A relatively small but incredibly organized faction is working to turn the country into something resembling a theocracy

The two genders: men and ‘earthen vessels’

Forget everything you ever thought you knew about pregnancy: a 26-year-old congressman, who will never be pregnant himself, has helpfully stepped in to explain the process to everyone. A fetus is just like a photograph, according to Madison Cawthorn, a rightwing congressman from North Carolina. During an anti-abortion speech on the House floor last week, Cawthorn proclaimed that having an abortion is like snatching a half-developed photograph of a sunset out of someone’s hand and ripping it to shreds. (You could almost see his brain working as he spoke: a photo develops … an embryo develops … wow, I am very smart!)

I’m afraid it gets worse. Having delivered this torturous analogy, Cawthorn (who has been accused of sexually harassing college classmates and once advised mothers, “if you are raising a young man, please raise them to be a monster”), then switched to religious rhetoric. “Eternal souls woven into earthen vessels sanctified by almighty God and endowed with the miracle of life are denied their birth,” Cawthorn declared grandly. Weirdly, a lot of women weren’t too keen on being described as “earthern vessels,” and Cawthorn’s remarks quickly caused online outrage.

Whenever women get upset about their rights being taken away by misogynistic extremists, you can always rely on a Reasonable Man™ to swoop in and explain how everyone’s overreacting. This incident was no exception: Grayson Quay argued in the Week that the women getting angry on the internet had misunderstood the biblical passages to which Cawthorn was alluding. “[I]t seems Cawthorn, a vocal evangelical Christian, was using ‘earthen vessels’ to refer not to the mother’s body, but to the body of the unborn baby,” Quay wrote. Even if that is what Cawthorn was referring to, it’s not much better is it? The separation of church and state is supposed to be a pillar of US democracy: we should all be alarmed by politicians who seem to think they are actually preachers.

Cawthorn, after all, isn’t the only high-profile figure who seems to be trying to advance a Christian nationalist agenda. Josh Hawley, a pro-Trump senator from Missouri, has spoken about the need to “take the lordship of Christ, that message, into the public realm and to seek the obedience of the nations – of our nation … to influence our society, and even more than that, to transform our society to reflect the gospel truth and lordship of Jesus Christ.”

And then, of course, there’s Michael Flynn, who served as Donald Trump’s first national security adviser in 2017. Last month Flynn made headlines by calling for the establishment of “one religion” in the US. “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion,” Flynn told a crowd in San Antonio. “One nation under God and one religion under God.”

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