Fighting Oligarchy or Fighting Christianity?

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At his “Fighting Oligarchy” rally in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders hosted Against Me! singer Laura Jane Grace, who performed an obscene and blasphemous song mocking Christianity. This comes as hundreds of Christian minorities are massacred by Al-Qaeda-linked terror groups in Syria. 

“Does your god have a big fat d— / Cause it feels like he’s f—ing me,” read the lyrics of “Your God (God’s D—)” by Laura Jane Grace. “Are his balls filled with lightning? Do they dangle like heaven’s keys?”

Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world, yet it is the only religion that can be openly mocked and disparaged in the U.S. without consequences. Grace likely wouldn’t dream of performing a sacrilegious song deriding the prophet Muhammad or Allah. 

As a transgender musician, she would not have the freedom to live out her identity or even pursue her musical career in many Middle Eastern countries, where LGBT individuals are violently persecuted and musical performances are restricted. As Palestinian singer Hamada Naserallah said, “To sing is not a right in the Gaza Strip.” 

Only in a Western country steeped in Christian ethics can Grace say and do as she pleases without punishment. Even after releasing and publicly performing a song at a U.S. senator’s rally that scornfully desecrates the Christian faith, the only condemnation she will receive is the moral outrage of some religious conservatives.

From Sanders, at least, she received a personal thanks. By endorsing this vulgar blasphemy against Christianity, Sanders spits on the moral framework that provides the basis of his political agenda — undermining his message to help the poor and hold the rich accountable. 

During his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Sanders has compared the present political moment to the American Revolution or the abolitionist movement, “when ordinary people stand up against oppression and injustice and fight back.”

But the American founders and the abolitionists appealed to heaven and cited scripture to justify their noble causes — they did not sing profane songs about God’s genitals. 

The rights and freedoms enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and safeguarded by the U.S. Constitution, which progressives like Grace and Sanders enjoy and exercise by attacking Christianity, are indebted to the West’s Christian inheritance. 

As historian Tom Holland wrote, “To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions.” It is Christianity that affirms the inherent dignity and moral equality of all people before God — principles that have become powerful spiritual weapons wielded by the marginalized against their oppressors. From the earliest Christians resisting the pagan tyranny of Rome to the abolitionist and civil rights movements of America, the Gospel transformed the world with an enduring moral revolution.

While Sanders provides a platform for a grotesquely anti-Christian performance, his rebuke of greed, inequality, oppression and injustice — as well as his ostensible concern for the poor and downtrodden — invokes explicitly Christian moral sentiments. 

Are Sanders and the Democratic Party “fighting oligarchy” amid an economic showdown between rich and poor, or hypocritically fighting Christianity in a theological battle between good and evil? In stark contrast to the Old Left, their animosity toward traditional Christians far surpasses their opposition to Wall Street speculators and industrial tycoons. 

Their anti-Christian enmity is not motivated by the command to “open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land,” but rather by the moral injunctions against alternative lifestyles and sexual identities that progressives champion. 

By abandoning Christian ethics and norms in their eagerness to defend the individual’s supposed right to determine “xir” own reality, progressives have no basis to oppose inequality or exploitation. 

Mocking a transcendent moral authority in pursuit of radical autonomy, such as by singing, “Does your god have a big fat d—”, has grim consequences. Under such amoral conditions, the “oligarchs” who grasp the levers of power may simply impose their will with force and violence against the weak and defenseless. For absent the objective standard of morality that progressives emphatically reject, might makes right. 

The sheer brutality of the pre-Christian pagan world returns, and the forlorn cries of oppression and injustice from bleeding-heart progressives are scoffed at. 

If you want to truly fight oligarchy, put on the whole armor of God and embrace Christianity.

Aidan Grogan is a history PhD student at Liberty University and a contributor with Young Voices. His work has appeared in The Daily Wire, The Federalist, The American Spectator, RealClearMarkets and The Daily Economy. Follow him on X @AidanGrogan.  



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