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Panel: Christian nationalism based on complex intents
Promised as a provocative and challenging discussion, a panel of authors and activists tackled the aims of Christian nationalism for this year’s Mendenhall Lecture event on Wednesday.
Prefacing as its moderator, Rev. Jonathan Martin noted that spirituality and nationalism, as unique topics, involve sweeping claims about meaning, as well as narratives about who and what matters. Inevitably, there will be tension in conversations about how they connect.
However, it was pivotal to set out a definition for what Christian nationalism is, and why it is the way it is.
Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist and leading voice in the conversation, put it as a cultural framework that idealizes and advocates for a particular expression of Christianity in civic life. As he put it, this brings along extra “cultural baggage.”
This baggage consists of four elements: a desire for traditionalist social policies, authoritarian social control and action, strong ethno-racial boundaries and a sense of populism with conspiratorial thinking.
“All of those elements together make up this Christianity of Christian nationalism,” Whitehead said. “It isn’t just in the public square, it is this commitment to a very particular type of faith.”
Pamela Cooper-White, a priest and psychotherapist, followed with how people are drawn into this faith. She provided a punchy definition of it being a distorted version of Christianity. One that serves as a cover for white supremacy and patriarchal power structures.
Cooper-White defined nationalism, not a singularly American issue, as a movement that asserts exceptionalism over different societies. However, she put forward that there are conscious and unconscious motivations behind this.
The conscious ones entail belonging, fear for white people of a loss of social status, fear of a loss of patriarchal authority and enthusiasm for conspiracies. A kicker of it all is accord among adherents that non-Christians create immoral policies.
“This is not a fringe movement,” Cooper-White said, noting that one-in-five Americans value a “paranoid style” of politics, as defined by historian Richard Hofstadter.
The unconscious motivations, she granted, are more speculative. The necessity, she provided, is understanding group persuasion, insofar as to how and why followers bolster and defend idealized leaders.
“The narcissistic leader can heighten this appeal by framing it all in terms of a religious cause,” Cooper-White said. “Such religious appeals invoke a battle of good versus evil, in which fear is easily mobilized into hate and violence.”
Andre Henry spoke on such motivations being in the backdrop of his journey as an artist. Hard internal discussions about race, for him, diffused into a sense of betrayal by white friends who did not stand up.
He questioned whether it had been that way the whole time. He determined that, yes, it had. The Royal Rangers and Stone Mountain were celebrated in his childhood. This, he suggested, was because their context was suppressed.
“It makes me wonder, like, why are we talking like this bogeyman is new?” Henry queried.
It was lugging a 100-pound boulder as he tried to find a church to pastor. The repeated crux, Henry related, was keeping the “main thing” the “main thing.” It was to avoid speaking out and then upsetting people.
Again, as he noted, it had been this way the whole time.
“Personally, what that put me on was a journey, was to figure out, ‘How do I get this boulder off of me?’” Henry said about now being active in social justice. “I’m trying to put that into the music that I make, to encourage people who feel that same thing.”
Brian Zahnd, who has led Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Mo., for four decades, criticized Christian nationalism’s relevancy. He posited political theology as difficult, saying the Gospel does not set out a vision for how Christians can possess political power.
As Jesus Christ professed God’s kingdom not being of this world, Zahnd related, that vision cannot come in the way of the Caesars or the pharaohs. Not by the sword, in essence.
“I wish the church would just leave that alone for a while,“ Zahnd said about a “change-the-world” rhetoric. “It’s not our task to change the world. It is our task to be that part of the world already changed by Christ.”
Otherwise, Zahnd said, the allure of political power becomes irresistible to Christians bent on using it toward enforcing rigid convictions. Instead of taking up the Cross, they will put up crosses.
As Zahnd sees it, this is what the evangelical movement has become. An American flag flying above the “Christian” flag is unintended truth-telling. The primary allegiance is America as it is conceived.
While America as a nation and a culture can be admired, Zahnd insisted, America as an empire has become a religion. A rivalry between it and genuine Christianity is, to him, now out in the open.
“It’s that ‘Christian’ gets reduced to adjective duty in service of the all-important political mountain,” Zahnd said. “I think I’m finally understanding what Stanley Hauerwas said: Jesus is Lord or else.”