Hilton Head Island, SC – June 25, 2023
The Chapel Without Walls
Joshua 10:29-37; Galatians 3:19-29
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. – Galatians 3:28
Certain dates ring bells in American history: July 4, 1776 (the signing of the Declaration of Independence), April 12, 1861 (the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the end of the Civil War), November 11, 1918 (Armistice Day, when World War I ended), December 7, 1941 (Pearl Harbor), November 22, 1963 (the assassination of John Kennedy [Americans are better-than-average assassins]), September 11, 2001 (i.e., 9/11).
January 6, 2021 is a recent date which should forever be etched into the nation’s consciousness. It was on that date that thousands of people gathered on the National Mall to listen to a speech by President Donald Trump. Afterward many of them marched to the Capitol Building. Then hundreds of them stormed into the building by breaking windows and doors, killing four capitol policemen in the process, and injuring many more, doing much damage to the building.
Many flags were carried into the Capitol that day. Most of them were American flags, but some American flags had a large cross superimposed over them. There even were a few Christian flags, such as are properly located in churches throughout the country. It was an alarming sight to see armed men carrying flags that are associated with the Christian Church being used as projectiles against the greatly overpowered capitol police.
There were several different groups with varying ideologies represented in the mobs who attacked the capital on that unforgettable day. In its aftermath, it became evident that some of the groups and individuals were people who are described as Christian nationalists. Everyone carrying a Christian flag or a Trump flag or an American flag with a cross stitched onto it definitely can be termed “Christian nationalists.” That term had occasionally been used before by journalists and sociologists, but now it has become even more important for everyone to know what it means.
The word “nationalism” presupposes that those who are nationalists hold their nation in especially high regard. Typically they think it is better than any other nation. They are devoted to what they perceive to be their nation’s highest ideals, and they promote those ideals in any way they can.
John Winthrop, the leader of the group of Calvinists who came to Massachusetts Bay in 1620, can be described a proto-Christian-nationalist. He wanted the American colonies to be Christian in their orientation. However, it was to be a Puritan kind of Christianity, not Lutheran or Anglican or Baptist or Anabaptist, and especially not Roman Catholic. It was to be of the sort which emanated a generation later in England under the English strongman, Oliver Cromwell, in the English Revolution. That was when the king, Charles I, was beheaded. Cromwell was also a proto-Christian nationalist.
A new book has been published that describes the 1640s in England. It is called The Blazing World, written by Jonathan Healey, a history professor at the University of Oxford. Healey explains the many strands of religious warfare which flared up during the English Civil War, which that disruption is also called. He wrote, “The Civil War wasn’t a class struggle. It was a clash of ideologies, as often as not between those of the same class.” Cromwell was a wealthy landowner described as “cruel, self-righteous, and bloodthirsty” in a review of the Healey book in The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik. Cromwell destroyed many Catholic churches in Ireland. He also burned Protestant churches of denominations in England and Scotland he strongly opposed. Cromwell called himself the Lord Protector. That says a great deal about who he thought he was. Christian nationalists sometimes assume such lofty notions of themselves.
A century and a half after John Winthrop, when the Constitution of the United States of America was written, most of its signers pointedly did not want the USA to try to be a distinctively Christian nation. No doubt they were pondering the English Civil War when they wrote the political basis upon which the USA was to be built. In the first statement in the first amendment of the Bill of Rights, their position on religion clearly declared, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Anyone can follow any religion they want, or no religion, they said, but no one can be forced to adhere to any particular religion or brand of religion. In England there had been an established Church, the Church of England, and the framers were insistent that was not to occur in the United States.
Many who currently fancy themselves Christian nationalists suppose the Founding Fathers were all Christians. They were not. Many of them were deists, people who believed in a distant kind of God who created the world and then left the world to its own devices. Relatively few of them were active church members. They were convinced that religion had been more harmful than helpful in the Old World, and though they made no attempts to suppress it in America, neither did they want to give it any government encouragement. They wanted what Thomas Jefferson described as a wall of separation between church and state.
Two sociologists, Andrew White and Samuel Perry, have gleaned six propositions from several surveys of those who claim to be Christian nationalists, and here are the six: The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation (the Founders would be horrified); the government should advocate Christian values (well, yes, but which values and determined by whom?); it should enforce strict separation of church and state (I will address that shortly); the government should allow the display of religious symbols in public spaces (years ago the Supreme Court said that is unconstitutional, but the current Supreme Court might not only allow it, but promote it); it should allow prayer in public schools (ditto); and finally, it should be decreed that the success of the USA is a part of God’s plan (says who?).
That there should be a strict separation of church and state would seem to be at odds with the other five propositions in this list. They want the government openly to support Christianity as they perceive it, but they do not want a state religion. What, exactly, do they understand Christianity to be? That is the issue raised by this sermon. That question also prompts another question: What, exactly, is Christian nationalism?
Year ago, when the Supreme Court was trying to make a judicial decision regarding pornography, Justice Potter Stewart famously said, “I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see it.”
It is very hard to give a definition of Christian nationalism which will suit everyone, but here are some of the factors which describe it. Christian nationalism is one example of evangelical Christianity. Not all evangelicals are Christian nationalists, but virtually all Christian nationalists are evangelicals of a misbegotten sort. They favor prayer in public schools and government vouchers for students in private Christian schools. They think no one should kneel during the singing of the national anthem before sports events, and laws should prevent them from doing so. They favor the removal of certain books from school libraries, and they alone want to determine what are the offending tomes. They oppose abortions in general, and want strict laws to govern the few exceptions where abortions may be permitted. They want parents to be more influential arbiters of what is taught in schools, not administrators or teachers. They do not want anything about racial prejudice or slavery to be taught to their children, or to have mistakes highlighted which Americans have made in the past. They want the past to be airbrushed in such a way that their children will imagine the United States of America to be the greatest nation that ever existed, which is what all American Christian nationalists believe.
Many – but not all - Christian nationalists truly think whites are the superior race. Many think of Donald Trump as an exemplary Christian leader. How they ever came to that conclusion is impossible to understand for everyone who is not a Christian nationalist. Nothing he has said or done would validate such an opinion of the former president.
Christian nationalists believe our country has widely strayed from the principles upon which they believe our country was founded, and they want to return to the good old days of the past, as in Puritan New England and the pre-Civil War South, when they believe Christian gentlemen and ladies exemplified a peaceful and honorable culture. They want all people to be in their proper place in society, and they feel too many people have risen above the level where they belong. Grievance is a major factor in the psychology of Christian nationalists. They are gravely concerned that our nation is headed in the wrong direction, and they feel it is incumbent upon them to take whatever measures are necessary to get it back onto its proper course.
It should be no surprise that many Christian nationalists are also neo-Nazis. They admire how strong Hitler was as the leader of Nazi Germany. (That’s what the sadly unstable young man implied when he drove a truck into a White House gate a few weeks ago.) Hitler was the kind of leader we need now, they say, a strongman, someone who knows what to do and sees that it gets done, someone like Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis. When the Capitol was attacked, some of the attackers carried Nazi flags, and they might correctly be termed fascists..
There is much about Christian nationalism that is crooked, twisted, and fundamentally flawed, just like the Nazi crooked-cross flag. Most evangelicals and Christian nationalists are pro-Israeli, and Bibi Netanyahu is the kind of Israeli they most favor. He has turned a democracy into a crypto-autocracy. He is trying to emasculate the Israeli judicial system, and to make it impossible for Palestinians ever to have their own state. Many evangelical Americans believe a strong Israel is a necessity for Armageddon to come, the end of the world, the termination of history, when God will take all the true believers to heaven, of whom they think there will be few, and the rest of us (of whom there will be billions) will be left on earth to perish in eternal strife and mayhem. Ron DeSantis has turned the judicial system in Florida into his own legal fiefdom.
Does all of this sound hard to pin down, like some wild, radical characterization of a movement which, while it may be offbeat, is not dangerous? (Don’t for a moment suppose it is not dangerous.) Is this a conspiracy theory about people who are not a threat, even if they might be deluded? A survey taken in 2020 showed that 84% of the white evangelical vote went to Donald Trump. Is that as ominous to you as it is to me? Is Christian nationalism a harmless movement? Is it essentially Christian in any sense?
Why, you may have asked, did I ever choose Joshua 10:29-37 as a scripture passage for today? I did, because it shows how religious people could and can actually engage in genocide, thinking it is God’s will. The wholesale slaughter of the Canaanites, if it really happened as the book of Joshua describes it, was demonic. January 6, 2021 was demonic, although many of its participants were convinced they were following God’s specific orders.
When bad theology and bad politics are yoked, it can very quickly turn nasty. Two men who are running for the Republican nomination for president are intentionally campaigning as strongmen. One has already shown on the national scene how disruptive he was, and the other has demonstrated how currently disruptive he is as the governor of the nation’s third-most-populous state. Both these men have clearly shown themselves to be Christian nationalists. When he smiles, Donald Trump has a smirk of his face like Benito Mussolini. When Ron DeSantis smiles, it is always a supercilious, very unnatural grin. When Gov. DeSantis announced his intention to seek the Republican nomination on Twitter, there apparently were several technological glitches. The biggest glitch was asking Elon Musk to support the announcement. Asking Musk to do that was like DeSantis asking Congressman George Santos to support his presidential bid.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet said of his new stepfather, “O villain, villain, smiling damned villain!” Are these two candidates fine Christian gentlemen, or are they villains, as Hamlet described his uncle, who murdered his father? That is the primary question voters considering either of these men as president need to answer.
Love of country is not in itself a flaw. But when anyone’s nation is thought to rise above all others in God’s eyes, it is theology gone awry. I love the national hymns and songs of many nations, but when they hint that God loves them more than any others, it can lead to terrible consequences. Land of Hope and Glory was written at the height of the British Empire in the nineteenth century. One of its lines declares of Britain, “God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.” I will never forget my professor of German history in college telling about being with a colleague in Berlin on August 31, 1939. It was the day before Hitler’s troops invaded Poland, igniting World War II. They were listening on the radio to Hitler speaking to the Reichstag. At the end of his speech, the members broke into a spontaneous triumphant tune. His friend thought they were singing the hymn, “Glorious things of Thee are spoken, Zion, city of our God.” Instead, what they were singing was, “Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles: “Germany, Germany, Over All Others.”
Do we want a Joshua, and a scorched earth policy against all who are perceived to be enemies, foreign and domestic? Or do we want a Paul, and a policy which seeks to establish a welcoming inclusion that overlooks obvious differences in order to cultivate similarities? “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Christian nationalists do not believe they are in unity with people like us. Is there any way we can legitimately be in unity with them?
Nationalists in any nation revere their nation above all others. American Christian nationalists are convinced God wants the United States of America to be superior to all other nations. But how can they imagine that the Creator of an endless universe could be so parochial that He favors one people on one average-sized planet over all the other people on that average planet?
God bless America; that’s fine. But God will equally bless every other nation on earth that is willing, humbly, to accept His blessings, many of which always come with strings attached..