Lyndon Sayers, Co-Pastor, Lutheran Church of the Cross, Victoria, BC

As we hear about another wave of Christo-fascism raging in the U.S., we hear similar currents making headway in Canada too. This movements are led primarily by white Christians who are comfortable with authoritarian forms of government and will manipulate democratic institutions to bring about a society ruled predominantly by white conservative Christians.

While alarming, none of these breaking waves should be much of a surprise. I remember seeing these themes emerging while living in Lexington, Virginia for ten years including two terms of the Obama years and half of Trump’s first term. I want to relate some of my experiences living and serving as a Lutheran pastor in Virginia and some of the glimpses of Christo-fascism I saw emerging during my time there.

Lexington is nestled in the bucolic Shenandoah Valley in Southern Virginia, not far from the West Virginia border. It’s in a valley in-between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains with pristine rivers flowing through. It’s an idyllic place for hiking and paddling. It’s also home to the burial places of General Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson, two infamous Confederate generals.

As a result their graves have become gathering spots for white supremacists paying homage to what was the climax of the white supremacist project in the U.S., fighting to uphold the institution of chattel slavery. The City of Lexington had been loathe to correct the pseudo history around the veneration of the Confederate generals because it helped promote local tourism. Since I moved away in 2019 more inroads have been made in this direction including renaming the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery where the general is buried to the Oak Grove Cemetery.

Anti Racism

One thing that brought my spouse and me into direct contact with Christo-fascist and white supremacist movement was helping form a local community group called Community Against Racism Effort Rockbridge (CARE Rockbridge). The group formed in response to a local KKK group dropping recruitment leaflets on neighbours’ doorsteps in the middle of the night. The leaflet drop also doubled as a terror campaign letting us know that white supremacists were actively organizing in the area.

As a result we organized a counter-protest in a local park to bring the community together to stand against white supremacy wreaking havoc on the community. The event was a success although at least one white supremacist was brazen enough to heckle Black university students who spoke out against the hate. The reality is that the KKK organizing was not an isolated incident as many people want to believe. It wasn’t a case of a few bad apples. But rather it was a case of decades and centuries of white supremacist organizing.

The Civil War wasn’t just a thing of the past. Not just a tourism relic, but rather for some people the Civil War never ended. White descendants of Confederate soldiers and generals have been waging a guerrilla war ever since, including lynchings which increased following the Civil War as a means of undoing the short-lived Reconstruction era in which Black people won increasing freedoms. White people have waged campaigns of terror ever since and still live in denial about the reason for the Civil War, described by some Neo-Confederates as the “War Between the States” or the “War of Northern Aggression.”

Denial is too soft a word. Truthfully these folks have engaged in a relentless propaganda campaign, reimagining racist traitors like Robert E. Lee as models for leadership. Since the Confederates lost the Civil War, its architects are instead worshipped as heroes who offer lessons in how to live life. The danger is that it’s easy to laugh this off as bizarre. The reality is that these folks have been playing the long game and winning in terms of turning the Confederacy’s bitter loss into a relentless pursuit of infiltrating state houses, municipal politics, police departments, court houses, even the White House as we saw in 2016 and the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol.

Obama

Fast forward to the end of Obama’s second term, perhaps not a surprise that after eight years of the first black man serving as president there was a significant backlash in whites supremacist organizing. Donald Trump was often ridiculed by opponents not seen as a serious candidate during the candidacy process for the GOP. After he won the primaries, progressives and moderates slowly started to realize this election could potentially have a disastrous outcome, but even to the end many of us thought it wouldn’t happen.

We wrongly believed that reason would prevail and yet that was shortsighted ignoring all the inroads that had been made to prepare for that moment. Some of us woke up to a surprise with Trump’s victory. Looking back Obama’s two terms could be compared to a short-lived Reconstruction period in which progressive gains were made by Black folks and other marginalized folks only to be undone a few years later.

In the meantime in 2015, some of us in Lexington had grown weary of Virginia celebrating a holiday called Lee-Jackson Day, commemorating the two Confederate generals. It was celebrated the same weekend as Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January. Lee-Jackson Day was created as a racist backlash to the federally mandated MLK Day, the third Monday in January.

Most Southern states that had once celebrated Lee-Jackson Day had ceased its celebration. Virginia remained a holdout. Over time Lexington became home to perhaps the largest annual celebration of the Lee-Jackson holiday since both generals are buried in the town. For years white supremacist groups had been holding a Lee-Jackson parade on the Saturday morning of the MLK weekend, with around 200 mostly white men, women, and children often in Confederate uniforms marching down Main Street.

One year the organizers discovered a municipal loophole that allowed them to force the city to hang up hundreds of Confederate flags along the street to mark Lee-Jackson day. It looked like a Klan rally. While some local folks including the mayor at the time later helped close the loophole to prevent a similar situation in the future, it was clear that local leaders needed wider community support.

This and similar issues exacerbated a city and county divide, where the majority of people living in the City of Lexington stood against flying Confederate flags on public structures, many in Rockbridge County supported celebrating the Confederacy.

In response to the Lee-Jackson Parade, some of us in CARE rallied behind the idea of organizing an inaugural Martin Luther King Jr. Day Parade in its place. We applied for a parade permit before the Lee-Jackson parade group. After months of stalling by the city and an allegedly lost application, our parade permit was granted. In hindsight I have to admit I went into this naively. I did not fully appreciate how racist and violent the folks were behind organizing and supporting the Lee-Jackson Day Parade. Many of us received a crash course the fall of 2015.

Once word broke that CARE had obtained a permit to celebrate MLK in place of the Lee-Jackson Day Parade all hell broke lose. As then president of CARE, I did a string of short-form local cable news interviews. This got the message very quickly with my face and name attached to the initiative. Before long other members of CARE, including a queer Black professor, and I began getting trolled, even receiving death threats online from white supremacists. I was doxxed, with my name, contact info, and home address published online. We had to change our home phone number and began to live with the threat of reprisal from white supremacists and Christo-fascists for organizing a MLK parade. For context, organizing a MLK parade in many U.S. cities is standard fare and would barely be considered newsworthy. However in Lexington it was a different story.

Non Violent Resistance

The local police began forming a security plan together with state law officials and let us know minimal details they would be at the parade but couldn’t guarantee anyone’s safety. With the help of a union organizer, we trained our leaders in non-violent practices, not reacting to any taunting or goading from others looking to disrupt the parade. After much anticipation, the inaugural Martin Luther King Jr. Community Parade was a huge success. In a town of 8000 people we had 800+ people turn out. Anyone who had the courage to do so showed up for the parade.

While we gathered for the parade at Randolph Street Methodist Church, a historically Black church, the Lee-Jackson Parade folks gathered at a local gun shop to erect a giant Confederate flag. In the end they had to remove the flag because they hadn’t applied for a permit for the flag pole, which violated zoning laws. The success of the parade was considered a win and buoyed a lot of spirits.

But its success came at huge personal cost for many of us who served as organizers. Threats of violence can be mitigated when an entire community stands up together in unison. However that solidarity needs to extend beyond the day of the parade. We needed year-round support for a movement to become sustainable. There was always support for events we organized but not enough support from folks in the community checking in on organizers and offering to shoulder some of the load.

The summer following the first MLK parade, white supremacists gathered at the University of Virginia in nearby Charlottesville, the closest midsize city up the interstate. These rallies were covered worldwide with young white men wearing white polo shirts, marching with tiki torches, chanting the Nazi slogan “you will not replace us.” These smaller rallies were followed that August by a much larger rally in Charlottesville that led to violent clashes that left one woman dead and many people brutally attacked and traumatized.

Around this time the City of Charlottesville underwent intense public debates about whether to remove Confederate statues revering Confederate generals. Statues that had been erected by white supremacists as a propaganda campaign following Reconstruction in order to rehabilitate the image of racist traitors. It was another reminder that local leaders and institutions needed significant local and national support standing up against white supremacy. These cities had mostly ignored their racist pasts but could no longer with increased attention and white supremacist organizing.

Those of us with CARE organizing a second MLK parade became aware of a couple things. One was that it would be incredibly dangerous trying to hang onto the Saturday date for the parade. Christo-fascist groups armed with handguns and assault rifles made their presence known both in Charlottesville and passing through Lexington, reminding us they were around. We made our point the first year and the Lee-Jackson Parade folks got back their usual parade time slot. We arranged to celebrate the MLK parade on the MLK Monday which felt safer, two days later than the white supremacist event, with less chance of a physical confrontation with violent groups.

Also post-Charlottesville the local police switched tactics. Rather than taking a low-key approach with plain clothes officers they decided to place a uniformed officer on nearly every street corner during the parade to help ward off a domestic terrorist attack as had happened in Charlottesville. Even a full-size dump truck was position as a buffer in the parade staging area beside the church where we gathered, to help prevent someone using a vehicle attacking those marching in the parade.

Nevertheless Virginia is an open carry state and nothing prevented people from carrying handguns or even assault rifles along the parade route. Thankfully we were able to hold another successful parade. Although post-Charlottesville we were all weary about the threats of violence. The reality is that white supremacy organizing showed no sign of slowing down especially with Trump as president.

These years in Virginia served as an unexpected boot camp for community organizing. I will admit I didn’t fully realize what we were walking into. However I value the experience and insights I learned during my time in Virginia, including lessons how to build community support and push back against Christo-fascism and white supremacy in our communities.

In my followup to this article I would like to articulate ways in which we can look to some of these current, in the U.S.A. and help us interpret and understand how they are at work in Canada as well. The danger is assuming what is unfolding in the U.S. isn’t already at work in Canada as well. However, working together we can work towards building more loving and inclusive communities together.

Part 2 in future issue of ICN.