Like so many Americans, I watched the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in horror. As a Christian, I watched in particular dismay as the mob incorporated Christian symbols, rituals, prayers, and Bible verses into their actions. Christian crosses and religious iconography were ubiquitous, and some of the rioters built impromptu gallows, presumably for Vice President Mike Pence or whomever else they were targeting, and decorated them with “Amen,” “God Bless the USA,” and “In God We Trust.”
Flags flew everywhere, and many of them carried Christian images. There were red, white, and blue “Jesus 2020” banners and “Make America Godly Again” flags. There were Confederate flags—which some white Southern Christians have embraced for years—and the ecumenical Christian flag—a white flag with a blue field and a red cross—which a rioter carried onto the floor of the Senate while US Capitol Police drew their guns to keep the attackers out of the chambers. And there were more than a few white flags emblazoned with a single green evergreen tree and the words “Appeal to Heaven,” which have become an emblem of Christian nationalism.
In one of the more unforgettable and bizarre scenes from the siege, a clutch of mostly male insurrectionists gathers on the Senate dais to offer a prayer. “Jesus Christ, we invoke your name!” one man begins in a video captured by the New Yorker. Shortly thereafter, the prayer session is commandeered by a bare-chested, bullhorn-wielding Jacob Chansley, a.k.a. the QAnon Shaman, with his red, white, and blue face paint and fur hat with black horns. “Let’s all say a prayer in this sacred space,” Chansley says before launching into a rambling monologue addressing a “divine, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent creator God,” whom he thanked for allowing the rioters to “exercise our rights, to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists, and the globalists that this is our nation, not theirs.”
Christian nationalism was not the sole cause of or explanation for the events of January 6, but it played a vital role in the events leading up to the siege and provided a unifying ideology for many disparate groups that day. Christian nationalism imbued the violence with religious significance and added another layer of self-justification for the rioters’ indefensible actions. The Christian language, symbols, and imagery also provided a common vocabulary for the perpetrators—one that carries great cultural significance and legitimacy.
If the QAnon Shaman represented the entirety of Christian nationalism, it would be easier to write off the movement as marginal and oddball. But Christian nationalism as an ideology can be embraced, in varying degrees, by anyone. And people who embrace Christian nationalism are wielding immense power—not just at riots but at the center of state and national government, on local school boards, and in churches and community organizations.
Christians who seek to follow the Christ revealed to us in the Bible must reckon with the expanded power and future trajectory of the Christian nationalist movement. While January 6 provides us with the most blatant examples of Christian nationalism in recent memory, Christian nationalism runs much wider, deeper, and longer than any one expression of it.
Christian nationalism is pernicious and insidious, and its influence in the United States is rising at an alarming rate. It is up to each of us to confront and call it out as the destructive ideology that it is and for the damage that it is causing our country—and the world. But in order to do that, we must first understand it. James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” If we are to end Christian nationalism, we must first develop a better idea of the threat we are facing.
THE DEFINITION
Christian nationalism is a political ideology and cultural framework that seeks to fuse American and Christian identities. It suggests that “real” Americans are Christians and that “true” Christians hold a particular set of political beliefs. It seeks to create a society in which only this narrow subset of Americans is privileged by law and in societal practice.
You will notice that this definition is confined to Christian nationalism in the current US context. This is but one expression of a larger ideology of religious nationalism, which has been a recurrent problem throughout history—and still is around the world today. It helps to keep these connections in mind as we dive more specifically into the present problem we have in the United States. I will weave in references to the historical and global issue of religious nationalism where appropriate, but those topics are not the primary focus of this book.
Christian nationalism is a gross distortion of the Christian faith that I and so many others hold dear. It employs the language, symbols, and imagery of Christianity, and it might even appear to the casual observer to be authentic Christianity. But Christian nationalism merely uses the veneer of Christianity to advance its own aims. It points not to Jesus of Nazareth but to the nation, as conceived of by a dangerous political ideology, as the object of allegiance.
Christianity is a religious faith that follows Jesus and his gospel of love, and when Christian symbols and language are used to do that, we most likely are dealing with an authentic expression of Christianity. But when those same symbols and language accompany appeals to order and conformity, point the intended audience to the American flag, or compel political unity under a particular leader, we have moved into the territory of Christian nationalism.
Christian nationalism is the greatest threat to religious liberty in the United States today. Christian nationalism is antidemocratic, and it is a clear and present danger to our constitutional republic. Christian nationalism also poses an ongoing threat to the health and vitality of authentic Christian faith and practice in America.
Christian nationalism transfers religious devotion from worship of the divine to worship of earthly power. One of the ways it does this is by contending that America has been and should always be a distinctively “Christian” nation, from top to bottom—in its self-identity, interpretations of history, sacred symbols, cherished values, and public policies.
Christian nationalism is not a new problem. In terms of world history, we can date one of the first examples of Christian nationalism to the fourth century, when an emperor, Constantine, made Christianity the religion of his empire—and then used the military force of that empire for religious persecution in the name of Jesus. Prior to Constantine, Christianity was mostly a faith of the margins, interested less in garnering power in the nation than in spreading the good news of love and caring for those who were poor. Christians were much more likely to be persecuted for their faith than to wield political power to force their religion on others. Jesus eschewed political power in favor of a ministry aligned with those who were oppressed, marginalized, and otherwise harmed by that power. Jesus was eventually murdered by the empire for his radical message and acts of love.
After Constantine, the faith of Jesus morphed into the practice of European Christianity that used power to gain control by oppression. We should not overlook or underestimate the lasting impact this use of power to enforce and propagate Christianity has had on the integrity of the Christian faith. In other words, because of Christian nationalism, there has been an ever-widening gap between the teachings of Jesus and the religion of Christianity.
In the US context, Christian nationalism was present before the nation’s inception. European invaders of this continent were armed with not just weapons and disease but also the blessing of the church in the form of the Doctrine of Discovery: a series of papal bulls that “justified” the seizure of land inhabited by people who were not Christians—all in the name of God.
Christian nationalism has ebbed and flowed throughout US history, with high tides at certain moments: in the generation after the founding (see the Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted citizenship to “white persons”); the years preceding the Civil War (see the division of Christian denominations along North-South lines over the issue of slavery); the years of rapid population expansion due to immigration (see laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882); the years following Reconstruction (see the rapid growth of the Ku Klux Klan [KKK] in the early twentieth century); and the Red Scare of the 1950s (see the adoption of “In God We Trust” as a national motto and the addition of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance).
In all these instances, Christian nationalism flourished not only because it was a prevalent ideology but also because its adherents held political power and used it in law and policy, with actions taken and not taken. The same is true today: Christian nationalism is flourishing both because it is a pervasive ideology and because it is a well-funded political movement. Though it can be tempting to focus on the movement aspect of Christian nationalism, I think our efforts are better directed at dismantling the ideology—which is, admittedly, a much more difficult task.
This is an excerpt from How to End Christian Nationalism chapter 1: Name and Understand the Threat of Christian Nationalism.
