At first blush, Casey Means seems like the last person Christian conservatives would want as the Surgeon General. Donald Trump’s new pick for the nation’s top doctor, though she does not have a medical license, favors the occult-speak popular in the “wellness” influencer world where she makes her money. As Kiera Butler and Anna Merlan at Mother Jones documented, Means veers “in a more New Age direction” in her “medical” writing. “Perhaps the body is simply the material ‘radio receiver’ through which we can ‘tune in’ to the divine,” she mused in her October newsletter, where she also speculated about “the vibration of humanity” and how the “future of medicine will be about light.” In another, she wrote about how she found love after she built a “small meditation shrine in my house,” performed “full moon ceremonies,” and spoke with trees, “letting them know I was ready for partnership, and asking them if they could help.”
Kennedy has a long history of embracing fake science while ignoring real science, but this is his first foray into doing it to cape for a cause that’s primarily, if not exclusively, associated with the religious right.
One MAGA influencer, Laura Loomer, did try to make hay over this, but she’s Jewish and so is largely ignored by the Christian right on matters like this. But Loomer isn’t wrong that, in the past, this behavior would get the evangelical world all worked up over the evils of paganism and witchcraft. So far, however, they’re mostly silent on the matter. That’s likely because Means is aligned with them against an enemy they hate far more than Satan: feminists. Along with her shrines-and-moons talk, Means also wrote that she had shed “my identity as a ‘feminist,'” giving up on wanting “‘equality’ in a relationship” to instead embrace “a completely different and greater power: the divine feminine.” It’s woo-woo, but ultimately no different than the message promoted by conservative Christians: that a woman’s role is as a man’s helpmeet, not his equal.
Christian conservatives know they have a branding problem. Increasing numbers of Americans in recent years are rejecting organized religion, seeing it as cruel, restrictive and close-minded. At the same time, interest in a more vague spirituality is on the rise, fueled by “wellness” influencers framing spirituality as a shortcut to worldly gains like money, fitness, and romance. The Christian right was always more interested in social control than in Jesus. Increasingly, they seem comfortable with reskinning their retrograde ideas with the aesthetics of woo-woo instead of Christianity, so long as it serves the goal of crushing social progress.
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Tucker Carlson is a good barometer of this. The internet show he started after he was fired from Fox News has an overtly Christian nationalist lean. He had Means on in September to spread lies meant to scare women out of using hormonal birth control. After Carlson falsely presented it as forbidden information with “you were not allowed to criticize the pill,” Means fired off a rapid series of lies. She compared the birth control pill to “spraying of these pesticides” and said it was “literally shutting down the hormones in the female body that create this cyclical lifegiving nature.” She said it’s a “disrespect of life” to prevent pregnancy. Unsurprisingly, while recommending other women stay perpetually pregnant for their “health,” Means appears to have no children.
The fantasy that there was some “natural” past era when people were healthier has a lot of appeal in some corners, and the Christian right is only too happy to exploit it to push a deeply anti-feminist message.
Part of the Christian right’s comfort with a pagan-esque spin on their retrograde politics is that conservative Christianity has been getting witchier in recent years. That’s due to the rise of charismatic Christianity, which has received a big boost by associating itself with Trump, who many charismatics regard as a holy figure fulfilling a prophecy. “It is a style of supernaturalist spirituality and miracle- and prophecy-based preaching that was fairly niche within American evangelicalism circa 2015,” explained Dr. Matthew Taylor, a religious scholar at the Institute for Islamic-Christian-Jewish Studies. Charismatics emphasize practices that used to be fringe in American Christianity, such as “ideas of faith healing or miracles, prophecy, and the occult/demonic forces of opposition,” are normalizing as charismatic Christianity surges, he added. Carlson, again, is a good barometer of this. He used to present as a staid mainline Episcopalian, but now he denounces that church and speaks of being “mauled by demons.”
Casey and her brother, Calley Means, are tight with Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert Kennedy, which is why she got the surgeon general nod and her brother got a position as a “special government employee” assisting Kennedy. Kennedy has exploited the false perception that he’s a liberal Democrat to bamboozle some people into thinking far-right health policies, such as slashing Medicaid, are “moderate” positions. Like the Means siblings, he’s also using his appeal to people outside the religious right as a way to launder Christian right views.
Last week, Kennedy ordered the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to “review” the legality of mifepristone, a drug used to abort pregnancies. He said this was necessary due to “new data,” which is actually a non-reviewed “study” by a Christian right organization falsely claiming abortion pills are dangerous — a “study” that was immediately debunked by experts. Kennedy has a long history of embracing fake science while ignoring real science, but this is his first foray into doing it to cape for a cause that’s primarily, if not exclusively, associated with the religious right.
But it works for him because his “MAHA” slogan — short for “Make America Healthy Again” is based on the lie that Americans were healthier in the era before public health interventions like vaccines. That notion fits nicely with the long-standing, false Christian right claim that American women were better off before the pill was invented or abortion was legalized. It’s all lies. In 1950, life expectancy for women was 71 years, and it’s nearly 80 years now. Similarly, maternal and infant mortality declined throughout the 20th century, in large part because of contraception and legal abortion. But the fantasy that there was some “natural” past era when people were healthier has a lot of appeal in some corners, and the Christian right is only too happy to exploit it to push a deeply anti-feminist message. Certainly, the “tradwife” trend on social media, which ties a naturalistic aesthetic to patriarchal gender roles, is part of this larger MAHA rebranding of the Christian right.
Nor are Christian conservatives merely riding the coattails of charlatans like Kennedy or the Means siblings. In January, Politico reported that Christian right groups are using “MAHA” packaging to claim that abortion pills are a water contaminant and must be banned under anti-pollution laws. “This is not because the environment was my first weapon of choice — it’s because it’s the one we have now,” Kristi Hamrick, the vice president of Students for Life of America, admitted. “And, frankly, I’m for using the devil’s own tools against them.”
By “devil’s tools,” she means laws keeping air and water clean for living, breathing human beings, including the babies Christian conservatives falsely claim to care about. But lying is also a “devil’s tool,” and lying is very much what is going on here. There is not a shred of scientific evidence that women who miscarry at home from abortion pills and flush their very early pregnancies are contaminating the water supply. That thinking is more magical than scientific, as if the perceived “sin” of abortion could somehow transmit itself through water. But it’s not surprising that anti-abortion activists think they can sell this nonsense in the RFK era, where “vibes” and conspiracy theories are replacing science-based medicine.
