Resisting Christian Nationalism
This is my third attempt to examine the tenets and manifestations of Christian nationalism. I posted two blogs on this topic in 2020. The first was mostly a review of Messiah College’s history professor John Fea’s 2018 Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, and the second mostly a review of journalist Katherine Stewart’s 2022 The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of the Religious Right. Stewart had embedded herself for over a decade within the Christian Right, going to conferences and interviewing dozens of leaders and evangelicals, some of whom she came to consider friends. In fact, John Fea himself did an interview of Stewart in 2020, based on a previous book of hers on a similar topic.
Now, I want to introduce you to an impressive scholar and public servant. Paul D. Miller (PhD from Georgetown University in international affairs) is Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and also the General Hugh Shelton Visiting Chair in Ethics at the US Army’s Command and General Staff College Foundation at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. Miller served in both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama’s National Security Council staff (Director for Afghanistan and Pakistan). Finally, he served as a military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army and later worked as an intelligence analyst for the CIA.
This man is clearly a patriot. In fact, his 2022 book, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism, argues that patriotism is a virtue, but that nationalism, and especially Christian nationalism, is dangerous and a cancer in the body politic that sows division and hate. New York Times columnist David French, one of the few in his league who are not afraid to write as Christians, said this in his Foreword to Miller’s book:
“But while Christian nationalism could be more or less malignant in American life, it could never truly be benign. It warps both religion and patriotism, and when turned against fellow Americans, it’s a force potent enough to rupture the fabric of American political life—and possibly even the American republic itself” (xii).
I will now highlight three points Miller makes in his book about Christian nationalism and then wrap up with some comments on the Democratic nominee for the Senate race in Texas this fall, James Talarico.
It’s about disgruntled Anglo-Protestants seeking to recover the power they wielded from the dawn of the republic
I resonated with Miller’s historical analysis. Broadly, Christian nationalism asserts that there is something identifiable as an American “nation,” distinct from other nations; that American nationhood is and should remain defined by Christianity or Christian cultural norms; and that the American people and their government should actively work to defend, sustain, and cultivate America’s Christian culture, heritage, and values. Historians have often argued that a generic Protestant Christianity served as the de facto established religion of the United States until the 1960s. Even so, their strident anti-Catholicism started to erode in the second half of the twentieth century, and particularly with the election of our first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, and the reconciliation of the nascent Christian Right with Catholic conservatives in the 1970s on the issue of abortion. But the Christian Right that emerged has even upped the ante of the cultural wars and longstanding racial tensions.
Miller’s eighth chapter (“The Christian Right’s Illiberalism”) is particularly telling. Following international affairs scholar Walter Russell Mead’s analysis of 19th-century American politics (in his 2012 book, Special Providence), Miller argues that at the heart of this nationalist undercurrent was the conviction that America was called by God to be a second Israel, a “city on a hill” (allusion to Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount). These were not so much the convictions of the three elite political factions which historically laid out America’s foreign policy—the Hamiltonian (prioritize commerce); the Jeffersonian (preserve the democratic system); and the Wilsonian (build on moral principles). Rather, to understand Christian nationalism you have to look to “Jacksonian America,” which he calls “America’s predominant subculture, the folk community of the South and Midwest, the heartland of tribal evangelicalism.” We shouldn’t focus on elites and ideology, but rather on this populist movement’s “embodied practice, its priorities and blind spots—and the unarticulated, implicit presuppositions behind them” (166).
Jacksonian America, with its explicit racist and sectarian past, is still very much alive in today’s America. These are the people Trump very intentionally courted: “a preexisting but neglected reality, one long simmering in a part of America long overlooked by many of its elite institutions.” Indeed, this large proportion of the American electorate “represents a deeply embedded, widely spread and popular culture of honor, independence, courage, and military pride among the American people” (167). It’s not an intellectual school, but rather an “an expression of the social, cultural, and religious values of a large portion of the American public,” or a “community of political feeling.” From the Anglo-Protestant settlers of New England, it later drew from the Scotts-Irish settlers of the South, and then from the Western frontier. It was shaped by its battles with the Native Americans and the wilderness. These people prized their self-reliance and their mastery of their weaponry. That was their code of honor.
Politically, these Jacksonians are naturally suspicious of the federal government, skeptical about any foreign aid, though fond of government programs helping the middle class. Any means to help the “folk community” are admissible. More than anything, they “look to a popular hero to restore government to its proper function”—a hero who “dares to say what the people feel and defies the entrenched elites” (168). And even if they don’t go to church, they believe that their Christian culture “should define the nation.” As Miller puts it, “The Jacksonians have been ‘the voting base’ of the Christian Right since the 1970s.
Yet for Miller, “the enduring problem with Jacksonian nationalism is its amnesia about its own past”— showing “little awareness of, or contrition for, America’s historical sins” (171). Several other shortcomings: its knee-jerk tendency to consider “real Americans” as White Protestants; “its insensitivity to how it sounds to outsiders; its tendency to identify the nation with its largest demographic group; its tendency to blame inequality entirely on personal failings to the exclusion of systemic or structural factors; and the potential for it to lapse back into old habits of equating culture with color.”
Miller contrasts Christian nationalism with Christian republicanism
Miller states in several places that he’s a political conservative and would always vote Republican because he believes in small government and traditional family values—that is, if Donald Trump, or someone with his views and values, were not on the ticket. He devotes a whole chapter to a scathing critique of Trump, and that critique would be even harsher if he were writing this book today (remember, this was in 2022). Trump, he says, fanned the flames of the worst version of Jacksonian America—a tribal power grab to force all minorities to conform with the Anglo-Protestant majority. And the fact that this erstwhile majority has now dramatically dwindled and lost its former influence only adds to their sense of frustration and bitterness.
There is anger too, mostly because of how drastically mainstream American culture has changed. Pat Buchanan, addressing the Republican National Convention in 1992, told his audience that America was in fact at war—"a culture war . . . for the soul of America.” The other side wants “abortion on demand . . . homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, [and] women in combat units.” But we can’t abide by this kind of change, he said, “in a nation we still call God’s country” (143).
Miller is both a Christian and a patriotic American who believes deeply in the values expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, and in the way those values are put to use in its democratic institutions. This is what he calls “republicanism” with a lower case “r.” And thus, as a Christian republican, he deplores the ways in which these universal ideals (he attributes them to “natural law”) have been abused and trampled over the course of history. This is not unique to the United States: “Part of what happened is that democracies professed equality but in practice governed in the interest of the majority tribe. Democracy in America claimed to represent all people equally but empowered only White men for much of American history” (108).
In fact, the Christian Right is an amalgamation of Christian nationalism (especially by trying to impose its own religious culture on the nation), while at least paying lip service to democracy, human and civil rights. “To the extent that Christian nationalism predominates, the Christian Right is identity politics for tribal evangelicals, a response to the decline of Anglo-Protestant power, more than a movement of ordered liberty and equal justice for all” (164).
Miller’s plea to his Christian nationalist brethren
In his last chapter (“How to Think of Nation, Gospel, and Creed”) before his shorter conclusion chapter, Miller lays out what he believes to be the kind of political theology and practice a Christian should espouse—at least a politically conservative Christian (he understands that other Christians can take their views in a more leftward direction). To the libertarians on the right, he asserts that their extreme individualism goes against the community and solidarity values of the gospel of Christ. For in the light of God’s good creation, “we cannot escape some kind of overarching story about who ‘we’ are, a story that gives us meaning, purpose, and direction” (230). Feeling a part of a particular nation “meets enduring, deeply rooted psychological needs.” This is so, because “[these nations] help to cement and sustain the communities that sustain us” (231).
Miller makes several insightful comments about history and American identity, but I want to end with the following remark—his strong recognition of the political and social contributions of African Americans. I was amazed that he mentioned Amanda Gorman, the 22-year-old first youth national poet laureate and also the youngest inaugural poet who delivered a poem at President Biden’s inauguration. Especially memorable were the following two lines: “Being America is more than a pride we inherit / It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.”
More importantly, MIller devotes a whole section to Frederick Douglass’s remarkable career, from his days as a slave on a Maryland plantation, then his ordination in the AME church, then the rest of his life spent as “an activist, writer, publisher, journalist, commentator, lobbyist, and ambassador” (250). Whether through his many writings or his public speeches, his eloquence was electrifying. Notably, he evolved from making common cause with abolitionists who believed the whole U.S. system was tainted with injustice and blood to a position which recognized the high ideals of its founding documents and which, consequently, called for deep reforms.
By 1852, when giving a 4th of July speech to a mostly White audience, he could say, “The principles contained in [the Declaration of Independence] are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost” (251). But then the coup de grace: “What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?” he asked. “Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?” That question was never discussed among White Americans.
In a later speech, he continued on this theme, “The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie” (253). But in a 4th of July speech during the Civil War, Douglass had now come to believe he was an American: “we are only continuing the tremendous struggle, which your fathers and my fathers began eighty-six years ago.”
Douglass had latched on to this hope that, despite all its errors and aberrations, the U.S. could shake off its demons, abolish slavery and truly become this nation where all its citizens could equally share the benefits of freedom, justice, and prosperity.
Does James Talarico’s nomination signal a hopeful shift?
Fast forward to today. For the first time in recent American politics, a rising young politician is seeking a Senate seat on the basis of his Christian faith, and because of that faith, he has set his sights on defeating Christian nationalism in the biggest red state. Thirty-six-year-old James Talarico has won the nomination of the Democratic Party for the Texas Senate race this fall. Already a Texas state legislator, he is taking a year break from his course work at Austin Presbyterian Seminary to run for a Senate seat.
David French, the columnist I mentioned above who wrote the Foreword to Miller’s book, penned a column on Talarico last week, opening with these words, “These days, I’m asked more about James Talarico than I’m asked about any politician not named Donald Trump.”
Talarico, notes French, openly grounds his ideology and policies in his faith and he even mentions theology on occasion, especially when arguing against Christian nationalism. In a 2023 sermon, he argued, “Jesus liberates, Christian nationalism controls. Jesus saves. Christian nationalism kills. Jesus started a universal movement based on mutual love. Christian nationalism is a sectarian movement based on mutual hate.”
In another New York Times article, Talarico is quoted as saying, “I don’t see myself as challenging the Republican Party,” he said. “I see the real fight as all of us, whether we’re progressive or conservative, Democrat or Republican, uniting together to take on the very powerful people who have corrupted our politics and who are corrupting our church.” The two authors then comment, “As he moves into the general election, Mr. Talarico is pushing Christians to reclaim what he sees as core principles of their faith in American political life, including compassion for immigrants, helping the poor and loving one’s neighbor.”
The most noteworthy fact about Talarico’s run for the Senate, concludes David French in his piece, is not that a progressive politician is openly Christian, but that he eschews any vitriol in speaking about his opponents and remains civil in all his conversations and speeches. Christians, and most Americans really, used to think that virtue and character are non-negotiables for electing a politician. Talarico’s likely opponent, John Cornyn, has run his campaign on exactly that platform. Should we be hopeful that good character in American politics will make a comeback? French thinks we should be.
And hopefully too, we could all unite around the founding creeds of American republicanism—freedom and justice for all. Then I’m sure that people of faith and many others could agree to show compassion to immigrants and begin to tackle some of the structural injustices of our society.