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Last week, Katie Britt, one of Alabama’s two Christian nationalist senators, provided a now-notorious rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. If nothing else it was compelling television (and it even inspired a widely shared Saturday Night Live parody featuring Scarlett Johansson).
Speaking from her family’s luxurious-but-barren kitchen, and carefully staged as “America’s mom,” the Republican senator wasted no time diving into her worries about “the future of the nation.” Using an exaggerated voice and melodramatic body language, she lied about sex trafficking in an attempt to discredit Biden’s border policies, a narrative contradicted by the victim herself. As if that weren’t enough, Britt blamed spending by the Biden administration for inflation, a claim rejected by most economists, and indulged conspiracy theories about the Chinese Communist Party’s intentions for the U.S.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson placed Britt’s appearance in the context of social conservatism’s long reactionary project, commenting that Britt “represented the outcome of the longstanding opposition to women’s equal rights in the United States.”
Britt was more than a representative, though. She was an active marketing agent, selling both opposition and the fear that fuels it.
It’s almost universal today to find social conservatives clinging to a rigidly hierarchical vision of family and society out of fear of difference, cultural change, or anything or anyone who challenges those hierarchies. Nearly 30 years ago, George Lakoff posited that, at the core of the conservative mindset is the “strict father” model of the family, in which people respond to a fallen and dangerous world with the authority of a strong and virtuous male head.
Fear is the glue that holds the strict father family together, and so fear must be forever sustained. It demands a constant rehearsal of the reasons to be afraid of the outside world, and why those reasons require obedience to one’s betters. Social conservatism is a perpetual sales job to convince both insiders and outsiders of its own worthiness.
The New Yorker
By Kelefa Sanneh
March 27, 2023
Seven years ago, during the Republican Presidential primary, Donald Trump appeared onstage at Dordt University, a Christian institution in Iowa, and made a confession of faith. “I’m a true believer,” he said, and he conducted an impromptu poll. “Is everybody a true believer, in this room?” He was scarcely the first Presidential candidate to make a religious appeal, but he might have been the first one to address Christian voters so explicitly as a special interest. “You have the strongest lobby ever,” he said. “But I never hear about a ‘Christian lobby.’ ” He made his audience a promise. “If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power,” he said. “You’re going to have somebody representing you very, very well.”
By the time Trump reluctantly left office, in 2021, his relationship with evangelical Christians was one of the most powerful alliances in American politics. (According to one survey, he won eighty-four per cent of the white evangelical vote in 2020.) On January 6th, when his supporters gathered in Washington to protest the election results, one person brought along a placard depicting Jesus wearing a maga hat; during the Capitol invasion, a shirtless protester delivered a prayer on the Senate floor. “Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you, and that love Christ,” he said.
The events of January 6th bolstered a growing belief that the alliance between Trump and his Christian supporters had become something more like a movement, a pro-Trump uprising with a distinctive ideology. This ideology is sometimes called “Christian nationalism,” a description that often functions as a diagnosis. On a recent episode of “revcovery,” a podcast about leaving Christian ministry, Justin Gentry, one of the hosts, suggested that the belief system was somewhat obscure even to its own adherents. “I think that, spitballing, seventy per cent of Christian nationalists don’t know that they’re Christian nationalists,” he said. “They’re just, like, ‘This is normal Christianity, from the time of Jesus.’ ”
In contemporary America, though, the practice of Christianity is starting to seem abnormal. Measures of religious observance in America have shown a steep decrease over the past quarter century. In 1999, Gallup found that seventy per cent of Americans belonged to a church, a synagogue, or a mosque. In 2020, the number was forty-seven per cent—for the first time in nearly a hundred years of polling, worshippers were the minority. This changing environment helps explain the militance that is one of the defining features of Christian nationalism. It is a minority movement, espousing a claim that might not have seemed terribly controversial a few decades ago: that America is, and should remain, a Christian nation.
There is no canonical manifesto of Christian nationalism, and no single definition of it. In search of rigor, a pair of sociologists, Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, examined data from various surveys and tracked the replies to six propositions:
Note to readers:
The text below is an excerpt from an article written by The theme of the article is training homeschooled children to defend Christian Nationalism doctrines. published by Religion Dispatches.
For most students, debate serves an academic purpose. For Christian homeschoolers, however, debate serves both a spiritual purpose and a sociopolitical purpose.
The spiritual purpose is evangelism. Sarah Pride, a homeschool alumna and daughter of homeschool leader Mary Pride, explained in an article for Practical Homeschooling that debate “prepares young communicators for the specific purpose of serving Christ.” Debate thus becomes a means to accomplish the Great Commission—the idea that Jesus tasked Christians to make disciples of all nations. As a pseudonymous alumna of homeschool debate once wrote, “The larger purpose of all of this was to… eloquently and winsomely communicate a ‘biblical worldview’ in the culture at large—we were supposed to become world-changers and culture makers.”
The sociopolitical purpose is dominionism. Christian Right expert Frederick Clarkson* describes dominionism as “the theocratic idea that… Christians are called by God to exercise dominion over every aspect of society by taking control of political and cultural institutions.” Debate is seen by the Christian Right as a powerful tool for equipping young people with the skills necessary to take control of these institutions. Former Florida debater Kieryn Darkwater states, “They want to create articulate teenagers to take over the world.”
(RNS) — The Rev. Gerald L.K. Smith loved Jesus so much he built a seven-story statue on the top of an Ozark mountain to honor his savior. Smith loved America, too, but despised many of his fellow Americans. Especially those who were Black, Jewish or immigrants.
An ordained Disciples of Christ pastor, master showman, skilled fundraiser, prolific writer and “minister of hate,” Smith spent decades warning white Christians that they were in danger of losing their country to devious forces conspiring against them.
To combat those forces, Smith founded a political party, ran for U.S. Senate and churned out tens of thousands of copies of The Cross and the Flag, a monthly magazine dedicated to the cause of Christian nationalism.
For Smith, that work was defined not by Jesus or the Constitution. His main concern was preserving Christian power and what he called “traditional Americanism.”
“The first principle for which we stand is: Preserve America as a Christian Nation being conscious of the fact that there is a highly organized campaign to substitute Jewish tradition for Christian tradition,” he wrote in “This Is Christian Nationalism,” which outlined the 10 pillars of his movement.
Among the other pillars of Christian nationalism: outlawing communism, destroying the “bureaucratic fascism” of income tax and the Supreme Court, and preserving racial segregation forever.
Smith aimed to take the latent prejudices and anxieties of American society and fan them into flames, wrote the late Glen Jeansonne, a longtime University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee history professor and Smith’s biographer. For Smith, the fear of communism was an excuse to embrace prejudice and pursue power.
“His life illustrates that the career of a person of remarkable talents can be tragic if it is guided by a lust of power and fueled by a bigotry that appeals to latent hatred,” wrote Jeansonne in his 1988 biography, subtitled “Minister of Hate.”
Note to Readers:
The article below reports a proposal by conservative Israeli lawmakers to overrule the authority of the Israeli Supreme Court. This appears to be the kind of movement that Christian Nationalists have made to stack the US Supreme Court with conservative judges. It may anticipate what could happen in America if Christian Nationalists gain full control of the US government — including state and federal courts.
JERUSALEM (RNS) — Susan Weiss, an Israeli activist, worries that proposed judicial reform that would grant Israeli lawmakers the right to overrule the country’s Supreme Court would greatly broaden the reach of Israel’s Orthodox Jewish establishment.
“We think the state should not be in charge of religion. The state should not pick and choose which expression of Judaism they think is authentic,” said Weiss, one of an estimated 300,000 Israelis who flooded the streets outside the country’s High Court on Monday (Feb. 13) to protest the proposed bills.
If successful, the proposed reform would allow a slim majority of lawmakers — just 61 of 120 in the Knesset — to reverse High Court decisions. It would also give parliamentarians the final say on who can serve as a judge.
Weiss and many others fear that the proposed judicial overhaul would allow the religious parties that make up a crucial swing vote in Israel’s Knesset, or parliament, to impose fervently religious norms on Israel’s non-Orthodox majority.
“I’m here for my grandchildren. I want them to live in a country that’s democratic and protects the civil liberties of all its citizens,” said Weiss, whose organization has argued cases on behalf of women’s rights before the High Court.
Supporters of the reforms consider them a necessary step to “rein in” the judiciary, according to the Israel Democracy Institute. Over the decades, the court has repeatedly challenged the authority of Israel’s religious institutions in favor of religious pluralism.
Critics of the reforms “fear that the removal of the only effective check on executive power in Israel will jeopardize civil liberties, economic prosperity, and Israel’s international standing,” the institute said.
Washington Post
By Jennifer Rubin
When you hear the phrase “Christian nationalists,” you might think of antiabortion conservatives who are upset about the phrase “Happy Holidays” and embrace a vaguely “America First” way of thinking. But according to a Public Religion Research Institute-Brookings Institution poll released Wednesday, Christian nationalists in fact harbor a set of extreme beliefs at odds with pluralistic democracy. The findings will alarm you.
“Christian nationalism is a new term for a worldview that has been with us since the founding of our country — the idea that America is destined to be a promised land for European Christians,” PRRI president and founder Robert P. Jones explained in a news release on the survey of more than 6,000 Americans. “While most Americans today embrace pluralism and reject this anti-democratic claim, majorities of white evangelical Protestants and Republicans remain animated by this vision of a white Christian America.
To measure Christian nationalism, the PRRI/Brookings Christian Nationalism Survey included a battery of five questions about the relationship between Christianity, American identity, and the U.S. government. Respondents were asked whether they completely agree, mostly agree, mostly disagree, or completely disagree with each of the following statements:
By Neil J. Young | February 14, 2023
Of all the songs I loved singing as a child at my church’s Vacation Bible School every summer, my favorite was one called, “I’m in the Lord’s Army.”
We sang the lyrics—“I may never march in the infantry, ride in the cavalry, shoot the artillery. I may never fly o’er the enemy, but I’m in the Lord’s army, yes, sir!”—to what sounded like a rousing military parade song. But the real fun came from the hand and body motions we got to perform as we belted the tune out in our pews, movements where we pretended to be valiantly marching, riding, shooting, soaring, and, finally, saluting when we yelled out the “yes, sir” line at the top of our lungs.
What had been an almost forgotten song—and an equally distant memory—came unexpectedly rushing back to me as I was reading Bradley Onishi’s new book, Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—and What Comes Next. Onishi, a religious studies scholar and co-host of the popular podcast, “Straight White American Jesus,” is a former evangelical minister who no longer identifies as a Christian. Watching the horrific events of the January 6 Capitol insurrection on his television in 2021, however, Onishi found himself confronted by an unrelenting thought: “I could have been there.”
Onishi grew up in what was the conservative hotbed of Orange County, California, and became an evangelical Christian as a teenager in the 1990s, a conversion that, he writes, was “extreme” and that ushered him into a zealous life of religious revivals, purity pledges, anti-abortion pamphleteering, and earnest, if frantic, efforts to convert others. Reflecting back on his past and mindful that some of those he once worshipped alongside were among the violent January 6 rioters who breached the U.S. Capitol—and that far many more of his former fellow churchgoers supported the events of January 6—Onishi is haunted by the idea that, had he not left the faith while in graduate school, he could have been one of them, another righteous crusader who believed he was saving the nation by any means necessary.
In Preparing for War, Onishi situates memories of his own religious fervor within the “extremist history,” as the book’s subtitle states, of white Christian nationalism from the 1950s to today. Yet what comes alive in Onishi’s absorbing and often disturbing work is the simple ordinariness and ubiquity of a lot of what he explores. How so much of what often passes as regular—and unremarkable—features of American life and culture have also helped cultivate the context in which a radical white Christian nationalism could take hold.
Onishi is right to trace the history of religio-political extremism from the John Birch Society’s rabid anti-communism in the 1950s through the Moral Majority’s anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ backlash in the 1980s to the recent sight of MAGA vigilantes attacking the Capitol while holding “Jesus Is My Savior—Trump Is My President” flags. Onishi’s most significant and startling contribution, though, to the growing body of works on Christian nationalism is in how he portrays an American past where the seemingly anodyne—from bland, soulless suburbs to “See You at the Pole” school prayer events to the persistence of nostalgia—has facilitated a rising acceptance of and even longing for political authoritarianism in the United States in the guise of restoring the nation to its “proper” heritage where white Christian men sit in authority. It’s this understated revelation of Preparing for War that had me suddenly recalling the drumbeats of “I’m in the Lord’s Army” and pondering how a bunch of white suburban kids singing a militaristic hymn almost 40 years ago in a different Orange County—in my case, Florida—may have foreshadowed the army of January 6 insurgents, complete with crosses and “Jesus Saves” banners.
Onishi rightly distinguishes white Christian nationalism from white evangelicalism, noting that many Catholics and Mormons subscribe to white Christian nationalist ideas. Onishi also points out that a significant number of Christian nationalists do not attend church, have meager religious literacy, and often live lives not in keeping with conservative evangelical theology. Some evangelical thought leaders have especially glommed onto this fact, eager to show white Christian nationalism as a fringe and areligious peculiarity, thus rescuing “pure” evangelicalism from the mess. (Such insistence feels similar to those who fixated on some of the data that showed evangelicals with lower church attendance rates were stronger Trump supporters, despite the more important statistic that, overall, self-identified white evangelicals, whatever their churchgoing habits, gave the thrice-married casino magnate more than 80 percent of their vote in two different elections.) Onishi contends, however, that it is evangelicalism’s “apocalyptic cosmology” that has shaped the notions of those, religious and secular alike, who believe the United States is on the “precipice of catastrophic decline” and has provided them with a righteous justification to “save the nation” from the ravages of demographic change and progressive transformation, especially in regard to issues of sexuality and gender.
Onishi’s nod to the non-churchgoing minority within the white Christian nationalist camp provides a potentially rich subject matter for future scholars to investigate more deeply. Especially in a time of declining church attendance rates and as Christian-affiliated Americans approach a minority status over the coming decades, understanding non-religious Americans’ use of white Christian nationalism as a form of political expression may help us rethink the secularization thesis for the United States and shift our ideas about religious affiliation in a period of institutional freefall.
At the same time, Onishi loses some of the subtle complicatedness of his own narrative when he contends, several times, that January 6 was the next “logical step” of white Christian nationalism. It’s an argument that threatens to reduce the big and sprawling history he has compellingly laid out into a sort of secularized form of the deterministic theology many Christians hold of how history unfurls. It also fails to account for the many other factors that played into that violent day.
This quibble with Onishi’s argument doesn’t discount the important case he makes in Preparing for War, nor does it detract from his urgent contention that we must understand what led to the January 6 attack to better prepare for what is coming. January 6, Onishi writes, “was the first battle in MAGA Nation’s war on American democracy.” Anyone watching the headlines of the last two years, not least the ongoing collapse of the GOP into full-scale extremism, should recognize this.
Yet, one might easily grow hopeless wondering what sort of counterforce can possibly stand up to the powerful movement Onishi is spotlighting. At the conclusion of his book, Onishi writes about the emergence of the “American Redoubt,” the name given to the region of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and the eastern parts of Oregon and Washington, where thousands of white Christian conservatives have begun moving at an accelerating rate. (Many of those who are relocating are Californians, including from Orange County where demographic shifts have made white Christian conservatives there a minority.) Journalists have reported on this development in recent years, but their often-quizzical coverage has tended to treat this phenomenon, even in our age of fracture and violence, as an outlier: a place of COVID-denying wackos and survivalist separatists who are building their alternative theocratic society in the middle of nowhere.
Onishi sees something different in the American Redoubt: not the early signs of a breakaway republic but instead the continuation of a history seven decades in the making. Smartly, Onishi connects this current “geographical consolidation” to the earlier mass migration of white Southerners into Southern California in the mid-twentieth century, a resettling that turned Orange County into the conservative stronghold from which a powerful religious right emerged to take over the Republican Party and transform the nation.
“Only this time,” Onishi writes, “the goal is not to take control of a political party. The goal is to prepare for the collapse of the United States and the chance to rebuild a theocratic state.”
“Why didn’t we see this coming?” Onishi asks. It’s a good question, especially considering how much of the history he sketches has been thoroughly documented by a score of scholars of white evangelicalism and of the Christian right for more than two decades now. Yet these scholars, myself included, may have been too generous in our treatment of the politics of conservative Christianity, too eager to find a place for culture war extremists calling for the nation’s destruction within the mainstream of American politics, and too willing to interpret all their talk of warfare, righteous soldiers, and “good and evil” as spiritual metaphors rather than literal statements of reality and messianic calls to action. As political violence escalates and as a Christo-fascist worldview increasingly dominates the American right, we might heed Onishi’s admonition to revisit this history with an eye attuned to its violent and extremist impulses.
Neil J. Young is the author of We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics and co-host of the history podcast, “Past Present.”
COMMENT ABOUT THIS ARTICLE: There is movement in several states to censor books that do not agree with Christian Nationalism ideology. This article is about that movement in Florida. These actions are in keeping with the Seven Mountain mandate to control eduction. Paul Borene |
A book about late Afro-Puerto Rican MLB legend Roberto Clemente can’t be found in the shelves of public school libraries in Florida’s Duval County these days.
“Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates” by Jonah Winter and Raúl Colón — and other books about Latino figures such as the late Afro-Cuban salsa singer Celia Cruz and Justice Sonia Sotomayor — are among the more than 1 million titles that have been “covered or stored and paused for student use” at the Duval County Public Schools District, according to Chief Academic Officer Paula Renfro.
School officials are in the process of determining if such books comply with state laws and can be included in school libraries.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed laws last year that require schools to rely on certified media specialists to approve which books can be integrated into classrooms. Guidance on how that would be implemented was provided to schools in December.
Books must align with state standards such as not teach K-3 students about gender identity and sexual orientation; not teach critical race theory, which examines systemic racism in American society, in public grade schools; and not include references to pornography and discrimination, according to the school district.
RELIGION DISPATCHES
Religious freedom has been at the center of American history since the founding. (And by the founding, I mean of the United States of America, not including the roughly century-and-a-half of colonial era.) There’s a story of religious freedom in the U.S. that isn’t widely or well understood—and is fiercely contested by the Christian Right.
Religious freedom was and is a revolutionary and liberatory concept that can disrupt entangled religious and political establishments and corrupt alliances of convenience. On Religious Freedom Day (January 16th) some will praise faith, and maybe the Founding Fathers, and some will call for interfaith understanding. Nothing wrong with all that. But if they fail to discuss the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which the day is intended to commemorate, they will have muffed the meaning and power of the moment.
There are many roots of religious freedom, but the story of religious freedom as a constitutional right in the US begins with the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which was originally drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1777 and shepherded through the Virginia legislature by James Madison in 1786. The following year, Madison served as the lead author of the Constitution, and in 1789, as the lead author of the First Amendment. Thus, the Virginia Statute is rightly understood to be the clearest statement of the intentions of the Framers in matters of the right relationship between the individual, religion, and government.