In season six, episode seven of Hulu’s rendition of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian nightmare “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the main character experiences a gut-check moment. June, the once-enslaved handmaid turned fugitive refugee, has just been confronted with a horrific betrayal by Nick, her former lover-turned-commander in the Gilead totalitarian patriarchal theocracy.
While June and Nick’s relationship is complicated (to say the least), the truth is that Nick has always been part of the regime. He just always seemed…better than the rest of them.
In this moment, however, he reaches the epitome of “good guy turned evil.” June’s shock over learning her long-held trust in him led to the murder of several innocent women and the foiling of resistance plans is met with zero empathy from Luke, June’s always faithful, freedom-fighting husband.
June (dismayed): “I don’t know what to do.”
Luke (yelling): “Don’t fall in love with a f***ing Nazi! Do that!”
That line, delivered with perfect passion and timing by actor O-T Fagbenle, struck a chord deep in my motherly heart. At just over 100 days into the Trump 2.0 administration, I realized those words were, in essence, my deepest prayer for my daughter.
As a toddler, her entire childhood and adolescence lay in front of her, open and innocent. Lying in front of me is the aching knowledge that the damage being done by this authoritarian, xenophobic, White Christian Nationalist regime will take years, if not decades, to rectify. It will take her entire childhood, adolescence and, possibly, adulthood to recover and set things right.
It is with that knowledge I send her out into that same world every day like prey for the prevalent White Christian Nationalism to find a way to ensnare her heart. This could happen through friends she makes along the way, or indoctrination through a public school system being systematically dismantled in favor of privatized religious education. It may occur through social media, the 24-hour news cycle, or any other means from which we cannot provide a full armor of constant protection.
I recently met philosopher and critical whiteness scholar George Yancy, whose work I deeply admire. He gave a lecture entitled “The Hoax of Whiteness,” where he stated, given our political reality, White people having children must consider if what they are doing is (White) nation-building. That hit hard.
This week, I had a conversation with a fellow mom who shared that her oldest child, whom she had raised in a mainline (not evangelical, not Christian Nationalist), justice-seeking church environment, had encountered a much more conservative brand of Christianity when she left for college. As a result of her involvement with this group, she changed all her education and future career plans to become a Christian missionary to wealthy people living in another country, to people deeply steeped in their own cultural and religious traditions and values.
And then Yancy’s words came back to me: “White people having children right now must consider if what they are actually doing is (White) nation-building.” I told my friend it is becoming increasingly important that, just as Black parents must have “the talk” with their children about policing and “driving while Black,” White parents must have “the talk” about not falling prey to White Christian Nationalism.
But the truth is, it can’t be just one talk. And it can’t be just a prayer, no matter how sincere and frequent it may be.
And if my friend’s experience is any kind of example, it can’t even be just raising our kids in the kind of Christian environments that seek to live in harmony with other faiths and cultural traditions.
It must be all of those things. And it must be more.
The dystopian nightmare “The Handmaid’s Tale” fans have watched unfold for six seasons might once have seemed like Hollywood fiction, unimaginable in our postmodern democratic society. But less than four months into Trump 2.0, many Americans and global citizens alike are starting to wonder just how far into fascism our democracy might bend.
Currently, the U.S. Supreme Court is considering whether to allow public funds to support religious charter schools. If public education becomes religious indoctrination, who gets to decide what kind of religion is being taught? What choices will parents have when the Department of Education is currently being gutted by DOGE and our nation’s most vulnerable children are forced to pay the price?
Every White parent should indeed be praying that their children “don’t fall in love with fascism!”
The first step will be to do all in our power to ensure White Christian Nationalism does not become the law of the land. While we may feel powerless over much of what is happening at the federal level, pay attention to your local and state school boards. Insist that your children—that everyone’s children—maintain the right to publicly funded education free of religious indoctrination.
For those of us who consider ourselves followers of Jesus, striving to prevent our children’s hearts and minds from becoming ensnared by the false idol of White Christian Nationalism might be the most faithful thing we can do for their futures and for the kin-dom of God.
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Dr. Rebecca M. David Hensley holds a PhD in religious studies, with an emphasis in theological and social ethics. She is a member of the adjunct faculty for Iliff School of Theology and an ordained Deacon in the United Methodist Church.
