The Deep Christian Roots of Republican Weirdness

or, Sex and the "Sinners," from the Apostle Paul to the Present

If St. Augustine were alive today and living in the United States, he would undoubtedly be a Republican. Like J.D. Vance, the man was a weirdo of the first order. Naturally, there’s a city in Florida named after him.

By way of illustration of Augustine’s supreme weirdness, take Stephen Greenblatt’s summary of the man’s obsessions from a 2017 New Yorker article:

Augustine returned again and again to the same set of questions: Whose body is this, anyway? Where does desire come from? Why am I not in command of my own penis?

Or take it straight from the ancient weirdo’s mouth. Augustine wrote the following in The City of God:

But surely any friend of wisdom and holy joys, who lives in wedlock but knows, as the Apostle admonished, ‘how to possess his bodily vessel in holiness and honor, not in the disease of lust like the gentiles who do not know God,’ would prefer, if he could, to beget children without this kind of lust.

This god is a petty, vindictive tyrant made in the image of his devoted weirdos.

But seriously, folks.

Fear of sexuality never leads anywhere good. Along with bizarrely overwrought concerns about human reproduction and declining birthrates (especially among the “right” kind of people—in our context, white people), this obsessive fear of normal sexuality is one of the animating forces behind every authoritarian movement. It’s also very deeply rooted in western, Christian civilization, and is just one of the threads that makes Christianity so congenially compatible with imperialism, colonialism, and fascism.

Want more Chrissy Stroop? Check out this recording of “Hegemonic Christianity: Why ‘Christian Nationalism’ is Too Narrow a Frame to address this All-American Problem,” a talk I delivered virtually for Secular Arizona on August 30. I promise I don’t refer to myself in the third person in it!