We have allies in the fight against Christian nationalism!
There really is something we can do, and people we can collaborate with!
Before we jump into a little more Christian nationalism (and how our ancestors resisted), I wanted to let you know that if you haven’t had a chance to become a paid subscriber, you might want to in order to learn about what I’m learning in school; earlier this month I dropped an essay about the origins of Critical Race Theory for paid subscribers (it’s not what Chris Rufo’s been telling us it is—and even he admits that). Next month I’ll be doing a deeper dive into CRT founder Derrick Bell’s reflections on how to resist injustices even when you have no hope you’ll succeed. It’s been helping me a lot as I think about our work to preserve democracy, and I think you’ll find it meaningful, also.
If you’re not already a paid subscriber, if you click the button below (even if you’re already a free subscriber), it will give you the option to become a paid subscriber. It’s how people are supporting my studies, and I’m so grateful.
And now back to our regularly scheduled Christian nationalism.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Our partners in the work of resisting Christian nationalism today
Today I want to share some really good news. There are phenomenal folks you can connect with to resist a movement to replace democracy with theocracy and equality with patriarchy:
I used to work for the Interfaith Alliance, and collaborated with People for the American Way, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty—all top notch. [note: the BJC link takes you to a petition for Christians against Christian nationalism if you’re interested.]
If you’re Muslim, there’s good work happening through MPAC, AROC, and CAIR.
If you’re Jewish, I particularly admire the work of the Religious Action Center on Reform Judaism, and both the ADL and Jewish Voice for Peace do work in this arena as well.
If you’re Christian, you could look to Christians for Social Action or Sojourners or Red Letter Christians if you’re evangelical, or the National Council of Churches or the social justice arm of your denomination if you’re mainline or orthodox, or NETWORK or Pax Christi if you’re Catholic.
Buddhist Peace Fellowship and Sikh Coalition have also historically engaged in this work in meaningful ways.
And I’ll say it again: if you don’t have the bandwidth or time to join an existing campaign or connect with an organization (which I know can be a little daunting), doing a little reading and talking about it with your friends, your book group, your work wife, your cousins…it all makes a difference. My friend Beau Underwood recently wrote a book called Baptizing America that is incredibly accessible for mainline Christians to examine our role in propping up or pushing back against Christian nationalism. A classic text if you’re Christian is Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon on how Christianity isn’t about God favoring a geographic location. Two books I found chilling but important, which are for people of any or no faith are Hijacking History by Kathleen Wellman about the way conservative Christian schools teach world and US history to shape a generation, and Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin duMez about masculinizing Christianity and weaving it into Christian nationalism (more in the next section on that).
Please know that while this threat to secular democracy is real and it is powerful, it is a minority perspective, and together we can protect our collective right to freedom of religion and religious tolerance as a floor, not a ceiling. Keep up the good work. I am grateful for you.
Christian Nationalism and History
Let’s talk about Christian Nationalism and whose rights get protected (hint, almost nobody’s.) I’ve been reading Kristin Du Mez’s book Jesus and John Wayne, which is about how white American evangelicalism got so invested in a “muscular Christianity” based less on the Jesus of the Bible and more on athletes and cowboys and war-inclined politics. I wanted to talk about it because patriarchy is so at the core of its message. You may have heard about former Vice President Mike Pence following the “Billy Graham” rule about never being alone with a woman who isn’t his wife, and the fact that he didn’t care about how that limited women’s ability to contribute to public policy. Well, that’s because Billy Graham strongly advocated for women to be subservient to their husbands and not be involved in decision-making more broadly.
I know the Bible pretty well and it advocates repeatedly for women’s equality, but those aren’t the verses Christian nationalists are using to cast their vision for this country. Instead, they’ve put muscles on Jesus and used passages that remove women’s equality (and those passages do also exist). And I don’t think we realize how broadly those ideas have been adopted. It makes me sad because it doesn’t serve ANY gender in the end, but it particularly doesn’t serve non-males. I can’t recommend the book highly enough, because while it is enraging, it is also illuminating and motivating. We aren’t in this place by accident, and knowing what got us here might help us find a better way forward.
An ancestor who resisted Christian nationalism
I recently learned about Anna Dickinson, who got her start as a public-facing abolitionist at the age of 13. Once, at a key moment in the Civil War, she gave a speech in Congress to stay true to the cause of full and equal rights for Black people, and they say Lincoln was so inspired—or indicted—by her testimony that he refused to speak after her, letting her words stand as the defining testimony on abolition that day.
Dickinson, a Quaker, also spoke out on the dangers of religious intolerance, saying in one speech,
"The same spirit which enslaves a race today may enslave a sex tomorrow. It is the spirit of tyranny which must be met and overthrown wherever it appears."
She fought against sexism. She fought against racism. She fought against religious intolerance. She fought for Black and women’s enfranchisement. I thought we deserved the reminder that we’re not the first ones to stand up against people manipulating religion for corrupt purposes. We stand on the shoulders of giants like Anna Dickinson, as well as Black abolitionists like William Henry Garnett, who once said,
"But will the American church allow us to be men? It is easy to see, that if they do not, we must see to ourselves, and for ourselves."
Amen.
Thanks for your ongoing support, and thanks for remaining engaged in the work of justice.