Friend:

I’m pinch-hitting for Rachel Laser this week, while she’s at an AU board meeting revving us up for the second half of this dizzying year.

Just as we started leaving our face masks at home, COVID-19's dangerous Delta variant is igniting fresh debate about mask and vaccine mandates—and it’s not going down well with religious extremists. On Sunday, a Tennessee pastor vowed to eject any worshiper who dares to wear a mask in his church, and a Maine church continuing to challenge the state’s long-expired limits on in-person services just asked the Supreme Court to weigh in. 

A different kind of virus, this one political, is also resurgent this summer. You know it as “Project Blitz”—the secretive crusade to manipulate state legislatures into passing laws to force a Christian nationalist worldview into schools, libraries, public venues and beyond. 

Respected researcher Frederick Clarkson exposed Project Blitz and its legislative “playbook” in 2018. In a new Salon article, Clarkson credits Rachel personally as a major reason the project was forced underground:

“We were fortunate that Rachel Laser, the then-new president of [AU] ... made taking on Project Blitz a signature campaign of her presidency.” A highlight of her work, says Clarkson, was “organizing dozens of national religious and civil rights organizations to issue a joint letter to state legislators opposing the anti-democratic, Christian nationalist intention” behind Project Blitz.

The coalition Rachel helped build continues today. I am so proud of her prescience and courage in those early months of her tenure. She was among the first to predict Project Blitz would metastasize to undermine civil society and unity in real time:

“The same white Christian nationalist ideology that is behind Project Blitz is also driving the backlash against a deliberate caricature of critical race theory,” Rachel tells Salon. “Therefore, a similar strategy to the one that has hamstrung Project Blitz—recapturing the narrative about our nation's ideals, exposing the real intent of the extremists, making clear how their agenda harms freedom and equality for all of us—should be part of the strategy to combat opponents of racial justice." 

We saw the Christian nationalist agenda in all its frightening implications at this week’s hearings of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. DC Metropolitan Police Department Officer Daniel Hodges said, “It was clear the terrorists perceived themselves to be Christians. I saw the Christian flag directly to my front. Another read, ‘Jesus is my savior. Trump is my president.’”  

And Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn, who is Black, recounted the ugly racial epithets and physical assaults hurled at him by the mob: “No one had ever, ever called me a [expletive] while wearing the uniform of a Capitol Police officer.”  

Religious extremism and, let’s face it, white Christian nationalism, were part and parcel of the terrorism these officers fought at great risk to themselves. This dangerous ideology is behind efforts to erase and sanitize the history we teach our children, and to contaminate the laws that define us as a nation.

That’s the struggle we face today. Being on the right side is more important than ever, and I am so glad to have you there with us.

With gratitude for all you do,