The text from my friend, a fellow local social justice activist, came through on a Saturday afternoon. I was in the basement of my townhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It was the end of a long week, one that marked three years since I had returned home to Pittsburgh to attend my relatives’ funeral. They were killed at the Pittsburgh Tree of Life mass shooting in 2018. Eleven worshippers had been shot and killed by a man shouting antisemitic slurs.
My friend’s text included a link to an article in our local newspaper. The headline read: “A group of notorious white nationalists met secretly in historic Lancaster County barn last year. Why here?”
Apparently, in August 2020, a new political entity called the National Justice Party was launched less than eight miles from my house, less than five minutes from my children’s school, and right down the street from the convenience store where my former student’s immigrant parents serve the best egg rolls in town.
The article reported that the National Justice Party’s leader, Mike Peinovich, in his speech in the barn, made clear the purpose of the new party. “You cannot have a nation of justice, a nation of liberty, without a white majority forever,” he said. According to Peinovich, the new party’s enemy “is capitalism, Zionism, and the international Jewish oligarchy. These are the people that are oppressing us.”
The fact is, the meeting in the barn was part of a problem on a national scale. But the bigger problem for me and my family—as the headline suggests—is that Lancaster County is such a desirable, even obvious, place for a rally like this. I’ve known for years that a conservative, white, Christian hegemony is pervasive in my community, and that Christian hegemony leads to antisemitism.
I have been sounding alarm bells in Lancaster with my writing and activism for years. Sometimes I get through to people, like when I represented local Jews at an NAACP rally at the Lancaster County Courthouse in 2017. It was organized in response to a Ku Klux Klan rally in our county and, though I was wary, I thought it was important to self-identify as a white Jew and stand with the Black and brown members of our community who grew up here and were raised in the shadow of this hate.
When we moved to Lancaster more than a decade ago, the mover who was tasked with putting together my daughter’s crib had a swastika the size of my face tattooed on his upper arm. Six months later, my nineteen-month-old daughter came down with walking pneumonia while my husband was out of the country for work. In the grocery store pharmacy where I was getting her antibiotics, someone in the check-out line took an interest in the sick child strapped to my chest.
“She has pneumonia,” I said, hoping this would prompt the woman to give us a little more space. Instead, she placed her hands on my daughter and prayed to Jesus Christ to heal her.
Did the lady mean well? Absolutely. Was what she did OK? Absolutely not. But this was typical in my new home. A place steeped in a kind of aggressive, assumed Christianity and a belief that if you mean well you can do no wrong. But that is far from the case.
Shortly after the grocery store incident, my daughter’s pediatrician told me that one way to get my daughter to give up her pacifier was to say that the Easter Bunny would bring her a bike if she gave it up before Easter. And as recently as last Christmas, at the end of 2020, a year marred by isolation due to the pandemic and punctuated by videos of the killing of so many Black people by police and white vigilantes, I woke up to candy canes on my doorstep.
However, the neighborly gesture took a turn when I read the accompanying note:
For the last year, whenever I’ve walked through my neighborhood and someone has waved or smiled, I’ve wondered, “Are they the person that left the candy canes on my porch?” Or “Are they the ones who give out pamphlets about God and sin with their Halloween candy?” Or “Are they the ones who had a Confederate flag in their garage until I posted about it in NextDoor?”
Now, when I drive by a picturesque barn, as I do on so many of my drives in the area, I can add “Are white nationalists organizing in there?” to my list of questions.
The National Justice Party came here, to an almost rural, suburban area on the outskirts of a city with shifting demographics, because they know that white people here are afraid, and people who are afraid can be convinced to do a lot of unsavory things.
In the Lancaster County school district where I live, the all-Republican school board is attempting to ban transgender children from competing on sports teams. It’s no surprise that National Justice Party leader Mike Peinovich has reportedly stated that the goal of the party is to gain support by focusing on divisive social issues like race and LGBTQ+ issues and to run candidates for office and become the voice of conservatives.
As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
This is why I fight so hard to expose the toxicity of the conservative white Christianity that is rampant in my area. Allowing Christian hegemony to pass as a norm threatens my Jewish family the same way that it threatens my Muslim friends, my immigrant friends, my Black and brown friends, my disabled friends, and my queer friends.
I am proud to have progressive Christians fighting alongside me. But until our county is safe for all of us, our country won’t be safe for any of us.