“Normal Christian political engagement is humble, loving, and sacrificial; it rejects the idea that Christians are entitled to primacy of place in the public square…”
Paul D. Miller, professor of the practice of international affairs at Georgetown University and a research fellow with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
I appreciate the feedback I got last week on my working definition of American Christian nationalism. Please keep your insights, encouragement, and push-back coming, as I hope to complete this project in the next six weeks. This week, I share some research directly related to your questions.
One of you commented, “I think highly partisan behavior is partially a result of mixing religion and politics because religion deals in absolutes – black or white, right or wrong. Heaven or Hell, etc. When we transpose that into politics, we create friends or enemies with nothing in between – ironically, without the love of Christ.”
Another asked, “What’s the history of Christian nationalism?”
In answering that question, it is important to keep in mind that “Christian nationalism is not merely a US phenomenon. There are versions of Christian nationalism in Europe, Africa, Asia, South America, and even Australia. Today, the most pernicious version is probably that in Russia, where there is unholy alliance between the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church…”[1]
Additionally, “to fully understand the deep roots of today’s white Christian nationalism, we need to go back at least to 1493—not the year Christopher Columbus “sailed the ocean blue,” but the year in which he returned to a hero’s welcome in Spain, bringing with him gold, brightly colored parrots, and nearly a dozen captive Indigenous people. It was also the year he was commissioned to return to the Americas with a much larger fleet of 17 ships, nearly 1,500 men, and more than a dozen priests to speed the conversion of Indigenous people who inhabited what he, along with King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, still believed were Asian shores.
The return of Columbus in 1493 also precipitated one of the most fateful but unacknowledged theological developments in the history of the western Christian Church: the creation of what has come to be known as the Doctrine of Discovery. Established in a series of 15th-century papal bulls (official edicts that carry the full weight of church and papal authority), the Doctrine claims that European civilization and western Christianity are superior to all other cultures, races, and religions. From this premise, it follows that domination and colonial conquest were merely the means of improving, if not the temporal, then the eternal lot of Indigenous peoples. So conceived, no earthly atrocities could possibly tilt the scales of justice against these immeasurable goods…”[2]
If you are still struggling to see or understand what Christian nationalism is, here are two more simple definitions:
- “Christian nationalism is the belief that the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way.”[3]
- “Christian nationalism is an ideology that seeks to create or maintain a legal fusion of Christian religion with a nation’s character. Advocates of Christian nationalism consider their view of Christianity to be an integral part of their country’s identity and want the government to promote—or even enforce—the religion’s position within it.”[4]
Finally, I found this question and answer from Christianity Today particularly helpful in teasing out the difference between healthy Christian political engagement and Christian nationalism:
“Can Christians be politically engaged without being Christian nationalists?
Yes. American Christians in the past were exemplary in helping establish the American experiment, and many American Christians worked to end slavery and segregation and other evils. They did so because they believed Christianity required them to work for justice. But they worked to advance Christian principles, not Christian power or Christian culture, which is the key distinction between normal Christian political engagement and Christian nationalism. Normal Christian political engagement is humble, loving, and sacrificial; it rejects the idea that Christians are entitled to primacy of place in the public square or that Christians have a presumptive right to continue their historical predominance in American culture. Today, Christians should seek to love their neighbors by pursuing justice in the public square, including by working against abortion, promoting religious liberty, fostering racial justice, protecting the rule of law, and honoring constitutional processes. That agenda is different from promoting Christian culture, Western heritage, or Anglo-Protestant values.”[5]
[1] N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird, Jesus and the Powers (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2024), 135-136.
[2] https://time.com/6309657/us-christian-nationalism-columbus-essay/
[3] https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2021/february-web-only/what-is-christian-nationalism.html
[4] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Christian-nationalism
[5] https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2021/february-web-only/what-is-christian-nationalism.html