Christofascism: The "Spanish" lesson Georgia isn’t prepared for

Her childhood was defined by fascism and faith that reshaped Spain. Today, what she sees in Georgia reveals a dangerous callback.

Those who don’t learn from the rise of Christofascism in 1940s Spain are doomed to repeat in Georgia and across the South, according to someone who lived through it. image credit: Shutterstock

Not everyone can recognize the early architecture of authoritarian religion, but those who survived it see the pattern long before the rest of the nation understands the danger. At a protest in Columbus, Georgia, a woman named Ana Maria Smith listened to the chants and the speeches and then quietly said something that stilled those around her. “It is happening again.” She had grown up under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, a regime anchored in a political theology known as National Catholicism, a fusion of state power and religious authority that reshaped Spain for nearly four decades. Her story does not arrive as metaphor but as living history and the parallels she observed in Georgia’s present political climate demand attention from anyone committed to the survival of democracy. 

The overlap between religious rhetoric and state policy is precisely what Ana Maria recognized in Georgia. She described how Franco’s government eliminated freedom of speech and religion, how it executed teachers, writers and intellectuals, and how it targeted anyone who threatened the ideological purity of the nation. “They killed the people who could think,” Ana Maria said. “Intellectuals are always the first to go.”

Authoritarian religion thrives when obedience is sanctified as morality. Studies from the Baptist Joint Committee and the Public Religion Research Institute show that Christian nationalism in the United States follows this same pattern, elevating one religious identity as the basis for law, culture and political power. Franco used Catholic ritual to enforce loyalty, a practice historians have described as the weaponization of faith. Ana Maria remembered nuns forcing children to kneel for punishment so long that their knees bled, priests demanding that women kiss their hands on the street and public officials who viewed moral conformity as proof of patriotism. “You had to kiss the priest’s hand or they said you were a bad child,” she explained. “They controlled everything. What you wore, where you went, even what you thought.”

Ana Maria Smith was born in the basement of a Spanish jailhouse because her parents had fled persecution and had nowhere else to go. “We lived in a hole in the wall, literally.” image credit: the subject

She spoke of how even women’s clothing became a battleground for state enforcement. In the 1960s foreign tourists began wearing bikinis on Spanish beaches, and Franco’s police removed them from the water and fined them because modesty was considered a national obligation. These regulations are preserved in the Spanish National Archives as part of a broader moral regime that sought to regulate gender and sexuality through religious doctrine. That instinct toward control is visible in the surge of American laws restricting bodily autonomy, LGBTQ recognition and gender expression, including measures introduced in Georgia. The Defining Male and Female Act advanced by Georgia lawmakers in 2024 attempted to assign legal sex purely through biology, a move researchers at the Williams Institute argue has no scientific basis but carries immense political symbolism for Christian nationalist groups who view gender diversity as a threat to divine order.

The overlap between religious rhetoric and state policy is precisely what Ana Maria recognized in Georgia. She described how Franco’s government eliminated freedom of speech and religion, how it executed teachers, writers and intellectuals, and how it targeted anyone who threatened the ideological purity of the nation. “They killed the people who could think,” Ana Maria said. “Intellectuals are always the first to go.”

Southern history contains similar theological distortions. Enslavers once claimed that Black people had no souls, a doctrine preserved in the Library of Congress archive of pro slavery theology. White supremacist pastors throughout the Jim Crow era argued that segregation was divinely mandated. Today some of the same ideological currents reappear in political rhetoric that casts multiracial democracy as a threat to Christian civilization.

This logic is not foreign to the United States. Christian nationalist leaders have increasingly framed educators, librarians, public health scholars and journalists as enemies of the nation. Georgia has already become a key battleground in the effort to control public knowledge. The rise in book bans, curriculum restrictions and attacks on academic freedom, tracked by PEN America, reveals the early stages of the campaign. State lawmakers supported sweeping “parental rights” bills that allow ideological objections to dictate what students may read or learn, while far right advocacy organizations such as the Faith and Freedom Coalition and networks connected to the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation have intensified their organizing in the state. Analysts at the Brennan Center for Justice warn that these movements seek not only policy influence but a long-term cultural transformation that frames pluralism as immorality and democracy as disorder.

Ana Maria’s memories illustrate how this transformation unfolds in ordinary life. She worked in textile factories beginning at age thirteen because education for poor children had been restricted and child labor became the economic engine of the regime. “I ran a machine longer than this whole room,” she said. “Twelve hours a day, one week mornings and one weeknights. We were children.” Research on Franco era labor practices conducted by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid confirms widespread exploitation of youth labor in industrial centers during the dictatorship. She also described rampant sexual abuse of working class children by wealthy men who faced no consequences because the church and the state collaborated to protect the powerful. “You are a sexual predator,” she told one of her abusers decades later, “but they all said he had just touched me by accident.”

These conditions reinforced a moral hierarchy that treated poverty as evidence of inferiority and wealth as proof of virtue. When Ana Maria worked as a nanny in the home of a wealthy Catholic family, she was ordered not to eat with them at the table and was told she was permitted only one banana a day. “That is not allowed,” the matriarch said when the child ate a second piece of fruit. “You can only eat one banana.” Such humiliations were not incidental. They were pedagogical. They taught children their place. They taught them that goodness meant submission.

Southern history contains similar theological distortions. Enslavers once claimed that Black people had no souls, a doctrine preserved in the Library of Congress archive of pro slavery theology. White supremacist pastors throughout the Jim Crow era argued that segregation was divinely mandated. Today some of the same ideological currents reappear in political rhetoric that casts multiracial democracy as a threat to Christian civilization. Scholars at Emory University and Mercer University have noted the resurgence of dominionist thought in the Southeast, a belief system that frames political power as a divine inheritance for Christians alone.

These dynamics are accelerating now and as 2027, approaches. Analysts at Brookings and Political Research Associates predict increased pressure from Christian nationalist coalitions to influence state constitutions, judicial appointments and school boards. Georgia remains a prime target because its demographic shifts have challenged the political dominance of white Christian conservatism, igniting a reactionary movement determined to preserve cultural authority through legal and theological means. Far right donors connected to national evangelical networks have increased funding for legislative candidates and advocacy groups in the state, a pattern documented by OpenSecrets. Policy proposals related to reproductive rights, trans healthcare, public education and election administration increasingly reflect national Christian nationalist agendas rather than local consensus. 

Ana Maria’s voice offers a warning that is not speculative. It is rooted in experience. She recalled leaving work at six in the morning and walking home through snow, her mother meeting her halfway with a knife hidden in her sleeve because girls alone in the dark were never safe. She spoke of wealthy Catholics who looked at her with pity and said, “Oh poor baby,” to which she responded silently, “I am not poor, I am underprivileged.” She spoke of her mother begging her not to leave Spain and of the moment Franco finally died in 1975. “The son of a bitch is dead,” she said, describing the relief her community felt when the dictator’s reign ended.

Her story carries the weight of someone who has already lived through the consequences of merging faith with authoritarian rule. She recognized the same early signals in Georgia that she witnessed in Spain: the tightening of laws around gender and sexuality, the sanctification of obedience, the moralization of political power, the vilification of dissent, the elevation of one religion above all others and the quiet expansion of surveillance and control in the name of stability.

Christofascism does not always begin with violence. It begins with virtue. It begins with leaders who claim divine authority and with communities taught to fear difference. It begins with the belief that God sanctioned the hierarchy and that democracy threatens it. The question for Georgia, standing at the intersection of its religious history and its political future, is whether these patterns will be recognized in time. Ana Maria’s words echo because they are not prophecy. They are remembrance. She knows what happens when a nation confuses piety with power. She knows what it costs to survive it. Her story stands as a mirror held before a state that must decide whether it will heed the memory of those who have already lived through faith-turned regime.