the label of Christian Nationalism

Transcript below for podcast, available on Spotify and most platforms.

I really tried over the past several years to not be reductive and what I mean by that is, you know, a lot of things get labeled. and they’re shortcuts. and, you know, sometimes the shortcuts fail us a little bit because what I mean by something isn’t necessarily what you mean by that phrase or label. And so sometimes you get into these confusing discourses because we’re actually not using definitions the same way, and there are certain definitions that are at odds with each other. There are certainly people who don’t understand the labels and so they misapply them and then there are certain people who try to create labels that don’t quite get at what we need it to or it’s too big. It’s too big of a label.

Here’s an example, an analogy, if you will, like you’re sorting your office supply closet and you just label everything office supplies. It’s not helpful anymore, right? Like, of course, it’s not. office supplies. Like, how do you label in such a way to make sense? 
You put all your writing, utensils in one section and you say writ utensils. Well, is it helpful to then have a section for pens and pencils or mechanical pencils? Is it helpful to have a different section for Sharpies? 
And please don’t put the Sharpies in with the dry race markers. They’re all writing utensils, but they’re not the same and they don’t have the same functions. when you’re in a pinch and you’re looking for a dry race and you grab a sharpie, you end up, I mean, there’s a trick to that, by the way, but that’s not what this particular conversation is about.

Anyway, the point being that sometimes labeling can get us into more trouble than it might have if we were a little more careful on how we were labeling things and how we were separating things out. 
All this to say, you also ran into the opposite problem, no true Scotsman fallacy, right, where there’s nobody applies to this label fully and nobody gets to own this label because you can’t put “pens” because there’s 500 different kinds of pens and nobody’s a pen. You know what I’m saying? So that’s not helpful either. 


I run into this a lot when you start talking about Christianity and anyone who kind of makes digs on Christianity as a concept, as a religion, as a worldwide global religion for arguably 2,000 years, you know, you get into some problems, don’t you? You get into some semantics, you get into some discrepancies on on who, what, when, and where, because it’s not quite right to make broad statements about Christianity on the whole. I’ve done it. 
You’ve done it. We’ve all done it because it’s just this big umbrella that we tend to be comfortable with and just applying it to everybody and so when you start talking about something, for example, like Christian nationalism, it gets conflated with Christianity as a whole and there are many of us dozens of us who who would absolutely reject that premise because we are not aligning with Christian nationalism as concepts at all in really any iteration of it any any definition that that you can come up with that actually still defines Christian nationalism as concept as an ideology. Yeah, I’m not going to. I’m not going to be able to lay out every iteration of Christian nationalism across the board on my own. 
I mean, I, you know, I look to other people who have done this work, and academics and pastors and all. They’ve been looking at this for decades because… here’s where I think we need to start if we’re going to have a reasonable conversation. Christian Nationalism is not a new concept by any stretch and in many ways it dates back to Rome, right? I mean, there’s plenty of people who have been making that argument where what happened in the Roman Empire, you know, folks like, Nero and then Constantine and I, you know, I’m not going to I can get all my names and dates right because I was never a good name and date person. if I was writing this, I would research it and look it up, but the point being that, you know, you have precedent for entire countries, nations, nation state, if you will that adopt the language of Christianity because they know it holds power they know that it holds you know the religion of Christian thought and theology holds power and at that point it becomes Christian nationalism where we’re going to hold the ideals of Christianity or what we say are the ideals of Christianity.

Let’s be clear on that because there are other people who will say no that’s actually not what we believe and we still call ourselves Christian. 
We still have that label of Christian, but we are absolutely not aligning with those ideals and there’s room for all of it. There is. There’s room for Christianity as an umbrella concept, big tent if you will. I mean there are so many shades of Christianity and and trying to lump them all into one is deeply problematic.

All that said, you know there are many crossovers between Christianity and certain factions within Christianity that align with Christian nationalistic ideas and and you know how Christianity in their minds offers the most organized, committed, and moral values and standards for a society. 
There’s certainly that argument, and they might even throw in like, you know, Judeo Christian, which becomes a thing, particularly here in America, where where the history of, conflation, again, of certain Jewish principles and values that cross over into Christian, specifically, that type of Christian morality, let’s say. and so somebody comes up with the term Judeo Christian values and that’s what our country is built on … which is also deeply problematic, but it’s the rhetoric that we’ve been given, right? I mean, if you and I, whoever you are, wherever you grew up, if you grew up in an American school system and particularly within a church system, you probably have come across that where you were told that America was built on Judeo-Christian rights that, you know, they’re founding fathers believed in the Ten Commandments and that should guide our principles for the rule of law here in this country and that this new country is going to be based on the Bible and on, you know, God-fearing people, right? And particularly God-fearing white land-owning men, you can’t you can’t can’t ignore that factor, but, I mean, you try. 


And people are trying, but the point being that, this rhetoric of the founding fathers were all Christians and they were all held to these kinds of values and principles. And it’s that all has been questioned, debunked to a large degree because it’s not true, because there are absolutely some of the founding fathers who were very much against the idea of religion influencing, unduly influencing the government, and that there should be a kind of neutrality. Can we get to some neutral that’s devoid of religious reasoning and religious support, if you will?. 
Like we’re not doing this because we’re Christian. We’re not doing this because we believe in God or we believe in Jesus or the kingdom of heaven on earth. We do this because we’re good moral people. 
Whatever religion we may have developed in and continued to hold, we’re good people. And what does that mean? What does that mean to be moral people? 
that without having to throw in the specifics of a religion? Because then you start getting into, well, which religion? Which Christianity? 
Let’s say we were suddenly a Muslim nation. Like what is there only one kind of Muslim? No, there’s not. 
We know that there’s not. We know that there’s, just like any other religion, there’s multiple ways of how to be a devout insert religious blank in the blank.

So here we are, you know, having these conversations about what is Christian nationalism and what is, what are the ideals of Christian nationalism and do we take the definition that people within Christian nationalism itself? Do we take their definitions? I believe, yeah yes. we go from what they said they are. It’s like “if someone tells you who they are, believe them. “ This is what they’re saying. It’s who they say they are.

And so when we look at the case, (i mean, did you know there is actually a book called The Case for Christian Nationalism?) when we look at that and we say, okay, these are the people claiming this label for themselves. 
This is what they believe about our country and how it should operate and we need to take them at face value. This is what they’re saying they wanna do and are we OK with them? And is that a threat to our way of life? 
Is it a threat to democracy and plural pluralism and freedom of religion, freedom from religion, whatever prepositions people like to use. I mean, well, we need all of it.

We need more conversations about whether or not these ideas… in some ways like, I’m gonna say this for the record, in some ways they are more progressive than progressives are because in some ways, it’s like, they want to take a stand on these principles that are not American. 
They’re actually quite extreme and they’re actually quite beyond the scope of what the founding fathers were trying to do because now they’re trying to push the entire country into a religious era that, if regardless of whether you actually believe it or not, you have to adhere to it. They don’t even care if you become a Christian, they just want you to live a Christian lifestyle. and that’s one irony of it all to me as someone who grew up and evangelicalism who, you know, fundamentalists, who were constantly talking about converting everybody, converting the “heathens.” What we’ve come to now is even less of a conversion experience than it is just do what you’re told. Like just do what you’re told and stop fighting us. I mean, that’s really, very much the direction that these conversations are going now where the culture war, some of us have been calling it, because the original culture war wanted people to become Christians and to follow Jesus. This culture war is, “we don’t care if you’re going to follow Jesus, get out of our way.”

And it’s very much has this feel of a modern-day crusade.

I can’t get away from that feeling, the Knights Templar coming in to Jerusalem and killing anyone who won’t do what they tell them to do, right? You know, “come to Jesus or I’m going to kill you.”


So our conversations have to kind of start there. It has to start at taking people who are defining themselves as Christian nationalists for their word, and then developing this very rational model for how it actually is not American. It is not the American ideal. 
Even according to the original founding Fathers, it is not what America was built on. That’s the work that I think needs to be done.