Meanwhile on Parler... claim Black Lives Matter is front for Chinese Communist Party because Asians for Black Lives... which is just... I mean, there's racist & then beneath that there's this. They "prove" with a clip of a Chinese American man--who's *been to China!* #evidencing

The idea that someone traveling to China is evidence of a Chinese communist plot is, foolishness aside, indicative of a foreclosed imagination. These are folks who can't think of why someone would want to go anywhere they don't want to go.

The implicit & sometimes explicit racial logic of purity spills over into all ideas, so that these believers can't imagine -- or force themselves not to imagine -- even the desire to learn from that which is not like yourself

For some RW (definitely not all) evangelicals, this is what "spiritual war" is about--resisting not just sin but the desire to know that which is other. Or rather, preemptively determining that such a desire is sin. That feeds right back into white supremacy.

For other (again, not all) RW evangelicals, a desire to learn from that which is other is legitimate, but only if it is justified by "evangelism"--scare quoted because the idea of sharing good news morphs into making others like yourself. Vanity of vanities...

I think of American evangelicals I've met working in Africa. Simultaneously knowledgeable about local communities & determined to make them over in the image of a suburban megachurch--it's odd to sit in a church in Kampala or Nairobi & hear a sermon written for Orange County.

Which, of course, means that local evangelicals in Kampala & Nairobi want in some sense to be like those whose sermons they gladly preach & songs they sing. & why not, if you believe as they do? Evangelicalism encourages imperial subjects to read empire as the blessing of God.

The message that for a century justified American empire as a Christian mission necessarily conflates God's will w/ power. The "seduction," as @BethMooreLPM puts it, is the death spiral of such an entwinement. It didn't have to come to Trump, but it was always leading there.

Ok, but Trumpers who've made "China" a synonym for "all evil" aren't all evangelicals. Right. But I'd argue that the Christian nationalist imagination reaches far beyond church goers or even believers. It's the big river of the American right, into which all tributaries flow.