In the 1980s, in the throes of the Cold War, huddled in a Baptist college dorm room with friends, I watched the original version of the movie Red Dawn. The film portrays a hypothetical invasion of the United States by the Soviet Union.
Mouths full of pizza, we repeated some of the pulse-pounding jingoistic one-liners like a shot-down American pilot saying, “It was five to one; I got four.” And we joined the high-school-aged main characters in their school-mascot-inspired war cry, “Wolverines!” We digested the pizza along with the film’s key theme: “Hell yeah! A bunch of teenagers armed with guns and American ingenuity could outwit them commie Russians.”
Brad Bull
The original screenplay for Red Dawn was written by Kevin Reynolds. Film aficionados might recognize Reynolds as the director of several popular and/or thought-provoking films like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Waterworld and The Count of Monte Cristo. However, many might not realize Reynolds is the son of the late Herbert Reynolds, a decorated Air Force captain who did health-related research for NASA before serving from 1981 to 1995 as president of Baylor University.
However, that connection to Baptist life should not be taken to link the final product of the movie to Baptist ways of thinking. Reynolds has said he wrote the original script to be more of an art film in the spirit of Lord of the Flies — intending to prompt thought about the horror of a war on American soil.
The production company brought in John Milus — who wrote Apocalypse Now and Conan the Barbarian and was a board member of the National Rifle Association — to rewrite the script into a popcorn-munching testosterone bath. Vietnam War commander Gen. Alexander Haig served as a consultant on military strategy. The result was a film that, for a time, held the Guiness Book world record for most acts of screen violence.
Both the 1984-released Red Dawn and the 2012 remake feed one of the main philosophical underpinnings of opposition to gun control laws: Just as with the invasion of the United States by British monarchist Redcoats, defenders of democracy need to be well armed to repel an invasion of “red” communists. As Britannica quotes a since-removed article at the Libertarian Party’s website: “A responsible, well-armed and trained citizenry is the best protection against domestic crime and the threat of foreign invasion.”
The 1984 version of the film also asserted that the invasion by Russia was facilitated by illegal immigration of Cubans via Mexico. Thus, the film helped erect two pillars of MAGAism: worship-level love of guns and militant fear of immigrants.
Women dressed as “handmaids” lined the plaza in front of the Reflecting Pool on the Naitonal Mall in 2019. (Photo by Sam Sweeney / WJLA ABC 7)
The Handmaid’s Tale
In 1985, a year after the first release of Red Dawn, Canadian Margaret Atwood published her novel The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian portrayal of a United States overrun not by foreign invaders but by domestic Christian theocratic authoritarians. Atwood was speculating on the logical conclusion of Jerry Fallwell’s Moral Majority facilitating the full expression of Gary North’s vision of a theonomic government.
It was the first piece of fiction I read upon graduation from seminary in 1992. Amidst the pain of the story, I remember the excitement I felt when I read Atwood’s description of Baptists as opposing the oppressive authoritarian government of Gilead. I said out loud, “Yes! She knows her Baptist history!”
Tragically, the post-1979 Southern Baptist Convention along with independent Baptist Jerry Falwell took the historic identity of Baptists and turned it inside out, backward and upside down before feeding it through a shredder and then burning it.
“I read his comment in the paper three times and couldn’t believe it was made by a Baptist.”
In 2001, when I spoke against my community requiring the exclusive posting of the Ten Commandments in government buildings, one of my relatives said a member of her Episcopal church asked if I were really a Baptist. The person said, “I read his comment in the paper three times and couldn’t believe it was made by a Baptist.”
Last month, Baptist News Global published an article I wrote about conscientious objection. It was shared on the social media page of Roger Wolsey’s book Kissing Fish: Christianity for People Who Don’t Like Christianity. One of the readers in that thread said, “Wow, and this is from the Baptists. … I know there are different Baptist denominations, but I’ve never thought of them as rabble rousers.”
Roger Williams
I was reminded how one of my former Baptist university religion professors responded back in 2001 when I told him about the person’s disbelief that I was Baptist: “Oh my. How sad that we are no longer associated with one of our distinctives” as rabble rouser promoters of separation of church and state.
Today, rather than being known for promoting a civil state providing freedom for all, Baptists are more associated with what they oppose and for limiting freedom. Take, for example, a Reddit thread where someone expresses surprise about the portrayal of Baptists in the TV series The Handmaid’s Tale, where the part of the theocratic state of Gilead — based in Washington, D.C. — requires women to be stay-at-home moms and is executing homosexuals:
I know this is only mentioned like once in the show, but I found it interesting that Baptists specifically were mentioned as resisting Gilead. … Baptists? Evangelical, oft too conservative, LGBT non-affirming. Baptists are the ones that can’t integrate into Gilead?
Since so many Baptists themselves don’t know the history of how early Baptists promoted passage of the Bill of Rights, we can’t blame non-Baptists for not knowing this history and for having a hard time imagining it based on how a majority of contemporary Baptists behave. Tragically, just like a genetic predisposition to alcoholism, the seeds for the demise of any entity usually lies within itself if the worst within itself is given expression.
Worried about what they saw as liberal teachings at Baptist universities and seminaries, the late Judge Paul Pressler along with Paige Patterson held their now infamous meeting at Café du Monde in New Orleans. They realized procedural loopholes would allow a systemic purge of the Southern Baptist Convention, turning it from a denomination focused on Christian proclamation in word and deed to a denomination shrinking in numbers but exploding as a political monolith focused on promoting secular power. This was aided by a pew population that was so bored by highly intellectualized sermons from the left that they were easily lured by the passion more typically associated with conservative preaching.
The 1985 SBC annual meeting in Dallas, which registered the highest attendance in denominational history.
SBC and MAGA
As the nation’s largest Protestant denomination has gone, so has gone our nation.
“As the nation’s largest Protestant denomination has gone, so has gone our nation.”
Using a Pressler/Patterson-like playbook, MAGA’s forebears accumulated power first through gerrymandering and now through the soured musk of nonconstitutional eschewing of checks and balances and of due process. Thus, the MAGA brand of conservativism is imposing the will of a large minority on an enfeebled small majority.
The documentary God & Country shows how this transpired and the fruit it has yielded that tastes sweet to its fans who are oblivious to its Sleeping Beauty poison. As with Southern Baptists, an American population bored with dull academic liberalism has been lured by flashy showmanship. And the seeds of this demise were within the very showmanship that first helped temporarily diffuse one of freedom’s greatest threats: the Soviet Union.
The 2024 movie Reagan depicts how a Soviet intelligence officer tried to raise alarms about Ronald Reagan, whom he foresaw might be a long-term threat to the Soviet Union. His warnings were ignored. Former Soviet KGB agent and current Russian dictatorial president Vladamir Putin resents the subsequent demise of the Soviet Union brought on by an American film actor. Putin wants to restore it.
History will show what Elon Musk’s AI chatbot already suggests: Russia successfully found a way to invade the U.S. not with guns but with the Trojan Horse of another showman. Having learned from the power of an actor opposing them, they nurtured a showman as an asset, empty of any of Reagan’s substance but full of enticing promises of the “good ol’ days.” However, the actual goal is not Mayberry but to turn the U.S. into an authoritarian Russian ally where oligarchs can thrive while the general population supports them like the hives of drained bodies in The Matrix.
Thus, without firing a shot, a Trojan Horse infiltration in the form of Red-capped Don has left a Soviet-style asset holding all the U.S. government’s military personnel and weapons. The fact that Red Dawn’s final-draft writer, Milus, ardently supports Donald Trump could hardly be more dark in its irony. The tremendous difference between Reynolds’ original script and what Milus recrafted should be a warning for how stories often don’t turn out the way we thought they would — especially when profit becomes the main goal over character.
The question now is this: How will Christian progressives who have scoffed at the need to arm civilians against foreign invasion be able to join with anti-MAGA conservatives and combine their American ingenuity to nonviolently purify an authoritarian invasion with the true salt and light of Christ?
Rescuing democracy will be the ultimate test of either American progressives’ uncomfortable accommodation of conservative hawkishness in the fashion of Red Dawn Wolverines or their true commitment to nonviolent resistance. While I’ve never heard of vegan wolverines, it appears pescatarian penguins can be pretty pernicious to plutocrats. Ultimately, the response must be guided, as ever, by two questions: What would Jesus do? What will history say?
Brad Bull graduated from high school in 1984. His senior thesis was on George Orwell’s novel with that year as the title. His father often read assignments along with him. Upon finishing 1984, his father threw the book across the room, disgusted that Winston had been successfully brainwashed by Big Brother.
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Justice sated in The Handmaid’s Tale | Opinion by Julia Goldie Day
Welcome to Gilead | Opinion by Susan Shaw
It’s 1984 in Texas | Opinion by Terry Austin