4th place — 2025 grad student essay contest: Bailee Roberts

FFRF awarded Bailee $2,000.

By Bailee Roberts

Somewhere in America, a woman lies in a hospital bed, unmoving, unknowing, and already dead. Her body is hooked to machines — not to save her life, but to preserve her womb. In the world of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” this would be expected: women’s bodies reduced to vessels, animated only by the state’s desire to reproduce.

This isn’t a dystopia. It’s Georgia. It’s the law. And because her pregnancy had progressed just three weeks beyond the six-week gestation limit, her body remained on life support — not for her, but for the state. Her family was left grieving a daughter they could not bury, because Georgia had other plans for her body.

Christian nationalism isn’t content with banning books or policing bathrooms. It’s building a future where your body doesn’t belong to you. It’s starting with trans people and immigrants, but it won’t stop there. Because, beneath the surface, this isn’t about faith, it’s about control. Christian nationalism is just the costume. What we’re watching is the rise of an authoritarian movement, using religion as a tool to legislate identity, morality and reproduction. Trans people are the test case. Immigrants are the distraction. The end goal is total bodily control: forced birth, stripped autonomy and a population raised not for freedom, but for labor and obedience.

Authoritarian movements can’t survive without an enemy. Christian nationalism thrives on moral panic — a manufactured fear that frames trans people, immigrants and pro-choice individuals as threats to order, children or God. This isn’t new. Sociologists like Stanley Cohen warned how societies have used “folk devils” to justify fear, repression and social regression. But what makes this tactic so effective now is our empathy drought. We’ve lost the ability to sit with moral complexity. Abortion, gender, immigration — these are nuanced, deeply personal experiences. But Christian nationalism depends on black-and-white thinking. It needs you to stop asking questions. It needs you to stop feeling.

When outrage becomes a scroll, authoritarianism slips in quietly, dressed as tradition. And when black-and-white thinking replaces nuance, real people don’t disappear, they get rewritten into policy as problems to be fixed. Not because the system is working, but because it’s rotting.

And, from that rot grows the real agenda — not protecting children, but producing them — molded to fit a biblical blueprint that rebrands authoritarianism as “family values.” Under Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation wants the Department of Health and Human Services to “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.” It is no coincidence that the same movement pushing for biblical education is also advocating for a total abortion ban. More children equals more control over culture, labor and the future.

Restrictive laws aren’t only ideological, but have devastating tangible impacts on millions of Americans. According to the March of Dimes’ 2023 Nowhere to Go report, a staggering 35 percent of U.S. counties are classified as maternity care deserts: places with no hospitals, clinics or doctors who provide pregnancy care. More than 2.3 million women of reproductive age live in these areas, and in 2022 alone, 150,000 babies were born without access to local maternal care. Worse, a study from the Commonwealth Fund found that maternal death rates were 62 percent higher in 2020 in abortion-restriction states versus states without such bans — a direct result of systemic neglect.

This didn’t happen overnight. During his first presidency, Donald Trump outsourced all three Supreme Court nominations to far-right think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society. A Heritage legal expert helped shape the shortlist that gave us Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, the very court that overturned Roe v. Wade and dismantled federal protections for reproductive rights.

That same agenda lives on in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s plan to reshape the U.S. government around Christian nationalist ideals: a federal abortion ban, the defunding of public education, expanded executive power and surveillance of dissent. But, peel back the language of faith and morality, and it’s not about Christianity at all. It’s authoritarianism in a clerical collar. It’s power, wrapped in scripture, sold like salvation, and enforced like law.

History doesn’t just repeat itself; it escalates. And silence is always its accomplice. Don’t let them numb you. Join something. Build community. Make noise. Look up. Feel something. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Bailee, 23, attends Lewis & Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling with plans to get a degree in art therapy.

Bailee writes: “At Syracuse, I studied sociology alongside painting and psychology, graduating summa cum laude with an award-winning thesis on gender inequality in the art world. Now I co-lead a passion project turned brand that uses handmade goods and design to spark reflection and inspire small acts of compassion. I enjoy volunteering at local farms and have also spent time as a mentor in children’s hospitals.”