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<p>Allan</p>
<p>I read this article with great interest. It was interesting to
see the history of Methodist social gospel. The difference today
is that the USA has no money for a New Deal only the hundreds of
billions dollars they are spending on their proxy war via the
Ukraine. I t is a different time in history. <br>
</p>
<p>The author uses the social gospel story as a lead in to his main
point the rise of Christian Nationalism. I think it serves as
propaganda for the democrats more than anything else. It fans
the flames of the left right divide. I believe a more Christian
response would be to encourage unity with those elements of MAGA
that are attempting to do good instead of creating a fear of right
wing Christians and distract one from the dirty deeds and lies of
the military industrial complex and the role of Epstein. Bill
Clinton, Biden and Gates could not possibly be pedophiles.</p>
<p>
<blockquote type="cite">right.” (More worrisome, almost sixty per
cent of the people whom the P.R.R.I. counts as QAnon
believers—that is, people who agree with such statements as “the
government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are
controlled by a group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who run a
global child sex-trafficking operation”—are also identified
Christian nationalists.)</blockquote>
<br>
</p>
<p>As George Gallaway says: 'Its not about left or right any more.
Its about right and wrong."<br>
</p>
<p>Good ground for discussion tomorrow. hope you can make it. <br>
</p>
<p>Art<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 4/18/23 1:10 p.m., Allan Baker via
craic wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:927F4D75-2EB2-4C71-A579-F6DEA9898DCB@gmail.com">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
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<h1 class="gmail-BaseWrap-sc-SJwXJ
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A Christian’s Thoughts on the Problem of
Christian Nationalism</h1>
</div>
<div
class="gmail-ContentHeaderAccreditation-gTueYh
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style="box-sizing:border-box;display:inherit;margin:0px
auto 0px
0px;max-width:1600px;width:1081.71px;padding-bottom:0px;text-align:inherit;color:rgb(255,255,255);padding-top:0.5rem">
<div class="gmail-ContentHeaderDek-tfbwp
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font-feature-settings: normal; font-style:
italic; line-break: auto; line-height:
1.3em; font-size: 22px; margin-bottom:
1rem;">The separation of church and state,
though under attack from the right, is still
ingrained in our national psyche. Who’s best
positioned to keep it there?</div>
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class="gmail-BaseWrap-sc-SJwXJ
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style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;font-feature-settings:normal;line-break:auto;line-height:1.33333em;text-align:inherit">By </span><a
class="gmail-BaseWrap-sc-SJwXJ
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April 18, 2023</div>
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<p class="gmail-has-dropcap
gmail-has-dropcap__lead-standard-heading"
style="box-sizing:border-box;margin-top:0px;padding-bottom:1rem">The
private building that’s closest to
the U.S. Capitol—indeed, the only
nongovernmental building on Capitol
Hill proper—belongs to the United
Methodist Church. The corner
lot—near where the Supreme Court now
resides—was a muddy hole when the
Reverend Clarence True Wilson
spotted it, in 1917, and decided it
would be the ideal location for the
denomination’s political efforts,
especially its campaign for <a
href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/21/drunk-with-power"
style="box-sizing: border-box;
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By 1922, built with donations as
small as fifteen cents from
churchgoers across the country, the
five-story Italian Renaissance
structure, made of Indiana
limestone, was christened as the
headquarters for Methodism’s Board
of Temperance, Prohibition, and
Public Morals.</p>
<p class="gmail-paywall"
style="box-sizing:border-box">We’re
used to thinking of Prohibition as a
regressive failure, an attempt to
legislate morals. It was a failure,
and it was an attempt to legislate
morals, but it wasn’t regressive. It
was led, in large part, by women
demanding a better life for their
sisters in a country where domestic
violence, usually linked to alcohol,
was a scourge. The educator and
reformer Frances Willard was the
president of the Woman’s Christian
Temperance Union for nearly twenty
years, and also a leading campaigner
for women’s suffrage; her object,
she said, was “to secure for all
women above the age of twenty-one
years the ballot as one means for
the protection of their homes from
the devastation caused by the
legalized traffic in strong drink.”
A Methodist and a socialist, she
thought that men and women should
have equal political power, because
“God sets male and female side by
side throughout His realm of law.”</p>
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<p class="gmail-paywall"
style="box-sizing:border-box">She
was no anomaly. Methodism, then the
largest Protestant denomination in
the country, adopted its Social
Creed in 1908, the year that
President Theodore Roosevelt
addressed its annual conference. The
creed called for the abolition of
child labor, the end of sweatshops,
“the gradual and reasonable
reduction of the hours of labor to
the lowest practical point, with
work for all,” a “living wage in
every industry,” and the “highest
wage that each industry can afford,
and for the most equitable division
of the products of industry that can
ultimately be devised.” These were
radical goals then, and some of them
still are. Similar ideas continued
to be part of the denomination’s
official ideology throughout the
twentieth century: in 1956, the
Methodist General Conference
endorsed birth control; in 1960, it
urged “complete disarmament”; in
1964, the Methodist bishops declared
that “prejudice against any person
because of color or social status is
a sin.” Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s
1963 March on Washington was
planned, in part, in the meeting
rooms of the Methodist building on
Capitol Hill. In 1966, at a four-day
celebration of Methodism’s
bicentennial, President Lyndon
Johnson said that the Social Creed
was “a perfect description of the
American ideal,” in that it called
“for social justice for all human
beings.”</p>
<p class="gmail-paywall"
style="box-sizing:border-box">Though
it makes me happy, as a Methodist,
to recount this history, I don’t do
it for recruiting purposes.
Methodism was far from perfect;
having split regionally over
slavery, it trafficked, in the
South, with segregation, and it has
yet to come fully to terms with gay
rights. Nor was it, in its basic
social liberalism, an outlier. I
could have given a somewhat similar
pocket history of the Presbyterian
Church (in which I was baptized), or
the Congregational Church (in which
I was confirmed), or of
Episcopalianism, or of
Lutheranism—the other constituents
of the so-called mainline Protestant
Church, which dominated American
religious life in the twentieth
century. In 1958, according to the
religious historian Mark Silk, “52
out of every 100 Americans were
affiliated with a mainline
Protestant denomination.” That same
year, President Dwight Eisenhower,
who had been baptized as a
Presbyterian less than two weeks
after taking office, laid the
cornerstone for the Interchurch
Center in Manhattan, not far from
Grant’s Tomb. The center became home
to the headquarters of many of these
denominations and to their joint
National Council of Churches—it’s
known as the God Box. The United
States, Eisenhower said, was
politically free because it was
religiously free, in contrast to its
Cold War opponents, adding that
without this “firm foundation,
national morality could not be
maintained.” Protestantism—in its
modernist, as opposed to its
fundamentalist, guise—was, for most
of the century, a key part of the
group project to make America a
fairer, more humane, and more equal
nation. It was bipartisan (almost
every President in the twentieth
century except John F. Kennedy came
from a Protestant denomination), it
was often shallow (if you’re half
the population, you’re essentially
baptizing the status quo), but it
was real.</p>
<p class="gmail-paywall"
style="box-sizing:border-box">The
reason to tell this history now is
to complicate the idea of <a
href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/03/how-christian-is-christian-nationalism"
style="box-sizing: border-box;
background-color: transparent;
line-height: inherit;"
moz-do-not-send="true">Christian
nationalism</a> that’s currently
gripping sectors of the right. A <a
class="external-link"
href="https://www.prri.org/research/a-christian-nation-understanding-the-threat-of-christian-nationalism-to-american-democracy-and-culture/"
rel="nofollow noopener"
target="_blank" style="box-sizing:
border-box; background-color:
transparent; line-height:
inherit;" moz-do-not-send="true">new
poll</a> from the Public Religion
Research Institute and the Brookings
Institution found that around a
third of Americans are adherents of
or are sympathetic to a political
creed that holds that the government
should declare this a Christian
nation, that “being a Christian is
an important part of being truly
American,” and that “God has called
Christians to exercise dominion over
all areas of American society.”
Moreover, more than half of
Republicans support such ideas.</p>
<p class="gmail-paywall"
style="box-sizing:border-box">These
attitudes reflect, among other
things, a much more personalized
religious sense, one in which
individual salvation is the main or
only goal and social reform an
unwanted distraction. In the same
era that the God Box was built, the
evangelical leader <a
href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/08/22/the-big-tent"
style="box-sizing: border-box;
background-color: transparent;
line-height: inherit;"
moz-do-not-send="true">Billy
Graham</a> was insisting that “my
one purpose in life is to help
people find a personal relationship
with God, which, I believe, comes
through knowing Christ.” That more
self-focussed Christianity proved
immensely popular; decades later, it
merged with the more personalized
economics of the Reagan era to
produce the New Right. (Graham
himself was not a Christian
nationalist in this modern sense,
and he would doubtless be regarded
as a squishy globalist liberal by
many of its adherents, given that,
for example, he visited Mikhail
Gorbachev in the company of ten
Vatican officials, and spent his
life a registered Democrat.) But his
oldest son, the Reverend <a
href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/franklin-grahams-uneasy-alliance-with-donald-trump"
style="box-sizing: border-box;
background-color: transparent;
line-height: inherit;"
moz-do-not-send="true">Franklin
Graham</a>, is an exemplar of the
new belief system. After ten House
Republicans joined the Democrats to
impeach President Donald Trump for
inciting the insurrection at the
Capitol, Graham said, “It makes you
wonder what the thirty pieces of
silver were that Speaker Pelosi
promised for this betrayal.”</p>
<p class="gmail-paywall"
style="box-sizing:border-box">You
can see the personalized roots of
the new nationalism pretty easily.
In the P.R.R.I. study, more than
two-thirds of white
Christian-nationalist sympathizers
and adherents reject the notion that
“generations of slavery and
discrimination have created
conditions that make it difficult
for many Black Americans to work
their way out of the lower class,”
insisting instead that
“discrimination against white
Americans is as big of a problem as
discrimination against Black
Americans and other minorities.”
More than four-fifths of this group
think that immigrants are “invading
our country and replacing our
cultural and ethnic background”—the
core tenet of what’s called
replacement theory. Two-thirds think
that “society as a whole has become
too soft and feminine,” and half
that “we need a leader who is
willing to break some rules if
that’s what it takes to set things
right.” (More worrisome, almost
sixty per cent of the people whom
the P.R.R.I. counts as QAnon
believers—that is, people who agree
with such statements as “the
government, media, and financial
worlds in the U.S. are controlled by
a group of Satan-worshiping
pedophiles who run a global child
sex-trafficking operation”—are also
identified Christian nationalists.)</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="gmail-GridWrapper-uChIO
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style="box-sizing:border-box;margin-bottom:1rem">
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<div class="gmail-body__inner-container"
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<p class="gmail-paywall"
style="box-sizing:border-box;margin-top:0px">Not
surprisingly, leaders have risen to
cater to this need, a notable
example being Trump: in 2020, white
evangelicals were <a
href="https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2020/03/12/white-evangelicals-see-trump-as-fighting-for-their-beliefs-though-many-have-mixed-feelings-about-his-personal-conduct/"
style="box-sizing: border-box;
background-color: transparent;
line-height: inherit;"
moz-do-not-send="true">eight times</a> as
likely to say that he had helped
their cause than hurt it, even
though they recognized that his
behavior was less than godly. But
Trump is clearly tone-deaf to the
tropes of evangelicalism, unwilling
to perform its rituals of public
piety. He explained once that
he’d never repented of any sins,
saying, “I like to be good. I don’t
like to have to ask for forgiveness.
And I am good. I don’t do a lot of
things that are bad. I try to do
nothing that is bad.” (And, on the
fringes, Trump has repeatedly failed
to denounce QAnon conspiracy
theories.) Florida’s governor, Ron
DeSantis, though a Catholic, is far
better at this show. A recent <a
href="https://account.miamiherald.com/paywall/stop?resume=265261411"
style="box-sizing: border-box;
background-color: transparent;
line-height: inherit;"
moz-do-not-send="true">analysis</a> by
the Miami <em
style="box-sizing:border-box;line-height:inherit">Herald</em> and
the Tampa Bay <em
style="box-sizing:border-box;line-height:inherit">Times</em> found
that he is “increasingly using
Biblical references in speeches
and . . . flirting with those who
embrace nationalist ideas that see
the true identity of the nation as
Christian.” That “flirting” is an
understatement—last September, at
the evangelically and politically
important <a
href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/10/the-christian-liberal-arts-school-at-the-heart-of-the-culture-wars"
style="box-sizing: border-box;
background-color: transparent;
line-height: inherit;"
moz-do-not-send="true">Hillsdale
College</a>, in Michigan, as the
papers reported, the Governor
instructed his audience to “put on
the full armor of God” to fight not
the Devil, the original enemy in the
passage from Ephesians, where that
image originates, but “the left’s
schemes.” He told them, “You will
face flaming arrows, but if you have
the shield of faith you will
overcome them, and in Florida we
walk the line here.” Then, last
November, just before the
gubernatorial election (in which he
won a second term, by almost twenty
points), he released a
black-and-white campaign ad in
which, over a montage of photographs
of DeSantis and his family and
supporters, a voice declares that,
on “the eighth day,” God “looked
down on his planned paradise and
said, ‘I need a protector.’ So God
made a fighter.”</p>
<p class="gmail-paywall"
style="box-sizing:border-box">DeSantis’s
antics seem a bit silly, but looking
around the world this combination of
nationalism and fundamentalism is
fairly common. In India, Prime
Minister Narendra Modi has used <a
href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/on-religion/the-violent-toll-of-hindu-nationalism-in-india"
style="box-sizing: border-box;
background-color: transparent;
line-height: inherit;"
moz-do-not-send="true">Hindu
nationalism</a> to tighten his
control on a nation that is about to
become the world’s most populous. In
Turkey, President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan has managed to turn the
secular nationalism of <a
href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/ataturk-versus-erdogan-turkeys-long-struggle"
style="box-sizing: border-box;
background-color: transparent;
line-height: inherit;"
moz-do-not-send="true">Mustafa
Kemal Atatürk</a> into an Islamic
force, modelled on the Ottoman
Empire. <a
href="https://www.newyorker.com/tag/benjamin-netanyahu"
style="box-sizing: border-box;
background-color: transparent;
line-height: inherit;"
moz-do-not-send="true">Benjamin
Netanyahu</a>’s Israel is now torn
apart by strife and operationally in
the grip of Jewish nationalists,
whose understanding of their faith
excludes even many Americans who
thought they were co-religionists.
In Russia, <a
href="https://www.newyorker.com/tag/vladimir-putin"
style="box-sizing: border-box;
background-color: transparent;
line-height: inherit;"
moz-do-not-send="true">Vladimir
Putin</a> has made the defense of
Orthodoxy a bulwark of his politics;
at Orthodox Christmas, he said that
the Church had prioritized
“supporting our warriors taking part
in the special military operation”
in Ukraine. His annual address to
the Russian parliament, in February,
included remarks that could have
been delivered by some <span
class="gmail-small"
style="box-sizing:border-box;line-height:inherit;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-caps:small-caps;font-variant-alternates:normal;text-transform:lowercase">maga</span> politicians
in this country:</p>
<blockquote
class="gmail-BlockquoteEmbedWrapper-sc-eRLsRb
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style="box-sizing:border-box;width:361.714px;margin:1.5rem
auto">
<div
class="gmail-BlockquoteEmbedContent-hrCtBo
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style="box-sizing:border-box;padding-top:0px;font-feature-settings:normal;line-break:auto;line-height:1.5em;font-size:18px">
<div style="box-sizing:
border-box; margin-top: 0px;
margin-bottom: 0.5rem;">Look at
the holy scripture and the main
books of other world religions.
They say it all, including that
family is the union of a man and
a woman, but these sacred texts
are now being questioned.
Reportedly, the Anglican Church
is planning to, just planning
to, explore the idea of
gender-neutral God. What is
there to say? Father, forgive
them, for they know not what
they do.</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<p class="gmail-paywall"
style="box-sizing:border-box">Such
rhetoric still feels foreign to most
Americans—the separation of church
and state is ingrained in our
national psyche. In fact, atheists,
agnostics, and others in the
category that religion scholars call
Nones are the fastest-growing part
of the American population,
especially among young people.
Almost by definition, though,
they’re not organized—American
Atheists, the group founded by
Madalyn Murray O’Hair, has just some
seven thousand members. Who, then,
might take a lead in preventing
religion from further encroaching on
government? The mainline Protestants
who, in the nineteen-sixties, made
up more than half of Americans don’t
have anything like that kind of
influence now, but they haven’t
disappeared. According to the
P.R.R.I.’s <a class="external-link"
href="https://www.prri.org/research/2020-census-of-american-religion/"
rel="nofollow noopener"
target="_blank" style="box-sizing:
border-box; background-color:
transparent; line-height:
inherit;" moz-do-not-send="true">religion
census</a> for 2020, white
mainline Protestants still make up
about sixteen per cent of the
population, and their numbers have
grown very slightly in recent years,
including among younger Americans.
That’s closing in on fifty million
people in this country. They’re not
all liberal—being white, they may
tilt Republican in elections. But
only seven per cent meet the
criteria as adherents of Christian
nationalism. And their
leadership—their clergy, their
seminarians—is more progressive: a <a
class="external-link"
href="https://pres-outlook.org/2009/04/study-mainline-clergy-growing-even-more-liberal/"
rel="nofollow noopener"
target="_blank" style="box-sizing:
border-box; background-color:
transparent; line-height:
inherit;" moz-do-not-send="true">2009
study</a> from Public Religion
Research found that more than
seventy-five per cent of mainline
Protestant ministers wanted
government to do more to solve the
poverty and housing crises,
two-thirds wanted to outlaw capital
punishment, four in five thought
that gay people deserve equal
treatment, and nearly seventy per
cent wanted more governmental
measures to protect the environment.</p>
<div class="gmail-Container-inRyLO
gmail-VAZYn"
style="box-sizing:border-box">
<div style="box-sizing: border-box;
margin: 0px 0px 0.5rem;
text-transform: uppercase;
font-family: IrvinText,
IrvinHeadingPro, Georgia,
"Times New Roman",
Times, serif;
font-feature-settings: normal;
line-break: auto; line-height:
1.33333em; font-size: 12px;">VIDEO
FROM THE NEW YORKER</div>
<a rel="noopener noreferrer"
target="_blank"
class="gmail-BaseWrap-sc-SJwXJ
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href="https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/leonard-cohen-the-last-interview"
style="box-sizing: border-box;
background-color: transparent;
margin: 0px;
font-feature-settings: normal;
line-break: auto; line-height:
1.5em; display: block;"
moz-do-not-send="true">
<p class="gmail-BaseWrap-sc-SJwXJ
gmail-BaseText-fEohGt
gmail-InterludeTitle-bKhaJB
gmail-deUlYF gmail-famcRb
gmail-cmuPUE"
style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px
1rem
1rem;font-family:NeutrafaceNewYorker,"Helvetica
Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-feature-settings:normal;line-break:auto;line-height:1.2em;font-size:20px;font-weight:600">Leonard
Cohen on Preparing for Death</p>
</a></div>
<p class="gmail-paywall"
style="box-sizing:border-box">To be
clear, this leadership group is not
primarily involved in partisan
politics. Its members are primarily
involved in running
churches—preaching, visiting sick
people, making sure that the
stewardship drive raises enough
money to fix the roof. (I’ve been a
lay leader of a small Methodist
congregation; it’s all storm windows
and insurance coverage for the
parsonage.) And most involve
themselves in the larger world
through good works, from stocking
the church free-food pantry to
allying with national efforts, such
as the Reverend <a
href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/william-barber-takes-on-poverty-and-race-in-the-age-of-trump"
style="box-sizing: border-box;
background-color: transparent;
line-height: inherit;"
moz-do-not-send="true">William
Barber</a>’s Poor People’s
Campaign, which fights effectively
for state and national legislation,
or the Lutheran Immigration and
Refugee Service, which has become
the largest faith-based resettlement
nonprofit in the country. (I’m on
the service’s advisory council.)
Often, what political instincts
these leaders have are channelled
into denominational work, passing
resolutions—over time, the
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has
adopted motions favoring restorative
justice, opposing Israel’s
occupation of Palestinian lands,
supporting “just globalization,” and
calling racism a public-health
issue. But we no longer live in an
era when the mainline churches have
enough power to make such
resolutions more than words on
paper; I served for some years on my
Methodist conference’s Board of
Church and Society, and I’m afraid
that we sometimes referred to
ourselves as Bored with Church and
Society.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="gmail-GridWrapper-uChIO
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<div class="gmail-GridItem-btGJuM efCVnM
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<div class="gmail-body__inner-container"
style="box-sizing:border-box">
<p class="gmail-paywall"
style="box-sizing:border-box;margin-top:0px">Still,
these mainline leaders do have
unique credibility for a different
task: taking on Christian
nationalism from a Christian
perspective—acting, in a sense, as <a
href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/12/inside-the-lincoln-projects-war-against-trump"
style="box-sizing: border-box;
background-color: transparent;
line-height: inherit;"
moz-do-not-send="true">the Lincoln
Project</a> and <a
href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/liz-cheneys-kamikaze-campaign"
style="box-sizing: border-box;
background-color: transparent;
line-height: inherit;"
moz-do-not-send="true">Liz Cheney</a> have
acted in relation to the Republican
Party. They are insiders who can say
that the current incarnation of
Christian power is not, in fact,
particularly Christian—who can,
among other things, scoff at their
brethren’s sense of victimization
and point out that they are not, in
fact, the targets of discrimination.</p>
<p class="gmail-paywall"
style="box-sizing:border-box">Such a
move wouldn’t be easy, for a variety
of mostly temperamental reasons. Not
only do many mainline leaders value
consensus and avoid conflict, often
knowing that the people in the pews
are more moderate than they are, but
they’d be particularly likely to do
so in interreligious disputes.
Ecumenicism, especially since the
Second World War, has been one of
the calling cards of this
group—there’s a humility that
discourages declaring your form of
faith as better than another
person’s. (My grandfather was born
in China, the son of missionaries,
so this humility strikes me as
entirely appropriate, and a welcome
development.) But one needn’t call
Christian nationalists fake
Christians. Though some are secular,
and just using the Christian tag,
the P.R.R.I. data make it clear that
most are not “Christian in name
only. They are significantly more
likely to be connected to churches
and to say religion is important to
their lives.” Instead, it seems
imperative to say that these people
have been sold a fake Christianity.</p>
<p class="gmail-paywall"
style="box-sizing:border-box">This
is not a charge that secular critics
of Christian nationalism would be
able, or would want, to make—and
it’s at least as powerful to argue
that we are a diverse country where
no religion should exercise
authority, which is clearly what the
Founders intended. But the task
should be important to mainline
Protestants (and to progressive
Catholics) for two reasons. First,
the social goals that they believe
in—all those Presbyterian
resolutions (and all the
recommendations from Pope Francis’s
encyclicals on poverty and the
environment)—would be a dead letter
in a Christian-nationalist America.
Second, Christian nationalists are
well along in the process of
subverting the popular understanding
of Christianity.</p>
<p class="gmail-paywall"
style="box-sizing:border-box">In
fact, Christ—the central focus of
Christianity—is not a king, and not
a fighter, but an advocate for the
downtrodden. His ministry has no
apparent interest in
nationalism—indeed, welcoming
strangers is one of its hallmarks.
He is insistently nonviolent, and
almost every gesture he makes is one
of compassion. (His crime policy
states that if someone takes your
shirt, you should also give him your
cloak.) His chief commandment is to
love your neighbor. The four gospels
are radical, rich, and deep, but
they’re not complicated. If you read
them and come away saying, “I’d like
an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle,”
you’ve read them wrong.</p>
<p class="gmail-paywall"
style="box-sizing:border-box">You
can tell from this précis that I am
not a theologian. I have written <a
class="external-link"
href="https://www.amazon.com/Comforting-Whirlwind-God-Scale-Creation/dp/1561012343"
rel="nofollow noopener"
target="_blank" style="box-sizing:
border-box; background-color:
transparent; line-height:
inherit;" moz-do-not-send="true">a
book</a> on the Book of Job, and
I’ve occasionally taught the Bible
at Middlebury College, where I
mostly lecture on the environment,
and I’ve preached in some of the
world’s nicer pulpits. But mostly
I’ve absorbed the messages of the
great preachers of my lifetime—men
such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
(and what a lot of Protestantism is
in that name) and the Reverend
William Sloane Coffin, Jr. Nor am I
convinced of the superiority of my
religion. (My two great political
heroes are the Hindu Mahatma Gandhi
and his greatest associate, the
Muslim Abdul Ghaffar Khan.) But I am
convinced of the worth of my
religion, and so it maddens me to
see it hijacked in favor of a
nationalist reading that can be
supported only by bad-faith
cherry-picking (or, as theology
students would have it,
“proof-texting”).</p>
<p class="gmail-paywall"
style="box-sizing:border-box">Some
good-faith Christians are beginning
to rise to the challenge. Not long
ago, William Barber told an
interviewer, “When you have some
people calling themselves Christian
nationalists, you never hear them
say, ‘Jesus said this.’ They say,
‘I’m a Christian, and I say it.’ But
that’s not good enough. If it
doesn’t line up with the founder,
then it’s flawed.” And a Baptist
layperson named Amanda Tyler, having
watched insurrectionists storm the
Capitol on January 6th carrying
crosses, heads a group called
Christians Against Christian
Nationalism, which circulated a
petition stating that “Christian
nationalism seeks to merge Christian
and American identities, distorting
both the Christian faith and
America’s constitutional democracy.”
The group has also developed a <a
href="https://www.newsweek.com/faith-groups-launch-new-curriculum-bid-address-surge-christian-nationalism-1606701?amp=1&__twitter_impression=true"
style="box-sizing: border-box;
background-color: transparent;
line-height: inherit;"
moz-do-not-send="true">curriculum</a> for
churches, and, last December, Tyler <a
class="external-link"
href="https://baptistnews.com/article/amanda-tyler-testifies-before-congress-against-christian-nationalism/"
rel="nofollow noopener"
target="_blank" style="box-sizing:
border-box; background-color:
transparent; line-height:
inherit;" moz-do-not-send="true">testified</a> at
congressional hearings on extremism.
Voices and projects like these need
to grow louder and more numerous.
The American experiment in pluralism
is endangered, and so is public
understanding of one of the world’s
great faiths. It’s a perilous
moment, but a teachable one. ♦</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
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</blockquote>
</div>
<br>
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