Is it me, or is it a little Christian Nationalist-y these days?

And what can we do about it?

Christian Nationalism Today

This month is mostly going to be “have you seen this documentary?” because we have SO much really solid content out there right now. This week I want to make sure you’ve seen a docu-series that left me shook, as someone who worked in Congress and had no idea how powerful this seemingly innocuous and long-standing group was (and is) on politicians and politics. Have you heard of the Family? There’s a four-part Netflix documentary about it, and if you haven’t heard of them or their founder Abraham Vereide, you’re not alone, even though you’ve heard of their biggest venture, the National Prayer Breakfast. Vereide, back in 1935, heard God tell him instead of focusing on the down and out, his calling was to the “up and out,” as in rich and powerful people who either were or could be connected to him through Jesus, thereby allowing God’s power to grow in the US. When he started a bible study with members of Congress in 1942, apparently he told them that God wanted them to break the spines of labor. That is VERY specific. [Note: I didn’t learn that anecdote from the documentary but from additional research about religion and labor in US politics.]

Today, the Family’s catch phrase is “Jesus plus nothing,” which sounds pretty harmless, except that according to the documentary, they actually mean Jesus plus power minus accountability minus equal rights for women…so a group focused on building relationships with powerful people prioritizing Jesus but not prioritizing any ethics, founded by someone who saw workers as a threat to the people God actually cared about: the rich and powerful. They have stood by corrupt politicians in their network and pushed out the people who said “shouldn’t we demand better ethics of Jesus followers?” The Family has boosted the work of anti-gay politicians in Africa and anti-woman politicians in the US, and internally, they support the notion that women’s job is to support the thriving and success of men, so that tracks. And every politician from at least Carter on has publicly honored the Family’s leaders (although they worked with Eisenhower on establishing the National Prayer Breakfast and likely interacted with Presidents from that point on with regularity).

A lot of us find ourselves wondering how Christian Nationalism got so powerful, because what we see of Christian Nationalism is white supremacists and fringe religious leaders and famously Marjorie Taylor Greene. However, behind the scenes, there have been people with power and connections moving forward an agenda where the rights of religious minorities have no place and also while Jesus is at the center, his teachings are largely ignored. And actually, it’s not just happening behind the scenes: many of my friends participated in “See You at the Pole,” a nationwide movement I remember from the early 90s where high school students gathered at the flagpole at school before class to pray together. And every year, we hear in the news about that year’s National Prayer Breakfast. Those are both initiatives of The Family, even though almost no one knows that.

This current surge of Christian Nationalism has a whole infrastructure built up over decades. It’s worth learning about it so we can recognize and respond to it.

Christian Nationalism in History

I want to take us back to the late 1800s. If you haven’t heard the term Manifest Destiny, it was the language used to explain the inevitability and even sacredness of the United States’ expansion westward, which included the land on which Indigenous Americans lived but also other lands where the US imposed military or financial dominance, like the Philippines, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. The concept of manifest destiny went all the way back to the Puritans but it was popularized as a term in the 1840s.

The reason I’m talking about manifest destiny today is it was a widespread belief among early White Americans couched very much in religious language. Pastor Lyman Beecher in his 1832 leaflet advocating for westward expansion said God had made sure America was “destined to lead the way in the moral and political emancipation of the world.”  This subtle tying of religion to American democracy to liberating people (who had actually been free before the arrival of Americans but were about to lose that freedom) carried political and military weight, and that language still shows up in some of the discourse about US involvement in nations abroad.

When we stand for equality and against military interventionism, we’re pushing against that centuries-old idea that the English Puritans were sent by God to possess a land, to rescue its native peoples from heresy, and to profit financially in the process. No wonder people react without even knowing why—we don’t realize the ways manifest destiny is still part of our story, or that it goes back so far.

Who took on Christian Nationalism in our history?

You may know that I currently spend two semesters a year in Philadelphia, PA. I’m a big history buff and am always looking for an excuse to take friends to various historic sites. (When my mom and I visited Independence Hall, I had “The Room Where It Happens” going through my head, and she was hearing “Sit Down, John” in hers.)

[this statue of the revolutionary history of the University of Pennsylvania stood about 50 feet from the Gaza student solidarity encampment until the administration had police come in to dismantle it just before graduation ceremonies. Lest families of graduates worry that the school still adhered to those founding principles. The football team’s name is the Quakers.]

So I obviously find myself thinking a lot about the founder of Pennsylvania, as one does. William Penn was a student at Oxford University in England until he was expelled for joining the Society of Friends (also known by others as “Quakers”). Religious freedom was a foundational value for Penn, who was jailed and tried several times. Despite this history, Penn was given a charter to establish the colony now known as Pennsylvania in 1681, and religious freedom was unsurprisingly a key tenet of its charter. Penn was also one of the first to call for independence from Britain.

"No people can be truly happy, though under the greatest enjoyments of civil liberties, if abridged of the Freedom of their Conscience as to their Religious Profession and Worship." (Pennsylvania Charter of Liberties, 1701)

Despite his fellow Quakers in Germantown making a forceful stand against enslavement in the American colonies as did many Quakers, Penn also enslaved people and profited off of chattel slavery. Part of looking back on US history is recognizing that some of our greatest champions on certain issues also unhesitatingly exploited, dehumanized, and harmed people. I’ve lifted up FDR’s worker justice, and he incarcerated Japanese Americans and also rounded up Mexican immigrants and also US-born Chicanos and dropped them in the middle of Mexico during his administration. Last week I talked about Teddy Roosevelt demanding that corporations be regulated and monopolies be broken up, and Roosevelt’s anti-Indian and pro-westward expansion beliefs manifested in violent, destructive and racist public policy.

What I think is worth noting is that the good policies that prominent leaders put into place in these moments in history were the result of many regular people generating attention and heat and resistance so that something had to be done. I’m grateful for religious freedom, and William Penn was on the forefront of baking that into the Pennsylvania and ultimately the US constitution. And that’s because he joined a religious tradition where so many people risked their freedom, safety and well-being for their right to worship in a way that deviated from a state religion. And while racism or greed stopped him from hearing the Germantown Friends’ call for the abolition of slavery, many Friends joined others, particularly Black people who had liberated themselves and each other, in ultimately banning chattel slavery.

So as I continue to engage the “forebears” section of this newsletter, I plan to be more intentional about naming more of the story as well as looking to and celebrating the people who pushed the prominent leaders.

Just blowing off a little steam about the origins of Christian Nationalism in the US:

I want to complain about something I learned back in seminary: that throughout all of US history, there have been two distinct schools of thought related to religious freedom in this country. One is the idea of religious freedom for all people, embodied by Roger Williams who founded Rhode Island as a “lively experiment” to protect “liberty of conscience.” He is famous for his coining of the separation of church and state in these flowery words: “[a] wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.” The other school was the Puritans who weren’t in favor of religious freedom for all people so much as religious freedom for them, and also the freedom to dominate those who weren’t them.

It brings me joy that when I do an internet search for religious freedom, the first thing I see is the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, and now that you’ve heard the Roger Williams quote (dude was a Baptist), you can see why SOME Baptists are really proud of their history…the other ones don’t want you to talk about their history because it conflicts so much with what they want now.

But it brings me no small amount of pain that the second or third item in my internet search for religious freedom is the website for the Alliance Defending Freedom, that extremist organization that supports the sterilization of trans people and represented in the Supreme Court the lady who says she’s religiously oppressed because someday maybe gay people will want her to design a wedding website for them. HOW ARE THOSE BOTH RELIGIOUS FREEDOM? OK. Rant over. Let’s get to work.

What we can do

I know this feels like so little, but so many of us have been trained that it’s impolite to talk about religion that we end up not being able to talk about some core values as a result. Many Americans think the US should be a Christian nation, but they don’t agree on what that means. And I do think part of the reason that number is so high is we no longer talk about why religious liberty is a good thing, and how it actually protects people of all religions (including Christian). I’ve occasionally had conversations with friends of mine who say they’re in favor of teacher-led school prayer. I’ve asked how they would feel if the teacher leading it believed God wanted women to be inferior, if the teacher believed God wanted them to use corporal punishment, if the teacher believed God saw their child’s race as inferior, if the teacher believed God condemned their child’s religion as heresy. I’m not saying those conversations result in thunderbolts from the heavens, but I think they can plant seeds that are important.

And I definitely talk with people about what I’ve learned in the documentaries about Christian Nationalism that I’ve been watching. Sometimes we have really rich conversations. Sometimes they’re not as concerned as I am. But if we can’t talk about religion, then the only people talking about it are the folks who want to make sure this is in fact a Christian nation—and a very specific version of Christianity at that.

Thanks again to you who are reading, you who subscribe and share content you find helpful, you who follow my content on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Twitter as well as on Notes here, and you who have paid subscriptions if you are in a position to afford it. I am so grateful to be in community with you at a fairly intense moment.

-Sandhya