My (Autistic) Grand Unified Theory of How We Got Here

On white evangelicalism, Christian fascism, and learning to connect to our true selves

My (Autistic) Grand Unified Theory of How We Got Here

Jon Minadeo II, founder of the Goyim Defense League, in Orlando, Florida, September 2, 2023. Minadeo was allegedly seen on a boat bearing swastika symbols and Donald Trump flags, which was hosed down after trying to join a parade in Jupiter, Florida. Less Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

I don’t think it’s a secret to anyone reading my newsletter that I have been obsessed with uncovering the puzzle of American Christian fascism for some time now¹. 

Since 2016, I — and a whole lot of other folks — have increasingly been concerned about the similarities of the US currently and Germany in the 1920s and 30s. But every time I tried to talk about this publicly — either by tweeting or writing or even in public speaking — I was shouted down by Very Angry Christians (mostly Men, I might add). People continually told me that it was intellectually lazy to bring up Hitler when discussing Trump. People told me I was being hysterical, hyperbolic, emotional. People told me it was insulting to everyone to even say the word “fascism” in regards to America and that an authoritarian movement could never happen here.

So I did what (some) autistic people do: I dug in my heels, and I got my receipts. 

I studied German oral histories and the mass psychology of fascism and the rise of Christian nationalism and looked at how trauma impacts the brain and how cycles of violence against children impact societies. I read Alice Miller on Hitler, I tried to read and comprehend Hannah Arendt, I studied how a democracy functions and how far away from this ideal America truly is. I researched authoritarianism and high control religions². I became familiar with the parenting experts in Germany in the 1700s that paved the way for an authoritarian uprising with the Third Reich. I interviewed experts on American Christian fascism. 

Piece by piece, I wove together my theory of the story I was born into. How I was the child of parents who were sucked into the Jesus Movement in the 1970s, which I would now call an apocalyptic cult with extremely good branding. I was a homeschooled undiagnosed autistic child bombarded by Christian media and textbooks aimed at creating a prototypical Christian authoritarian woman destined to remain in the fold forever. I was born into something called “good news” that was predicated on eradicating my sense of self so I would better serve the purposes of my parents, the church, and the Republican party. Upholding the good news of the white Christian patriarchy was the family business, it was my entire world. It was totalitarian, in every sense of that term.

From my earliest memories I was surrounded by conspiracy theories and apocalyptic visions of a future full of suffering until our deliverance would come: young earth creationism and penal substitutionary atonement, vaccine conspiracies and rumors of the one world government and the gay agenda infiltrating public schools. I was groomed from birth to be a Good White Christian American Woman, to always vote along party lines, and to never think too hard about what was being told to me by my leaders — be it my parents, my Bible college professors, my pastors, or conservative politicians.

They told me not to use my brain, but I did — and I used my body, my emotions, my empathy and “rigid” sense of justice too. I used them all to piece together what kind of world I was born into.

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In my own autistic way, I thought if I did all the research and explained it exactly right, people would listen.

I was flush with the pride of fitting the last piece into the puzzle, lining up the toys just so, of arranging my Grand Unified Theory of What the Hell Kind of Movement I Was Born Into. I finally figured it out! How trauma, passed down through the generations, is eventually commoditized and exploited by people who want power. How people with terrible childhoods found themselves flocking to the image of a loving, bearded savior — only to find themselves sucked into a machine that was predicated on crushing the will of those within it. How authoritarians throughout history have followed the same patterns, and how they need a traumatized and fearful group of people who do not trust themselves in order to fulfill their ultimate plans of control and domination. I was born into a religious authoritarian movement several centuries in the making. I was born into white evangelicalism, which will go down in history as a particularly chilling brand of Christian fascism. 

I was born to people who had given everything to a cult that promised to take away their pain. And instead they just passed it on to me, and to so many others. Born to a long line of people who had been taught to distrust themselves and give all of their faith to a deity who demanded strict obedience in exchange for everlasting life — a one-way ticket out of all the trauma of being a human in a very confusing world.

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When Trump glided down a gold escalator to announce his presidential run in 2015, I was seized with a sense of foreboding so strong I couldn’t catch my breath. This was it, this was the antichrist I had been trained for my whole life to be on the lookout for — and yet, the majority of Christians I knew would end up voting for him. Eventually, white evangelicals would make up his most ardent and fervent base, primed from birth to await a savior who would save them from the evils of the world. 

It took me nine years to learn that this, also, was part of the puzzle of being born into an apocalyptic end times cult. Over the past 5 decades it has become a multi-billion dollar business that impacts every facet of American life — from media, to politics, to how people educate and (most importantly) discipline their children. It’s obsessed with policing and enforcing strict gender norms and heteronormative standards, because it is also a positive eugenics movement predicated on the fear of white people losing power and control in America. There is no real end goal of this cult except to usher in the end of days, which means that this group I was born into has nothing to say at all about solutions to climate catastrophe, genocide, inflation, sexism, racism, transphobia, or oppression of any kind. They simply do not care, and are barreling towards an apocalyptic scenario that they have spent thousands of hours fantasizing about, bolstered by cable TV news and crackpot prophets and smooth-talking megachurch pastors.

The cult I was born into has millions and millions of members, but because it is under the umbrella of a privileged and protected religion in the US, you aren’t really supposed to call it one. I know plenty of people who think I am wrong, and that’s OK. But I was raised in it, and I was indoctrinated into it. I was conditioned to give everything — my time, my money, my every single waking thought — to this religion and to the political party it was loyal to. This was my life, and I get to call it what it was to me. And for me, it was the place where I was taught to dissociate from myself, my body, and my emotions, and to be used as a vessel for The Lord — which turned out to be a smokescreen for white supremacist patriarchal values.

Regardless of what we call it, I know in my bones that people will study this period in American history and focus in on the question of why so many people fell under the spell of a wanna-be dictator like Donald Trump. And many scholars will come to the conclusion that I already have — this was the natural result of a religious authoritarian movement that bloomed with the Jesus Movement, was predicated on abusing children in order to get them to comply with authority, and that ended with the devastating and outright fascist 2024 presidential campaign of Donald Trump. 

I’ve been reading a lot of Alice Miller lately³, and her analysis of why Hitler and the Third Reich were so successful reminds me a lot of America in this current moment. Hitler and all the people who followed his orders were raised under religious authoritarian methods similar to those peddled here in the US by James Dobson, Bill Gothard, John Piper, and John MacArthur. German parents too were taught that children are inherently sinful, manipulative, defiant — and that the will of a child must be broken by the parents in order to ensure the continuation of good Christian Germany. If you discipline a child early and often enough, and teach them to fear both God and their parents, then eventually you will have a population that not only complies with authority — but that actually clamors for it. If you focus on the family enough, children will turn into citizens who have no sense of self or will — making them highly susceptible to authority figures who claim to be able to save them from perceived threats to the national identity. 

But Miller also has shown me a path forward. In her book, For Your Own Good, she writes that looking at the people who resisted Hitler and the rise of authoritarianism, we can see that it had nothing to do with intellect. Plenty of German intellectuals downplayed the danger of Hitler’s views and even openly admired them. Even more damning, as the authoritarian Third Riech barrelled on with its violence against Jewish people, intellectuals and philosophers and religious leaders obeyed orders and stayed silent, withering away into ethical irrelevance. Miller ended up writing thousands and thousands of words all centered around a puzzle she wanted to solve: what caused the majority of Germans to comply with horrific authority, and what caused a minority to resist?

According to Miller, it is an issue of embodied humanity. She wrote: “Our capacity to resist has nothing to do with our intelligence but with the degree of access to our true self.⁴” 

The closer you are to being able to listen to your intuition, your emotions, and your body, the less likely you are to fall under the spell of an authoritarian who promises to keep you safe, be it from your own sinful soul or the apocalypse or whatever marginalized group your culture has decided must fulfill the role of scapegoat. 

This is good news for those of us who are on the journey of finding our true selves after decades of abandonment, dissociation, and numbing out. We are learning how to be alive while the world falls apart around us. We are learning how to connect to ourselves while surrounded by people who resist this kind of work at every turn. We are learning about our gender and our sexuality and our rage and our joy. We are refusing to scapegoat ourselves or anyone else. We are clawing our way out of the narrowly prescribed roles assigned to us at birth in order to keep a few people rich and a few people in power. We are learning that we aren’t just pieces in a puzzle after all — we are precious human beings born into systems called “good” that seem to be good for only a few.

As Donald Trump goes to the ballot for the third time in the United States in just a few weeks, the signs of the apocalyptic authoritarian cult are all around. For me as an autistic person, it was important to read the books, follow the threads, and come to my own conclusions about the movement I was born into. The knowing doesn’t make it any easier, but it helps me to accept the reality of the situation. I can feel and process the grief and rage and exhaustion. And I can also connect to the parts of myself that have always stubbornly refused to be a cog in the machine of hierarchical patriarchal power. 

As we gear up to survive the next few weeks, as the death cult spins into ever more outlandish lies and fear tactics to control those who have been trained since birth to follow the order, let’s continue to do the work that will long outlast these authoritarians and their terribly short-sided view of the world. Let’s connect and nurture our true selves, day by day, practice by practice. Let’s set our sights on the puzzle of connecting to parts of us that we had to abandon long ago. Let’s have discovering and nurturing our true selves become our special interest — and I promise you, together we will see a better world be revealed in our lifetime.

It is the end of so much, but the beginning of connecting with who we really are.

The world is being birthed right in front of us, and it needs us to show up as our whole selves. Messy and interconnected and committed to the survival of all, with no apocalyptic savior in sight.

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Last year, I wrote this post about how to resist authoritarianism without losing your mind. In it a give a very brief overview of some ways to connect with our bodies and our emotions, so give it a read if you are looking for some tips).

For now, I would love to know:

How are you connecting to your true self these days? How is it helping you during these intense times?

1. The last big piece I wrote for a Christian publication was this one, where I explicitly made connections between the Third Riech and white evangelicalism: https://www.christiancentury.org/critical-essay/good-white-christian-women-nazi-germany

2. I even made a zine about Christian fascism! Which nobody read :)

3. Alice Miller is a really complicated person, and I have been deep-diving her work and her life — including the revelations from her son (after her death) that she herself was a terrible mother. The particularities of how Miller’s own unprocessed trauma ended up impacting her and her child are pretty wild, and they also serve to highlight how important the main message of her work is — cruelty against children continues cycles of violence. Perhaps another day I will write an essay all about Miller herself, but today is not that day.

4. Alice Miller For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence 1990 p. 43