By Karen Swallow Prior
Sunday, June 23, 2024
There’s a lot to be said in opposition to Christian
nationalism. Indeed, much has
been said and written. Indeed, the very definition of Christian nationalism is
contested, even among those who openly embrace it.
In Taking
America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, Andrew
L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry define Christian nationalism broadly as “a
cultural framework—a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and
value systems—that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with
American civic life.” As played out in the current American context, Whitehead
and Perry show, Christian nationalism “is as ethnic and political
as it is religious,” and assumes a “divine sanction for authoritarian control
and militarism.”
A key element of Christian nationalism in Perry and
Whitehead’s definition is that it “idealizes.” Idealization—of the imagined
past and imagined futures, but especially the past—is a general human tendency.
But the core of any “-ism” or movement is, of course, its ideals. And it
is easy for ideals to become unmoored, first from reality, then from our very
humanity.
History is rife with such examples, and ample critiques of
Christian nationalist arguments convincingly
show that its leading voices read history selectively at best. Not being a
historian myself, I will leave the historical analysis to those experts.
But I can speak to another aspect to the trending and
increasingly vocal brand of Christian nationalism: the impoverishment of
imagination, a lack rooted in unreality and fantasy.
The painter whom
Steve Bannon has called “the artist of the MAGA movement,” for example, has
churned out countless paintings that, his website states, “tap into the heart
of American Patriotism.” These and similar images have spread virally across
the internet, spawning endless memes and AI imitations. This sort of saccharine
art that fills the imaginations of Christian nationalists makes Thomas Kinkade
look edgy and similarly malforms imaginations: pale-skinned families with rosy
cheeks worshipping
from wooden pews, Jesus hovering
next to Donald Trump, and
medieval knights and cathedrals displaying nary a chink in armor or stone
from time or wear.
These latter images appear in a recently published
Christian nationalist fever dream of a futuristic fantasy
(set all the way in 2032!) about a no-longer-united United States ruled by a
Christian Prince, a confederacy (naturally) finally rid of liberals and
unbelievers by force of law and peopled by women relegated entirely to the home
and prohibited from all public service. The tale is, the author notes, a work
of fiction (just in case anyone was wondering). It’s written in the sort of
prose that would shame a college freshman in a peer-review session:
Chapels and cathedrals, which
formerly belonged to the Enemy, have been duly confiscated and returned to the
orthodox; and, by order of the Prince, new chapel and cathedral constructions
are taking place, both in metro and rural areas throughout the Confederacy, in
consultation with the finest Christian architects and city planners. Civil
renewal is well underway.
This is just one entry in an entire genre of Christian
nationalist fantasy
literature. Such art is to political theory and religious faith what
romance novels are to real life and real relationships.
Fortunately, some of the most brilliant minds in history
have already imagined more realistically what the tenets of Christian
nationalism (even when called by other names) might look like. A brief glance
at even a few of these great works shows how the questions raised by Christian
nationalism, questions around national identity, race, and religious liberty,
can be addressed with foresight, originality, and creative genius—as opposed to
the pastiches of the past that mere nostalgia and the plagiarism of AI offer.
One of the most challenging works that wrestles with
these questions is Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Swift, a
devoted Anglican priest of the 18th century, understood the dangers of
nationalism, racism, and xenophobia. Even as a loyal defender of the
established church, serving as dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Catholic
Ireland’s capital of Dublin, Swift was beloved by the Irish for championing
their human dignity and freedom from oppression.
In the final voyage of the Travels, Gulliver,
the naive narrator, finds himself amid a race of noble, rational horse-like
beings called Houyhnhnms, who rule over another race of goatlike barbarians
called Yahoos. The horses believe that Gulliver is also a Yahoo, and Gulliver
has increasing difficulty denying their assessment of him, despite his fiercest
wishes otherwise. The seemingly benevolent horses tolerate Gulliver for a
while, teaching him their language and ways, but eventually decide that because
they plan to exterminate the entire race of “odious” Yahoos, he must leave or
share their fate. The gentle, reasonable rulers turn out to be violent fascists
after all.
In an essay on
Gulliver’s Travels, George Orwell points out that this seeming
utopia—governed by pure reason, overt racism (the Houyhnhnms marry based on
color of their coats), and consensus rather than rule of law—is in fact a form
of government that is totalizing. To be clear, nationalism (Christian or
otherwise) is not necessarily totalitarian or totalizing. The concept is
anachronistic in the context of Swift, and Orwell’s concerns were not the same
as those of today’s Christian nationalists. Nevertheless, both Swift and Orwell
help us see how what can at first allure and comfort can ultimately turn
vicious to both those in power and their subjects. For the race of overly
rational horse-like people, Orwell observes, are in fact “exempt from love,
friendship, curiosity, fear, sorrow and – except in their feelings towards the
Yahoos, who occupy rather the same place in their community as the Jews in Nazi
Germany – anger and hatred.”
While Orwell makes the common error of mistaking the
perspective of Swift’s character for Swift’s own view, the essay, published in
1946, laid the groundwork for Orwell’s masterpiece, published just three years
later, 1984. As anyone passingly familiar with 1984 knows, the
story features a totalitarian dystopia ruled by an anonymous entity known only
as Big Brother. The thoughts and imaginations of the citizens are narrowed by
shrinking the language as Big Brother makes many words (and thoughts) illegal.
Religion is illegal, too, and Winston Smith, the protagonist, is interrogated
by the government merely for letting the word “God” slip into printed material
from which such words were supposed to be excised.
“Aha!” the Christian nationalist might say. “Rather than
outlawing religious faith, we would make atheism illegal!”
But, alas, compulsory Christianity is no better than
compulsory atheism.
Moving further back in history to the time when the
modern notions of religious toleration and liberty were first emerging, we
should consider the life of John Bunyan, most famous for his enduring classic
of the Christian faith, The Pilgrim’s Progress. A Dissenting minister
during a time when preaching outside the authority of the established Church of
England was illegal, Bunyan was arrested for doing just that. He was imprisoned
for 12 years (then jailed again for several months for another religious
crime). We can look to John Bunyan (and many of his Christian brothers and
sisters) to see what the lack of separation of church and state looks like in
real life. Bunyan’s imaginative works were fueled by the fire of real
persecution—not fantasies about idealized Christian princes. Indeed, it is
owing to his life and legacy—along with many others like him—that America came
over time to codify religious liberty.
Another 17th century Puritan offers explicit arguments,
not only for religious liberty, but for freedom of the press, free speech, and
the freedom to be wrong—even to the point of heresy.
In 1644, John Milton, most famous for the Christian epic
poem, Paradise Lost, published a treatise
directed at his own political and religious faction, the Puritan-led
Parliament, appealing to it not to resort to the licensing restrictions of the
printing press that had been the approach of his faction’s enemy, the monarchy.
Areopagitica (whose title is linked to the same Areopagus, or Mars
Hill, made famous by the Apostle Paul in Acts 17) makes some of the most
compelling arguments in modern literature for religious liberty. The work
became a cornerstone for the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Milton’s arguments are thoroughly rooted, not only in
robust Christian doctrine, but in firsthand knowledge of just how corruptible a
marriage between religion and government is.
Virtue, Milton argues, differs from innocence, which does
no wrong because wrong is not an option. Virtue must be chosen in order to be
virtue:
He that can apprehend and consider
vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet
distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true
wayfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised
& unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out
of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and
heat.
Liberty, not the coercion of the law, is the friend of
truth, Milton writes. Licensing and prohibiting are its enemies:
And though all the winds of
doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do
injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and
Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the wors, in a free and open
encounter. Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.
Living and writing during the height of the English civil
wars, wars fought between factions whose religious and political identities
were indistinguishable, Milton fought for the right to be wrong (and free to be
wrong), even on matters of utmost political, spiritual, and eternal importance:
Truth is compared in Scripture to a
streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they
sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretic in
the truth; and if he believe things only because his Pastor says so, or the
Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be
true, yet the very truth he holds, becomes his heresy.
A flourishing Christian faith, along with a flourishing
nation, depends on minds free and well-formed enough to recognize truth amid
falsehood. The primary question Christian nationalism claims to ask—namely,
what does it look like for people of faith (Christian or otherwise) to advocate
in the public square for the public policies they believe will do the most
public good?—cannot be answered with tropes, types, and cliches. Such are the
makings of a flattened imagination that can deal only with ideas, not the real
world.
Fortunately, great works of the human imagination that
can cultivate imaginations capable of wrestling with the complexities of such
questions are there—in abundance—to taste and see.
Another Sunday Read
Always driven by her professional dreams, Christianity
Today reporter Sophia Lee never thought she’d trade a full-time career
for full-time motherhood. But pregnant with her second child, she’s putting
down her reporter’s notebook indefinitely. In the age of stereotypical tropes
about feminism and “trad
wives,” she does so clear-eyed about everything she’s giving up—and
everything she’s gaining. “Neither side speaks to me. And these aren’t the kind
of conversations I have with other women who struggle to feel fulfilled in
motherhood or career,” Lee writes
for Christianity Today. “Yes, I suppose I am that ‘typical
modern woman.’ But there’s something more. Those delicious hours I spent as a
child filling notebooks with ideas and stories were not feminist roars but an
innate expression of a creative God, who blessed both men and women to create
and cultivate. I didn’t go to work excited about toppling patriarchy or earning
wealth or social status. I worked because I loved it. But then that changed.
Our son, growing in my womb for months before I finally noticed him, started
kicking. And before I ever felt ready to be a mother, two years ago, he was
born with an indignant cry.”
A Good Word
The baseball world lost whom many regarded as the sport’s
greatest living player—if not the greatest player ever—when
Willie Mays died on Tuesday at the age of 93. Born in Jim Crow Alabama and
rising through the Negro Leagues, by 1963 Mays was a superstar for the San
Francisco Giants who had signed a record contract. But he was also plunging toward
bankruptcy.
Louis Keene at The Forward has
the story on how Mays was connected with an unlikely friend: a
pioneering Jewish banker, Jacob Shemano, who saved Mays’ finances and welcomed
him into a new community. Here’s a bit, as told by Shemano’s son, Gary:
The relationship ultimately
ingratiated Mays with the Jewish community. Shemano once took Mays on a visit
to the local Jewish Home, Gary said, and Mays later made visiting there a
habit.
He appeared at Jewish community
events so often that Mays was eventually invited into the local
Concordia-Argonaut Club—a Jewish social club—as the first Black member,
according to James Hirsch, author of the biography Willie
Mays: The Life, The Legend.
And while Mays frequented the
Shemano home on holidays, there was one Jewish delicacy he couldn’t handle.
“He loved my mother until she made
him eat some smoked salmon on a bagel for Thanksgiving and he couldn’t swallow
it,” Gary said. “It was hysterical.”
Read the whole thing here.
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