What We Talk About When We Talk About Christian Nationalism

Getting our Terms Right

Over the next few weeks, I’d like to spend a little time on here “thinking out loud” about Christian Nationalism. For those who read regularly (or don’t!), I want to unnecessarily over-qualify this series: I’m not sure where it’s all going, and I’m treating this much more like a “blog” - an online log of thoughts - than a publishable series of essays. So, I’m in process, but I do have a few building blocks of thought on this issue I’d like to flesh out alongside you all over the next couple of months. I haven’t heard these kinds of things articulated elsewhere and I feel like I’ve had increasingly clarifying thoughts about what we call Christian Nationalism over the last year.

Today’s first thought is one of them, and it’s this:

A. I don’t think everything we call Christian Nationalism is Christian Nationalism,

AND

B. I don’t think that makes what we’re describing any less evil.

So, part one: I don’t think everything we call Christian Nationalism is Christian Nationalism. Surely Christian Nationalism is a real thing. But it very much hurts the case of those of us worried about this growing movement when we don’t define our terms correctly, and call every conservative political sin Christian Nationalism. Christian Nationalism, so far as I understand it now, is really about the rejection of the project of American pluralism in favor of a kind of official endorsement of Christianity as the enforceable and explicit vision behind American faith and policy. There is definitely some muddy water here. But if we hold to this definition, it also means that much of what we’re calling Christian Nationalism isn’t Nationalism at all.

For example, when a Christian individually promotes and votes for policies that flow from their Christian convictions…this is not necessarily Christian Nationalism. Allowing for Christians let their Christian ethical vision flow out into whom we vote for, and how we think about policy, is very much the friend of pluralism. To say that all faith convictions must be checked at the door when we go to the voting booth is not pluralistic at all, but is a kind of Secular Nationalism that I think clearly betrays the vision of the founding fathers. And often, this kind of enforcement of Secular (or we could even say Atheistic) Nationalism is what Christian Nationalists point to in self defense, because I think Christian Nationalists are absolutely right to say, “Atheistic Nationalism was not the original American Vision.” And now we are at an impasse.

However, it’s a problem when the conversation ends here, because believe it or not, sin is tricky and cancerous and multifaceted…and Christian Nationalism is not the only way we Evangelicals sin in the public realm. Another term I’ve been thinking about lately, and that I think we need to use much more often, is political syncretism. By political syncretism, I mean adopting the agenda of any political candidate, or party, as the “Christian” agenda, or Jesus’s agenda, or the agenda of “Faith”. Once the secular vision of a given candidate or party (or at the very least very flawed and imperfect) is stitched to Christianity, we’ve in fact entirely lost the Christian vision for political engagement, because no political candidate or party - even a CHRISTIAN political candidate - can accurately be collapsed into Jesus’ entire agenda. The only fully accurate representation of Jesus is Jesus, and the chosen representation of Jesus is his church. Not a candidate or American political party.

I’m not saying, here, that we can’t choose flawed candidates or parties as “co-billigerents” on certain issues. Of course we can, and we must. But once this candidate, or party, begins to become the unquestionable authority on moral and political issues, we can be assured we have exchanged the kingship of Jesus for some other, darker form of kinship. And I think it is actually quite clear when we have crossed this line. When we are unable to name, and prophetically push back on, the deep evil we see in our own chosen politician and party, we can be assured that we’ve adopted the vision of said candidate our party as the spokesperson for Jesus himself. And this is the behavior of a cult member: proclaiming Jesus in name while using his name to tout the secular agenda of a figure or group.

This is not, however, what I would call Christian Nationalism.

It is Christian syncretism.

That’s not to say the evil is less evil. In many ways, syncretism is more dangerous and damning than Christian Nationalism, because Christian syncretization is an active, powerful force in our country, while Christian Nationalism (as I’ll write about in a later post), is really a fanciful kind of nostalgic cosplay. Christian syncretization is idolatry, but it is idolatry that can be acted upon, packaged into a sermon, and publicly enforced.

If this sounds like a post that is “Coded Left”, it’s not meant to be. I have been disturbed to see all sorts of Rightwing political syncretization. But in this last election, I’ve seen much more explicit political syncretization on the Left: ignoring the deep evils Kamala/Biden have endorsed and enforced in the White House, many Evangelicals publicly syncretized Jesus’ own agenda with the agendas of the Left, claiming that whoever-opposed-Trump was Jesus’ candidate. This, too, is idolatry: the unwillingness to prophetically speak back against the Left’s disregard for vulnerable human life, the predatory and corrupt promotion of gender confusion, the condescending attitudes of the elite toward the majority middle class Americans…for all of the complaining against Rightwing syncretization, it seemed the solution, for these Evangelicals, was syncretization to the Left. So in one sense, no matter who is pointing fingers, naming political syncretization may start with us: how have we politically syncretized?

Let’s remove that log first.

This, I think, is where the critiques of what we call “Christian Nationalism” fall flat. We’re actually not talking about Christian Nationalism at all, but a more subtle and I think more insidious version of evil: Christian syncretism. It’s not that the evil being named is any less evil. It’s simply mislabeled. If we want to kill Voldemort, we need to be less abstract in naming him.