Imagine the political landscape right now: it is less of a shared reality and more like a bad action movie script where the protagonist keeps screaming “LAW AND ORDER!” while deploying the National Guard into the heart of American cities like Washington D.C., Chicago, and Portland under a guise of restoration. This is a deliberate theatrical stunt—the branding of urban hubs as modern-day “Sodom and Gomorrah”—that is actually a potent tool of fascist rhetoric designed to carve our communities into a zero-sum cage match of “pure” rural values versus “decadent” urban pluralism. When a leader labels the very centers of our economic and cultural engine as “abscesses on the body of the people,” he isn’t seeking safety; he is deploying a political weapon that justifies the concentration of power and the dehumanization of those who embrace diversity. By casting the city as a site of “carnage and blight,” the authoritarian places urban dwellers permanently outside the circle of the “true” nation, where their very presence is treated as a violation of the “natural order”.
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This is the ninth entry in our Faith vs. Fascism series: Attacking Cities. We’ve watched the super-villain build a Mythic Past to manufacture nostalgia and use Propaganda to mask his cruelty with virtuous language. We’ve seen the War on Expertise dismantle public reason, while Unreality replaced facts with emotional addiction. We’ve explored how Hierarchy and Victimhood convince the dominant group that equality is an attack, and how Law and Order and Sexual Anxiety are used to mark and police the bodies of the vulnerable. Today, we unmask the fascist obsession with the “purity of the soil” and the demonization of the City.
The “Sodom” Stigma
In the fascist imagination, the countryside is pure, while the city is a “poisonous snake”. This ideology relies on a manufactured “Golden Age” where the nation was allegedly a collection of self-sufficient, traditional families living in rural harmony. As Jason Stanley points out, fascist politics aims its message at the populace outside large cities because this message is grossly flattering to them; it presents the rural resident as the “backbone of military power” and the “main bearer of a healthy folkish heredity”. This isn’t a new trick; Hitler’s Mein Kampf celebrates his rural birthplace while describing Vienna as a “hotbed of blood-mixing” that causes the “ultimate decay of the people”.
This rhetoric functions by creating a false hierarchy of worth. In this warped worldview, the rural person is a “maker” while the urban person is a “taker” or a “parasite”. It is a wicked inversion of reality. In nearly every case, metropolitan areas are the economic engine of the state, generating the tax dollars that flow outward to support rural infrastructure. But accuracy is irrelevant to a demagogue. The goal is to stoke an emotional addiction to resentment by convincing rural citizens that their hard-earned money is being siphoned off to support “lazy” urbanites who don’t share their religion or “blood”.
Demonizing the city is almost always a proxy for attacking religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities. Because large urban centers tend to be hubs of pluralism and tolerance, they represent a fundamental threat to fascist ideology, which demands a single, monolithic way of life. When politicians shriek about “crime-infested inner cities,” they aren’t making an evidence-based claim—US violent crime rates have hovered near historic lows for years. Instead, they are using “urban” as a dog-whistle for the presence of non-white populations.
By invoking the biblical imagery of Sodom and Gomorrah, the demagogue ties urban life to sexual anxiety and moral panic.1 Cities are painted as dens of “degeneracy” where traditional gender roles are supposedly eroded by liberal rot. Mussolini once argued that the city starts growing in a “diseased, pathological way,” eventually leading to the “sterility” of the nation as it loses its “manhood”. This pathologizing of the city allows the authoritarian to justify an “internal cleansing”—whether through the deployment of federal troops or the withdrawal of public services—all in the name of protecting the “purity” of the heartland.
The Imperial Mirror: Fear of the “Void of Strangers”
Fascist politics breathes through the suspicion of the stranger. Authoritarian movements capitalize on the fear that the diversity of the city will “overwhelm” the traditional order. This is the “Gondor” delusion, a shallow usage of The Lord of the Rings where people are led to believe they are innocent “gentlefolk of the shires” who need “hard men of Gondor” to protect them from an invading sea of immigrants and cosmopolitans.
This is a dramatic misreading of the source material. In Tolkien’s world, it isn’t the military might of Gondor that saves the realm; it’s the overlooked hobbits—the weak and the small—who shame the strong and save the world. But for the fascist, the city is no longer a shared space of innovation; it is a “void of strangers” where evil strangers are tilting the world off its course. As we watch the National Guard being sent into cities where people are protesting for justice, we see a sovereign decision to treat citizens as insurgents. The goal is to separate “us”—the law-abiding rural “makers”—from “them”—the chaotic, lawless urban “takers”.
From Garden to City
As a community of faith, we must scream from the rooftops that Christianity is not an anti-urban movement. While the book of Revelation certainly demonizes Rome—depicting it as a “harlot” and a “beast” because of its imperial violence and demand for total conformity—it does not end with a return to a primitive, rural garden. The culmination of the entire biblical narrative is the New Jerusalem: a city that comes down out of heaven to settle on earth.
The New Jerusalem is the Divine DEI made manifest. It is not a place of forced assimilation where everyone must become a “monoculture,” but a celebration of a “Countless Multitude” from every nation, tribe, and tongue. In this city, the gates are always open, and the “wealth of the nations”—their distinct cultures, innovations, and progress—is brought inside to be made holy. Most importantly: God does not reside in an isolated garden of the past; God dwells in the very center of a dense, diverse city where the Tree of Life is available to all.
That’s right: the Tree of Life, lost to humanity since our exile from Eden, grows in the center of the city. Eden has become New Jerusalem. The original human assignment - to “till and keep” the garden - finds fulfillment in the city, the ultimate expression of human development.
We must reject the fascist lie that human progress is a descent into depravity and that the city is an abscess to be excised. Instead, we must view the city as the natural evolution of human progress, moving from the agrarian to the urban as we learn to live together in radical solidarity. The natural order is not one of hierarchy and exclusion, but one of unconditional love and mutual respect.
Our task is to dynamite the pyramid of rural-urban division and instead build a flat circle of hospitality. We must address the underlying feelings of powerlessness and insecurity that the demagogue attempts to mask with hatred for the city. We offer a truth that demands the courage to see the city not as a den of sin, but as the blueprint for heaven on earth.
YOUR TURN: What city is closest to you? What do you love about that city?
It matters here that this rhetoric reflects the perception of Sodom & Gomorrah as centers of sexual sin. This is a misreading of the story in Genesis, but it’s the prevailing interpretation in Western culture so it serves an effective metaphor for demagogues.
This framing of the city as pathology rather than progress is so critical to understanding contemporary authoritarianism. The inversion where cities become "takers" despite being econmic engines really shows how fascist rhetoric operates through emotional narratives rather than data. I grew up in a small town and watche this exact rhetoric take hold, where the city became this abstract evil even though most folks relied on urban hospitals and universities. The New Jerusalem point is especially sharp because it completely undermines the "back to Eden" nostalgia that fuels so much reactionary politics.