for autistic, ADHD, and other neurodivergent kids, in order to make their “behaviors” more Neuro-average, more “socially acceptable,” often without really getting down to the whys, and understanding where those behaviors come from, often not very trauma informed. So there’s a lot of problems that many autistic, neurodivergent people, and other advocates have.

One of the main problems is it comes from this desire to “normalize behaviors” so we can better “fit into society,” instead of rearranging society and spaces around us, to better support our needs.

These conversion therapies put pressure on an individual to change themselves, to suit the world around them, much like other forms of Queer conversion therapy, trying to change behaviors of Queer people, trying to dehumanize us, by categorizing our natural human behaviors as something other- “queer behavior,” “autistic behavior,” “let’s get rid of these behaviors,” instead of looking at us as people.

I’ll link to my, my, my post, my ABA master post, that has more information on Substack, if you’d like to know more.

The church has known, for a long time, that it’s easier to indoctrinate young children, and even advises parents to use similar methods to ABA on a child that has “behavioral challenges” and even gives information on how parents can start with this brainwashing from a young age, when kids are more easily manipulated and coerced.

For example, from the website Focus on the Family, “Little children don’t come into the world with fully formed, independent thoughts of their own about God, nor do they have the wisdom, experience, or intellectual capacity to make up their own minds about the deeper questions of human existence. In the spiritual realm, as in every other area of life, they are utterly dependent on you to feed them, nurture them, and point them in the right direction, and if you don’t, somebody else will. What makes this assignment all the more urgent is that you have a fairly narrow window of time in which to carry it out with the maximum effect. There’s a brief period, during childhood, when kids are wide open to the spiritual and moral training.”

That is from Focus on the Family, on the religious indoctrination of children. They even offer a phone number at the bottom of this article for guardians who need help implementing these behaviorist principles.

If you are a neurodivergent person, familiar with ABA, and other conversion therapies, you may notice some of the language is very similar, to how ABA is packaged as an early intervention, and this window when they’re young and malleable, that you have to get into (because it’s easier to brainwash people when they’re young, and vulnerable).

You may also notice that they use similar fear mongering tactics. “If you don’t do this, somebody else will.” So, they are trying to scare parents into thinking they have no other option, similar to ABA and neurodivergent conversion therapies.

Christian nationalists also have been pushing Queer and trans conversion therapy, again, very hard in recent years, and, if you look at the inventors of ABA, And the inventors of Queer conversion therapy, and some of the main groups, who have pushed both of these things. ..

I’ll add some links.

You’ll find a lot of interesting connections, and ties, to these Christian Nationalist organizations, these organizations that founded the research on ABA, and the people who invented ABA, and really started pushing that, as well as the people who did a lot of the research on Queer and gay conversion therapy. There’s a lot of overlap here.

The Christian Nationalists want everyone to behave and be compliant and obedient. And some of us aren’t going to fall in line. Makes it seem like religion is something used to control the masses.

We’ve spoken a lot about Christianity today, because Christianity is the flag under which all of this religious, moral policing, has been flown, but let’s get this straight: there’s nothing Christian about Christian Nationalism.

The thing about being an ex Christian is, I was raised in the church, so I know the Bible. I know what Jesus taught. I know the values Jesus had, and Jesus wouldn’t be okay with these Christian nationalists.

Jesus, who flipped over tables in churches, and spent his time with poor people, and people the church deemed to be sinners, instead of rich people, and people who claim themselves to be holy,

Jesus wouldn’t be on board with what Christian nationalists are proposing.

Christian nationalism focuses on power, dominance, and exclusion, which go against the teachings of Jesus, who preached love, humility, and inclusivity. The nationalist ideology’s reliance on fear, hatred, and division also, contradict the values of compassion, forgiveness, and reconciliation taught by Jesus… who they’re supposed to be following.

One can see these values, or lack thereof, in the ways these nationalists recommend parents handle the most vulnerable members of society, their children, and how these nationalists speak about people they deem to be sinners.

By prioritizing political power, over spiritual principles, nationalism distorts the gospel, and perpetuates harm, making it fundamentally un Christian.

There’s a meme out there that says if Project 2025 isn’t Keeping you up at night, it should be.

These nationalists are being told they’re “under attack,” and they must “fight to preserve this country’s Christian values.”

Many of them believe Project 2025 is something that will help secure their place, as the rightful leaders of this country.

So what’s Project 2025? If you’ve been living under a rock, and you somehow haven’t heard of it by this point.

Basically, it is a plan, for when president elect Donald Trump takes office, that the nationalists want to use, to influence laws and policies, in a way that could harm religious freedom, including freedom from religion, in a very short time period. We’re talking just a few months.

When talking about Project 2025, saying “they want to give Christianity special treatment” would be a massive understatement, because, if enacted, Project 2025 could destroy the rights of religious minorities, non believers, and other marginalized communities.

Project 2025 reflects the harmful ideology of Manifest Destiny, which justified the displacement and genocide of native peoples on this continent, and the theft of their lands.

Both of these ideologies perpetuate a divine right to dominance, seeking to impose a specific belief system, and culture, upon others, disregarding the sovereignty and humanity of those who do not conform.

Basically, Project 2025 is a Christian Nationalist initiative, aiming to “restore America’s Judeo Christian heritage.”

Air quotes, air quotes.

This initiative points a significant threat to non Christians, Queer, and other marginalized groups, by seeking to impose a particular brand of Christianity, that aims to erase religious diversity, and marginalized spiritualities, restrict reproductive rights, and access to health care, criminalize Queer identities, and relationships, enforce cisgender, heterodormativity, suppress free speech, and dissenting voices… and that’s just a short list of the shit Project 2025 will bring down upon us if it is successfully activated in the next year, 2025.

As a Queer person, I am deeply worried about the direction this country seems to be headed in the not so distant future.

All right, everyone. Thank you. That’s it for this video.

I did share a bit more, including some examples of religious based laws and legislation, in the written text version of this post, that was shared to founding members on Substack.

If you’d like to follow my work and my writing, Substack is the place where I’m most active, other than Facebook.

On Substack, I put out two to three posts each week. Facebook, I share a lot of memes. I do put out my content there too, but it’s hit or miss if you see it… because algorithms.

I would love to connect with you on Substack, Facebook. I’m also on Patreon if you’re over there. I hope to continue the conversation with you.

Let me know in the comments below, if you’ve seen any of this rise in Christian nationalism, if you know about Project 2025, if you’ve heard about Project 2025, if you’ve heard about Project 2025, does this scare you?

If this is the first time you’re hearing about Project 2025, I’d love to know that too.

But yeah, I’m concerned, I’m worried.

It’s a very scary time to be a. Queer person in the United States.

If you are also a Queer person in the United States, I am sending you my love right now in, in these really uncertain times, I’ll talk to you next month. Bye. I’m out. See you next week. Bye!