Mind Dump

What foreign invader are Christian Nationalists fighting against though?

Non-white Immigrants.

US Christian Nationalism extremism is far more fruitful to compare to something like the South African Apartheid than an extremist fundamentalist resistance group.

The Boers were obsessed with segregation because it enabled a small number of white plutocrats expansive control over the real estate of the southern end of the continent. Their biggest threats tended to come from the borders, where local peoples could align with foreign neighbors and form dissident groups. Angola, Zimbabwe, and The Republic of the Congo all ousted their colonial governments with the aid of like-minded Africans from outside their respective countries.

One of the upshots of anti-colonialism during its 70s/80s peak was the Pan-African movement - an effort by the various African states to form an EU-style unity government to secure Africa by and for its native people. This unity movement ultimately failed, as the Christian/Muslim divide and the various tribal beefs were exploited by European intelligence services to turn neighbors against one another.

And now we're seeing a rival of white nationalism across the continent, thanks to support from white nationalists in the US, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Israel. US Christian Nationalism and South African apartheid are joined at the hip, in that regard.

Comparing US Christian Nationalism to the Taliban just isn’t that instructive

I think there's one factor that ties the two together that people regularly overlook. Both modern US Christian Nationalism and Afghani Taliban conservatism are grounded in a reactionary response to local drug epidemics. In fact, both are being driven by the opium trade. And - even more notably - an opium trade that originated in Afghanistan before flowing into East Asia and the Americas.

Religious fundamentalism as a response to the social destabilization of drug abuse is a tale far longer than this entangled conflict. You find it in Hinduvista India and Russian Orthodoxy and in the post-pothead California mega-churches and the coked up cartel states of the Panama region.

In that sense, there's a long cycle of human behavior - from liberal tolerance of opening trade to economic decay fueled by cheap pharmaceuticals to reactionary border closing to economic stifling to liberal re-opening in pursuit of growth.