Refuting Conservative Dogma...Yet Again: Why do people pretend The Handmaid’s Tale is about white men, when it perfectly mirrors Islam?

On Quora, N.J. Aubin asks:

Why do people pretend The Handmaid’s Tale is about white men when it perfectly mirrors Islam?

My reply: 

Let me turn this around and put this in its proper perspective, okay?

Why do white men who also identify as Christians pretend that The Handmaid’s Tale is about Islam when it’s perfectly clear what Margaret Atwood’s authorial intent is?

First off, if Margaret Atwood had wished to tell her dystopian novel about a near-future America where the government was annihilated and a particularly strict branch of Islam had declared an Islamic Caliphate and renamed Washington, DC into New Al-Andalus, she would have.

But she did not. She wrote about the creation of a radical Christian nation governed by white Christian males where men are at the top of the power structure, and women are either their powerful but sterile helpmates and others - the handmaidens - are there to be used to breed future citizens of the Republic of Gilead.

Look, Atwood’s novel is an allegory and a story about what America would be like if it was governed by a ruling elite based on the extremist views of conservative white men who followed the tenets of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority (an oxymoron of gigantic proportions) and others who believe the following:

1. That the only religion that counts is Protestant Christianity
2. Women should be subservient to men
3. Might makes right

Atwood, of course, was not saying that every faithful Christian believes this nonsense, and she was pointing out that every religion has its share of crazies. She was basically explaining that there are people out there - men and women both - who would like to create an authoritarian society based on their vision of a perfect religious-based national culture.

You know, one where men call all the shots, women are there to assist them in doing so, and an underclass of women get to be vessels for the men’s sexual needs.

And even though they are a minority of believing Christians, there are people out there who have these notions of a “Christian America.”

They are often nicknamed the American Taliban.