Christian Nationalism, Christian Reconstructionism, White Supremacy
Aug 15, 2023
Growing up in California in the 60s, I learned in my high school American History class that America was founded by people who believed in the freedom of religion, and that the First Amendment to the Constitution was designed to protect that freedom. I was taught that this meant that the government could not impose any particular set of religious beliefs on anyone. As a member of a small minority religion, I have felt that being a Buddhist is something I was free to follow for myself, a freedom protected by the Constitution. But, the recent past has demonstrated how widely divergent interpretations as to what “religious freedom” means.
A recent interview of the evangelical leader Russell Moore surprised me since Moore is not someone with whom I have ever found myself in agreement. The pleasant surprise is that Moore addresses the dangers of Christian Nationalism, including the danger to evangelical Christianity itself. To quote that section of the interview as published:
Christian nationalism is the use of Christian symbols or teachings in order to prop up a nation-state or an ethnic identity. It’s dangerous for the nation because it’s fundamentally anti-democratic. Christian nationalism takes a political claim and seeks to make it ultimate. It says: If a person disagrees with me, that person is disagreeing with God. No democratic nation can survive that, which is why the founders of this country built in all kinds of protections from it.
Christian nationalism is also dangerous for the witness of the church, because Christian nationalism is fundamentally, at its core, anti-evangelical. If what the Gospel means is for people to come before God, person by person, not nation by nation or village by village or tribe by tribe, then Christian nationalism is heretical.
Christian nationalism assumes outward conformity enforced by social or political power. It transforms the way that we see reality with the assumption that the really important things are political and cultural, as opposed to personal and spiritual and theological. <link>
The phrase “ethnic identity” perhaps alludes to, while at the same time avoids mentioning, the role of White supremacy and racism in the dynamics of Christian nationalism. (A group actively working against White Christian Nationalism is Faithful America, which has compiled a useful set of information and resources <link>).
In another recent NYTimes column, Charles M. Blow explains that Christian nationalism is
a subset of white supremacy that holds that God has ordained America as a Christian nation and that its ideals must be protected from the encroachment of pluralism — racial, religious or otherwise. <link>
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s report on “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2022” identifies White Christian Nationalism as the “key ideology” inspiring the January 6th insurrection and attack on the US Capital. The conflation of White supremacy, Christian rhetorics, and a tribal nationalism is made quite clearly in the report’s description of Christian Nationalism,
White Christian nationalism generally refers to a political ideology and identity that fuses white supremacy, Christianity and American nationalism, and whose proponents claim that the United States is a “Christian nation.” Their ideology’s end goal is power for “true Americans” who hold their specific political and religious views. In this paradigm, the nation’s foundational separation of church and state contradict their conception of God’s plan, and U.S. laws, policies, leaders and even culture should reflect adherents’ extremely narrow interpretation of biblical values. <link>
My own awareness of this movement began when I started teaching classes in Religion in America and came across the video journalism of Bill Moyers.
One episode of Bill Moyers and Company focused on Rousas John Rushdoony (1916 to 2001), who was a key figure in the movement known as Christian Reconstructionism. <link> This was in 1987, thirty-six years ago, when the episode “On Earth as it is in Heaven,” on Christian Reconstructionism appeared. Described as “a religious movement that believes the Bible should form the sole basis for social, political, economic and cultural order, as they believe it did in ancient Jerusalem,” Christian Reconstructionism clearly set the groundwork for White Christian Nationalism.
Central to the Christian Nationalist legal argument today is that religious commitments are superior to those of citizenship. A person’s religious identity—their sincerely held beliefs—authorizes them to ignore the law. Such an approach avoids the question of whether such beliefs are pre-existing prejudices now cloaked in religious language. This legal argument is expressed succinctly by Jane Mayer who summarizes the Hobby Lobby case that successfully argued before the Supreme Court that “corporations are entitled to religious freedom and therefore can exempt themselves from national laws that they deem violations of their beliefs.” <link>
Thus, not only are corporations legal persons who have the right to freedom of speech, which they can express through campaign donations to politicians and political action groups, but now they are legal persons who have the right to freedom of religion, a right that is deemed superior to other legal obligations.
Similarly disconcerting (a nice word for frightening) is the ability of Christian Nationalists to insert Christianity into public schools—as evidenced by the apparently still active support for teaching the doctrine of Intelligent Design as an alternative to Darwinian evolution. Now this state support of sectarian Christian teachings includes the use of taxpayer’s money to fund private religious schools. This consequence of the charter school movement—a development out of the homeschooling movement pioneered by Rushdoonie and the Christian reconstructionists—should have been obvious from the start. Oklahoma law says that charter schools must be “non-sectarian.” The Oklahoma state attorney general, however, has judged that this is an infringement on religious freedom. In other words, it is okay in this view to spend public moneys—collected from everyone whether Christian or not—to support sectarian religious education. <link>
What a fantasy world we live in now. Legal fictions, such as that a corporation has the same legal standing that an actual human being has, are rampant, and our society is dominated by those powerful corporate immortals. At the same time, the law is being restructured so that religious commitment is superior to the law, and that the Constitutional amendment separating church and state has been reinterpreted as if it “really” means that the state should support some churches.
Richard K. Payne 