Ran across this perennial social-media favorite, on Facebook, about Christian voters:

It’s a little unfair to describe them as “Christian voters,” though. Really, these are Christian nationalist voters. (Most progressive voters are also Christian. Don’t they count? Joe Biden is a Christain, for crying out loud, to the point that it annoys me.) The Christian nationalists have so thoroughly claimed the label “Christian voter” that we don’t even question it anymore.

When I was an Evangelical Christian, we absolutely believed that Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses were not Christian—hint: they are, by definition—and we looked down on Episcopalians and other progressive Christian sects, thinking them to be heretical, and just barely put up with Catholics. We really believed that we were the only “true” Christians, and when we used the word “Christian,” we meant to refer only to Evangelicals and other fundamentalists.

And when we talked about voting our conscience, we absolutely believed that meant we needed to force our religious views on others. And we characterized everything they did as them forcing their religious views on us. (Because, naturally, why would others behave any differently than we would?)

(To be fair, even when I was an Evangelical, this angered me, because I believed it was wrong for me to force my religion on anyone else. I gave others the right to live their own religious values and expected the same right in return. But when I say “we,” I refer to what I saw everywhere in my religious community. And I also feel a little shame at the fact that I did nothing to challenge them… not that it would have made even a whit of a difference.)