All religion is toxic leading to unnumbered atrocities throughout history. In the United States the biggest threat and most toxic presently comes from evangelical Christianity.
There is ample evidence that evangelical Christianity, deeply bound up in America’s dark history of slavery, racism, discrimination, and nationalism sanctioned in law, is driving regressive politics in America. Some refer to this manipulation of political processes to secure ideology in law as Christian Nationalism. In the United States, Christian nationalism has a particular history tied to colonialism and dehumanizing the other. Early “settlers” referred to indigenous people as “heathens,” just as slavers often referenced the people they enslaved as “heathens,” dehumanizing those they subordinated, and attempting to justify their actions through religious conversion.
In recent decades, evangelical Christians have made a concerted effort to place their own into all key sectors of politics, law, and the media. The Council for National Policy (CNP) seeks to fuse fundamentalist theology with regular civic life, by reaching into media, state, and federal legislatures, state and federal executive offices, and the judiciary. The owners of Breitbart and the Daily Caller are members, as are leaders of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Members run affiliated groups that advocate for a modern segregated America “ruled by white people,” and the criminalization of LGBTQ+ people and abortion. Early CNP members included Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ronald Reagan, and the head of the Federalist Society. Current members include two of the wealthiest families in the world, Koch and DeVos (Secretary of Education under Trump, and CEO of a militant mercenary group). CNP also affiliates with proponents of so called “birthright citizenship,” who hold that America is for “natural born Americans” which is where the nationalism comes in.