Artificial gravity only solves half of the dosing and debilitation problem. For any progress in Human Space Flight to happen a sea change regarding radiation shielding is required. As we set sail on this new sea we are going to have to take our own little ocean with us. This fundamental change is accepting massive shielding as unavoidable. There is simply no way around the basic physics of heavy nuclei. The “Parker Minimum” is a 5 meter layer of water and this is the starting point for HSF. For a small capsule this equates to about 500 tons of water. This is simply not practical for long duration missions with more than a couple astronauts, not because of the mass, but due to human psychology and the inefficiency of the ratio of shielding thickness to crew space. As the sphere gets larger the inner sphere crew space geometrically increases. Constructs between 60 and 80 feet in diameter, with inner spaces between 26 and 46 feet, with shields massing approximately 3000 to 6000 tons, are likely the lower limit.
Starting with that 5 meters of water several concepts appear as solutions. The first, to deal with microgravity debilitation, is a tether system with roughly equal masses at either end and lesser tuning and dampening masses moving along the multi-tether. A rate of one revolution per minute would prevent the severe difficulties inherent in faster rates and require a 6000 foot long tether system. Second comes the wet workshop, a structure already made to handle one gravity of centripetal acceleration or, since the double-hulled structure will be spherical or ovoid, the “Fat Workshop.” Third, due to their large size, comes a Super or Ultra Heavy Lift Vehicle to loft the workshops. Fourth is some form of Nuclear Propulsion, not nuclear thermal, to move these multi-thousand-ton constructs once they are complete. And fifth comes an off-world source of water shielding. Twenty three tons of water can be lifted from the Moon for every ton from Earth. Using a lunar rail gun it may be possible to economically launch water containers from the Moon, as originally envisioned by Gerard K. O’Neill.
To “establish a basic model” of a Moonbase I see two models, based ether on roofing over craters and covering with regolith, or finding a suitable lava tube.
Either model would allow inflatable habitats to provide very spacious accommodations while shielding occupants from radiation and micrometeorites.
The crater model near the ice at the poles would likely be a grid set up, then covered with a suitable material, and then a small earthmover pushing regolith over it. All robotically constructed long before any astronauts land.
My view is that water robotically lifted from the lunar poles into orbit for shielded Space Stations and robotically constructed bases should happen before astronauts ever leave Earth.
Getting that lunar ice up into space as cosmic ray water shielding is the only path to any progress in Human Space Flight. Robot landers and rovers should be a priority.
A 60 foot diameter sphere with a 26 foot sphere inside it would require 2889 tons of water shielding for 9203 cubic feet of crew space (if my math is correct). This is about the same as a olympic swimming pool and three 3-bedroom apartments. As these constructs get larger they become several times more efficient. An 80 foot diameter sphere with a 46 foot inner sphere would need 6037 tons for 50,965 cubic feet of crew space.
In comparison the ISS has a pressurized volume of 35,491 cubic feet, though it only lists 13,696 as living area. I’m assuming equipment fills up the difference.
A pair of 80 foot diameter spheres spinning opposite each other with a tether system would require over 12,000 tons of water alone. Using the ISS as a guide and with half of those 3 bedroom apartments filled with equipment, this Space Station would have a crew of thirty or forty astronauts. This is not so extreme when compared to a 18,750 ton missile sub with a crew of 155.
On the plus side that water, as a medium for a closed loop life support system, would provide air, drinking water, and basic calories for an indefinite number of years with little or no resupply. Dock nuclear electric propulsion modules and off to the outer solar system we go with no dosing or debilitation. I believe that is how we will do it.
Lunar exploration with robots and rovers should have been ongoing and continuous after Apollo. We would have found the ice at the poles by 1980 instead of 2010. We would likely have found lava tubes by 1990. And by 2000 robot landers may have demonstrated ISRU of ice into water and propellants allowing water to be repeatedly lifted off the lunar surface and transferred to water depots in lunar orbit. By 2010 there would have been cislunar Space Stations and by 2020 inflatable habitats inside lava tubes. And right now, we would be seeing larger and larger numbers of people Beyond Earth Orbit. Possibly several hundred.
What we got was the Reagan Revolution and one of the worst designs possible for a Space Transportation System. Leading to NewSpace as the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration.
No…. Nuclear Thermal is no good for several reasons… it is a money scam, and it would be better to just spend that mountain of money they will blow on a giant chemical booster. They have all the data from rover so they think it will be easy to charge billions while only spending millions.
There are three paths; the one that will work right now and take us to Ceres is nuclear pulse. But repurposed nuclear weapons are politically problematic. The second is some form of nuclear electric and new TPV cell tech is improving the prospects of that. But it has a way to go. The third is fission fragment propulsion and it appears to be a nearly ideal concept. Unfortunately, the isotope required, Americium 242, would require a new near-trillion-dollar nuclear industry to be built.
They could replace the SLS SRB’s with New Glenn first stages and develop an engine return module for the RS-25’s. That is my best plan. Of course, a certain psychopath fanboy goes apesh#t crazy when I mention that. He even made a graphic to mock me with. Really creeps me out.
Human Space Flight Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit HSF-BELO will require, in my view, a Near Sea Level Radiation One Gravity NSLR1G crew compartment. A cosmic ray water shield well over a thousand tons and a several thousand feet long Tether Generated Artificial Gravity TGAG system. And that means nuclear propulsion and NOT nuclear thermal, which does not have the necessary Isp. It probably means using a wet workshop and getting the water shielding from the Moon. None of this is my idea…it is all from scientists and engineers. And fanboys hate that.
Waiting for China to build some BIG engines and then the west scrambling to match it. If they build a thrust chamber exceeding the 1.8 million pound thrust of the F-1A, let’s say they go 1.9, and then feed two of these chambers with one set of turbopumps, technically making it a 3.8 million pound thrust engine, they will be on their way to a Moon base.
Four such engines, with 8 thrust bells, and a center variable thrust landing engine, would be the reusable version of the original Nova concept entertained before Lunar Orbit Rendezvous made the “smaller” Saturn V the cheaper go-to. If only they had built Nova, where would we be now?
I can see inflatable habitats used inside lava tubes or in craters that have been roofed and covered over with regolith on the Moon…but not in space. Likewise, the plentiful depictions of Moonwalkers bunny hopping fancy free are not reality. Radiation means EVA will be for emergencies only. Astronauts will only suffer exposure when unavoidable such as transit to a shielded conveyance such as a Lunar Cycler, Space Station, or even a lunar water carrying vehicle. Such vehicles could lower themselves over surface features blocking most of the radiation.
Spacesuits will be needed for working in these repurposed craters or lava tubes, however. The main problem, if I am not mistaken, are the gloves, which precludes 1 atmosphere suit. It seems like haptic technology needs some investment.
The logical sequence is to identify and start with an ultimate goal. This was done almost a half a century ago by Gerard K. O’Neill…miles in diameter artificial hollow spinning moons. He also identified the economic engine to enable space colonization and also solve the overheating of Earth: Space Solar Power. The resources for manufacturing both Space Solar components and colonies can be lifted into space from the Moon using 23 times less energy than from Earth.
After initial industrialization of the Moon the need for resources like water and volatiles will grow. There are vast quantities in the asteroid belt with no gravity wells to limit exploitation.
I would bet the Chinese have identified the goal and are working on resources. And wondering if the west is really as greedy and stupid as we seem.
Large human-crewed Space Stations in GEO as repair and recycling stations are the best solution to maintaining a sustainable satellite environment. Megaconstellations are unsustainable. Strict limits on the number of LEO satellites are hopefully on the way.
In my view the ideal system would be Ultra Heavy Lift Vehicles launching to GEO. Part of a typical mission would be to make a stop and collect old satellites from a lower orbit and then carry them to the GEO stations. The second stage engine module would then separate and reenter, leaving the tankage to be repurposed.
This kind of space commerce would, due to economy of scale, result in the minimal mass launching and only engine modules reentering would result in minimal reentry byproducts affecting the upper atmosphere.
LEO crewed platforms will be gone soon enough, and their replacement will be the “true” Space Station, that is, a construct with both a massive cosmic ray water shield and a tether generated artificial gravity system.
A simple capsule would require, at a minimum (the “Parker Minimum”), 500 tons of water. For any practical living space at least double…and for a crew larger than a couple astronauts on a long duration mission double it again. The options are lifting a couple thousand tons of tap water into GEO, which is halfway to anywhere (not LEO), or bringing it up from the surface of the Moon using 23 times less energy.
This water from the Moon is the critical resource upon which any progress in Human Space Flight depends. Getting that water into a double hulled construct stressed for over 1 gravity of centripetal acceleration (a wet workshop) is a goal worthy of adulation. Setting sail on a new sea.
This cheering about spacex pocketing more pork for paddling in a duck pond is fanboy buffoonery.
The shiny is designed to lift tens of thousands of satellites into LEO. It uses engines about 1/3 the size of those used on the Saturn V, because they are cheaper. It uses a single type of stainless steel for both stages, because it is cheaper. The number of engines and structure, along with landing back both, entail a huge payload penalty.
The concept is a VTVL fully reusable SHLV, but much like the Space Shuttle, the design is mismatched with reality and likely destined to fail at whatever mission it undertakes. This is very similar to the gamble another wealthy eccentric took on a giant wooden seaplane.
The need was to fly cargo across the Atlantic if the German submarines succeeded in sinking ships faster than they could be built. The need disappeared. The low latency megaconstellation was never needed to start with.
Great questions! Thank you for asking. So, first, “fully reusable” includes the wet workshop concept. But a wet workshop program is fundamentally opposed to making money with satellites because it changes the whole point into expanding humankind into space instead of turning a profit. This is why it is not part of NewSpace ideology, which is only about profit. Wet Workshop reusability..is the correct match, not returning what is essentially a Shuttle external tank made out of steel.
Second, the shiny is designed to support an LEO internet satellite megaconstellation, one of the truly worst ideas ever. In regard to expanding humankind into space, it is a dead end. Space Solar Power by way of lunar resources, as the solution to Climate Change, as envisioned by Gerard K. O’Neill, is the only path to accomplishing the survival imperative. One path leads to Elon becoming god-emperor of cyberspace and the other to an insurance policy for the human species. If you worship wealth and individual greed, then Elon is your choice… not mine.
Space Solar Power is the economic engine enabling a multitrillion dollar multinational energy project on the Moon realizing all the dreams of space enthusiasts. Elon could never own and monopolize such an immense enterprise, so he wants nothing to do with it. As a state sponsored public works project his libertarian whack job fans want nothing to do with it. Fossil fuel interests want nothing to do with it. Defense contractors cashing in on the new satellite cold war want nothing to do with it. If the public understood it as the solution to Climate Change, they would support it, but NewSpace ideology is all they are getting….and that may cost hundreds of millions of lives. All of us end up on the right or wrong side of history. I know which side I am on.
Ironically, the Space Shuttle was going to “make space pay for itself” by launching all commercial satellites cut-rate and using those monopolized profits for “the dream.” The obvious problems were the Shuttle was a great concept but a horrible design and there was no designated goal, no specific dream, to realize. And the third showstopper was the defense industry, and the fossil fuel industry, and congress. Politically, the right did not want taxes spent on anything but defense and what lobbyists for the energy industry wanted, while the left wanted to address social issues and infrastructure.
Enter NewSpace, which could have adopted Space Solar Power by way of lunar resources as the ultimate goal, but a certain entrepreneur realized he could never monopolize such an immense multinational project. Making him the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration. The shiny is a new kind of Shuttle with a new set of problems and the new goal is simple greed by way of a contrived satellite market. What a mess.
I was immediately branded a Marxist when I cited the following article on a forum. I explained that if it describes the problem, to a certain extent I don’t care who wrote it. This article relates directly to the solution to the biggest problem of our time, Climate Change. A recent NASA report on the most practical solution was likely influenced by obscene wealth.
The first problem with the recent NASA report on Space Solar Power is it ignores Climate Change. Comparing cents per kilowatt hour is not going to matter much after civilization suffers a global catastrophe with inestimable trillions in lost revenue and incalculable human suffering. Fossil fuel interests are human and non-human profit-seeking entities that have gone to great lengths for decades to lie and misinform the public about this to safeguard their investment.
The second problem with the report is it ignores Lunar Manufactureof the components. Providing a western standard of living for a projected population of 10 billion means the industrial activity involved in replacing fossil fuel energy with renewables is a self-defeating feedback loop. Sending rockets (burning hydrogen) to the Moon and building simple antenna farms on Earth is the only way to avoid that loop.
The third problem with the report is the influence of those with Competing Agendas and any acknowledgement of this is ignored. Not only fossil fuel interests but private companies with their own schemes want nothing to do with any legislation phasing out fossil fuels and subsidizing Space Solar. It will hinder their own projects and for those civil servants or others seeking employment with these companies, as many are, it is in their interest and to their credit to work against Space Solar.
While Starship is being mentioned in connection with Space Solar Power by many, this is, in my view, disingenuous. Elon Musk is infamous for having stated in 2012, “Let me tell you one of my pet peeves: space solar power. Okay, the stupidest thing ever. And…-“I wish I could just stab that bloody thing through the heart.” He has never recanted that statement and has a completely different scheme in mind for his company SpaceX.
NewSpace ideology is, at this point, broadly accepted as a for-profit worldview with an LEO megaconstellation lofted by a privately built Super Heavy Lift Vehicle as “the future.” While Elon Musk has spoken much on Climate Change in the past he recently showed his true colors:
ROME, Dec 16 (Reuters) – Oil and gas should not be demonised in the medium-term, Elon Musk, the founder of electric car maker Tesla, said on Saturday, but he also said it was important to reduce carbon emissions to preserve the planet. Musk, speaking at a right-wing political gathering organized by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party said: “Climate change alarm is exaggerated in the short term,” adding that the environmental movement may have gone too far, causing people to lose faith in the future.”
“The future” is obviously about money. Not averting a slowly unfolding global catastrophe. Having taken part in rescue operations right after a category 5 hurricane I can attest that adding a new category 6 with winds over 192 mph, as is being discussed, is not a good sign. Fires burning around the world, pathogens spreading, the backlash from illegal migration breeding fascism around the world…all this is just the beginning.
The solution to nuclear deterrence is to place the nuclear arsenal months in deep space on human-crewed “Space Boomer.” It solves several problems. The first problem is deterrence. The second problem is launch-on-warning, and the third problem is climate change.
From the Slate article: “Maybe it’s because of the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, but few gasps were heard, no jaws went slack, when the U.S. Air Force announced last month that the price tag for its new nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile, called the Sentinel, had suddenly gone up by 37 percent.
That would put the missile program’s total cost at $131 billion. That’s twice as much as what the Air Force had estimated back in 2015, when the program was first introduced.
The new estimate—and it’s just an estimate—includes the cost of developing the missile, buying 634 of them, installing 450 in silos (the rest will be for tests and spares), and connecting their launch-control centers to the command-control network. It does not include the costs of maintaining the missiles over the next 20 years, which would likely raise the total cost to well over $200 billion. Nor does it include the $15.9 billion price tag for the new nuclear warhead, called the W87-1, to be perched on top of the missile.
All of which raises the question: Are these new ICBMs—which will replace the 450 Minuteman IIIs—really necessary? The Minutemen are 50 years old, and while they’ve been modified many times, they will probably need to be mothballed someday. But that raises another question: Are silo-based ICBMs necessary at all? Might the other two “legs” of the nuclear arsenal’s “Triad”—the 970 warheads on submarines and the 500 or so bombs and cruise missiles on bomber aircraft—be sufficient to deter all enemies? And by the way, we’re also building 100 new bombers, called the B-21, at a cost of $750 million per plane, and the first of 12 new Columbia-class nuclear-missile-carrying submarines at a cost of $15 billion per boat.
Few outside the nuclear cognoscenti are asking these questions, but as America’s annual national security budget has passed $1 trillion, and as the demand swells for more conventional weapons (combat planes, warships, air-defense missiles, artillery shells, etc.), it’s time to start asking.
We know about the Sentinel program’s cost overrun only because a law—the Nunn-McCurdy Act, sponsored by Sen. Sam Nunn and Rep. Dave McCurdy back in 1983—requires the Pentagon to notify Congress when a weapon system exceeds its baseline cost by more than 15 percent. If a weapon overruns its cost by 25 percent or exceeds its original cost estimate by 50 percent, it is said to be in “critical” breach of Nunn-McCurdy and must be canceled unless the secretary of defense certifies that the program is vital for national security.
Just after hours on Jan. 18, the Pentagon notified Congress that the Sentinel was in critical breach. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is expected to certify sometime soon that the missile is necessary. But is it?
Among nuclear insiders, the sanctity of the Triad has been an article of faith for decades, as bedrock a belief as the Holy Trinity has been to the Catholic Church. But there’s little substance to the idea. It started as an outgrowth of bureaucratic politics, with each branch of the U.S. armed forces seeking its own piece of the nuclear arsenal—land-based missiles for the Army, bomber aircraft for the Air Force, and submarines for the Navy. (Around 1960, the Air Force beat the Army in the competition for land-based missiles, and separate factions within the Air Force clutched tight to both.)
For a while, the ICBMs did have one unique property: Their guidance systems were accurate enough to destroy discrete military targets, such as blast-hardened missile silos, without doing much damage to the area around the target. Bombers could do that too, but it would take hours for them to reach the target. Submarine-launched missiles weren’t accurate enough.
Then, in 1990, the Navy started putting D5 missiles in their submarines. The D5s are just as accurate as the ICBMs, and because the subs prowl under the ocean’s surface undetected, they are less vulnerable to an enemy attack. By contrast, land-based ICBMs sit fixed in their silos. They are accurate enough to launch a first strike and vulnerable to an enemy’s first strike. Because of that, in a serious crisis, their very existence might compel both sides—all countries with a substantial ICBM force—to launch a preemptive first strike, before any of the other countries launch a first strike. (Strategists call this situation “crisis instability.”)
As a result, several strategists and politicians—and not just doves or arms control advocates—started thinking that ICBMs were possibly more trouble than they were worth and, in any case, redundant. In response, the nuclear wing of the Air Force devised a new rationale for land-based missiles: the “sponge” theory. The idea was this: If we got rid of our ICBMs, there would be only a handful of nuclear targets in the continental United States—a few bomber bases and submarine pens, as well as the commanders in Washington, D.C. An enemy such as Russia might think that, by launching just a few handfuls of nuclear weapons, it could disable much of our ability to retaliate. The Kremlin’s master could then tell the U.S. president: If you do retaliate with your bombers in the air or submarines at sea, I will fire back at your cities. On the other hand, this argument goes, if we kept our 450 ICBMs, a Russian first strike would require them to launch a major attack; the radioactive fallout from such a strike would kill tens of millions of Americans, and a president would have to retaliate. So, we need to keep those ICBMs as a “sponge” to soak up the enemy’s attack—and thus to deter the enemy from launching an attack to begin with.
This is a very bizarre argument. The point of burying ICBMs in silos out in the middle of nowhere has always been to keep them away from cities to minimize the civilian casualties of a nuclear war (if doing so was at all possible). Now the Air Force was turning the concept on its head, saying that deterrence is strengthened by ensuring that millions of Americans die in a nuclear first strike.
But let’s accept the sponge theory as valid. Do we need 450 ICBMs to soak up the attack? Would 100 ICBMs—which would require the Russians or Chinese to launch at least 200 nuclear warheads, which would also kill millions of Americans—be enough? Would 50? Would a dozen?
The case to replace the entire Triad with new weapons began with an act of deception. Back in 2010, when President Barack Obama was trying to get the Senate to ratify New START, the nuclear arms–reduction treaty he’d negotiated with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Republican senators refused to go along unless Obama agreed to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on new nuclear ICBMs, bombers, submarines, and warheads. Obama wrote a carefully worded letter saying he would request funds to “replace or modernize” all three legs of the Triad. The key words were “or modernize”—that might mean he would simply upgrade the software or the communications system in some weapons. However, the Republicans started regarding “modernize” as a synonym for “replace” and boasted that Obama had agreed to spend $1.3 trillion over the next 30 years to do so. (The number was grabbed out of a hat; Obama hadn’t agreed to any dollar figure, nor had anyone calculated how much these new weapons, which weren’t even sketched on blueprints as yet, would cost.)
When Donald Trump took office in 2017, his defense secretary, retired Gen. Jim Mattis, thought seriously about dismantling the ICBMs. Mattis had been in the Marines, a service that had never possessed or desired long-range nuclear weapons. But the Republicans were by now referring to the plan of replacing the entire Triad, including ICBMs, as “the Obama program of record.” The idea of proposing something less hawkish than Obama was politically unpalatable. Also some Air Force generals successfully sold Mattis on the sponge theory.
It’s time to revisit all this. True, Russia and China are building new nuclear weapons—though Russia, which has about the same number of weapons as we do, isn’t expanding the size of its arsenal, and China, which is expanding theirs, right now has only about 500 nukes in all, many of them not terribly reliable. (This is a good argument for engaging China in arms control negotiations.) By all but the most fanciful measures, we have more than enough. We don’t need to match everything that the Russian or Chinese nuclear bureaucracies are doing. We don’t need to duplicate their waste—especially if it means proceeding with the critically overpriced mistake of the Sentinel.”
When the great one says it is “the stupidest idea ever”, those looking for future employment with his company, where several NASA higher-ups have gone, are going to ride that wave.
Terrestrial industry is overheating the planet so setting Space Solar up by way of lunar industry, as advocated by Gerard K. O’Neill, is the path to solving climate change. This makes comparisons to terrestrial economic models meaningless. The goal is to fix climate change, not profit off cheaper electricity.
It would be a dream come true for the environmental movement if Musk were to change his direction on Space Solar Power and support it as the solution to Climate change. He would then actually be the savior that many accuse him of fantasizing himself as. He would go from villain to superhero overnight.
“-Brandes took it upon himself to use his considerable soapbox to introduce Nietzsche to a wider audience, which he did in a popular essay “Aristocratic Radicalism” published in 1889. Brandes read Nietzsche as a creative critic of the “slave morality” that was currently sweeping across Europe through demands for liberalism, socialism, and democracy.
While critical of Nietzsche for deploying a militaristic language common to right-wing German intellectuals, Brandes largely commends Nietzsche’s rejection of the idea that society should try to secure dignity for the lower orders or to achieve the utilitarian goal of the “greatest happiness for the greatest number.” Brandes reads Nietzsche as claiming that the “fostering of a stronger, higher form of humanity than that which surrounds us (the ‘overman’) would be a great, and actual form of progress even though such could only be achieved through the sacrifice of masses of human beings as we know them.”
For Brandes’s Nietzsche, the production of a worthy aristocracy capable of greatness is both the means and ends of providing human life with meaning, and almost anything is permitted in pursuit of that goal. This means establishing a new aristocracy to undo egalitarian achievements stretching back from the Enlightenment through (at least) the dawn of Christianity.
Nietzsche is also very explicit that a form of slavery will be required, to ensure that his new aristocracy possesses the leisure and material needed to pursue its great projects. This reflects his insistence in The Will to Power that he was not an individualist, but a thinker concerned with an ordering of rank.”
In this age of intense political and religious division, many Christian nationalists have convinced themselves that they have a special claim on America. That simply is not true. The United States was not founded as a “Christian nation.” The Constitution enshrines a clear separation of church and state, and no version of Christianity has ever been the official national religion.
Furthermore, white evangelicals and Christian nationalists are not the “silent majority,” nor indeed a majority of any kind. Public opinion research has consistently demonstrated the opposite: Across a range of issues the policies and politics supported by the Christian right are broadly unpopular among the American people.
Ultimately, the voices, beliefs and desires of those who embrace what some scholars and observers have called “White Christianity” are not entitled to any special privileges over people of other faiths or none at all.
In reality, such believers in “White Christianity” are a diminishing minority in American society, even as they aspire to be the dominant force and to silence those they disagree with, by any means necessary. In a fateful attempt to win and hold power, the Christian right forged an alliance with Donald Trump and his neofascist MAGA movement. This has been a transactional relationship, given that Trump transparently violates almost every supposed tenet of Christian faith and doctrine. Through almost any religious lens, he can reasonably be described as an unrepentant sinner.
With the 2024 presidential election approaching, Trump is increasingly suggesting that he has been chosen, almost as a messianic figure or the Second Coming. In a brilliant work of propaganda, he recently debuted a campaign ad proclaiming that “God Made Trump” — which translates into Trump being a type of messianic figureIf they consistently applied their purportedly deeply held beliefs, right-wing evangelical Christians should condemn such behavior by Donald Trump and his MAGA movement as blasphemy. Instead, they appear to have convinced themselves that Trump is in fact some type of divine messenger, sent to permit them to impose their reactionary-revolutionary project on the American people. The classic warning that when fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and waving the cross is proving correct.
I recently spoke about Trump and contemporary American Christianity with Dr. David P. Gushee, who is distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University and chair of Christian social ethics at the Free University of Amsterdam. He is also a senior research fellow at the International Baptist Theological Study Centre and a past president of both the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Christian Ethics. Gushee is the author of several books including his most recent, “Defending Democracy From Its Christian Enemies.” He has published hundreds of opinion articles and been interviewed by many major outlets, including the Washington Post, CNN and USA Today.
In this conversation, Gushee explains his view that the Christian right is an implacable enemy of American democracy, and reflects on what it means to be a Christian and person of faith in a time of ascendant neofascism and global discord. He argues that believing Christians should actually oppose and resist authoritarianism, rather than supporting it in any form. Toward the end of this conversation, Gushee details the types of myth-making, conspiratorial thinking and other fantastical narratives that the Christian right has created to justify its campaign against multiracial pluralistic democracy — and even against reality itself.
This is the first of a two-part conversation, and has been edited for length and clarity.
Given all that is happening with the 2024 election, Trumpism and the reality that he and his MAGA movement are an existential danger to the country, how are you feeling? What are you preparing yourself for in 2024?
I am feeling a sense of dread as I contemplate a Trump-dominated 2024. He is like one of those horror-movie villains who you think has been defeated or destroyed but keeps showing up to terrorize the neighborhood. While the polling results are mixed, there are plenty of polls that show him leading in most or all of the swing states. The fact that this person in 2024 might well create a constitutional crisis, and that he doesn’t care at all about that — and that his followers are fine with it — is appalling beyond words. The weakness of Joe Biden’s candidacy in this context only raises the sense of vulnerability.
I am preparing myself for 2024 like a person who is facing a grave spiritual, emotional and moral challenge, with a very limited sense of agency and no control over the outcome, but with responsibilities that I am trying to discharge faithfully.
How did we arrive at such a moment of crisis or disaster in America?
Deep cultural polarization since the 1960s. The frozen two-party system. Money in politics. The marriage of the Christian right to the GOP. The uniquely malignant Donald Trump, who has facilitated the rise of what I am calling authoritarian reactionary Christianity.
For you, what does it mean to be a person of faith, a Christian, in a time of such challenges?
It means that I am called to act faithfully — that is, to try to follow Jesus’ way and teachings and to fulfill my calling as a Christian, pastor, ethicist and public intellectual with fidelity to God. It does not mean that I am assured of any particular outcome, as I believe that humans determine what happens in human history, or at least that we must act as if we are entirely responsible for our own actions and their results. In light of the manifest surrender of so many Christians to Trump and to authoritarian reactionary Christianity, being a Christian means resistance to this surrender, participation in this internal struggle for the soul of Christianity in the United States.
What does it mean to be an evangelical Christian in the Age of Trump?
For me, evangelicalism as a “movement” in the U.S. needs to be abandoned because it has lost its religious and moral credibility and is a source of more harm than good. I abandoned it in the 2015-2018 period. I write about that in my memoir “Still Christian” and my book “After Evangelicalism.” I fear that what “evangelical” has come to mean is an authoritarian, reactionary white conservative population whose religion has become indistinguishable from radical right-wing politics. Those who remain “evangelical” by self-definition and do not want their movement to mean what I just called it have the responsibility to wrestle it back in a different direction.
What is the role of Christianity in a time of democracy crisis and ascendant neofascism, both here and around the world?
Christianity should be a source of resistance to neofascism, illiberalism and authoritarianism. That is what I take it to be and the path I outline in my new book. Christianity is, instead, often a source of neofascism and illiberalism because of how its religious and moral demands and implications are so badly misunderstood. This means there is an internal civil war within U.S. Christianity that must be understood as a big part of the current situation we face here.
Language matters. The mainstream news media and the country’s political leaders use terms such as “evangelical” and “Christian” without defining them. “Christian nationalist” is another example. What do these words actually mean in practice?
All significant definitions are contested. The contours and boundaries of any and all religious communities are also contested.
For me, the term “Christian” should mean a person devoted to following Jesus Christ, his way of life and teachings. In practice it means many other things, including a person with a vaguely religious identity associated with Christianity rather than some other world religion and whose way of life could be fundamentally driven by any number of factors other than their purported religious identity. Thus, a white xenophobic tribalist American filled with hatred for “the other” could self-identify as a “Christian” because they are not, for example, Muslim, Buddhist or atheist.
“Evangelical” should mean a Protestant Christian who demonstrates very high degrees of commitment in their relationship with Christ, respect for the Bible, involvement in church life and determination to share their faith with others and to live it out with integrity. It has come to mean many other things in practice, including a right-wing white person who supports Donald Trump somehow, in part motivated by a vague connection to his and their purported religious identity. It is up to evangelicals to police their own boundaries and identity so as to prevent such a dramatic and disastrous identity and definitional slippage.
The color line goes through all things in America and around the world. How does race, and specifically the Black prophetic and liberation tradition, complicate and push back against those definitions and boundaries?
You make an important intervention. The religious-political movement or problem we have been talking about so far is a white people’s thing. It reflects distortions in Christianity that were introduced during the earliest days here on this continent and can be traced more broadly to European colonialism. This is Christianity as inflected or infected by whiteness (e.g., a worldview of white supremacism), conquest, colonialism, genocide of the Indigenous populations and enslavement of Africans. “White” equals American equals Christian equals nationalism equals goodness only in this frame.
The Black prophetic, liberationist, abolitionist Christian tradition is the single most significant resistance movement ever to develop in the U.S. Enslaved people in the 18th and 19th centuries largely embraced the faith of their enslavers, but then many profoundly reworked it — drawing on biblical resources like the Exodus and a different reading of the meaning of Jesus — to be a religion of liberation. That’s why I devote a chapter to this tradition in my new book. I think it is a hugely important resource for resisting white authoritarian reactionary Christianity now, as it has been for 400 years.
In my writing about the Christian right, especially as that movement is working the levers of power in the Trump era, I have sometimes described them as “Christofascists” or “White Christian supremacists.” Is that language accurate or excessive? Offer a corrective, if you would.
“Christofascism” is certainly a provocative term. I deal with fascism in my book and try to define it very carefully. While it is not the term that I choose to describe the main problem as I see it, there are especially awful parts of authoritarian reactionary Christianity and its political expression that might well merit the term. As one who wrote his dissertation and first book about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, I don’t use these terms lightly.
But I also know that the deployment, manipulation and fusion of Christianity with racism, authoritarianism and violence was not just a possibility in one country at one given time. It is a possibility in any country that has a large but shrinking Christian population that feels threatened by unwanted cultural changes in a liberalizing direction — including immigration, racial and ethnic pluralism, loosening of sexual morality, feminism, etc. — is attracted to authoritarianism and disdainful of democracy, and finds leaders who can take them right over the edge into the future of which they had perhaps only begun to dream.
Politics is about emotions and stories. What narrative and mythology have those on the Christian right created about the United States and their relationship to it?
The story is that America was a great nation, founded by Christians as a Christian constitutional republic, which lost its way and needs to be made great again. What they really mean is that America was founded by white Protestant Christian men as a white-dominated quasi-democracy (with slavery and then segregation, which to them was perhaps unfortunate but doesn’t change the fundamental narrative) who properly set the values and parameters of the society. Those were the good old days, ruined in the last X number of years by, fill in the blank, socialism, atheism, globalism, communism, political correctness, critical race theory, liberalism, wokeness, feminism, immoralism, Democrats, etc. Now we are in a cosmic fight to the finish between the rightful leaders and vision of the society and those who have hijacked it.
One of the great challenges in this moment of political and social crisis is that the Christian right, like “conservatives” more broadly, do not believe in facts, evidence, consensus reality and verifiable truth claims. They engage in magical thinking, driven by ideology and raw power, in a reactionary project to remake American society. You can’t argue facts, data and evidence with those who are possessed by religious politics. That is a source of great frustration for many self-described liberals and centrists who have deluded themselves into believing that the truth and good policy will win out in the end.
The susceptibility to QAnon-type conspiracy theories on the right reflects the geographic ghettos and echo chamber in which many of these folks live. I lived in small-town west Tennessee for 11 years and it helps me understand this phenomenon. There are huge numbers of pious white Christians who live and move exclusively in 99% white Christian enclaves — home school or church school, fundamentalist or evangelical churches, school curricula, publishing houses, magazines, friendship circles, entertainment outlets, social media subcultures, Fox News and OANN, etc. The subculture extends onward to colleges and seminaries and professional schools in the conservative Christian world.
Utterly alienated from mainstream culture and mainstream higher education and scholarship, which is often viewed with suspicion, these people live in an information bubble in which their version of reality is constantly repeated and reinforced. I view House Speaker Mike Johnson as a garden-variety Louisiana outgrowth of this subculture. People with his views are a dime a dozen all over the South.
Everything, EVERYTHING, in politics can be traced back to the rich evading taxes and regulation. The culture war issues allow politicians and the media to focus on what their corporate donors and owners do NOT want the public focused on. Simple as that.
“So there is no equivalence or symmetry between the ways that the right and left make claims of counterfeit victimization. Broadly speaking, progressives have identified with victims and fought to defend and care for them. Modern conservatives like Trump and Carlson, however, are basically propagandizing when they position themselves and their audiences as injured parties in order to justify anti-democratic and xenophobic measures aimed at seizing, holding and expanding their power. Their aim isn’t to defend victims, but to stir up a mob that they hope will get rid of the democratic norms that currently provide some restraint against their political aims.”
False equivalence is the poison that will end America. The right is working for monied interests but saying they are working for the people. The left is also in many ways working for monied interests but mostly draws the line at the critical balance point of the social safety net. Mostly is all we got.
It is never talked about on corporate media that the left need only shift honestly on a very limited number of issues, and they would win all elections. All of them. But “they” will not do it and they will not discuss it. Why is that? Even a limited shift on Borders, Guns, and Gender– and the democrats would win everything all the time. But nobody in the media will say one thing about this. My view is that “corporate” is the key term. Monied interests on both sides manipulate the media to evade taxation and regulation. That is what is pulling the puppet strings, that is the wizard behind the curtain. The mixed economy, or “imbedded liberalism”, that gave America the richest middle class in the history of the world can now only be found in the “Nordic Model”, in those few Scandinavian countries that have the happiest and most prosperous populations on Earth. That train left America with the Reagan Revolution. Those few countries have kept their progressive taxation, unions, universal health care, and free tuition while we essentially cut the taxes that pay for all of that. We the people have invested those redirected dollars into offshore accounts, fleets of private jets, mega yachts, and 100,000-acre ranches…for a few billionaires. It is unraveling and the right is trying to take power permanently while they have a short window of opportunity due to demographics.
History is now rhyming with interwar Germany with the rich playing on culture war issues to put their people in power. The simple greed of the relatively tiny billionaire class could very well resurrect Fascism and what ultimately comes with it…genocide.
Ice on the Moon 