Thursday 🇵🇸 Reflections

Christofacists Close to Home

It all started with a tweet:

jwz: Gary Tan is not just a cryptofacist, he’s a christofacist!

@sf_mills

The tweet linked to a blog post that lead me to a Gary Tan’s Linkedin and an event invite.

The Linkedin post reads:

Christians in Tech, it’s time to get together in SF.

Join us on Cinco de Mayo for “Holy” Guacamole at my home in SF for a happy hour serving tacos and tequila while DJ Canvas is spinning his famous remixed worship beats. During the second hour, Peter Thiel will lead a fireside chat to discuss what he calls “political theology” - the overlap between theology and various other fields like civil society, history, economics, and morality.

My brain started going a thousand miles an hour. I was reminded of conversations that had been happening at church around politics. My work organizing against the Christian Right from the belly of the beast in undergrad. It was time to do some digging.

Christofacism

“How did we become so well adjusted to injustice?” - Angela Davis in Are Prison’s Obsolete?

Cover of The Window of Vulnerability

After the 1/6 insurrection, a Magnificast episode introduced me to Dorothee Sölle’s framework of Christofascism. Sölle was a socialist, protestant, German theologian. In “The window of Vulnerability,” (1990) Sölle has a brief chapter on Christofacism in which she writes:

What has established itself in America since the beginning of the eighties as the New Right is a weaving together of goals of the ultraconservative Old Right with the pragmatic strategies of liberals, making skillful use of the media.

(Sölle 133, 1990)

While Sölle is primarily concerned with the the advent of televangelism in the 1980s, what strikes me today is the effective way in which conservative christian theologians dominate google searches and have a stranglehold on popular theology. It is so easy to stumble into conservative theological content online from places like The Gospel Coalition or the multi-million dollar ad campaign: ‘He Gets Us’. This ecosystem of conservative and militaristic popular theology cements a fascist christianity. This theo-politics of strength, hard work, and patriarchy arose in reaction to the anti-imperialist liberation movements of the “Third World and in the ghettos of poverty in North America” (136, 1990). In contrast to 1930s European fascisms, this fascism is not compulsory:

But the most dangerous thing about Christofascist religion is precisely that it is not compulsory, nor is it brought about in totalitarian fashion by violence. It is a matter of what critical Americans call “soft fascism”: chauvinistic nationalism, militarization of one’s own land and all its dependent countries, the still-unconquered racism that expresses itself also in the reintroduction of capital punishment, the celebration of violence in films—to the extent that the victims are described as “communists”—all these fascist tendencies are not imposed by violence, but instead are freely “bought.”

And one of the essential differences between this and European fascism is, in my judgment, the geopolitical fact that nowadays the concentration camps are not close to Weimar or Munich, but are far away: in El Salvador, in the Philippines, in South Africa, and wherever the great world power permits or encourages torture and murder, or has done so in the past.

These connections—the internal and external brutalizations— must remain as invisible as possible, and here too the religious-ideological support system of the Western world plays a key role. It leads the population to a freely chosen acceptance of militarism. And militarism, that is, the absolute priority of military ends over all other public obligations, is in fact a substantial criterion for Hitler-style fascism.

(Sölle 139, 1990)

Another quote that jumped out to me was in the closing paragraphs of the Christofacism chapter:

Everyday anticommunism is unimaginably blind; I myself was in a discussion in a middle-class church where, when I mentioned a friend of mine who is a pastor in East Berlin, a woman shouted at me: “That can’t be so; there are no pastors in the East, they are all in concentration camps and the churches have been burned!” This ideological mixture of nationalism, militarism, family ideology, hostility to working people, and blind hatred of communism is compounded with Christianity by the religious Right; the Christian religion is made the vehicle of these ideologies, so that in many cases people who are outside the churches have no conception of Christianity except in this Christofascist form. The deepest meaning of the Christian religion is conformed and subordinated to fears and threatening lies, to hate and the will to destroy.

(Sölle 139, 1990)

In center-right to liberal (center-left) christian communities I have often experienced the refrain “we’ll theres nothing better than capitalism out there” or “show me the alternative (to capitalism/imperialism).” This blind anti-communism is a product of of the hegemonic nature of christofacist ideology. Many middle-class american christians who come out of conservative and evangelical backrounds like InterVarsity/Crew/Westmont etc. lack the ability to theologize or imagine a world without capitalism, without prisons or police or imperialist violence.

Peter Theil and Gary Tan are Christofacists

In a recent lesson on propaganda, I brought my students a mountain of political mailers sent out for the 2024 primary election. After each student had analyzed one mailer and how it employed one of the five propaganda techniques, we had a conversation about the meta-narratives of the mailers as a whole. The students quickly identified that the mailers used concerns about public safety and crime to mobilize voters in support of their various political causes. If I had more time, I would have also liked the students to do some background research on who was sending out these mailers.

Mission Local 2024 Money Web BigMoneySF: Explore the major players paying out to remake San Francisco, Mission Local

What they would have found is that the majority of the mailers originate from a russian-doll like structure of billionaire-backed fiance and tech organizations. Mission Local mapped out these many organizations and their New and Old money donors. Notably, the list includes venture capitalist Gary Tan.

Like the Reganite Christofacists analyzed by Sölle, Tan is an ardent capitalist and a defender of the police state. Tan was large donor to the Chesa Boudin is on the Board of Grow SF. While far from perfect, Boudin was one of the few DA’s to actually prosecute police for their crimes and was at the minimum trying to stop the growth of mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex through restorative justice. The recall campaign was based on lies/disinformation about increased crime and Boudin not prosecuting criminals. Tan and Grow SF still lean into those narratives: overwhelming crime, lack of accountability, to expand police surveillance and rollback police reform.

If Tan is the boss at the end of (one of) the local dungeons, Theil is a the boss near the end of the game.

Ok getting tired of writing (it’s been 3 hours and i have a meeting) so I’ll just drop some resources below: