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We live in an hour when a significant minority in the US Church—Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox—increasingly believes that the way to save both the American Church and America itself is to embrace Christian nationalism. Many American conservative Christians, feeling themselves threatened and even victimized by something called “secularism,” seek a champion who will defend them from it and give them power to fight it and whatever else they believe threatens our Christian heritage. The thinking goes that the Gospel calls us to bring Christ to the world as Lord, so let’s have an America controlled by Christians and make the state impose that even (and perhaps especially) on those who do not acknowledge the Gospel. To question that is to exalt godlessness over God. People who subscribe to this thinking believe that if we will only give the state the power to impose “Christian values” on what they perceive to be an increasingly godless society, then all will be well, and America will be great again.
Accompanying this is typically a notion of America as being somehow “chosen” by God in such a way as to set it above and against other nations. This seemingly justifies our right to protect our border from an alleged “invasion” by desperate refugees as well as to purify the nation from so-called enemies within.
The promise, to many, seems to be simplicity itself. Once upon a time, America was full of prosperous, hard-working Christians who reverenced family values. Then the sexual revolution, the welfare state, scary minorities who kneel at the national anthem and say their lives matter, and godless liberals took over and America lost its greatness. All that can be restored if we make the state the protector of Christians and weaponize it against the forces of godlessness.
It is not a new idea. At the outset of Jesus’ ministry, he deliberately went into the wilderness to face exactly this temptation to impose the kingdom by law, blood, iron, force, and fear. As Matthew reports:
“Then the devil took him up to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their magnificence, and he said to him, ‘All these I shall give to you, if you will prostrate yourself and worship me.’ At this, Jesus said to him, ‘Get away, Satan! It is written: The Lord, your God, shall you worship and him alone shall you serve’” (Mt 4:8–10).
Several factors contribute to the confusion that leads many Christians to fall for Christian nationalism.
The first, as is always the case with false teaching, is that it exploits and exaggerates real Catholic teaching (just as the devil did when he quoted Scripture in the effort to get Jesus to sin during the temptation in the wilderness).
Specifically, it exploits and exaggerates the second greatest commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” We may well ask, “What could possibly be wrong with loving your neighbor as yourself?”
Nothing—as long as we clearly understand what is meant by “neighbor.” Because one of the temptations we face is to limit “neighbor” to a particular category of persons. And if we give that idea its head, we can (and have many times in history) come to the dark spiritual place where a particular class of neighbor becomes the only class that matters, while others are categorized as outsiders, foreigners, enemies, and even subhuman vermin fit only for extermination. “Love your neighbor” gets whittled down to “Love your kind,” and loving your kind becomes the pretext for oppressing, jailing, exploiting, enslaving, and even exterminating those who are not our kind.
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Much more here. Please do read the whole thing and share with any Christians you who are falling for (or intimidated by those who have fallen for) the diabolical lie of Christian Nationalism.
In addition, here is an interview I did with Stephen Copeland regarding this piece:
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2 Responses
The Christian Nationalist practice of hating immigrants, gay people, non Christians,etc is a perversion of Christianity. The hoarding of assault rifles to kill liberals,immigrants and others is quite unchristian. Why do fanatical right wing “Christians” think that they, and they alone speak for God?
Earlier versions of Christian Nationalism led to well-known historical events such as the Inquisition, the Crusades against the Islamic Mid-East, the Ost-Krieg, the religious wars in Germany, the English Civil War, various pogroms, and the list goes on. There is nothing worse than a religious war, where all sides each think they and they alone are favoured by God. When the Founders of the United States wrote the U.S. Constitution, the memories of the religious wars were fresh history within living memory, and so the Founders insisted on separation of church and state, and the government having no established religion. Current religious nationalism is nothing we have not seen before.