Last week, during Donald Trump’s Joint Address to Congress, I noticed, for the first time, the fasces on each side of the podium. The fasces is an ancient symbol dating back to he Etruscans and Rome. Fasces consists of a bound bundle of rods and an axe. You can find fasces, just like swastikas, in various places. When walking around Washington D.C., you can find them on the Lincoln Memorial, all around the US Capitol, including the rotunda, at the Washington Monument, and elsewhere. Within the context of their use across the nation’s capitol, the fasces represent the strength of the states working together, the bound wooden rods. However, the fasces, as well, served as the origin for the National Fascist Party in Italy and elsewhere, but unlike the swastika, it continues to appear in iconography in various governments, partly because it had been used in various iconography before World War II.

As I watched Trump approach the dais in the House of Representatives, flanked by J.D. Vance and Mike Johnson sitting behind him, I noticed, for the first time, the fasces on the wall. What became, for Benito Mussolini, the symbol of fascism, glared through the screen as direct fascism and Christian fascism took center stage. I have written, extensively, on fascism in the past and its current iterations, and seeing it there, within the context of Christian fascists such as Vance and Johnson and within the context of authoritarianism and fascism such as Trump, leaped out, especially when Representative Al Green of Texas stood up to the misrepresentation of facts at the start of the speech. Green spoke out when Trump claimed he had a mandate from voters (he only won the popular vote by 2.3 million votes), and Green let the people know about the administration’s plans to cut Medicaid. Johnson immediately issued a warning then had Green removed from the chamber. The image of Green speaking up, as he points his cane in the direction of the dais, sums up so much of this current moment.

Before ejecting Green, Johnson stood behind Trump, shaking his head as Vance made a motion with his thumb to throw out Green. The Republican side of the chamber vociferously screamed “USA! USA!” Eventually, Johnson asked the Sergeant at Arms to remove Green, and following the speech, Johnson told reporters, “He’s made history in a terrible way.” The entire episode, as Bradley Onishi and Dan Miller point out in their latest weekly roundup episode for Straight White American Jesus, points out the confluence of political fascism and Christian fascism, an eerie echo of the confluence of Catholics and protestants in Nazi Germany during World War II and the Holocaust. As the Nuncio says in Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy, a 1962 play about the ways that the Catholic and protestants churches worked with the Nazis, “Fascism is invincible only with us, when it stands with the church and not against it.”

What we see today has historical precedent, and while we look, at times to Germany and elsewhere for that precedence, Onishi reminds us that we need to look internally, at our own history, not beyond our borders, for the precedence of this current moment. Onishi notes that Green stood up, and in his defense of medicaid, told those on the dais that they cannot abandon the poor, appealing to their Christian “ideals.” He continues, “And the Catholic Vice President and the Baptist/New Apostolic Reformation Speaker of the House, saying to them, ‘You cannot abandon the poor,’ and he was thrown out.” Onishi concludes by saying we might be Germany in the 1930s or Russian the late 1990s or Orban’s Hungary, “but when you watch a Black Baptist from the NAACP be censured for standing up to a white supremacist president, a Nazi sympathizing VP, and a spineless speaker who uses piety as a weapon against the vulnerable, . . . unfortunately this is the most American thing I can think of. This is an us problem. This is the America of the 1870s, the 1950s, and the 1980s.”

We know that the Jim Crow laws inspired Hitler and the Nazis. We know that “Christians” supported white supremacists violence during Reconstruction and segregation. We know that “Christians” supported slavery. Frederick Douglass, in his 1845 narrative, asserted, “Of all the slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and bassest, and most cruel and cowardly, of all others.” William Apess (Pequot), in “The Increase of the Kingdom of Christ” (1831), proclaimed, “[Has] not the great American nation reason to fear the swift judgments of heaven on them for nameless cruelties, extortions, and exterminations inflicted upon the poor natives of the forest? We fear the account of national sin, which lies at the doors of the American people, will be a terrible one to balance in the chancery of heaven. America has utterly failed to amalgamate the red man of the woods into the artificial, cultivated ranks of social life.” Douglass and Apess both, in the early years of the Republic, point out the hypocrisies at the root of the nation’s founding.

Douglass, in his 1852 speech What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, directly called oout Christians who proclaimed Christ’s love yet adhered to the Fugitive Slave Law and to the continued enslavement of their fellow human beings. Douglass says, “The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a by word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union.” Like Douglass and Apess, I could go on and on pointing out the inconsistencies between the ideals of the nation and how the nation practices those ideals. I could detail violence during Reconstruction. I could detail anti-Chinese immigration laws and Ozawa v. United States (1922) and Japanese incarceration. I could detail the fact that Ross Barnett, the segregationist governor of Mississippi, taught Sunday school at First Baptist Jackson. I could go on and on, but I won’t.

Onishi is right, “This is an us problem.” This problem has spread its roots deep into the foundations of this nation. It has baked for decades in the crucible of the nation. We must face this problem. We must look at ourselves. We cannot gaze at ourselves in the mirror and say, “I ain’t gonna deal with it.” We cannot kick it down the road and leave it to the next generation. We’ve done that too much, and we can’t continue to do let the roots spread. As Lillian Smith says, “and people could change anything . . . if they really wanted to. . . . If they really wanted to. . . .” We must want to change. We must have the desire to move forward, even if others constantly struggle against progress. We must bring them along with us. We must not leave them behind because they are our family, our neighbors, our communities. Yet, we must want a better future, and part of that is recognizing our own selves and history.