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Nehemiah Scudder

Nehemiah Scudder stands at the intersection of Robert A. Heinlein’s biography, his politics, and current controversies about Christian nationalism. Inside Heinlein’s Future History, Scudder is the hinge on which the United States turns from a messy democracy into a theocratic dictatorship. He begins as a backwoods evangelist, not a general or party boss. Heinlein later described him as a mix of John Calvin, Savonarola, Judge Rutherford, and Huey Long — sharp theology, moral ferocity, populist demagoguery, and the gifts of a stump politician.

Crucially, Scudder’s influence was not national until a wealthy widow dies and leaves him enough money to build a powerful media operation—originally a TV station, which functions in the story roughly the way moderns now talk about a national cable or streaming platform. Mass communications plus a population craving certainty equals a path to power. He’s elected President in 2012, and by 2016 elections simply stop; the United States has effectively become a “Prophet-ruled” theocracy. The regime mixes scriptural language with federal law, uses torture on dissidents, and polices sexuality ruthlessly—while also being technologically competent enough to maintain a modern security state.

Both the fictional scenario of Nehemiah Scudder and the real-world 2025 situation involving Donald Trump center on allegations of sexual exploitation and the immense political fallout from those claims. Scudder's scandal was a state-sanctioned system of sexual slavery. The "Virgins" are women conscripted for the express purpose of sexually serving the dictator Nehemiah Scudder. This exploitation is a foundational and open secret of his tyrannical regime. The Trump allegations, as of November 2025, centered on knowledge and association. The crisis was ignited by newly released emails from Jeffrey Epstein's estate in which Epstein himself claimed that Trump "knew about the girls" and had "spent hours" with a victim. The scandal is not that Trump created the trafficking ring, but the allegation that he was aware of it and is now trying to conceal his connection.

The Prophet Scudder's abuse of the "Virgins" is a key symbol of his regime's corruption. This reality helps galvanize a revolution, and in the end, the "Virgins" themselves reportedly turn on him, leading directly to the collapse of his government. The Trump allegations created a severe political crisis with the potential to destabilize his presidency. The current situation involves an intense, public political battle, with a bipartisan effort in Congress to force the release of the "Epstein Files" against the White House's wishes. This has created a major rift within the Republican party and threatens to erode his political support.

Scudder's regime was a theocratic dictatorship that maintained power through total control of information, propaganda, and the violent suppression of dissent. The scandal is "secret" only in that no one is allowed to speak of it and survive. As detailed in numerous reports, the Trump administration engaged in an "intense pressure campaign" to stop the full release of the "Epstein Files." This has included direct lobbying of congressional members, reported "vague threats" to Republican holdouts, and procedural delays in Congress to prevent a vote. This effort to keep the files from being released is the central focus of the current political conflict.

The novella If This Goes On— is actually about the eventual overthrow of Scudder’s successors, the way a Freemason-inflected underground movement restores a constitution designed to maximize personal liberty and limit future prophets. From Heinlein’s own afterward and later commentary, we know he saw Scudder not as uniquely “Christian” but as one type of fanatical, totalizing ideology. What makes Scudder specifically American, though, is that the ideology is rooted in Protestant revivalism and in what Heinlein calls “a latent deep strain of religious fanaticism” in the United States—something he thought had burst out periodically throughout American history and could, under the right conditions, seize the state itself.

Heinlein’s Nehemiah Scudder and Gilead (from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale) are two distinct but related visions of how an American theocracy might arise, what form it might take, and what aspects of American culture make it possible. Although Heinlein wrote decades before Atwood, the two authors are circling around the same underlying anxiety: that the United States contains within itself a set of cultural, religious, and political tendencies that could be exploited by a charismatic religious movement and turned into a regime that fuses scripture with state power. Both Gilead and Scudder’s theocracy are warnings, not fantasies. They are examinations of an American fault line — one that runs through revivalist religion, gender politics, nationalism, and the perennial human hunger for certainty.

Heinlein’s Nehemiah Scudder predates Atwood’s work by more than forty years, and in many ways he predicted the conceptual blueprint for Gilead. Scudder is, in Heinlein’s own description, a revivalist preacher with the charisma of a televangelist and the ruthlessness of a political demagogue. His rise to power is tied directly to the emergence of mass media; he becomes dangerous only once he gains access to a national broadcasting network and the funding to turn religious fervor into political machinery. His vision of America is explicitly patriarchal, rigid, punitive, and premised on obedience to “God’s chosen leaders.” The result is a theocracy that abolishes elections, outlaws dissent, and treats sexual morality as a domain in which the state must intervene with absolute authority. Scudder does not merely corrupt religion or politics—he fuses them into a single system. Under him, the political order is the religious order, and obedience is framed as sacred duty.

Heinlein’s life and times

Robert Anson Heinlein was born in 1907 in Missouri and came of age in a United States that was still rural, Protestant, and deeply confident about its destiny. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1929, served as a naval officer, and only turned to writing seriously after being medically retired from the Navy in the mid-1930s. His formative adult years were the Great Depression, the rise of European fascism, and World War II—exactly the period when mass politics, mass media, and totalizing ideologies were showing how fast a modern state could slide into dictatorship.

Heinlein started selling fiction just before World War II. “If This Goes On—” was written in 1939–40, when the dictatorships of Hitler, Stalin, and Franco were very real concerns, and American politics was full of arguments about “demagogues on the radio” and revivalist preachers with national followings. The figure of Nehemiah Scudder — an obscure preacher who, with money and mass media, becomes President and then “First Prophet” — is Heinlein’s very 1940s way of asking: What if America got its own fusion of televangelist, dictator, and populist strongman?

Heinlein’s politics were famously complicated and shifted over time. Early on he had some New Deal–ish and even mildly socialist sympathies; later he leaned more libertarian and hawkish, especially during the Cold War. But if there is a through-line, it’s his obsession with individual liberty and suspicion of concentrated power, whether that power wears a uniform, a party badge, or a clerical collar. That’s what makes the Scudder theocracy so vicious in his Future History timeline: it sacralizes state power. The regime in If This Goes On— uses religious authority to justify torture and suppression, precisely the sort of thing Heinlein associated with the worst of European totalitarianism.

Heinlein himself never actually wrote the story of Scudder’s rise (“The Sound of His Wings”) or the earlier failed resistance (“The Stone Pillow”). In the afterword to Revolt in 2100 he openly says he disliked Scudder too much to spend more time in his head and that real life contained enough tragedy already. That’s a revealing note: Scudder was meant as a warning, not as a power fantasy.

In 2025, Heinlein’s reputation rests more on a handful of big, culture-shaping novels, notably Starship Troopers (1959), famous both for its militaristic civic ethos and for the decades-long argument about whether it’s a paean to militarism, a warning about it, or both. Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) was the story of Valentine Michael Smith, the human raised by Martians who returns to Earth and starts a quasi-religious movement, has become one of the iconic SF novels of the 20th century. It coined “grok,” explored sexuality and alternative religion, and was embraced in the 1960s counterculture. And The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966) is a libertarian touchstone about a lunar penal colony’s revolution, often cited by tech and space-colonization enthusiasts. Heinlein is recognized as one of the “Big Three” of classic American science fiction (with Asimov and Clarke), and he racked up multiple Hugos and retrospective Hugos not just for the big novels but also for novellas like If This Goes On—.

In the last decade or so, there’s been renewed interest in Heinlein because many tech and space-industry figures openly cite him. A recent piece in Le Monde walks through how Elon Musk borrows language and concepts from Heinlein—especially Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress—as a kind of ideological scaffolding for Mars colonization, individualist heroism, and distrust of government.

That’s a good example of how Heinlein’s work is now read: not just as retro SF, but as a reservoir of political and cultural tropes still being mined by very contemporary actors. So: in the public eye, Heinlein is now best known less as “the guy who invented Nehemiah Scudder” and more as: The novelist who made SF feel grown-up and politically charged; the source of a lot of libertarian, militaristic, and countercultural imagery; and a writer whose worlds are still being debated because they resist being pinned to a single ideology. But Scudder remains one of the sharpest distillations of his worry about religion fused with state power.

Heinlein’s Future History

Heinlein’s Future History is not a single novel, nor even a tightly plotted series. It is a meta-framework — a fictional historical timeline stretching from the mid-20th century to several centuries into the future. Heinlein had a habit of treating speculative fiction like architecture: he wanted his readers to feel that each story existed inside a coherent political, technological, and cultural evolution. He originally drafted the timeline for Astounding Science Fiction in 1941, and several later stories were retrofitted into it.

Robert A. Heinlein’s Future History is best understood not as a conventional series but as a vast conceptual framework—a sprawling, centuries-long imaginary chronology in which dozens of short stories, novellas, and novels are set. Heinlein did not simply write one future; he engineered a timeline. At its core, the Future History is about how American political culture, technological change, and human values evolve under pressure. It is a fictional history of humanity’s next several hundred years, beginning with recognizable mid-20th century America and ending with a mature, spacefaring human civilization that has left Earth as just one world among many.

The earliest part of the Future History corresponds more or less to Heinlein’s contemporary world, a United States that is comfortable, patriotic, and democratic on the surface but shakier underneath. Heinlein portrays a society undergoing strains that are social, technological, and spiritual. Mass media is transforming how Americans understand authority; inequality and dislocation are creating fertile ground for demagogues; and a rising corps of charismatic religious broadcasters is filling the airwaves with simplistic, apocalyptic certainties. This environment is where Heinlein seeds the origins of Nehemiah Scudder, the backwoods preacher who will eventually become the first Prophet of the United States.

Following the fall of the theocracy, the United States enters a radically reconstructed phase, shaped by what Heinlein imagines as the collective trauma of authoritarian rule. This new republic is intentionally decentralized, libertarian in orientation, and constitutionally fortified against any future merger of church and state. Power is fragmented; term limits are strict; freedoms are maximal; and suspicion of centralized authority becomes a cultural reflex. This post-Prophet society encourages entrepreneurial innovation and scientific advancement, setting the foundation for humanity’s expansion into space. Heinlein imagines that the memory of tyranny makes Americans acutely sensitive to potential overreach, leading to a culture where technological pioneers, inventors, and private space entrepreneurs play an outsized role. In this period the first lunar colonies, asteroid habitats, and deep-space mining operations emerge—not as government projects but as experiments in radical frontier freedom.

As humanity spreads into space, Heinlein uses the diaspora to explore new forms of society. The Moon becomes a bustling frontier, asteroids house libertarian enclaves, and space stations develop their own cultural norms and legal codes. Heinlein had a long-standing fascination with frontiers, and he treats space as the ultimate proving ground of self-reliance. In these stories, the “competent man”—resourceful, technically adept, morally independent—becomes the archetype of the future. Heinlein’s outer-space societies are microcosms of political experimentation: some are anarchistic, others corporate, still others quasi-utopian. What unites them is a stubborn ethos of autonomy. These societies challenge Earth’s political authority, sometimes peacefully, sometimes through outright rebellion, creating a future in which humanity’s center of gravity shifts decisively off-world. Earth, once the seat of power, becomes a cultural backwater compared to the dynamic frontier worlds.

By the end of the Future History sequence, humanity is no longer bound to Earth or its nationalisms. The timeline ultimately envisions a civilization so technologically sophisticated and widely spread that the old anxieties—religious tyranny, monolithic states, cultural rigidity—become relics of a more fragile age. Yet the shadow of Scudder lingers. Heinlein implies that the only reason humanity was able to build such a resilient, decentralized, exploratory culture was because it survived a brush with absolute theological power and learned to fear it. The Scudder theocracy acts as a kind of civilizational vaccine: a brutal lesson that inspires future generations to build better safeguards. In this way, Scudder is not merely a villain but the gravitational center of the entire saga. Without him, the Future History’s libertarian, frontier-driven universe would have no historical justification and no dramatic tension.

The Future History remains influential today because it grapples with questions that have only become more urgent. What happens when media magnifies charismatic populism? How fragile are constitutional norms in the face of religiously infused politics? What new forms of society emerge when technological change outpaces political structures? Can frontier cultures preserve liberty better than nation-states? These were speculative questions in Heinlein’s time; they are real-world debates in ours. And through the long arc of his imaginary history—from the first radio preacher to the first asteroid colony—Heinlein presents not a prediction but a diagnosis: societies rise or fall based on how they balance power, belief, freedom, and technology. That is why the Future History endures as one of the foundational works of modern science fiction—not just a set of stories, but a centuries-long argument about the human future.

If This Goes On—

Heinlein never fully narrates Scudder’s rise — though he left notes and fragments describing it — but he makes clear that Scudder succeeds because the soil is ready. Americans in this early epoch crave certainty, order, and moral revival, and they are newly reachable by mass communication technologies capable of amplifying simple messages to national scale. In Heinlein’s telling, a wealthy benefactor dies and leaves Scudder the funds necessary to build an empire of radio and television evangelism, the 20th-century precursor to the viralized, nationalistic religiosity we see in modern life.

With Scudder’s election in 2012, the United States descends into theocratic dictatorship, the darkest and most explosive turning point in the entire timeline. The Scudder era reveals Heinlein’s deepest anxieties: the surrender of civic institutions to religious absolutism, the collapse of constitutional protections, the fusion of political and spiritual authority into a single unquestionable regime, and the corrosion of personal liberty through the rhetoric of salvation. Under Scudder and his successors, elections cease, dissent is punished with torture, scientific inquiry is muzzled, and sexuality becomes a tightly policed terrain of state power. Heinlein presents the theocracy not as an aberration but as the logical consequence of a democracy that has allowed charismatic religious nationalism to rewrite the social contract. It is not theocracy masquerading as politics; it is politics redefined as divine command. Here Heinlein is working through a distinctly American fear — one that resonates sharply with modern concerns about Christian nationalism—that the same traditions that produced religious freedom can, under pressure, produce religious authoritarianism.

The novella If This Goes On— takes place almost a century into the theocratic regime and dramatizes its collapse. Through the eyes of John Lyle, a young guardsman assigned to the Prophet’s palace, Heinlein shows how totalitarian systems enforce obedience not only through fear but through sacred ritual, architectural awe, and the psychological capture of the devout. Lyle’s disillusionment is profoundly personal: his love for Judith, one of the Prophet’s supposedly holy Virgins, exposes the sexual exploitation and moral hypocrisy at the heart of the theocracy. As he flees the palace, he discovers an underground civil resistance centered around the Freemasons—an institution chosen not for its esoteric symbolism but for its continuity with the pre-Scudder republic. These Masons preserve forbidden knowledge, protect dissidents, and plan a constitutional restoration. Heinlein treats revolution not as a spontaneous uprising but as a slow, careful reconstruction of civic virtue. The power of the rebellion lies not in its guns but in its commitment to revive the civic architecture that Scudder destroyed. When the regime eventually falls, it does so more from a failure of legitimacy than from military force. Heinlein stresses that a dictatorship built on divine authority collapses the moment its followers cease to believe in the divinity of its leaders.

The story opens with protagonist John Lyle serving as a young member of the Angelic Corps, basically an elite guard force for the Prophet. Heinlein describes a palace that feels like a mix of medieval court, modern intelligence agency, and megachurch campus. The physical environment itself is propaganda: grandiose ritual spaces, constant reminders of the Prophet’s divinity, and a hierarchy that mirrors ecclesiastical authority. Politically, this illustrates:

• Legitimacy manufactured through architecture and ritual
• A security apparatus cloaked in religious symbolism
• Obedience sustained by psychological isolation

Lyle is a believer at this stage — earnest, patriotic, and spiritually sincere. Heinlein uses this to show that authoritarian systems do not rely on cynical followers; they rely on people who think they are doing good. The early turning point is Lyle’s horror at discovering how the Prophet uses the “Virgins,” ostensibly holy women dedicated to sacred service but, in practice, exploited as concubines. His relationship with one of them, Judith, pushes him to see the dissonance between doctrine and practice. Politically, this moment exposes:

• Hypocrisy as a structural feature of theocracy, not a bug
• Control of sexuality as a political tool
• The difference between private disillusionment and public compliance

The Prophet does not just sin; he uses sacralized power to demand submission. This is Heinlein’s way of showing how sexual authoritarianism and political authoritarianism are inseparable. Once Lyle and Judith flee the Palace, the story shifts tone. Heinlein describes America under the Prophet: rigid class structures, secret police, heavily censored communication, and pockets of underground resistance. This section demonstrates:

• How ideology becomes embedded in the everyday
• How dissent survives through parallel institutions
• The role of “forbidden truth” circulated in samizdat-like networks

Scenes involving clandestine meetings, encoded communications, and underground cells show how opposition movements behave under theological authoritarianism: not as organized armies but as distributed communities. Lyle’s rescue by the Freemasons is one of the more unexpected turns for a modern reader, but in context it works: Heinlein uses the Masons as a symbol of a pre-Scudder America with institutional memory of constitutionalism. Their movement reveals:

• Revolutionary legitimacy rooted in historical continuity
• Resistance as a moral, not merely political, duty
• How clandestine networks can maintain national identity under tyranny

Heinlein’s Masons are not mystical — they’re organizers, educators, printers, engineers, and strategists. They represent the civic backbone of a republic that the theocracy tried to extinguish. The middle portion of the story reads almost like a manual for overthrowing a dictatorship [a theme to which Heinlein returned in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress]: careful recruitment, compartmentalization, ideological clarity, and the importance of communication technology. Heinlein emphasizes:

• Revolutions succeed only when they have constitutional goals
• The danger of replacing one charismatic figure with another
• The importance of neutralizing propaganda networks

The anti-Prophet conspiracy focuses on systems — how to ensure that even victorious rebels cannot seize absolute power. This is where Heinlein’s libertarian instincts come through strongly: power must be prevented from corrupting even the well-intentioned. The rebellion succeeds when parts of the military refuse to carry out orders, and the regime’s legitimacy collapses in a matter of hours. Heinlein dramatizes a moment seen in many real authoritarian governments:

• A brittle regime that appears strong but lacks true loyalty
• A tipping point when coercion fails to work
• A revolution that succeeds because it is decentralized, not top-down

The final assault on the Prophet’s Palace is more symbolic than strategic — the real victory occurred when the regime could no longer command obedience. The closing sections show the creation of a new constitution designed explicitly to prevent another Scudder: Strict term limits; Constraints on executive power; Radical separation of church and state; and Mechanisms for decentralizing authority. This is one of the most philosophically important points in Heinlein’s writing: Freedom survives by engineering the system, not relying on the virtue of new leaders.

Nehemiah Scudder and Gilead

Atwood’s Gilead operates on a remarkably similar logic, though it focuses more intensively on gender and the reproduction crisis. The Handmaid’s Tale exists both as a pair of novels by Margaret Atwood and as a long-running television series, and each medium explores the world of Gilead in distinct but complementary ways. The original 1985 novel is a first-person account from Offred, a woman forced into sexual and reproductive servitude by a theocratic dictatorship that has overthrown the United States. Atwood’s writing is intimate and introspective, emphasizing Offred’s memories, fears, and subtle acts of resistance. The story ends ambiguously, leaving Offred’s fate unresolved and inviting readers to reflect on the power of storytelling, historical interpretation, and authoritarian control.

The sequel, The Testaments (2019), broadens the narrative by introducing multiple points of view, including Aunt Lydia and two younger women whose lives are shaped by Gilead in very different ways. This novel offers a wider perspective on how the regime operates and how it ultimately begins to crumble from within. Compared with the first book’s quiet tension, The Testaments is more plot-driven and expansive, providing answers to some of the mysteries left by the original novel.

The television adaptation, launched in 2017, begins by closely following the events of Atwood’s first book, using its aesthetic, tone, and internal monologues to capture Offred’s experience. However, after the first season, the show moves far beyond the novel, creating new storylines, characters, and political arcs. While the books tend to be subtle and psychologically driven, the show is more graphic, emotional, and action-oriented, depicting resistance movements, power struggles, and the broader geopolitical landscape around Gilead. Elisabeth Moss’s portrayal of Offred/June has been widely praised for conveying both vulnerability and fierce determination.

Gilead, like Scudder’s America, grows out of existing cultural seeds: the Puritan legacy, contemporary conservative Christianity, martial authoritarianism, and a society facing ecological and demographic collapse. Atwood is careful to explain that the founders of Gilead—men like Fred Waterford—did not invent their ideology out of thin air. They reassembled it from pre-existing beliefs and resentments already present in American evangelical and patriarchal movements. Like Scudder’s followers, the Commanders of Gilead use religion as a legitimizing language, but their core interest is power, not faith. Where Heinlein imagines a single charismatic prophet who becomes an American Ayatollah, Atwood imagines a cadre of ambitious men who use religious rhetoric as a strategy for seizing power during a crisis.

The most striking point of convergence between the two theocracies is their obsession with sexuality and gender as instruments of state control. In Heinlein’s theocracy, the Prophet keeps “Virgins” in a form of sacred concubinage disguised as religious service. Sexual purity is demanded of followers but exempted for the Prophet himself, whose conduct is shrouded in divine justification. Heinlein sees theocracy as inherently gender-stratified because it converts patriarchy into dogma. Atwood explores the same principle but magnifies it to a national scale: Gilead is constructed as a giant reproductive machine, a society designed to control women’s bodies in order to solve a fertility crisis and maintain patriarchal dominance. Handmaids are state-appropriated wombs; Wives are status symbols; Marthas are domestic laborers. Sexual control becomes a state-engineered hierarchy. Both authors grasp that authoritarian religion gravitates toward the regulation of sexuality because sexuality is one of the most intimate sites of human autonomy. A regime that controls reproduction and desire controls the future itself.

Another deep similarity lies in the use of scriptural language as political technology. Scudder’s speeches, like the Commanders' sermons, rely on carefully curated biblical references used to sanctify obedience. Heinlein foresaw an America in which religious rhetoric and political propaganda merge so tightly that dissent becomes not only treason but heresy. Atwood shows this process at its most refined: slogans like “Under His Eye” and “Blessed be the fruit” meld everyday speech with theological surveillance. In both worlds, language becomes a policing tool. Ordinary phrases turn into spiritual commands. The erosion of free expression accompanies the erosion of free thought.

Despite these parallels, the two theocracies differ in important ways, revealing the distinct political sensibilities of their creators. Heinlein, writing during the rise of fascism and in the shadow of mass-media evangelism, imagines a theocracy built around the cult of a single leader. Scudder is not merely a politician with religious backing—he is proclaimed a living Prophet, the vessel of divine will. The regime that follows him is hierarchical but centralized, and its legitimacy depends on the belief that Scudder’s authority is extra-human. Atwood, writing during the 1980s debates over Christian fundamentalism, the backlash to feminism, and the rise of the Moral Majority, presents a theocracy that is less charismatic and more bureaucratic. Gilead is not ruled by a singular prophet but by a committee of patriarchs who divide power, enforce discipline, and maintain a militarized hierarchy. Where Heinlein fears the charismatic preacher, Atwood fears the disciplined, ideologically committed political class.

The methods of enforcement also differ. Scudder’s America relies on ritualized public piety, secret police, and the Prophet’s personal cult, creating a society that is spiritually coerced and emotionally manipulated. Gilead, by contrast, is a surveillance state that uses informants, spies, and gendered violence to sustain obedience. Its cruelty is more systematic and its ideological apparatus more bureaucratic. Heinlein’s theocracy feels like a revival-tent nightmare scaled up to national size. Atwood’s feels like a militarized patriarchy descended from a corporate committee meeting gone totalitarian. Both are plausible extrapolations of American extremism, but they arise from different strands of American culture.

What most binds the two worlds together is the psychological environment that enables them. Both Heinlein and Atwood insist that theocracies succeed not because people are wicked but because they are frightened, exhausted, or desperate for order. In Heinlein’s narrative, the appeal of Scudder comes during moments of dislocation—economic upheaval, technological change, cultural confusion. Atwood’s Gilead emerges from environmental catastrophe, plummeting birth rates, and social instability. In each case, crisis becomes the justification for radical solutions, and religion becomes the language in which those solutions are sold. The underlying human vulnerability is always the same: people are willing to trade freedom for reassurance, especially when the reassurance is wrapped in sacred authority.

The resistance movements in the two universes also illuminate a shared message about the fragility of democratic institutions. In If This Goes On—, the Freemasons preserve the remnants of America’s constitutional order and plot to restore it. They are a reminder that even in darkness, alternative traditions persist, quietly sustaining the possibility of liberation. In The Handmaid’s Tale, resistance is far more fragmented and uncertain—Mayday, clandestine smugglers, sympathetic officials—but similarly rooted in the memory of a freer past. Atwood is less optimistic than Heinlein about whether the old order can be restored, but both authors affirm that authoritarianism never fully extinguishes the human impulse toward rebellion.

Ultimately, Gilead and Scudder’s America exist in dialogue across time. Heinlein imagines the theocracy as a detour—a dark interruption that teaches humanity to build a freer future. Atwood imagines the theocracy as a mirror—a reflection of what patriarchy and theological politics can become when taken to their logical end. Heinlein focuses on political engineering and the dangers of charismatic authority; Atwood focuses on gender, embodiment, and the structures of domestic oppression. Yet they are variations on the same theme: that American democracy contains latent theocratic impulses, and that those impulses can be activated under the right conditions.

Christian Nationalism

“Christian nationalism” today is a contested term, but most definitions describe a belief that the United States (or another nation) is, or should be, explicitly Christian in its identity, laws, and public life. It’s not just about personal faith or conservative moral views; it’s about the political conviction that the state has an obligation to privilege a particular Christian tradition. Recent survey work by PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute), based on more than 22,000 interviews in 2023, suggests roughly three in ten Americans fall into either strong or sympathetic support for Christian nationalist ideas, with big differences by party, race, region, and religious tradition.

Supporters are more likely to say that the U.S. should be declared a Christian nation, that laws should be based on Christian values, and that traditional social hierarchies should be preserved. Within Christian circles themselves, there’s an intense internal debate. Some theologians and pastors argue for a softer, cultural Christian nationalism (emphasizing heritage and moral order), while others warn that even “soft” versions inevitably drift toward coercion and marginalization of religious minorities.

Heinlein, of course, was not writing about contemporary Christian nationalism as we use the term. But Scudder is very clearly an imagined endpoint of these logics: what happens if “our nation must be Christian” evolves into “those who aren’t our kind of Christian have no place in public life, or even in the country.”

Mapping Scudder’s arc onto contemporary concerns provides a surprisingly clean set of parallels — not because moderns are literally “about to get President Scudder,” but because Heinlein was laser-focused on structural risks. Scudder became dangerous only when he acquires a media platform and money large enough to translate revival-tent charisma into national reach. That’s eerily recognizable in an era when religious and political entrepreneurs can build huge followings through cable networks, YouTube channels, or social-media ecosystems.

Modern Christian nationalism is heavily mediated: sermons clipped into viral videos, influencers mixing biblical language with partisan messaging, fundraising built around apocalyptic narratives. Heinlein’s worry is that once a figure commands both a religious following and a media empire, checks and balances become harder to maintain because criticism can always be framed as “persecution” of the faithful.

Scudder’s regime explicitly mixes scriptural language with statutory power: “biblical” sexual morality is enforced by secret police; dissenters are treated not just as political opponents but as heretics. That’s not so far from the more hard-line versions of Christian nationalism that call for civil law to enforce Old Testament punishments or to formally subordinate the constitution to biblical interpretation.

The crucial Heinlein point isn’t which theology is used; it’s that once the state grounds its legitimacy in a single religious interpretation, disagreement becomes treason against God. That’s the logic that makes torture and repression thinkable in If This Goes On— and it’s a logic that surfaces whenever political actors frame their opponents not just as wrong, but as enemies of God.

In Heinlein’s Future History, Scudder’s rise is tied to economic shock from “new imperialism” and space colonization, which creates massive dislocation and inequality at home. When people feel economically and culturally unmoored, a message of “return to God and order” gains power. Modern Christian nationalism often thrives in regions or communities hit hard by deindustrialization, demographic change, and perceived cultural loss. That doesn’t make the theology fake, but it does rhyme with Heinlein’s view that crisis plus nostalgia plus a charismatic preacher is a dangerous combination.

Heinlein’s theocracy obsesses over sexual control: the Prophet’s “Virgins,” the policing of desire, and the use of sexual purity as a political litmus test. That anticipates how modern religious-political movements often center their energy on questions of gender roles, LGBTQ rights, and reproductive autonomy. Heinlein’s rebels don’t just want a change in leadership; they want explicit constitutional barriers to this kind of moral authoritarianism. The implication is that liberty requires structural protections against any attempt to turn personal morality into state-enforced dogma.

All that said, there are also big differences that keep “Scudder = now” from being a one-to-one map. Heinlein is writing about a full-blown theocratic dictatorship where elections stop altogether and torture is routine. That is markedly different from democratic systems, however strained, where courts, legislatures, and public opinion still impose real constraints. Christian nationalism today is not a single, unified movement with a prophet at its head. It’s a diffuse cluster of organizations, thinkers, and constituencies. Some embrace the “Christian nationalist” label; others reject it but hold overlapping views; many Christians oppose it outright and argue for a pluralistic constitutional order.

Heinlein was deliberately heightening the scenario for dramatic and didactic effect. Scudder is a thought experiment about how bad it could get if certain trends went unchecked, not a prediction that it must happen. What makes Scudder useful as an analytic lens is not that America is literally on the brink of abolishing elections, but that he dramatizes the failure modes of mixing nationalism, religion, and mass media: persecution framed as piety, dissent framed as blasphemy, and a population taught to love chains because they’re engraved with scripture.

For a modern reader thinking about Christian nationalism, Scudder is handy in three ways:

1. He forces separating personal faith from political theology. Heinlein doesn’t spend much time attacking ordinary believers; his real target is the machinery that weaponizes belief for power. That’s a crucial distinction in today’s debates, too.
2. He shows how easily “Christian identity” can become a proxy for other anxieties. In Future History, the Scudder regime is as much about social control and stability as about salvation. That’s mirrored when Christian nationalism is deployed as a language for ethnic, cultural, or class grievances.
3. He insists that the real defense is structural, not just moral. In If This Goes On—, the rebels don’t simply swap in a nicer prophet; they re-engineer the constitution to make it harder for any ideology—religious or otherwise—to monopolize power.

That’s very much in line with modern arguments that the best safeguard against illiberal religious politics is a robust, genuinely neutral rule of law. Heinlein’s Nehemiah Scudder is an early, sharp fictional exploration of what is now called Christian nationalism — and a reminder that the problem isn’t “too much religion” or “too much politics,” but the fusion of absolute certainty with state coercion, amplified by modern media and legitimized by national myth.