How We Fight – Day 7: Right-Sizing Changes Everything

Why, despite their bluster, militant Christians are far less “Big Bad Wolf” and far more “Little Engine That Could”.

Freedom Riders, Jackson Mississippi, 1961.

“I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house down!” – The Big, Bad Wolf

“Second things second, don't you tell me what you think that I could be. I'm the one at the sail, I'm the master of my sea, oh ooh, the master of my sea.” – Imagine Dragons, Believer

There’s something almost unfathomable about how followers of Blue-eyed, Gun-toting, Make America Great Again Jesus, are positioning themselves. Not just because of how their actions are the opposite of the ethos taught by the Jesus they purport to be following – from “Blessed are the peacemakers” to “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant,” from the teaching of the Sheep and the Goats to the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Nor is it just because they’re abandoning one of religion’s core functions; to sound the alarm when our humanity is in danger of being violated. It’s because their so-called potency and power are completely fabricated. Everywhere we look, Christian militants are asserting that this election outcome, only the second time over the last 8 elections where Republicans have come out ahead in the popular vote, is evidence that they’re back, baby. It isn’t, and they aren’t. Not even close. But, if there was ever an example of a Really Big Lie (RBL) and of the kind of damage believing such lies can do, this is it.

The truth is, this faction has been shrinking like the polar ice cap for 50 years – since pop Christianity’s heyday in the ‘70s. And even then, when televangelists were what reality TV is today, they weren’t anywhere near as large as they claimed. And they knew this, despite their masterful marketing plan and presenting Jesus as a cool, long-haired, Euro-hippie. (But one that still needed you to fall down and worship him. Or, be cast into the lake of fire to burn for all eternity. Of course.)

This realization, one that led to the 1980 official launch of the religious right political strategy, was also why Pat Robertson, the effort’s de facto leader, started explaining to his fellow Southern Baptists how “a well-organized minority” could “take back the country for God”. And it’s why Paul Weyrich ( who coined the phrase “moral majority”) started teaching “democracy-gaming” to pastors all across the country; declaring that he didn’t want everyone to vote and inferring that those pastors — if they were on God’s side — shouldn’t want everyone to vote either.

And while they may be in denial about a lot of things, their shrinking membership isn’t one of them. Southern Baptists, by far the largest segment of this body, divulged that in 2019 – the year before the onset of COVID – they experienced their greatest single-year decline in membership ever, and that it was their 13th year of unbroken decline. That means, again, even by their own admission, they’ve been in decline for nearly 20 years. And I know from time as an insider, and with how congregational attendance is routinely exaggerated, that this has been going on far longer.

But, most telling was SBC leadership’s expectation-setting. They admitted that they saw no end to this numerical dwindling, that this was their future. They’re even smaller today than they were five years ago when they reported these numbers. That’s why, even after eking out every vote they possibly could, their numbers were about the same for both the 2020 and 2024 elections. And, as we saw in The Way It Is? when compared to growth in the size of the voting-age population, their turnout actually went down. Trump secured 29.4% of the voting-age population in 2020 and 28.2% in 2024.

Why is this important? Because, beneath everything they’re doing – every destructive executive order Trump is signing, every betrayal of the people by a religionized Supreme Court, every company that’s abandoning inclusion, every scapegoating of immigrants and every racist, homophobic rally is made possible by our believing of this one Really Big Lie they’ve been telling for 50 years – that it’s their party – “We’re Christians, we’re the majority and we’re coming for you.” It’s a story with four parts.

Gospel Truth

In Three Truths and a Really Big Lie, I shared how my two nieces, when they were little girls, butchered Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land by rewriting the lyrics, turning it into a hilarious, unintentional anthem for supremacy (“This land is MY land, this is not your land. I’ve got a shotgun, and you ain’t got one. And I will shoot you if you don’t get off my property. This land was made for only ME!”).

Then, there’s Goebbels, who asserted: “It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is, in fact, a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded.” Meanwhile, Hitler, in Mein Kampf, put it like this: “All effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward.” Same concept, different phrasing.

We’re Christians, we’re the majority, and we’re coming for you.

We’re Christians, we’re the majority, and we’re coming for you.

We’re Christians, we’re the majority, and we’re coming for you.

See how that works?

So, here we are, running from this faction that’s far less Big Bad Wolf and a lot more Little Engine that Could. And it seems that just about everyone’s doing it. Republicans who knew this faction was the worst thing that could happen to America went along with it because they believed they had no choice. Democrats are palling around and making nice with the same man they were just comparing to Hitler.

And, as we noted in How We Fight – Day 1: We’re Still Standing, some of the largest companies in the world are falling over themselves to dismantle the same programs they spent the prior four years building, ones that made them more diverse and more inclusive. They’re pulling out of climate consciousness initiatives and dropping support for everything from LGBTQ+ causes to voter registration drives. All because they’ve bought into this particular Really Big Lie.

We’re Christians, we’re the majority, and we’re coming for you.

But that’s the thing – they’re not the majority. They haven’t been for a long time if it was ever true. Take DC gatherings. For all their bluster, the number of people who descended on the Capitol in 2021 for what would become Insurrection Day? 10,000. The number of people who attended the 1963 March on Washington? 250,000. Damage done by these 10,000 Jericho Marchers? $30 million. Damage done by these 250,000 I Have a Dream marchers? Zero. Increasingly, militant Christians are the ideological tail, wagging the societal dog.

But, there’s simply no rational reason for this. Because, as we saw above, Southern Baptists, in 2020 were, by their own admission, smaller in number than in 2019. In 2021, they were even smaller, then, smaller still in 2022, then, the year after that, the year after that, and this year. And that’s all before getting to how, despite the clever “Moral Majority” marketing, they’ve never been a majority in this country – even back when people were flocking to see Jesus Christ Superstar the way we’re obsessed with Hamilton today.

But none of this changes if we don’t right-size our perceptions of the religious right, and even worse, the longer we allow this false narrative to go unchallenged, the bolder its proponents become, the more widely accepted this idea becomes, and before we know it, this Really Big Lie has rewritten reality. Squares become circles. And all because we accept their “givens” – the things they assert as gospel truth.

What’s Worth Fighting For

Back when I was nine, every facet of my little life changed. I went from my grandparents’ house, the only home I’d ever known, to live with 24-year-old Bernice, my birth mother (who was essentially an older sister to me), her husband, Joe, and my younger sisters and brother.

There’s no adequate way I could, in a sentence or two, do justice to how different these two households were, and the adversity I encountered in this new place, but if you’re interested, the entire second section of Me and Mary is about that phase of my life, and how Mary was my lifeline through it all. Here, all I want to say is that Joe suffered from severe mental illness that resulted in an environment marked by constant terror, explosive violence, and unpredictable bouts of cruelty.

I’d long been gone when Joe finally received the psychiatric care he needed. And that would fundamentally change him. But years prior, in my twenties, the trauma from those years caught up with me, and I had to find my own way to cope. What I remember most from that time was my dreams; how he was always larger than he actually was, upward of 15 feet tall, and adult me, still the same size I was when I was a little boy. I didn’t realize it, but simply by accepting he was as looming and powerful and unstoppable as he pretended he was, I’d actually made him such.

I knew that I was on the right track when, even in my dreams, I started right-sizing Joe, seeing him as just another guy. I think that’s why, today, I can so readily see the signs – how we need to do something similar on the societal level. We desperately need this right now. Because I can tell you from personal experience that right-sizing changes everything.

Right-sizing was in effect when little Toto pulled back the curtain and revealed that the Great and Powerful Oz was just another guy with a hot air balloon. It was at work in the Far Side cartoon where the lone hunter realized he was surrounded by a forest full of pissed-off animals. It was happening in The Color Purple, when Celie stopped calling her abusive ex-husband “Mister” and started using his actual name – Albert – and when she told him, “Until you do right by me, everything you think about is gonna crumble.”

"A U.S. Army soldier and a Chinese soldier place the flag of their ally on the front of their jeep just before the first truck convoy in almost three years crossed the China border en route from Ledo, India, to Kunming, China, over the Stilwell road." February 6, 1945. Sgt. John Gutman. National Archives

In This Land Is Your Land, I describe how Negro WW2 veterans, despite the horrific treatment they endured upon return, were forever changed by the experience and how it right-sized their view of segregationists:

Many [Negro soldiers] recounted the warm welcomes they received in places throughout Europe. Signalman Lorenzo Dufau, an African American who served on the USS Mason, spoke fondly of their group’s time off-ship in Northern Ireland; the genuine warmth of the people, the welcomes and toasts, and even the colored crew’s gratification at the good-natured teasing they took as “Yanks.” “We had to come all that way to be treated like Americans,” Signalman Dufau said nearly fifty years later, still clearly treasuring the experience.

James Jones, who served in the 761^st Tank Battalion, explained how it was the French who made a profound impact on his life. “The French had a certain kind of openness and warmth that they exhibited towards minorities that was just unexplainable. You wouldn’t know you were black when you were in their company.” These valiant men, after surviving the horrific European theatre of war, were essentially punished for what they learned; that the power of America’s white class was neither absolute nor all that dissimilar from the ideology espoused by the Nazis.

It was this sense of emancipation, this indomitable assurance of one’s personhood and dignity, this fearlessness possessed only by those who have seen the furthest reaches of the depths of inhumanity and faced it down; that these men (including Medgar, who, in 1954, dared launch an NAACP outpost right in the heart of Mississippi), brought back with them, and that made them such a threat. Like Frederick Douglass after just one day of freedom, nothing could make them turn back. And as a result, they infused the fledgling Civil Rights movement with courage.

“I see you,” their unspoken voices, their straightness of spine, and their audacity to look bigots in the eye, would say, “And I know you to be a small man. Over there, I ended men like you, and who shared your view of the world. You hold no sway over me. I see you. And I am, in every way, your equal.” Having looked behind the curtain, they’d realized something powerful; that there was no great wizard, just other insecure men turning dials, pulling levers and speaking into microphones. And that made them the most dangerous men in America.

Those soldiers returned with a sense of courage and self-affirmation that essentially jumpstarted the modern Civil Rights movement; doing so at a time when just KKK members alone outnumbered all African Americans alive by almost 2 to 1. And that courage was contagious. People started refusing to yield the sidewalk, even if that meant being arrested for “bumptious contact”. They started looking people in the eye, even if that earned them fines for “reckless eyeballing”.

And they started refusing to vacate the bus seats they’d paid for, even if that meant being pulled off, beaten, and if you were wearing a soldier’s uniform, tortured and even killed. They lived through an era where store personnel was fined for not attending to a white-identifying person first, where it was illegal for coloreds to try on shoes or clothes, or return items that didn’t fit, and where their fate was decided by a jury that didn’t believe they deserved equal rights.

And yet, they stood. Freedom riders and sit-in stagers right-sized segregation’s power by showing it wasn’t unassailable. The people from all over the country who converged on Selma, and especially the multi-ethnic, multi-faith members of the clergy, right-sized the threat of a government intent on crushing them, as did the NAACP’s statement issued after Bloody Sunday:

“If Federal troops are not made available to protect the rights of Negroes, then the American people are faced with terrible alternatives. Like the citizens of Nazi-occupied France, Negroes must either submit to the heels of their oppressors or they must organize underground to protect themselves from the oppression of Governor Wallace and his storm troopers.”

Martin was right-sizing religion when he said: “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state,” Rob Bell was right-sizing revelation when he described the Christian Bible as “an ancient library of poems, letters and stories,” and both James Brown, with Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud) and Lady Gaga, with Born This Way were using music to right-size perceptions. All of them overcame because they stayed in the fight, and because they never lost sight of what’s worth fighting for. When it was all over, they were still standing, as Elton John said, “better than they ever did.”

Taking Up the Work

Today, there’s virtually no limit to ways you and I, right now, can begin engaging in right-sizing:

• We can remind businesses that renege on inclusion that they have a lot more to worry about than online protests from a dwindling religious right;

• We can put members of Congress on notice that they should be far more concerned about the wrath of we who believe in an America for all, than followers of MAGA Jesus;

• We can do what it takes to protect people from deportation, forming a modern-day Underground Railroad and linking sanctuary cities together;

• When Congress passes laws making government IDs required in order to vote, we pass state laws that make those IDs free and non-contingent on things like legal backgrounds or unpaid tickets or outstanding fees;

• When companies charge the poor more, we stop supporting them, and when they refuse to serve LGBTQ+ customers we refuse them our business;

• When property owners take advantage of the poor by charging them fees just to submit an application, we refuse to rent from them;

• When they hold supremacist rallies, we, instead of counter-protesting, ignore them. We make them not-news;

• If law enforcement won’t police itself, we create apps that enable every person with a cellphone to police them;

• If our banks don’t offer a free, no-overdraft fee, no credit check, zero minimum balance checking account for the poor, we switch to a bank or credit union that does;

• We refuse to take out home loans with any entity that offers subprime mortgages to already struggling homebuyers;

• We support businesses that offer a livable wage to its lowest-paid workers and avoid those that don’t;

• We refuse to patronize any company whose commitment to diversity is not evident in its hiring, its leadership, its owners and its advertising;

• We can ship free contraceptives and morning-after pills to anyone in a state that limits access to such medications;

• We can publicize every company that opts out of climate initiatives and highlight every charity or religious organization that won’t hire LGBTQ+ people;

• We can offer free versions of books banned in oppressive states, including to people living in those states;

• We can pass automatic voter registration laws, and build apps that update every American of every upcoming political race that directly affects them so they can be informed participants in democracy;

• We can donate food to our local food pantry or donate money; like the UAW (United Autoworkers) did to help activists post bail and to help keep the families of striking migrant farmworkers fed;

• We can write poetry and write songs, make art and make films, share our stories and stand with those who do the same, welcome the stranger and reach out to our neighbor.

And so much more. But, right-sizing isn’t just about countering how a faction has inflated its threat or exaggerated its power. It’s about showing the consequences of minimizing and dismissing the rest of us. Malcolm X was engaging in right-sizing in The Ballot or the Bullet, when he said:

“Last but not least, I must say this concerning the great controversy over rifles and shotguns. The only thing that I've ever said is that in areas where the government has proven itself either unwilling or unable to defend the lives and the property of Negroes, it's time for Negroes to defend themselves. Article Number Two of the constitutional amendments provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.

(“I’ve got a shotgun, and you ain’t got one...”) Malcolm continued:

If the white man doesn't want the black man buying rifles and shotguns, then let the government do its job. That's all… If he's not going to do his job in running the government and providing you and me with the protection that our taxes are supposed to be for, since he spends all those billions for his defense budget, he certainly can't begrudge you and me spending $12 or $15 for a single-shot, or double-action…”

In 1965, while marchers were trapped in Selma, hundreds of students in Montgomery were met by the sheriff's posse, including Klansmen who, many, on horseback, charged them while brandishing actual whips — the kind once used on slave plantations — against them. Students refused to run, and instead, retaliated by throwing bricks and bottles.

Civil rights icon James Forman, given the lack of protection from the White House, warned that "If we can't sit at the table of democracy, we'll knock the fucking legs off." City officials, seeing where this was inevitably heading, changed course. They pulled the posse and Klansmen back, apologized for the assault and came to the table to talk, not about killing future protests but keeping them peaceful, including, for the first time ever, issuing march permits. James Forman and those students, by showing they weren’t running, were engaging in right-sizing.

But there might be no better example than the fate of Anita Bryant, who, in 1977, led a campaign to strip rights from gays in Dade County, Florida, at a time when militant Christianity’s powers were at their peak, and whose story was told in The Gospel According to Gaga. " As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children,” Anita infamously said, “Therefore, they must recruit our children." And, "If gays are granted rights, next we'll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nail biters."

After months of propaganda designed to sway a community where, at the onset, people opposed repealing the equal rights measure 2 to 1, Anita and Save Our Children succeeded. The four-month-old anti-discrimination ordinance was repealed, and Anita declared, "All America and all the world will hear what the people have said, and with God's continued help we will prevail in our fight to repeal similar laws throughout the nation."

But that’s not what happened. At all. Anita’s declaration of culture war led the LGBTQ+ community to take action. They became the very thing Pat Robertson would advance as religious right strategy a few years later — a “well-organized minority”. And they took her to task. They publicized her own words, exposed organizations that supported her efforts, and boycotted every product she helped sell.

Then, came the fallout. Companies cut ties with her, endorsements were lost, both her career and her marriage evaporated, and before long, the only appearances she could book were in fundamentalist churches. Meanwhile, the burgeoning gay rights movement was just getting started. The battle would require fighting not just the people who wanted them disappeared, but the devastation of the AIDS epidemic.

But, as we noted in How We Fight – Day 1, when the dust settled, they were still standing, again, like Elton sang, “Better than they ever did.” They refused to be shamed or go back to slinking in the shadows. Many died, but when they did, they died fighting; without apology. And in the end, they won. They shifted the consciousness of an entire nation.

They showed us the power inherent in coming out, in refusing to be invalidated, in being proud, of resilience, fortitude and perseverance — the very skills growing up in a hostile dominant culture taught them. They took up the work, doing all that with few allies and with a fraction of the power we hold. They right-sized the religious right itself.

Freeing Our Minds

Today, the only rational reason companies would abandon inclusion or politicians who disagree with this faction would go along with them is because they’re underestimating our size or overlooking our power. Or both. Either way, this simply can’t stand. Every day, from here forward, we all need to be engaged in relentless right-sizing — not just of who followers of MAGA Jesus are but who the rest of us are, and not just how companies and politicians see us but how we see ourselves.

But, when I say “right-sizing changes everything,” I don’t just mean out there in the world. I also mean within us, within our fabric of relationships. It saves everyone, even people who are exaggerating their power to get what they want. Because, the problem with imagining ourselves the big, bad wolf is that in our hubris, we end up scaling the walls of brick houses and sneaking in through the chimney, only to find we’ve landed ourselves in literal hot water.

It was John Lewis’ right-sizing of people like Elwin Wilson; people who, in the early ‘60s, had brutally beaten him for claiming his inalienable rights, that endowed him with power. Somehow, John and so many others like him, refused to take the easy way out; reducing people down to something less than human, to monsters. As such, when Elwin came to apologize to him 50 years later, John could meet him in his humanness. He didn’t discount or dismiss what Elwin had done. But he could also see that Elwin, like any of us, was more than his worst deeds.

Then, there was Elwin, who had his own right-sizing to do, including seeing past the bluster of younger members of the Klan, and, with those who were willing, engaging them in conversation about where that path had led him. John, regarding his ability to forgive Elwin and others who’d behaved similarly would say, “It’s in keeping with the philosophy of nonviolence. That’s what the movement was always about, to have the capacity to forgive and move toward reconciliation.” When Elwin died four years later, John was among those who eulogized him.

Likewise, with me and Joe. More than a decade after I’d left Birmingham, he called me up out of the blue to apologize for the things he’d done to me back then. Like Elwin, he didn’t make excuses or offer caveats. He simply said, “I’m sorry.” And I, because of the work I’d previously done to right-size him in my own heart, could meet him in his humanness, and let him know that I’d already moved on. And so could he.

Even more years later, after routing my travel through Birmingham so that I could visit Mary, who was still feeling the loss of my grandfather deeply, I met Bernice, my mother, and Joe for lunch. The three of us had the most wonderful conversation about everything from their work with people in poverty to books we’d read. When it was over, I hugged Bernice, then, Joe surprised me when he pulled me into a hug and said, in my ear, “You’re the closest I’ve ever come to greatness.” That would be the last conversation we’d ever have.

When he died a few years later, I’d think back on that moment, and how it would never have happened had I not right-sized him, humanized him, and recognized that he, just like me, was another worthwhile person trying to find their way. Right-sizing stops wrong-doing by diminishing wrong-doers’ power while still honoring their humanness.

It inoculates us against the panic and hysteria others try to stoke and prevents their rewriting of reality – turning squares into circles. It empowers us to stand against every form of injustice by stripping away any pretense of its legitimacy. And it clears the smog of RBLs polluting the air, so we can see a way forward – for all of us.

“Free your mind,” En Vogue sang, “And the rest will follow.” And those four beautiful divas were right. But that starts with us. Right-sizing, seeing through their inflations and distortions, is not only how we set things right; it’s how we make things better. Because right-sizing changes everything. Even for Little Engines that think they’re Big Bad Wolves.

Today marks Day 7 of the fight to make us into a society that works for all of us. There are 1,378 days between today and the next presidential election, and 1,453 days until Martin’s 100^th birthday. So, when do we fight? Today, tomorrow, and every day between now and then. Where do we fight? Anywhere and everywhere we see injustice occurring or oppression increasing. And, how do we fight? In every way we can.

Finally, thanks for the encouragement regarding these letters: for letting me know they make a difference. I do believe we’re on the cusp of something beautiful if only we can see it through. Keep passing along the seemingly small, immensely creative, everyday ways you’re taking up the work. It matters — because this is a battle that will be won in the trenches. And if you know of anyone who’s struggling with our current reality or wondering if we really can stand, send them this letter.

Or, better yet, talk with them. Help them learn to spot the distortions, to engage in right-sizing, and to see proclamations like “We’re Christians, we’re the majority and we’re coming for you” for what they are — propaganda.

The closing song I’ve got for you today is Imagine Dragon’s Believer, which was also the title of the 2018 documentary confronting the Mormon Church for its rejection of its LGBTQ+ members. I can’t think of a better example of right-sizing.