Nature: Christian Nationalism’s Achilles Heel

I’m not sure exactly what to call this, but there’s a moment that happens a few miles down the trail on hikes. Sometimes it happens you’ve set up camp, settled in, and you’re trying to go to sleep. You notice something not because it’s there, but because it isn’t.

The noise of the world isn’t there. You brought it with you, but there’s a point where the silence and the sounds of nature break through the shell.

The low hum of fluorescent lights, the endless ping of notifications, and the suffocating pressure to perform fall away. Your shoulders drop. Your breathing slows down. In the quiet of a pine forest or the vast expanse of high desert, your nervous system remembers something the modern world desperately tries to make you forget: you belong here, exactly as you are. You’re allowed to let go and just be.

Nature doesn’t operate on straight lines, inside rigid grids, or with factory-floor efficiency. If you look around a healthy ecosystem, you won’t find monoculture. You see old-growth trees leaning on each other, fungi weaving underground networks, and a chaotic, beautiful web of life that survives precisely because it is diverse. Every part plays a role and every part gets to be exactly what it is. No acting. No pretense. No training. Just being.

For thousands of years, people who didn’t fit neatly into society’s prescribed boxes (the sensitive souls, the queer, the intersex, the neurodivergent, and persecuted minorities) instinctively headed for the trees, the deserts, and the lonely beaches. They looked outside the city walls for sanctuary, inspiration, and connection.

Out in the wild, away from the eyes of the state and the church, they found a reality that didn’t demand an apology for how they were made. Many were able to see deeper truths and perspectives that allowed them to serve as medicine people, shamans, and trackers, becoming assets to their societies instead of outcasts.

It might seem like attacks on public lands, disposable income, and diversity are all separate problems we have to deal with. But, if you look at the history of Christian Nationalism, a more unified truth emerges. All of these things come together to present what these authoritarian whackjobs fear most: people connecting to the natural world, both outside and inside of themselves.

The Imperial Hijack

To understand why modern Christian Nationalists are so obsessed with controlling human bodies, squandering wealth, and destroying nature, you have to go back to the early 4th century.

Prior to that time, Christians were the outsiders. Belief was fluid and informal. There were genuine debates about what it meant to be a Christian, and even what the mission of Christ was. Some believed as is common now that Christ saved people from sin through sacrifice. Others believed that Christ delivered a message of liberation by knowledge (Gnosticism). There were many who believed that the mass murdering god of the Old Testament wasn’t the real god and that Christ had nothing to do with any of that.

All of this diversity and flexibility ended when the Roman Empire co-opted Christianity under Constantine. The goal wasn’t to save souls or unify the message. The goal was to make Christianity serve the empire. To rule a sprawling, chaotic territory before there were telephones and aircraft, the state needed near-absolute predictability. So, a series of emperors and their favored clergy flattened Christianity down from its free roots to create a rigid system of state control.

The model was simple: a top-down pyramid. One distant, authoritarian God at the apex, the Emperor and his state-sanctioned priesthood directly below Him, patriarchs governing every household, and everyone else locked into strict, unquestioning roles of labor and reproduction. Everyone had a place, and nobody was allowed to escape the box the Emperor had chosen for them. Fear of hell would keep most people in line. Fear of the other and the violence that entails would keep the rest in line.

This new system was designed not only to prohibit unapproved forms of Christianity. All other faiths were eventually outlawed. Women were no longer allowed to own property or leave abusive husbands. People from different social classes were no longer allowed to live together (marriage between the classes was already forbidden). Gays and lesbians now faced execution instead of acceptance and occasional lawful marriage. The transgender priestesses of Cybele (once revered by the Romans) were disbanded and forced to hide as men.

Why Christian Nationalism Needs These Rigid Structures

Ancient, pre-Christian, and Indigenous cultures worldwide—from Pueblo communities in the Southwest to Two-Spirit leaders on the Plains, Celtic healers, and global shamanic traditions—understood something the empire hated. They knew that people who existed outside standard biological or gender binaries possessed unique perceptual abilities. They were the trackers, the elders, the peacemakers, and the spiritual bridges. They were the people whose “double sight” or increased sensory sensitivity allowed them to see through rigid illusions and connect deeply with the cosmos.

Instead of fighting that variation, traditional cultures integrated it. Everyone had a place, and the whole community benefited. Cultures that connect with nature are healthier, and when people can accept their own unique natures, cultures can thrive.

These special people would go out and connect deeper with nature than most of society. They’d come back with new ideas. They’d insist that the people in their culture care for nature instead of treating it like an endless supply of wealth to be extracted. These societies were often very egalitarian in nature, with no bloody, ruthless monarch or emperor who ruled over the rest. Religious beliefs were centered in nature, not priests and holy books that most people couldn’t read.

To a Romanized state religion, however, an uncontrolled person with direct, unmediated access to truth was a threat to the state monopoly. If a person didn’t need the priest, the patriarch, or the king to validate their existence, the entire pyramid might collapse. Direct connection with nature was discouraged. Everyone was indoctrinated from a young age to see nature as “God’s creation” to make sure that nobody forgot the Emperor and their rigid social obligations during times when they might find real connection to the universe.

People are a part of nature, and the complex realities of biology are another way that nature threatens the imperial model. Christian Nationalism is always desperate to simplify anything it can so it can be more readily controlled. A society with a rigid binary system of tough, unfeeling male drones and submissive, nurturing women, set in stone from the moment of birth, makes it possible for one size to fit all.

But, nature doesn’t work like that. Some women are naturally more aggressive and competitive than others. Some men are naturally more sensitive and easy going. Some people are naturally born with a mix of male and female characteristics (intersex), brains that don’t match their bodies (transgender), or a desire to have deep romantic relationships with the same sex (lesbians, gays, bisexuals). The empire must either deny that these things exist or mercilessly crush them.

One final way that nature threatens the imperial model is that people naturally desire freedom. Nobody wants to be like a Borg drone that serves the collective and its queen. Because the Christian Nationalists don’t have the technology to implant cybernetic implants in us all and strip us of our individuality, they have to resort to other means.

To enforce this, the empire launched a centuries-long campaign of violence. They labeled liminal healers, gender-diverse elders, and independent thinkers as “heretics” and “abominations,” executing them or driving them out to secure absolute control over the human mind. Everywhere the empire spread, this oppression and dumbing down followed. After the Roman empire collapsed, European kings continued the campaign, using Christian Nationalism to bolster their own power as they expanded their colonial empires into the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

Every culture the Christian Nationalist collective encountered was forced to adapt to serve them. Here are a couple of examples:

Native American two-spirit shamans were murdered by Spanish conquistadors, who came in the name of the Roman Catholic church. After the Indian Wars, the United States and Canada implemented a system of forced schooling and cultural assimilation, with the children stolen from their parents by force. To this day, many native Americans are trying to restore their original cultures and connect with the past.

In China, it was the language that became the target of this cultural imperialism. Before the 1920s, written Chinese lacked gendered pronouns entirely, using a single character (他) to simply mean “that person.” When Chinese intellectuals began translating heavily gendered European literature, they struggled with the rigid distinction between “he” and “she.” To solve this translation problem, a linguist in 1920 invented a brand new character specifically for women (她) by swapping the traditional “person” radical for a “female” one. Early Chinese feminists fiercely protested the change, arguing that the original system was inherently egalitarian and that forcing women into a new sub-category while men kept the default “person” character was a massive step backward. Despite their resistance, the Western-style binary was permanently injected into the language, perfectly illustrating how imperial influence instinctively forces artificial gender boundaries onto cultures that never needed them.

The Monoculture vs. The Forest

Fast forward 1,700 years, and today’s Christian Nationalist movement is running the exact same imperial playbook.

Watch the rhetoric coming from political platforms and pulpit ideologues. They deliberately lump intersex people, transgender individuals, and the entire LGBTQ+ community into a single, boogeyman “ideology.” Why? Because acknowledging the simple, biological reality of human variation threatens their system of control. Women are likewise pushed under the thumbs of men, with Christian Nationalists now openly advocating for eliminating votings rights, divorce, and even female property ownership. Even straight men who are deemed too sensitive face ridicule and accusations of being part of the forbidden LGBT community.

Like an industrial monoculture crop that gets wiped out by a single pest because it lacks genetic diversity, a rigid, authoritarian mindset is profoundly fragile. It cannot tolerate nuance. If anyone steps out of place, the pyramid-shaped house of cards collapses.

When women are independent, when an intersex person lives authentically, when a trans person steps into their truth, or when a sensitive soul rejects the corporate treadmill to live simply on the open road, it proves that the empire’s rules are completely artificial. Their aggression isn’t a display of power; it’s the instinctual panic of a system that realizes its entire authority depends on keeping everyone terrified of stepping outside the box.

The Playbook of Isolation (And Why the Wild Fights Back)

Authoritarian movements know they can’t win on the facts of human nature, so they rely on a specific set of tools to keep the threat off-balance and prevent people from seeking deeper spiritual truths. They use social isolation, economic denial, and manufactured trauma to keep everyone outside of the pyramid in a permanent fight or flight state. This keeps higher brain functions dulled and spirituality outside of approved channels stunted.

When your nervous system is trapped in survival mode, you don’t have the bandwidth to stand up, build community, or challenge the system. 

This is precisely why public lands, nomadic living, and the outdoor community are fundamentally revolutionary. When you pack up a rig, hit the highway, or pitch a tent on public dirt, you step out of the sensory trap. The overstimulation calms down. The artificial shame fades under an open sky. Out there, under the stars, you reconnect with an unmediated reality, a reality that no politician, preacher, or corporate algorithm owns. 

Public lands aren’t just pretty places to take pictures; they are the physical infrastructure of human freedom. They guarantee that every single person, regardless of their income, identity, or background, has a place on this planet where they can just be. By going after public lands and indoctrinating people to associate the few gems that remain with their violent and wrathful “God”, they keep everyone in the control system.

The Forest Outlasts the Empire

History is a long trail paved with the ruins of empires that tried to force the world into straight lines. They build walls, draft laws, demand total compliance, and burn books.

And yet, despite 1,700 years of conquistadors, murderous native boarding schools, inquisitions, and modern legislation, diverse people keep being born. Nature keeps producing the sensitive, the liminal, the boundary-crossers, and the freethinkers because the Earth needs them to stay balanced. Humanity needs that diversity to survive and to thrive. Nature needs people to connect so that we don’t destroy ourselves and nature at the same time.

We all know somewhere deep inside that Christian Nationalism’s disdain for nature, freedom, dignity, and complex biological realities is wrong. Everyone, even the people deeply immersed in the hatred, are just one or two powerful nature experiences away from breaking the spell and embracing a better future.

Our job is to make sure everyone gets a chance to experience that shift.