Christian nationalism for dummies (Part 2)
Father, Son, and Uncle Sam
In his book The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It (Little, Brown and Company, 2009), Joshua Cooper Ramo discusses a painting by the German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer. It is one of Kiefer’s earliest and most massive works, measuring 267 inches (6.78 meters) from one side to the other, and 120 inches (3.05 meters) from top to bottom. The title, Deutschlands Geisteshelden (Germany’s Spiritual Heroes), is marked out toward the top in what seems an uncomfortable hand, in letters a foot high. In Ramo’s own words:
Kiefer was twenty-seven and twenty-eight when he was working on it, all through 1972 and 1973. This was years before he would be acclaimed as a great painter of our time, decades before critics would look at this one painting and say, “Yes, this is the sort of thing they will look at in two hundred years to understand our moment in history.”...
The canvas shows the most typical of German architectural constructions, a Lutheran meeting hall made all of wood. In the perspective of the painting, the lines of the floorboards lead away from the viewer like railway tracks. All along the walls, carefully spaced, are burning oil lamps. Near the base of each, Kiefer has inked the name of a German hero the lamp has been lit to honor. What gives the painting a particularly disturbing tension is what has not yet started but that we sense is inevitable, what you can feel as your eyes lead you along the walls of the monumental hall, from flame to wooden beam and back again: the strange foolishness of so much fire around so much wood. This is a building on the verge of combustion.
This painting shows us that what is most powerful in nations or men is often what destroys them.
What is Kiefer trying to tell us? The first lesson, of course, is about history. You need not pick up on the echo of a concentration camp that comes from the evocation of railway tracks in the wooden floorboards or the religious resonance of the oil lamps to pick up the echoes of Holocaust he’s evoking here. You need not know the names along the walls or even much about German culture to understand the tragedy of those heroes’ names. This painting shows us that what is most powerful in nations or men is often what destroys them. It is the German historical disaster we already know: how the nation’s great figures lit the country up at the end of the nineteenth century only, seemingly moments later, to burn it down....
This is a strong message, but it is not the only reason you can never walk away from Germany’s Spiritual Heroes quite the same as before you ever laid eyes on it. No, that indelibility comes from an artist’s trick Kiefer uses here to masterful effect: from where we stand, in the field of perspective of the hall, we too are in the painting. And there is no clear exit. We’re trapped.... When those walls in the wooden heroes’ hall finally do catch fire, they will do so with us inside....
We stand now like viewers of that Kiefer painting, aware that something dramatic is happening to the world around us. The people and institutions we might once have relied on to rescue us can’t. But what we decide to do now, the decisions we make as history touches each of us, will mark the future for all of us. The power of individuals has never been greater. This is the energy we’ve seen animating people as indecent as those Hezbollah guerrillas and as virtuous as Tony Moll.1 It’s the spirit that prompted me to write this book, to see what we could do once we understood the nature of the tsunami coming our way. But answering this call requires, finally, a leap of faith. It means accepting—because this can never be proved in advance—that change will always produce more good than bad. This is the hope without which the great acts of self-sacrifice and imagination that we now require will be impossible. It is the optimistic spirit buried, finally, in the answer to the question everyone asks at those moments when history bursts through its diorama case, when it unthinkably appears in front of us, when it threatens much that we cherish. It is the question Kiefer was trying to answer.... And now it is also the one we must all confront every day of our lives in this unstable, terrifying, and hopeful new order, the one, yes, you must, in two seconds, answer for yourself and for the people you love: This age, what does it demand of me?
Thank you, Joshua, for this inspired and inspiring piece of writing. What follows is the second of two emails/posts on Christian nationalism. This was the first:
Another important text on the subject is The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (Oxford University Press 2022) by sociologists Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry. Borrowing the concept of a “deep story” from Arlie Russell Hochschild (Strangers in Their Own Land, The New Press, 2018), they provide the following outline of white Christian nationalism’s deep story:
America was founded as a Christian nation by (white) men who were “traditional” Christians, who based the nation’s founding documents on “Christian principles.” The United States is blessed by God, which is why it has been so successful; and the nation has a special role to play in God’s plan for humanity. But these blessings are threatened by cultural degradation from “un-American” influences both inside and outside our borders.
Like any story, this one has its heroes: white conservative Christians, usually native-born men. It also has its villains: racial, religious, and cultural outsiders. The plot revolves around conflicts between the noble and worthy “us,” the rightful heirs of wealth and power, and the undeserving “them” who conspire to take what is ours. Sometimes, the conflicts culminate in violence—violence that restores white Christians to what they believe is their rightful place atop America’s racial and religious hierarchy. The heroes are those who defend the purity—and property—of the white Christian nation: with violence, when necessary.
What makes deep stories “stories,” Gorski and Perry explain, is that they function like a bare-bones movie script, and what makes them “deep” is that they have deep roots in a culture: “Deep stories have been told and retold so many times and across so many generations that they feel natural and true.” A deep story is a mythological version of history.
[W]hite Christian nationalism is not just a deep story about what was; it is also a political vision of what should be. First and foremost, of course, white Christian nationalists believe that America should be a Christian nation, or, at least, a nation ruled by Christians. And though the expectation of “whiteness” is rarely expressed explicitly, it is often clearly assumed.
Why would someone strongly favor institutionalizing Christianity as the national religion but also claim that one of their top priorities is “religious freedom”? Why would someone strongly affirm that the government should “advocate Christian values” and yet support the use of torture or oppose gun regulations? And whence the Commandment saying, “Thou shalt not wear a mask”?
What connects these stances to each other is a particular understanding of freedom, order, and violence... Freedom is understood in a libertarian way, as freedom from restrictions, especially by the government. Order is understood in a hierarchical way, with white Christian men at the top. And violence is seen as a righteous means of defending freedom and restoring order, means that are reserved to white Christian men.
According to Gorski and Perry, “white Christian nationalism marches its adherents toward a bloody battle.” It “has become a serious threat to American democracy, perhaps the most serious threat it now faces.” There is a misconception that contemporary white Christian nationalism is conservative. In actual fact it is reactionary: “It does not seek to preserve the status quo. Rather, it seeks to destroy the status quo and return to a mythical past: to ‘make America great again’.” As Bradley Onishi writes in his book Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—and What Comes Next (Broadleaf Books 2023), “make America great again” is code for “make America White and Christian again.”
One cannot discuss (white) Christian nationalism without stressing the issue of race, as Anthea Butler does in her book White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America (The University of North Carolina Press 2021):
It is racism that binds and blinds many white American evangelicals to the vilification of Muslims, Latinos, and African Americans. It is racism that impels many evangelicals to oppose immigration and turn a blind eye to children in cages at the border. It is racism that fuels evangelical Islamophobia. It was evangelical acceptance of biblically sanctioned racism that motivated believers to separate and sell families during slavery and to march with the Klan. Racist evangelicals shielded cross burners, protected church burners, and participated in lynchings….
Evangelicals are not naïve individuals who were taken advantage of by a slick New York real estate mogul and reality TV star. They were his accomplices. Their prayers and shows of piety surrounding conservative elected officials—most notably in recent times, the forty-fifth president—are a feature, not a bug, of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American evangelicalism. Race and racism have always been foundational parts of evangelicalism in America, fueling its educational, political, social, and cultural mores….
I know the answer to the question obsessively pondered by the popular press, pundits, and even experts in the study of American religion: Why do people who identify as evangelicals vote over and over again for political figures who in speech and deed do not evince the Christian qualities that evangelicalism espouses? My answer is that evangelicalism is not a simply religious group at all. Rather, it is a nationalistic political movement whose purpose is to support the hegemony of white Christian men over and against the flourishing of others. To put it more baldly, evangelicalism is an Americanized Christianity born in the context of white Christian slaveholders.
Another rich source of information on Christian nationalism is Bradley Onishi’s Preparing for War (cited above). Onishi is a former White Christian nationalist who is now a scholar of religion. In 2005, after eleven years in the movement and seven years in ministry, he left evangelicalism.
My elders in the church had always told me that if I read too many books, my brain would railroad my heart and lead me away from the church. Turns out they were right. When I began to read widely in theology, philosophy, and church history during and after college, my perspective started to expand and change. It became clear to me that the timeless truths we had attributed to the Bible in my church were modern inventions.... As I read and studied and reflected on my own experience, the picture grew ever more complex and yet much more vivid: White evangelicalism is a movement thoroughly entrenched in American nationalism, White supremacy, patriarchy, and xenophobia.
In 2018, Onishi and his friend Daniel Miller started the excellent Straight White American Jesus podcast. To Onishi,
the basic teachings across a broad swath of evangelicalisms are pretty simple: The Bible is the errorless Word of God. It should be read and followed as literally as possible. Unlike in Catholicism, hierarchy and tradition aren’t sources of authority. Instead, dynamic preachers invite worshippers into services more akin to contemporary tent revivals than solemn ceremonies. Evangelicals ... locate authority in the Bible and those who, in their minds, teach it faithfully. Spreading the gospel is a top priority for evangelicals, because they believe that all those who die without accepting Christ as their personal savior will spend eternity in hell.
Wanting to save non-believers from the eternal torments of hell is commendable, but it is also utterly disingenuous inasmuch as the machinations employed or endorsed by evangelicals serve very different purposes, as we have seen.
January 6
To Onishi, “the January 6 insurrection was a religious ritual carried out by the Americans who believe they have a God-given right to rule the country.”
The framework that guided them was Christian nationalism. And the story of Jericho provides a window into the spiritual mechanics of the most traitorous attack on the country in modern history.
The basis of the Jericho narrative, which animates the Jericho March coalition, and which inspired the “Jericho march” that took place not far from the Capitol the night before January 6, 2021, is based on Joshua 6:21: “They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.” Onishi:
In contrast to the murderous spirit in the air, the insurrection was marked by impromptu praise and prayer sessions. It wasn’t that rioters chose one or the other. Rather, the insurrectionists used prayer and other rituals to justify murderous intention. Every time the mob crossed a new boundary—past another police barricade or through another doorway or up a flight of steps—certain rioters stopped to pray and thank God....
Once rioters advanced past security and to the boundary of the building, they stopped to pray again.... In the Senate Chamber, the infamous QAnon Shaman, Jacob Angeli ... led the rioters in prayer: “Let’s all say a prayer in this sacred space,” he said, as he gathered them on and around the Senate dais. “Thank you, Heavenly Father, for this opportunity to stand up for our God-given inalienable rights,” he prayed. “To all the tyrants, the communists, the globalists: this is our nation, not theirs. We will not allow the American way to go down. Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you.”
[Writer and Smithsonian curator] Peter Manseau argues that the rioters had a “permission structure” that provided the psychological mechanism needed to justify killing police officers and erecting gallows for the vice president. “Even for those without strong Christian convictions, the pervasive religious imagery provided both a permission structure and a psychological safety net that allowed self-declared patriots to rampage through a space they supposedly held sacred,” Manseau writes. “If any had second thoughts as they charged up the Capitol steps, they perhaps needed only to see a Bible thrust in the air above the crowd to be put at ease. How could a righteous mob be wrong?”
January 6 and the way it is being remembered, Onishi argues, “has given the myth of the stolen election the martyrs, the sacred objects, and the rituals that any good myth needs to survive.” The parallel he draws between Hitler’s failed coup of 1923 and J6 (another failed coup) is instructive. While the former only fueled the stab-in-the-back myth at the heart of Nazi propaganda, J6 only fueled the myth of the stolen election. Hitler used the former myth to rouse his compatriots to make Germany great again. Trump uses the latter myth to rouse his compatriots to you know what. Onishi:
January 6, 2021, could have been the end of MAGA Nation’s role in the story of American politics. If politicians, media voices, religious leaders, and celebrities had formed a united front that painted the insurrection as a disqualifying event that barred Trump and anyone who advocated for the attempted coup from serving in political office, our political future might look differently. As it stands, however, it seems that J6 will become the foundational event in a long, perhaps slow-moving attempt to thwart American democracy. Like the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Germany, the 2021 Capitol insurrection may have been a “failure” only for a time, and in name only. When authorities stop a coup attempt, and when that insurrection births martyr stories and rituals and symbols among its adherents, any effort to trim back the myths that led to the coup simply end up stimulating their growth.
See also this important text, which I discovered after sending out this post.
Civil war and MAGA migration
“To understand how close modern America is to erupting into conflict,” political scientist Barbara F. Walter writes in her book How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them (Penguin Random House, 2022), “we must acquaint ourselves with the conditions that give rise to, and define, modern civil war.... Civil wars ignite and escalate in ways that are predictable; they follow a script. The same patterns emerge whether you look at Bosnia, Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Northern Ireland, or Israel.”
Experts have a name for countries which are neither full autocracies nor democracies but something in between; they call them “anocracies.” Asked by the CIA to develop a model to predict where political instability and armed conflict was likely to break out around the world, the Political Instability Task Force (which Walter later joined) came up with dozens of social, economic, and political variables—thirty-eight in total, among them poverty, ethnic diversity, population size, inequality, and corruption—and put them into a predictive model.
To everyone’s surprise, they found that the best predictor of instability was not, as they might have guessed, income inequality or poverty. It was a nation’s polity index score, with the anocracy zone being the place of greatest danger.
The polity index score is a 21-point scale that ranges from −10 (most autocratic) to +10 (most democratic). Countries are considered to be full democracies if they receive a score of between +6 and +10; countries are considered autocracies if they receive a score of between –10 and –6. Anocracies are in the middle, receiving a score of between –5 and +5.
No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war; the decay is often so incremental that people often fail to notice or understand it, even as they’re experiencing it. If you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America—the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela—you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.... Polity data has been collected on the United States since 1776. The last time America was an anocracy was between 1797 and 1800, when it was rated a +5.
January 6, 2021, led to America’s polity score dropping from a +7 to a +5, the lowest score since 1800.
The United States is an anocracy for the first time in more than two hundred years. Let that sink in. We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy. That honor is now held by Switzerland, followed by New Zealand, and then Canada. We are no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica, and Japan, which are all rated a +10 on the polity index.
Another useful index is provided by the ten “stages of genocide” laid out in a document by Gregory Stanton, the president of Genocide Watch. The document argues that countries go through eight steps before they reach genocide, and forcibly moving minorities out of a region is one of them.
“If you are in a country in the early stages of ethnic cleansing,” Walter writes, “you might not even notice the dangerous path your country is on.” The first two stages of genocide are known as “classification” and “symbolization.” Examples of symbolization are the appropriation of swastikas by the Nazis and the forcing of Jews to wear yellow stars of David on their clothing. “Already, the United States has moved through both of these stages.”
Stage three is “discrimination,” which is when a dominant group denies or suppresses the rights of others by means of law or custom.... Stage four, or “dehumanization,” easily follows: Those in power use public discourse to turn regular citizens against the targeted minority, denigrating them as criminals (as Serbs did with Bosniaks) or subhuman (as when Hutus called Tutsis “cockroaches”). The United States has already passed through these stages, too.
At recent rallies, Donald Trump, echoing Nazi rhetoric, has compared immigrants to “vermin,” and in a recent interview he said that immigration is “poisoning the blood of our country”. [Source]
“Organization,” the fifth stage, comes next. This is where a dominant group begins to assemble an army or militia and formulate plans to eradicate other groups.... In stage six, “polarization,” the dominant group escalates the propaganda, further demonizing and separating the target group.... This is where the United States is today: solidly in stage five, perhaps entering stage six.
Reminder: How Civil Wars Start was published in 2022.
The steps toward ethnic cleansing are often so gradual as to feel imperceptible. But according to “The Ten Stages of Genocide,” there’s a noticeable shift that takes place with stage seven. Known as the “preparation” stage, this is when a dominant group forms an army. Leaders also indoctrinate the populace with fear of becoming the victim, claiming that “if we don’t kill them, they will kill us.” It’s after this indoctrination that a country can explode quickly into stages eight and nine—“persecution” and “extermination”—and then the final stage, “denial,” which is when perpetrators deny having committed their crimes.... Stage seven is significant, in other words, because it’s when the logic of genocide develops as a means of self-defense. It’s common to think that ethnic cleansing is driven by hate. There is hate, yes, but the real fuel is fear—fear that you are threatened and vulnerable.
“Today,” Walter writes in 2022, the USA is “a factionalized anocracy that is quickly approaching the open insurgency stage, which means we are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.... In fact, the attack on the Capitol could well be the first of a series of organized attacks in an open insurgency stage.” As she points out, extremists typically find inspiration for their beliefs in certain canonical texts, such as Osama bin Laden’s Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places, which did for the members of al-Qaeda what Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf did for the Nazis.
In the United States a similar role is played by The Turner Diaries, which the FBI has called the “bible of the racist right.” A playbook for leveraging racial resentment into a race war, it offers “a specific picture (terror attacks, mass casualty bombs) for how a band of fringe activists could take down the federal government and ‘awaken’ other white people to the cause.” According to journalist Aja Romano,2 this book “teaches its adherents not just to adopt the mentality that they are at war with progressives, but that a real-life war is inevitable.”
Increasingly, civil wars involve some type of ethnic cleansing, and Walter believes that, thanks in part to texts like The Turner Diaries, “there is every reason to suspect that this is where an escalating campaign of far-right terror in the United States would lead.” Among other things, terrorists would “try to persuade regular Americans that they’d be safer if certain people—minorities, liberals, anyone deemed a ‘socialist’—left their cities and their states, creating a set of white ethno-states in the rural heartland.” This trend—a movement for geographical consolidation and de facto secession—has also been discussed by Bradley Onishi in his 2023 book:
I’m not talking about states officially leaving the Union but of members of MAGA Nation banding together in semiautonomous regions where they take over local government, cultivate Christian nationalist churches, and do everything possible to create a theocratic society where White Christians have all the power. Such a migration is already happening from places like California, coastal Washington, and parts of the East Coast to what is now known as the “American Redoubt”—the region comprising Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, eastern Washington, and eastern Oregon. Redoubt means stronghold or fortification.
Onishi quotes Ozzie Knezovich, the former sheriff of Spokane County, Washington:
A lot of good people are going to get sucked into that vortex, and they are going to wake up and go, “I didn’t buy into that. I didn’t buy into breaking away from the United States and forming my own country, because ultimately that’s what the Redoubt stands for.... You might think you are going into something where you will have freedom and liberty. No. You are going into tyranny. And the day you step out of line they will slap you back in line.
By the same token, Walters quotes the town clerk in Stratton, Vermont, who used the following language on the cover of the town’s annual report:
You came here from there because you didn’t like there, and now you want to change here to be like there. We are not racist, phobic or anti-whatever-you-are, we simply like here the way it is and most of us actually came here because it is not like there, wherever there was. You are welcome here, but please stop trying to make here like there. If you want here to be like there you should not have left there to come here, and you are invited to leave here and go back there at your earliest convenience.
Recommended reading:
Dr. Tony Moll is a renowned medical professional, now retired, who has made significant contributions in the fight against AIDS and tuberculosis in South Africa.
Aja Romano, “How a Dystopian Neo-Nazi Novel Helped Fuel Decades of White Supremacist Terrorism,” Vox, January 28, 2021.