Noah Berlatsky

Following credible accusations of rape and sexual assault, former Maine Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner withdrew from the race. The Maine Democratic Party has until July 27 to choose a replacement.

Many people, including me, believed that Democrats should have figured out long ago that Platner was unfit for office. Yet Platner was buoyed through numerous scandals thanks to his claims that he had changed, and his insistence that his past words and actions did not define him. Platner was a veteran who discussed past struggles with PTSD and addiction. He catered to people’s love of a redemption arc.

And while he’s an atheist himself, Platner also leveraged America’s very Protestant belief that the internal experience of transformation or goodness is more important than what one has done, or even than what one is doing.

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order setting up a task force to counter “anti-Christian bias.” Trump claims that the task force is necessary to fight discrimination against Christians. But in practice it seems designed to enforce a very narrow version of conservative Christianity. The task force will counter efforts to prosecute demonstrators who block access to abortion care and to allow for discrimination against LGBTQ+ people on campus. It will encourage the federal government to elevate right wing Christianity as a national ideology.

Imposing Christian morality on the U.S. seems out of step with the separation of church and state. But it’s not exactly out of line with American tradition. For example, at the height of the postwar Red Scare in March 1953, leftist poet and activist Langston Hughes was hauled before Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. PSI was looking to root out communist influence. But in that regard, many of the questions centered on religion — and on a poem which the subcommittee believed showed that Hughes was anti-religious and therefore pro-communist.

The poem in question was “Goodbye, Christ,” which Hughes wrote on a trip to Soviet Russia in 1932.

As a Jewish atheist, I’m not invested in arguments about which version of Christianity is truer. However, I am skeptical when I hear Christians respond to Christian nationalism by distinguishing it from “true,” “Christlike,” “pure,” or “orthodox” Christianity. If Christianity is only true Christianity when it is good or kind, then no “true” Christian ever does anything bad. That makes it easy to dismiss Inquisitors and slaveholders alike in the past, and it makes it easy to dismiss structural power to do harm that you may have as a Christian now as well.