Christian Nationalism

 By Morgan Lee

Millions of Americans believe in this political ideology. What church leaders need to know—and how they can help those under its influence.

As crowds lined up in front of the Capitol last week, Christian imagery was on display amidst the Trump/Pence 2020 and Confederate flags, QAnon memorabilia, and viking helmets. People held crosses, “Jesus Saves” signs and “Jesus 2020” banners. As protesters crowded onto the Capitol steps, across the street, someone blew a shofar while a woman sang “Peace in the name of Jesus. The blood of Jesus covering this place.”

In the aftermath of the Capitol attack, many saw a clear connection between the violence and Christian nationalism. As Tish Harrison Warren wrote for CT:

The responsibility of yesterday’s violence must be in part laid at the feet of those evangelical leaders who ushered in and applauded Trump’s presidency. It can also sadly be laid at the feet of the white American church more broadly.

Paul D. Miller is professor of the practice of international affairs at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He is also a research fellow with the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. He recently released Just War and Ordered Liberty and is currently finalizing a book tentatively titled Christian Nationalism in the Age of Trump for InterVarsity Press.

Miller joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to define Christian nationalism, shed light on its rise in the white evangelical world, and offer advice to church leaders trying to deradicalize members of their own community.

How do you define Christian nationalism?

Paul D. Miller: It’s easiest to define Christian nationalism by contrasting it with Christianity. Christianity is a religion. It’s a set of beliefs about ultimate things: most importantly, about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It's drawn from the Bible, from the Nicene Creed, and the Apostles’ Creed.

Christian nationalism is a political ideology about American identity. It is a set of policy prescriptions for what the nationalists believe the American government should do. It’s not drawn from the Bible. It draws political theory from secular philosophy and their own version of history as well. Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry wrote a great book last year about Christian nationalism called Taking America Back for God. They say Christian nationalism is a cultural framework, a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and value systems.

It idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life. That's a great way of understanding it. Christian nationalism believes that the American nation is defined by Christianity and that the government should take steps to keep it that way to sustain and maintain our Christian heritage. It’s not merely an observation about American history. It is a prescription for what America should do in the future. We should sustain and continue our identity as a Christian nation. That’s Christian nationalism.

Perry and White have five questions that they ask to measure people’s adherence to Christian nationalism. One of them is whether people agree with this statement: “I consider founding documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to be divinely inspired.” What’s your view on that?

Paul D. Miller: If you believe that the Constitution is divinely inspired, that puts you high up on the scale of Christian nationalism. You don’t get much more Christian nationalist than that. Sometimes social scientists talk about the ideal type of a thing. In other words, its logical conclusion, its purest form.

I think that any kind of nationalism in its purest form is religion. It is idolatry. That’s true of Christian nationalism. It takes Christian symbols, rhetoric, and concepts and weaves it into a political ideology that in its ideal form is idolatrous. I’m not saying everyone at the riot is an idolater, because I don't know if they hold the ideal type of Christian nationalist ideology. That’s the virtue of recognizing it as a sliding scale. People fall all along this scale, but at the extreme is an idolater.

Should we be considering Christian nationalism a worldview, like secularism and modernism? To what degree should we think of Christian nationalism as a comprehensive set of worldviews that if you have this belief, you will probably have that belief?

Paul D. Miller: I prefer the language of ideology, that Christian nationalism is a political ideology. Ideology is a linked set of normative ideas about the social and political order, specifically how society and politics should be ordered.

It's linked ideas, but it has an art to it. It says, “Here's the story of the world and how the world should be.” It gives me a role to work to bring that world to pass. That's what an ideology is. It’s true of socialism, Marxism, and fascism. It’s true of nationalism of all stripes, including Christian nationalism. I tend to use that kind of language. It's more common in literature and political theory.

How broad do we think Christian nationalism is? How influential are these claims? How far are they spread?

Paul D. Miller: Whitehead and Perry measured this and they say that 52% of all Americans are what they call ambassador. Then there are accommodators, people who are adjacent to Christian nationalism, tolerant of it, and accepting enough that they're not going to get in the way. 78% of self-identified evangelicals are either ambassadors or accommodators of Christian nationalism. It's really important to recognize that distinction, by the way, that the ambassadors are a smaller group. They’re the hardcore ideologues who spend time developing the energy, thinking about it, praying about it, and advocating for it, writing their congressmen, and attending the riot.

My response to those two groups is different. I think the ambassadors are the wolves and accommodators are, frankly, the sheep who need teaching, wise correction, and counsel to help them think more clearly about the ideology that they've been fed. I think the ambassadors are the deceivers and they need to be expelled and rejected, but the accommodators are the ones that need gentle correction if they'll accept it.

Would say that singing patriotic songs, displaying American flags and saying the Pledge of Allegiance in church fall under Christian nationalism?

Paul D. Miller: For the most part, I'd say it does. I want to be clear: I'm a patriotic American: I've served in the United States Army. I'm a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. I take my kids to the 4th of July parades. I read the Declaration of Independence to them on the Fourth.

There's nothing wrong with what I would call patriotism. In fact, I think we should be patriots because that's the best guardrail against the unhealthy kinds of nationalism. I'm proud to be an American but there is a time and a place for it. There are appropriate boundaries around that and I think the church is not the right place for that. I very much advocate for taking flags out of church buildings. Not because we hate America, but because when we're in church, we are celebrating our citizenship in a different polity in the kingdom of heaven, which is a kingdom that includes all peoples drawn from every people, language, and nation on earth.

That’s a wonderful thing and that’s why the American flag does not belong in a church building. Similarly, I would not advocate singing patriotic songs in church. I'm a little cautious about many churches celebrating, for example, Memorial Day weekend and doing a special shout out or thank you to veterans. That’s a gray area. Some churches go too far and hold big patriotic festivals on the weekend.

Do these churches tend to be more Southern or more rural? A number of us who have grown in the church have been blind to how common some of the God-and-country extremes of Christian nationalism congregations are.

Paul D. Miller: It is unevenly distributed around the country. This is more common in the South with a strong representation in the Midwest. It is stronger in rural areas and smaller towns, less common in bigger cities. There's also a class and education distinction here, more common in the lower middle class and more common amongst the population that does not have a college degree.

In certain parts of the country, you never see anything except this kind of God-and-country co-celebration. I'm from Oregon. I didn't grow up in the South, but I've traveled. In the military, I was based in the South for part of my time, where I saw some of this more up close. The regional distinction is important to keep in mind.

What is the draw of Christian nationalism to the “poor, uneducated, and easy to command” Religious Right, as they’ve been described? There was the rise of the Religious Right in the 70s and 80s, but it has gotten louder lately.

Paul D. Miller: From the time Europeans stepped foot on North American shores, they thought of the polity. They were building here in religious terms. It’s always been part of the kind of European Christianity that was imported here. It’s a version of Christendom, this blending of sacred and secular identities to makes sense of the universe.

Some Americans during the founding thought that America was the new Israel. They wrote it that way and they felt that the revolution was a step forward in the building of the kingdom of God. It was the case during the Civil War, which was this righteous crusade against an evil slave power. They use that sense of self-righteousness to construct a form of American nationalism that was highly Christian mystic and was unhelpful.

Over the past hundred years, as America has grown less Christian and less white, it has put the white Christian conservative population on the defensive. We feel like the world's against us. We're shrinking, our power is shrinking, our influences are shrinking against all of the other forces in the world.

Non-Christian and foreign influences are now controlling our country and taking it away from us. In the last 40 years, Christian nationalists tend to believe that Christians are under attack and are being persecuted. That leans towards a worldview that increasingly includes a lot of fear: us-versus-them dichotomy, forces beyond our control are steering events against us. I think it is why today's Christian nationalism is different than past generations and why it bleeds over into some of the conspiracy theory stuff as well.

To what degree is Christian nationalism a view of God being extremely active in the world, shaping the nation through sovereignty?

Paul D. Miller: If you ask me, should the United States try to adopt Christian values? I would say yes because as Christians, we are called to work for justice and the common good, and to care for the poor.

Those are Christian values and I think our country should pursue that. That doesn't make me a Christian nationalist. I think we should be involved in the public square. We should advocate for justice drawn from our understanding of justice that comes from the Bible.

That's not Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism is an argument about American identity: We are a Christian nation and we must remain. The distinctive belief of Christian nationalists is that God especially favors the United States. There’s an overlap between that and legitimate Christian engagement in politics. Religious liberty and the unborn are what Christian nationals advocate.

When we criticized and condemned Christian nationalism, that is not a criticism of all Christian political engagement at all. In fact, we need to remain involved in politics to take back the name of Christ and say, “we don't think that the name of Christ belongs on that agenda.”

What exactly happened during the 2016 presidential election and subsequent four years, that changed the influence of Christian nationalism? -Christianity Today