Threat Or Myth?: The Unending Clamor Over Christian Nationalism
(ANALYSIS) Here are a few added observations to Religion Unplugged’s continued reporting this election year on vigorous agitation against “Christian Nationalism” as a threat to American democracy, with “White” often added to signal racial animus. This accompanies heavy breathing overall about fusing religion with politics in multiplied events, books, articles, Internet postings and broadcast punditry.
As usual, candidate Donald Trump is at the center of things, marking Holy Week by marketing a $59.99 “God Bless the USA Bible,” saying his voters will make Election Day “Christian Visibility Day” and promising an evangelical confab that “if I get in you’re going to be using that power at a level you’ve never used before.”
Campaign agitation is mostly Protestant-flavored, but Catholics for Catholics insists Trump “is the ONLY option for Catholics of good conscience.” Some 1,000 believers attended its March “Prayer for Trump” rally at Mar-a-Lago, where via video Trump led the Pledge of Allegiance and imprisoned Jan. 6 rioters sang the National Anthem. Meanwhile, Religion News Service found affinities between CN and “the strange world of Catholic ‘integralism.’”
READ: Untangling Christian Nationalism (Both Real And Perceived) In The Age Of Trump
“Theocracy” cries erupted when the concurrence in an in vitro embryo case from Alabama’s chief justice said “human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself.”
Rob Reiner’s hostile “God and Country” documentary on CN drew dismal box office returns, but roused conservatives like Southern Baptist ethicist Andrew Walker, who decried the “continued delegitimization of any form of Christian witness in the public square that dares to challenge progressive dogma.”
Politico’s Heidi Przybyla remarked that “extremist” CN followers believe “our rights as Americans and as all human beings do not come from any earthly authority. They don't come from Congress, from the Supreme Court. They come from God.” Which is precisely what the Declaration of Independence proclaims. (Przybyla then posted more thoughtful views).
Robert P. Jones, founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, assailed House Speaker Mike Johnson as “the embodiment of white Christian nationalism in a tailored suit” due to his onetime defense of religious interests as an Alliance Defending Freedom attorney.
Overseas, a remarkable CN expression came on March 27 in the “order” to national leaders from the World Russian People’s Council, an advisory body chaired by Moscow’s Orthodox Church patriarch.
“From a spiritual and moral point of view,” it declares, the “special military operation” to take power over Ukraine “is a Holy War, in which Russia and its people” resist “globalism and the victory of the West, which has fallen into Satanism.”
The discussions are newly energized by prominent lay Catholic Kenneth L. Woodward, Newsweek’s longtime religion editor, in the lead article for the May issue of First Things magazine, titled “The Myth of White Christian Nationalism.” (Full disclosure: This writer competed directly with Woodward each week for decades covering religion for Time magazine).
Woodward depicts considerable confusion over the who and the what of CN. He notes that some figure perhaps 10 percent of Americans have CN leanings while alarmists say 52 perccent, as though tens of millions are mobilizing. Woodward thinks “the lack of historical perspective” in CN chatter is “appalling.”
He also asserts that compared with CN forces, anti-religious secularists are now “more numerous, wealthier, much better educated, and more politically active.” And political scientist Ryan Burge tells us CN thinking “has declined significantly” among Catholics and even evangelicals, whose views are not much different from Black Protestants.
CN is mostly defined and applied by outside critics, not much by individuals and groups supposed to be participants. Scads of churchgoers may agree with this or that opinion labeled as CN but not identify with any such movement. Also, CN is not the same thing as patriotism, normal love of one’s homeland. Today’s hardcore CN perpetuates a fringy U.S. movement known as theonomy, dominionism, reconstruction or the Seven Mountains mandate. See historical background here.
Definitions? Last year, proponents of Christian hegemony drafted a platform offering this one: “Christian Nationalism is a set of governing principles rooted in Scripture’s teaching that Christ rules as supreme Lord and King of all creation, who has ordained civil magistrates with delegated authority to be under Him, over the people, to order their ordained jurisdiction by punishing evil and promoting good for His own glory and the common good of the nation.” (Which leaves open the rights of citizens who are non-religious or practice other faiths).
An opposite depiction comes from Christians Against Christian Nationalism, led by attorney Amanda Taylor at the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and backed by top “mainline” and liberal Protestant leaders. It says CN “seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy. Christian nationalism demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian. It often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation.”
This month, a new approach to the tangle was proposed at Calvin University by political scientist Corwin Smidt, who analyzed a much-cited 2017 Baylor University survey and 2021 Pew Research Center polling. Smidt calculates CN followers are between seven percent and 25 percent of the public, depending on who’s counting with what basis. He insists CN be distinguished from “civic republicans,” the largest U.S. grouping at 47 percent who want respectful accommodation and a public role for religion but oppose special privileges. The third U.S. contingent, “radical secularists,” would minimize or eliminate religion’s role in society.
That tracks with new data from the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, which exemplifies cultural conservatism. A Lifeway Research survey issued on April 16 showed that 92 percent of lay members and 95 percent of leaders believe religious liberty rights apply equally to all faiths and adherents, while 81 percent and 85 percent, respectively, think government should not prefer any one religion.
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.