Christian nationalism for dummies (Part 1)

Hope for the best, prepare for the worst

The following short text is an abridged and slightly edited version of a recent Lincoln Project podcast.

Hey, everyone, it’s Reed Galen.... Yesterday [January 5, 2024] the United States Senate sent over a bipartisan bill on the US border, a bill that the Republicans have been screaming about for years—that they needed border security, needed more funding, needed more agents. So James Langford, a Republican from Oklahoma—Ruby Red Oklahoma—and Democrats in the United States Senate work together, hammer out a bill. Not everyone will be happy. Welcome to governing. They send it over to the United States house. What does Speaker Mike Johnson of the Christian Nationalist sect do? Says the Bill’s dead on arrival, he won’t have anything to do with it, it won’t even come up for a vote.

What’s going on? It’s pretty simple. First, Donald Trump runs the party. Donald Trump has told the likes of Mike Johnson and Mitch McConnell that he wants to run on immigration as an issue this year. And because they don’t want to give Joe Biden a win, the likes of Mike Johnson are never going to allow an immigration bill to come up for a vote.

Then, why don’t house Republicans want funding for Ukraine? Well, because of course, as we’ve known since the beginning, Donald Trump is in hock to Vladimir Putin. And Mike Johnson—Christian Nationalist—is perfectly happy to go along with all of this. It has nothing to do with decency or policy or doing the right thing. It has everything to do with naked power and ambition.

Alright, before I go, we’re gonna do a series over the course of the next couple of weeks on people like Mike Johnson, Christian Nationalists, evangelicals. We have a lineup of incredible guests who are going to explain to us how, as I’ve just described in, you know, maybe complicated terms, but also in really understanding how all of these things tie together. How the Republican party has really become a fully funded subsidiary of the White Christian Evangelical Church, how they now run the asylum.

I, for one, look forward to this series.¹ Meanwhile I did my own research, not with the help of AI (thank you very much) but by using my own (limited) intelligence to scan a fair number of books on Christian nationalism/white evangelicalism. What I found is quite jaw-dropping.

A good place to start is Julie J. Ingersoll’s Building God’s kingdom: inside the world of Christian reconstruction (Oxford University Press 2015). In this book she addresses an important aspect of “the story shaping contemporary conservative Christian subculture and the rise of the religious right: the impact of a small group of fundamentalists known as Christian Reconstructionists.” Although Reconstructionism, which sought to remake the whole of society to conform to a militant reading of the Bible, “didn’t attract much support, the movement’s ideas became a driving force in American politics.”

While there is now a growing body of work on the religious right that acknowledges the importance of Christian Reconstruction, it is often alarmist in tone, warning of an impending theocratic takeover. The alarmists are dismissed by scholars who point to the very small numbers of people who claim the label Reconstructionist, the absence of significant self-described Reconstructionist groups, and the assertion that most conservative Christians have never heard of them. Ingersoll contends that both the alarmists and their critics misunderstand the influence of the Reconstructionists.

Since the 1960s conservative Christians have slowly and steadily built an institutionally integrated, mutually reinforcing, and self-sustaining subculture that exists alongside the world in which most of us live. The religious right may be one of the most visible manifestations of that subculture, but it is not the full expression, nor the most influential aspect, of it. This subculture is often invisible, but it is so pervasive that there are now adult Americans who were raised in Christian homeschooling families, who believe that America is a Christian nation; that there is no separation of church and state implied in the Constitution; that authoritarian patriarchy is the God-ordained structure for families; that the functions of civil government are limited to providing for national defense and punishing crimes outlined in the Bible; that the Bible speaks to every aspect of life; and that we are all obligated to live under the law contained therein, law that is anchored in the literal six-day creation described in Genesis. Furthermore, this integrated worldview includes an ideological structure for identifying, explaining, and then dismissing any alternative ways of seeing things.

There are two key aspects of Christian Reconstruction expressed theologically as presuppositionalism and postmillennialism, culturally as theonomy and dominion, and cast in accessible popular terms as the critique of secular humanism and the effort to restore America as a Christian nation. [pp 8–9, my emphases]

Presuppositionalists hold that all knowledge is derived from unprovable presuppositions. While Reconstructionists acknowledge this with regard to their presupposition that the Bible is true, that everything must be seen through its lens, they contend that the equally presupposition-dependent alternative to theonomy is abject moral relativism resulting in chaos.

Every aspect of culture is to be brought into conformity with biblical law. Their strategy for bringing about that transformation has resulted in significantly more influence than they could have achieved through narrowly political efforts. It is the broad-based systematic worldview that has made Reconstructionists influential in the conservative Christian subculture and in the religious right. While Reconstructionists define the “political” in such a way as to declare that their efforts are not political, in a broader sense, of course they are intensely political. Their worldview requires a wholesale overturning of authority and political order. And it secures for them continued influence on the broader conservative Christian subculture. [p 12]

To be more specific, Reconstructionists “support the imposition of violent punishments (stoning and death) for all manner of behaviors that they consider sin (or, in their terms, that God considers sin).” Idolatry is one of them. Christians in leadership positions are therefore bound to enforce the prohibition on idolatry. Tolerating religious pluralism is treason toward God, the penalty for which (death) is dictated by the Old Testament. The saving grace—if there is such a thing— is that “such punishments would only be exacted after society has been transformed by the Holy Spirit such that the overwhelming majority of citizens would be believers who would submit willingly to biblical law.”

Postmillennialism gives Reconstruction both the confidence that it will ultimately win out and an extraordinary time horizon (thousands of years or more) that allows it to incorporate seeming setbacks as nothing more than short-term losses in an overarching trajectory of victory secured by the promises of an all-powerful God....

Reconstructionists ... want to organize every aspect of culture and society to conform to what they understand to be biblical law. They would create a world in which anyone who is not a Christian as they define the term—gays and lesbians, divorced people, women not in submission to male authority—would have severe, explicit limitations on how they live their lives, if they are allowed to live at all....

Reconstructionism seems so extreme, so far from the everyday reality in which most of us live, that it would be tempting to categorize it as yet another utopian (or dystopian) vision of the future. But because they hope to usher in this transformed world incrementally, we do not need to share their belief that this world will ultimately and inevitably come to pass in order to think that we should pay attention to their strategies and goals. Many aspects of their vision are at the center of our current culture wars, albeit usually without a thoroughgoing commitment to the underlying philosophical and theological underpinnings on the part of the culture warriors. [p 236–37]

In this and subsequent posts/emails I intend to show that ideologies of this kind are often mental perversions of verities that belong to a consciousness beyond the mental. The only way to realize these verities—to effectuate their true, salutary forms, free of mental distortions—is through the evolution or manifestation of a supramental consciousness. Like every falsehood that contains a truth, these mental perversions tend to be the more virulent the greater are the truths they disguise.

A case in point: Carter Heyward is a “politically progressive, white Christian American woman in [her] late seventies” as well as an Episcopal priest “who identifies these days as a ‘Universalist Christian’.” In her book The Seven Deadly Sins of White Christian Nationalism (Rowman & Littlefield 2022), she points out that our understanding of God as omnipotent is problematic “not because it is not true, but rather because most humans tend to equate ‘power’ with ‘power-over’—having control over someone or something.”

Most Christians in America believe not only in a God with power-over us and all creation but, moreover, imagine that we ourselves are made in the image of this omnipotent God. Our troubles as human beings often begin in our quest for omnipotence, to have power and control over others.

An important point! Most Christians believe in Fool’s God. The difference between God and Fool’s God is that the former is all there is (in one form or guise or another) while the latter exists in conjunction with or in opposition to something other than Himself. For God (the genuine item) there is nothing to control (or be controlled) but Himself. The only power He has is power over Himself. This includes the power to play hide and seek with Himself, to become matter by entering into relations with Himself and subjecting His self-relations to seemingly inflexible laws²—and this for the fun of the thing (including the fun of being ignorant).

If anyone feels the need to exert control over others, it is we mentally conscious beings who created Fool’s God in our own image, and who consequently believe that the God we created feels the same need. A supramentally conscious being, once it has come to exist in our world, as it surely will (eventually), cannot feel such a need, nor any other need for that matter. Knowing itself to be one with all beings, it will live in spontaneous harmony with all beings.

Here are Sri Aurobindo’s thoughts on the infantile notion that we are created in God’s image:

The idea of the Law of the world as primarily a dispenser of rewards and punishments is cognate to the idea of the Supreme Being as a judge, “father” and school-master who is continually rewarding with lollipops his good boys and continually caning his naughty urchins.... Man insists continually on making God in his own image instead of seeking to make himself more and more in the image of God, and all these ideas are the reflection of the child and the savage and the animal in us which we have still failed to transform or outgrow. [Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, pp 255–56]

God is one but he is not bounded by his unity. We see him here as one who is always manifesting as many, not because he cannot help it, but because he so wills, and outside manifestation he is anirdeśyam, indefinable, and cannot be described as either one or many. That is what the Upanishads and other sacred books consistently teach; he is ekamevādvitīyam, One and there is no other, but also and consequently he is “this man, yonder woman, that blue-winged bird, this scarlet-eyed”³ .... From one point of view they are one with him, from another one yet different, from yet another always different because they always exist, latent in him or expressed at his pleasure. There is no profit in disputing about these standpoints. Wait until you see God and know yourself and him and then debate and discussion will be unnecessary.

The goal marked out for us is not to speculate about these things, but to experience them. The call upon us is to grow into the image of God, to dwell in him and with him and be a channel of his joy and might and an instrument of his works. Purified from all that is aśubha [evil or defect], transfigured in soul by his touch, we have to act in the world as dynamos of that divine electricity and send it thrilling and radiating through mankind, so that wherever one of us stands, hundreds around may become full of his light and force, full of God and full of Ananda. [Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, pp 89–90]

Needless to say, growing into the image of God or becoming dynamos sending divine electricity radiating through mankind cannot be achieved by dancing, chanting, or raising one’s hands to the sky in large corporate prayer meetings.

Nationalist Jesus: From Theology of the Lamb to Theology of the Lion (Source: Bing Image Creator)

For another look into the black hole that is Christian nationalism, consider what Michelle Goldberg had to say in her book Kingdom coming: the rise of Christian nationalism (W.W. Norton, 2006):

[T]he Christian nationalist movement claims that the Bible is absolutely and literally true. But it goes much further, extrapolating a total political program from that truth, and yoking that program to a political party. It is a conflation of scripture and politics that sees America’s triumphs as confirmation of the truth of the Christian religion, and America’s struggles as part of a cosmic contest between God and the devil. It claims supernatural sanction for its campaign of national renewal and speaks rapturously about vanquishing the millions of Americans who would stand in its way. [p 6]

While the Christian nationalist movement does not represent a majority of Americans, “it does represent a significant and highly mobilized minority.” At the center of the movement to bring evangelicals into politics is the dominionism promoted by the aforementioned Reconstructionists—the idea that Christians have a God-given right to rule. Though most Christian Reconstructionist theology “has little appeal to outsiders and is controversial even among Christian conservatives,” dominionism “has been hugely influential in the broader evangelical movement.”

Like all ideologies, Christian nationalism tells a story. It’s a tale about a godly country, blessed for its piety, that began to go wrong in the nineteenth century and sank to unimagined lows in the twentieth. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution eroded people’s faith in man’s dignity and God’s supremacy. The great universities that once saw Christianity as the root of all knowledge turned away from scripture and toward the secular philosophies of a decadent Europe, which put man at the center of the universe. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal brought socialism to America and began the process by which government, rather than churches, became the guarantors of social welfare.

A generation of intellectuals and attorneys, educated to discount the centrality of God, fought a vicious campaign against America’s Christian heritage.... An angry God began to withdraw his favor. Crime and discord increased. Children turned against their parents and wives against their husbands. Hedonism and licentiousness ruled. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the forces of darkness threatened to turn America into Sodom.... But God didn’t give up on America. He changed the hearts of a few people, and before long, there was a great revival in the country. Conservative evangelical churches mushroomed. Believers shed their apathy, got organized, and elected godly men. [pp 7–8]

In 2006, at the time of writing Kingdom Coming, Goldberg predicted that “as Christian nationalism becomes more militant, secularists and religious minorities will mobilize in opposition, ratcheting up the hostility. Thus we’re likely to see a shrinking middle ground, with both camps increasingly viewing each other across a chasm of mutual incomprehension and contempt.” What I consider more important, however, is her perception of a different kind of struggle:

At a time when religious extremism seems everywhere ascendant, I see a different struggle, one between modernity, humanism, reason, and progress on one hand, and fundamentalism, tribalism, Puritanism, and obscurantism on the other. Liberals the world over are fighting religious tyranny....

In the summer of 2005 I interviewed Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian graphic novelist whose books, Persepolis and Persepolis 2, chronicle her childhood during the revolution that instituted religious rule. Part of a cosmopolitan, politically engaged family, Satrapi captures their terrified disbelief as theocrats obsessed with sex and death took over Iran. I thought secularists in America might be feeling some faint shadow of that same horror, but I was reluctant to make comparisons between Iran’s despotic mullahs and our Christian nationalists, because I didn’t want to trivialize her country’s exponentially greater suffering. Satrapi had no such qualms. “They are the same!” she said over the phone from Paris, before spontaneously launching into a plea for solidarity among all enemies of fundamentalism. “The secular people, we have no country. We the people—all the secular people who are looking for freedom—we have to keep together. We are international.” ...

The things so many Islamic fundamentalists hate about the West—its sexual openness, its art, the possibilities it offers for escaping the bonds of family and religion, for inventing one’s own life—are what the Christian nationalists hate as well. And so, in a final grotesque irony, we come full circle and see defenders of American chauvinism speaking the language of anti-American radicals. [pp 207–8]

Or consider what Katherine Stewart had to say in her book The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (Bloomsbury Publishing 2019):

For too long now America’s Christian nationalist movement has been misunderstood and underestimated.... It is not a social or cultural movement. It is a political movement, and its ultimate goal is power. It does not seek to add another voice to America’s pluralistic democracy but to replace our foundational democratic principles and institutions with a state grounded on a particular version of Christianity, answering to what some adherents call a “biblical worldview” that also happens to serve the interests of its plutocratic funders and allied political leaders....

This is not a “culture war.” It is a political war over the future of democracy.... It consists rather of a dense ecosystem of nonprofit, for-profit, religious, and nonreligious media and legal advocacy groups.... It derives much of its power and direction from an informal club of funders, a number of them belonging to extended hyper-wealthy families. It took me some time to navigate the sea of acronyms, funding schemes, denominations, and policy and kinship networks.

Steward lays out much of this ecosystem in her book. Yet for her “the important thing to understand about the collective effort is not its evident variety but the profound source of its unity.”

Christian nationalism ... asserts that legitimate government rests not on the consent of the governed but on adherence to the doctrines of a specific religious, ethnic, and cultural heritage. It demands that our laws be based not on the reasoned deliberation of our democratic institutions but on particular, idiosyncratic interpretations of the Bible.... It looks forward to a future in which its versions of the Christian religion and its adherents, along with their political allies, enjoy positions of exceptional privilege and power in government and in law.

Steward expresses her alarm at the widespread lack of awareness of the movement’s influence among the general public:

Their recent achievements have exceeded reasonable expectations. Yet much of the public continues to believe that little has changed. Perhaps the most salient impediment to our understanding of the movement is the notion that Christian nationalism is a “conservative” ideology. The correct word is “radical.” ...

[The movement] has no interest in securing the legitimacy of the Supreme Court; it will happily steal seats and pack the Court as long as it gets the rulings it wants. It cheers along voter suppression and gerrymandering schemes that allow Republicans to maintain disproportionate legislative control. It collaborates with international leaders who seek to undermine the United States’ traditional alliances and the postwar world order built up over the past seven decades....

The rank and file come to the movement with ... a longing for certainty in an uncertain world. Against a backdrop of escalating economic inequality, deindustrialization, rapid technological change, and climate instability, many people, on all points of the economic spectrum, feel that the world has entered a state of disorder. The movement gives them confidence, an identity, and the feeling that their position in the world is safe....

The Christian nationalist movement ... is a means through which a small number of people—quite a few of them residing in the Washington, D.C., area—harness the passions, resentments, and insecurities of a large and diverse population in their own quest for power. The leaders of the movement have quite consciously reframed the Christian religion itself to suit their political objectives and then promoted this new reactionary religion as widely as possible, thus turning citizens into congregants and congregants into voters.

From the perspective of the movement’s leadership, vast numbers of America’s conservative churches have been converted into the loyal cells of a shadow political party. Here, too, there is a widespread misunderstanding of the way Christian nationalism works. Its greatest asset is its national infrastructure, and that infrastructure consists not only of organizations uniting and coordinating its leadership, and a burgeoning far-right media, but also in large part the nation’s conservative houses of worship....

Under President Trump, the United States has become a flashing red beacon of hope for a new, global, religious, right-wing populist movement. It calls itself a “global conservative movement” and claims that it seeks to “defend the natural family.” But it’s really about taking down modern democracy and replacing it with authoritarian, faith-based ethno-states. You could call it a kind of global holy war. The Christian nationalist movement within the United States ... is in reality just one piece of this increasingly interconnected, globe-spanning movement. This global holy war has nuances specific to different countries. But the striking thing about it is its consistency in tone and substance around the world. The global holy war now defines itself against a single common, worldwide enemy: global liberalism.

More to come.

1. The first installment, in which Reed Galen is joined by journalist and bestselling author Jeff Sharlet, has already dropped. It’s very much worth a listen.

2. The laws of physics. Physicists tend to refer to the corresponding relata as particles, and a majority recognizes the numerical identity of all particles of the same type, if not that of all fundamental particles tout court.

3. Swetaswatara Upanishad IV. 3, 4:

Thou art the woman and Thou the man; Thou art a boy
and again a young virgin; Thou art yonder worn and aged
man that walkest bent with thy staff. Lo, Thou becomest
born and the world is full of thy faces.

Thou art the blue bird and the green and the scarlet-eyed,
the womb of lightning and the seasons and the oceans. Thou
art that which is without beginning and thou movest with
thy pervasive extension whence all the worlds are born.

[Sri Aurobindo, Kena and Other Upanishads, pp 235–36]