White Jesus amongst the White Aboriginals (from the Book of Mormon)

Christian fundamentalisms in the United States also present themselves as movement against social modernization, re-creating what is imagined to be a past social formation based on sacred texts. These movements should certainly be situated in line with the long US tradition of projects to create in America a new Jerusalem, a Christian community separate from both the corruption of Europe and the savagery of the ‘uncivilized’ world. The most prominent social agenda of the current Christian fundamentalist groups is centered on the (re)creation of the stable and hierarchical nuclear family, which is imagined to have existed in a previous ere, and thus they are driven specifically in their crusades against abortion and homosexuality. Christian fundamentalisms in the United States have also continuously been oriented (in different times and different regions more or less overtly) toward a project of white supremacy and racial purity. The new Jerusalem has almost always been imagined as a white and patriarchal Jerusalem. […]

The ‘traditional family’ that serves as their ideological foundation is merely a pastiche of values and practices that derives more from television programs than from any real historical experiences within the institution of the family. It is a fictional image projected on the past, like Main Street USA at Disneyland, constructed retrospectively through the lens of contemporary anxieties and fears. The ‘return to the traditional family’ of the Christian fundamentalists is not backward-looking at all, but rather a new invention that is part of a political project against the contemporary social order. (Hardt & Negri, Empire pages147-48)