Christian Nationalism Is an Oxymoron

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

By Patrick Anderson, editor

Almost anything said to be the basis for the establishment of the United States of America or the purpose of the Christian church in American society can be found to be true sometime in our history or somewhere in our country.

Some of the people who came to the American shores in the 16^th and 17^th centuries came from places where religious freedom was outlawed by a Protestant European government which endorsed a preferred state-approved church. Think Massachusetts Bay Colony. Others came through the Southwest beginning in the 15^th century under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church and selected Catholic nations. Think Portugal and Spain. They sought to subjugate indigenous people into the Catholic church, to find and claim lands and fortune. Think gold, enslavement, and dominating colonialism.

A great number of others who made up the original 13 colonies were not motivated to migrate to America by religious reasons or to make fame and fortune, but rather to secure a more prosperous life through opportunities not open to them in their home countries. Some were slavers and slaves. Some were tradesmen and adventuresome individuals. Many were motivated by religious separatism sentiments (think Puritans and Quakers), but a pious or religious purpose for people coming to America is certainly not the only reason people came here.

We must remember that the early Americans were not unified initially by the ideals of America’s founding. Our nation was “founded” in the 18^th century by “founding fathers” who led a revolution against England’s domination and drafted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America, the two documents most historians consider to be America’s most important founding documents, but which were nonexistent until the last years of the 18^th century.

Today’s Americans, especially religious Americans, celebrate mythical ideas of America’s founding such as the Thanksgiving Season story which depicts Puritans’ arrival at Plymouth Rock and the short-lived fictional lovefest between the European strangers and indigenous people living along the Northeastern coast of America. It took only about 50 years for that imagined relationship to evolve into enslavement and domination of the original native Americans by the progeny of the Puritans.

The White Christian Nationalism which is so visible in America today is built upon a fundamental lie: that America was founded by Christians for Christians. They believe that Christianity, particularly their version of Christianity, should have elevated status and indeed dominate every facet of our society. While it is true that most of America’s “founding fathers” were publicly, or at least nominally Christians, there were significant exceptions. They valued religious liberty, not Christian domination. The religious liberty they were seeking was far different from the state-supported churches some of their forebears had fled.

While this new “American experiment” was not modeled on church-state nations, comfort with the closely wedded church-state nations abroad did exist in the early years of this new nation. Indeed, nine of the 13 colonies had a state-supported church; but within 15 years, nearly all state churches in the colonies had ended and religious liberty in America began.

We were founded to be a nation where all Americans would be free to practice their faith as they saw fit or to observe no faith at all. That is the belief I was taught from my youth—both in my Baptist church and in the public schools which I attended. Yet today, there is a growing group of people — once on the fringe, but now in elected offices, courts and agencies across American government — who seek Christian domination. They want their version of Christianity to be the law of the land and given preferred treatment. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., even has a Christian nationalist flag hanging at the entrance to his Capitol office.

This concept of Christianity and the attendant desire for America to be a Christian theocracy is, ironically, antithetical to the life and teachings of Jesus, particularly the emphasis of Jesus on love, compassion and justice for all. Jesus did not promote a nation-centered religion. Indeed, Jesus of Nazareth never sought to dominate, coerce or control others. He did not seek preferential treatment for himself or his followers. The last thing Jesus wanted was the mantle of earthly kingship. In the wilderness temptation we read in Matthew 4:7-10:

⁸ Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. ⁹ “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.”

¹⁰ Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’”

For me, this harkens back to the first of the 10 Commandments, “You shall have no other gods before Me.” Nothing and nobody are equal to God. When the conjunctive “and” is placed alongside God (as in “God and country”), the magnitude of this commandment is violated. When Christians elevate political allegiance to be equivalent to or above the cause of Christ, they are effectively placing the nation-state in the place of God or alongside God. Loyalty to country is not equivalent to loyalty to Jesus. The church is not called to build an earthly empire, but to represent a heavenly kingdom, one that transcends all borders, ethnicities and political affiliations. Christian nationalism, by contrast, binds our faith to worldly power structures, diluting the universality of the Gospel and creating idolatry out of nationalism.

Nationalism is not the same thing as patriotism. American patriotism is an adherence to the ideals of the United States as expressed in our founding documents. Christian nationalism, on the other hand, seeks to merge Christian and American identities to the exclusion of the First Amendment’s separation of church and state mandate which says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…

Christian nationalists demand Christianity be privileged by the state and implies that to be a good American, one must be a good Christian and vice versa. The Christian nationalist would define what it means to be a good Christian and a good American. They insist on their own abridged version of Christianity as the exemplar for all Americans and Christians.

Christian nationalism is about exclusion. It runs against Jesus’ inclusion of all people which we find notably in the “Great Commission” in which Jesus sends the disciples out to all nations, and in “Parable of The Good Samaritan” in which Jesus emphasizes that it is the “hated outsider” Samaritan who bound up the wounds of the robbery victim left for dead on the side of the road, not the respected religious leaders who passed him by, who was a beloved neighbor.

White Christian nationalism distorts the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That Gospel is not about advancing a particular nation’s political agenda or empowering authoritarian regimes to impose a limited, unchristian belief system through law and force. While I recognize this most recent iteration of Satan’s temptation for Jesus to assume ownership of the kingdoms of this world, I also recognize that the allure of the temptation of this belief system has always been part and parcel of the family of God. Jesus rejected it. But the temptation to establish a “Christian” nation with laws enforcing an authoritarian set of beliefs has been and continues to be a feature of the American experiment.

The impetus toward White Christian nationalism most commonly arises during times of social unrest, economic uncertainty, large-scale immigration, war and technological changes. Politicians use times like these to call for a nonsensical “return to our Christian roots.” We are in such a time. A large number of the Christian church family truly believe that Donald Trump is a sincerely devout Christian, and they have trusted leaders like Franklin Graham who attests to his bona fides. Many others recognize that he is not devout, and perhaps not even a Christian; but he will fight for their kind of Christianity they see as under attack. They prefer a president with the fight over a president with the faith.

Without doubt I consider “Christian” and “nationalism” to be mutually exclusive terms; but I acknowledge that a wide swath of my fellow church family members identify themselves as both Christian and American nationalists. We sing the same songs, pray the same prayers, read the same Bible, receive the same sermons, recognize the same symbols of Christianity, and share the same rituals of our faith.

But we really do not share the same faith. America’s great experiment allows each person to live out faith on each person’s own terms where there is “no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

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