Christian nationalism: Origins, dogma, tactics and goals for all of us

“There are very good Christians who are compassionate and caring. And there are very bad Christians. You can say that about Islam, about Hinduism, about any faith. That is why I was saying that it was not the faith per se but the adherent. People will use their religion to justify virtually anything.” — Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Multiple online sources have written about the existence of Christian nationalism and its aggressive, toxic power. An article in The Nation (solid liberal bias, high fact accuracy), How Do We Confront White Christian Nationalism?, discusses various aspects of CN ideology and the CN political movement. The author, Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis writes:

Christian nationalism has influenced the course of American politics and policy since the founding of this country, while, in every era, moral movements have had to fight for the Bible and the terrain that goes with it. The January 6 assault on the Capitol, while only the latest expression of such old battlelines, demonstrated the threat of a modern form of Christian nationalism that has carefully built political power in government, the media, the academy, and the military over the past half-century. Today, the social forces committed to it are growing bolder and increasingly able to win mainstream support.

When I refer to “Christian nationalism,” I mean a social force that coalesces around a matrix of interlocking and interrelated values and beliefs. These include at least six key features, ....

• First, a highly exclusionary and regressive form of Christianity is the only true and valid religion.

• Second, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity are “the natural order” of the world and must be upheld by public policy (even as Latino Protestants swell the ranks of American evangelicalism and women become important gate-keepers in communities gripped by Christian nationalism).

• Third, militarism and violence, rather than diplomacy and debate, are the correct ways for this country to exert power over other countries (as it is our God-given right to do).

• Fourth, scarcity is an economic reality of life and so we (Americans vs. the world, white people vs. people of color, natural-born citizens vs. immigrants) must compete fiercely and without pity for the greater portion of the resources available.

• Fifth, people already oppressed by systemic violence are actually to blame for the deep social and economic problems of the world—the poor for their poverty, LGBTQIA people for disease and social rupture, documented and undocumented immigrants for being “rapists and murderers” stealing “American” jobs, and so on.

• Sixth, the Bible is the source of moral authority on these (and other) social issues and should be used to justify an extremist agenda, no matter what may actually be contained in the Good Book. 

Such ideas, by the way, didn’t just spring up overnight. This false narrative has been playing a significant, if not dominant, role in our politics and economics for decades.

In the Poor People’s Campaign (which I cochair with Reverend William Barber II), we identify Christian nationalism as a key pillar of injustice in America that provides cover for a host of other ills, including systemic racism, poverty, climate change, and militarism. To combat it, we believe it’s necessary to build a multiracial moral movement that can speak directly to the needs and aspirations of poor and dispossessed Americans and fuse their many struggles into one.

A Feb. 2020 article in Washington Monthly (center-left bias, high fact accuracy), Christian Nationalists Found the Leader They’ve Been Looking For, writes: 

I had previously referred to the group [Christian nationalists] that has shown unwavering support for Trump as “white evangelicals.” But that is a bit of a misnomer, primarily because, as we saw with the article in Christianity Today calling for the president’s removal from office, there are pockets of white evangelicals who aren’t part of the movement. There are also members of other religious groups that espouse the same beliefs. For example, Catholic leaders like Attorney General William Barr and Federalist Society President Leonard Leo are major players in the Christian nationalist movement. 

Equally important for us to understand is that this movement isn’t simply about culture wars. [Quoting Katherine Stewart's 2020 book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism]: 

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. (emphasis added)

When it comes to that “biblical worldview,” we often hear about the fact that Christian nationalists oppose abortion and LGBT rights. But as Stewart explains, the movement is actually based on the idea that “the Bible is very clear about the right answers to the political issues American voters face in the twenty-first century.” For example, they also believe that the Bible:

• opposes public assistance to the poor as a matter of principle—unless the money passes through church coffers;

• opposes environmentalism and, as a matter of theology, denies the science that human contributions to greenhouse gases causes global warning;

• opposes gun regulation;

• supports strong national borders;

• favors the privatization of schools;

• favors a gender hierarchy in both the home and church, with women being submissive to men;

• favors the use of corporal punishment when discipling children;

• favors government deregulation of business and minimal workers rights; and

• favors capitalism and property rights.

For me personally, the major myth about Christian nationalists that Stewart busted was to provide some history of where this movement came from. In this case, I have to disagree with my colleague Martin Longman. Trump hasn’t corrupted his Christian supporters, he is the apex of decades of work that led up to his election. Here are just a few of the men who laid the groundwork for where we are today.

Robert Lewis Dabney

Dabney was a Presbyterian minister and theologian who was born in 1820. He was an anti-abolitionist, who argued that opposing slavery was “tantamount to rejecting Christianity.” After the Civil War, Dabney, who referred to democracy as “mobocracy,” took up the cause of his “oppressed white brethren of Virginia and neighboring states to the south.”

Their oppression consisted in, among other things, having to pay taxes to support a “pretended education to the brats of black paupers.” These unjustly persecuted white people, as Dabney saw it, were also forced to contend with “the atheistic and infidel theories of physical science.”

As Stewart notes, “Christian nationalism came of age in the American slave republic” due to the proslavery theology of men like Dabney, who fused religion with a racialized form of nationalism.

Rousas Rushdoony

The importance of Dabeny can be seen from the fact that Rushdoony, whose writings provided the core of today’s Christian nationalism, considered him a role model.

The views of the theologian who lies at the center of so much influence are not hard to state simply and clearly: Rushdoony advocated a return to “biblical” law in America. The Bible, says Rushdoony, commands Christians to exercise absolute dominion over the earth and all of its inhabitants. Women are destined by God to be subordinate to men; men are destined to be ruled by a spiritual aristocracy of right-thinking, orthodox Christian clerics; and the federal government is an agent of evil. Public education, in Rushdoony’s reading of the Bible, is a threat to civilization, for it “basically trains women to be men,” and represents “primitivism,” “chaos,” and “a vast integration into the void.”

Two of the themes that are critical for today’s Christian nationalists emerged from Dabney and Rushdoony: (1) the fight against government (ie, public) schools, and (2) the disdain for democracy in favor of a hierarchy of authoritarianism. As Stewart wrote: “the new generation of leaders promoted a theological vision that emphasized the divine origins of the existing order, which invariably involved domination and subordination.”

Paul Weyrich

Weyrich wasn’t a particularly religious man. Instead, he was a Goldwater Republican who was passionate about “anticommunism, economic libertarianism, and a distrust of the civil rights movement.” It was Weyrich’s genius to meld those commitments with Christian nationalists in order to form a new radical right.

Initially, Weyrich joined with leaders like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Bob Jones to rally around the cause of fighting against federal attempts to desegregate their schools. In that effort, we can see the groundwork that was laid by Dabney and Rushdoony.

But they had a problem. As Weyrich understood, building a new movement around the burning issue of defending the tax advantages of racist schools wasn’t going to be a viable strategy on the national stage. “Stop the tax on segregation” just wasn’t going to inspire the kind of broad-based conservative counterrevolution that Weyrich envisions. They needed an issue with a more acceptable appeal.

That is when, several years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v Wade was actually embraced by most conservative Christians, they decided to focus on the issue of abortion. The rest, as they say, is history.

One of the most important moments of the so-called “Reagan revolution” was the fact that he launched his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi with a dog-whistle shout-out to states rights. But equally important was the speech the not-so-religious presidential candidate gave at the Reunion Arena in Dallas, Texas to a crowd of 15,000 pastors and religious activists.

I know that you can’t endorse me,” he declared, but “I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing.” The pastors went wild. Reagan went on to air his personal doubts about the theory of evolution. Then he offered a homespun hypothetical: if he were to be trapped on an island with only one book, he said, he would take the Bible. “All of the complex questions facing us at home and abroad,” he said, “have their answer in that single book.”

With his speech in Mississippi, Reagan secured the support of southern white racists. But it was his speech in Dallas that married Christian nationalists to his candidacy and forged the bond with the Republican Party that lasts to this day. Weyrich’s vision came to fruition.

Those are some of the historical highlights that led Stewart to this conclusion.

America’s conservative movement, having morphed into a religious nationalist movement, is on a collision course with the American constitutional system. Though conservatives have long claimed to be the true champions of the Constitution — remember all that chatter during previous Republican administrations about “originalism” and “judicial restraint” — the movement that now controls the Republican Party is committed to a suite of ideas that are fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution and the Republic that the founders created under its auspices.

Mr. Trump’s presidency was not the cause of this anti-democratic movement in American politics. It was the consequence. He is the chosen instrument, not of God, but of today’s Christian nationalists, their political allies and funders, and the movement’s legal apparatus.

Paul Weyrich in a 1980 speech directly 

attacking free and fair elections

(0:41 video)

From what I can tell, most rank and file Christian nationalists do not understand that they are Christian nationalists. The CN movement is highly disciplined in the dark arts of deceit, lies, irrational emotional manipulation and hyper-partisan motivated reasoning. CN elites know that most Americans do not want to buy what they are selling. That is no different than government-hating laissez-faire capitalist elites. Most Americans are not radical Christian fundamentalists who want Old Testament Biblical law with, for example, (i) death by stoning of gay sex and adultery, and (ii) legalized overt discrimination against, and oppression of, people who God commands be discriminated against and oppressed.  

When one combines the radical CN movement with wealthy, ruthless, government-hating laissez-faire capitalist political donors, one gets the modern but deceitful, autocratic and poisonous Republican Party.

Rousas Rushdoony arguing that if humans make laws humans 

are God, but when God makes laws, God is God

(2:45 video)