President Donald Trump has signed an executive order setting up a task force to counter “anti-Christian bias.” Trump claims that the task force is necessary to fight discrimination against Christians. But in practice it seems designed to enforce a very narrow version of conservative Christianity. The task force will counter efforts to prosecute demonstrators who block access to abortion care and to allow for discrimination against LGBTQ+ people on campus. It will encourage the federal government to elevate right wing Christianity as a national ideology.
Imposing Christian morality on the U.S. seems out of step with the separation of church and state. But it’s not exactly out of line with American tradition. For example, at the height of the postwar Red Scare in March 1953, leftist poet and activist Langston Hughes was hauled before Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. PSI was looking to root out communist influence. But in that regard, many of the questions centered on religion — and on a poem which the subcommittee believed showed that Hughes was anti-religious and therefore pro-communist.
The poem in question was “Goodbye, Christ,” which Hughes wrote on a trip to Soviet Russia in 1932.
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