F*ck Christian Nationalism
I used to never cuss. When I first converted to evangelical Christianity in high school, I entered the fold with a habit of saying hell, i.e. “What the hell is wrong with the Pittsburgh Pirates?” (A topic for another 13,000 blog posts.) It didn’t take long for my new evangelical peer group to shame me out of that habit.
Even now that I cuss regularly, it’s shocking to some of those close to me who knew me as someone who says darn and shoot.
All that to say this: when I say, “Fuck Christian Nationalism,” I really mean it.
Why am I ranting about this now?
A quick story time to explain why I’m so fired up about this at the moment.
In 2006, I went to an evangelical summer thing with about 100 other college students. There I met a guy, let’s call him “Nat” (short for Nationalist). My first experience with him for the entire summer was playing against him in a game of pick-up basketball, in which he became so filled with rage he at one point yelled at the top of his lungs and stormed off the court.
I never got close to Nat that summer, but we became Facebook friends and thus stayed a bit connected over the years. I was a bit disturbed when he got into Doug Wilson’s super patriarchal version of Christianity. But we rarely engaged each other until 2020, when our social media friendship ended.
In late November, a couple weeks after Biden’s victory, I posted some anti-Trump thing making fun of 45 for losing all his court battles in his quest to pretend that he won an election he had in fact lost by quite a bit. Nat swooped in, commented on my post that I was gloating or something, and instantly blocked me.
Fast-forward to now. Respected sociologists Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead (more on their work below) tweeted about the troubling rise of overtly Christian Nationalist messages. One of these signs they tweeted out was a book, written by none other than my old chum Nat—a defense of Christian Nationalism and, in fact, a guidebook for how to accomplish it in the US.
What is Christian Nationalism?
I should just come out right now and say I’m not remotely an expert on this phenomenon on the large scale. I’m just a progressive Christian magazine editor mathematician pastor who watches the news. So all I can really do is point you to a few resources on this threat to democracy and offer a few brief thoughts.
As for just what is CN, here is the definition of Perry and Whitehead from their wonderful book that I just started reading today:
an ideology that idealizes and advocates a fusion of American civic life with a particular type of Christian identity and culture… While there is considerable overlap between Christian nationalism and white evangelicalism, the the two concepts are not at all synonymous.
That idea of a fusion is the core of the CN cultural framework. The words sort of reveal to you exactly what its proponents long for: a Christian nation(alism). When you hear people talk about how the US ought to be a Christian nation, or when they wistfully state that we were founded as a Christian nation, you have now entered CN territory.
This plays itself out in many ways, and all of them are terrible for non-Christians. The more fused American culture is with conservative Christianity, the worse life in America will get for all the people marginalized by conservative Christianity.
Meanwhile, the paragons of that “particular type of Christian identity and culture” get even more privilege heaped upon them. Think of that high school football coach who recently won a Supreme Court case allowing him to pray with players on the 50-yard line after games. Setting aside how unfair and pressuring this is to non-Christian kids who want to impress the coach, there are other questions—would a Muslim coach be allowed to pray to Allah with students on the 50-yard line right after a game? Would a Satanist coach be allowed to do whatever cultic ritual Satanists do with the high school students in his charge?
We all know that only Christians are afforded this kind of right. And that discrepancy reveals that these cases aren’t about religious freedom, they’re about Christian nationalism. Here is a helpful article about how “dominionism,” a theology undergirding much of CN, has entered mainstream politics (and churches).
A better way
The opposite of Christian nationalism isn’t a secular, godless society. It’s pluralism. A society with actual religious freedom for everyone, in which every single person can practice whatever religion or non-religion they want as long as they don’t harm others. A society in which no one or two or three religions are given legal preference over all the others.
A Christian Nationalist might ask why I think pluralism is better than an explicitly Christian nation. Wouldn’t God “bless” a Christian nation and “curse” one that just sets up Christianity as one among many possible faiths?
There are too many responses to this to name them all. But let’s end with a few thoughts about why pluralism is better than Christian nationalism:
God set up the entire world as a pluralistic planet! No one is compelled to be Christian. Why wouldn’t we want our own society to mirror God’s design for freedom and choice?
There’s just no empirical evidence that God blesses Christian nations and curses non-Christian ones in, oh, the last 2000 years. Plenty of non-Christian nations have had (and continue to have) prosperity and wellness on a national scale, and plenty of Christian ones have suffered war, plague, and oppression. In fact, some of the worst atrocities ever recorded…
No matter how you read the Bible and honestly no matter what your theology is, just shut the fuck up and listen to actual Americans about what kind of society they want. The vast majority want pluralism. If everyone you talk to wants CN, go make some friends, any friends, who are Jewish, Muslim, non-religious, etc.
