Notes

Christian Nationalism

Nationalism: identification with one's own nation and support for its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations

- Donald Trump promised Christian people that as long as he was there, someone would be representing them very very well, and they are going to have plenty of power
- By the time he left office in 2021, he had a very strong alliance with them, a very strong one
- A claim was made that America is and should remain, a Christian nation
- Christian nationalism was, they argued, a divisive creed; its adherents were more likely than other groups to believe “that Muslims and Atheists hold morally inferior values.”
- This last data point might be a sign that “Christian” is starting to become something more like “Jewish”: an ancestral identity that you can keep, even if you don’t keep the faith.
- Christian nationalism is more of a "white people" thing
- the sociologist Philip S. Gorski. For many people, Gorski and Perry argue, “Christian” refers less to theology than to heritage. Drawing on their own survey, they found that more than a fifth of respondents who wanted the government to declare the U.S. a “Christian nation” also described themselves as being “secular,” or an adherent of a non-Christian faith
- o a secular liberal, it might seem distasteful for a Christian to consider Muslim or atheistic values “morally inferior,” or to want the government to promote “Christian values.” But to claim any set of values as your own is to find them superior, in some meaningful sense, to the alternatives, and probably to hope that they will guide the decisions that your government makes on your behalf.
- We are a country founded on faith and freedom
- Charles I, the former king. (One of Charles’s transgressions: “He authorized a book in favor of sports upon the Lord’s day”; on this front, anyway, America is indisputably less Christian than it used to be.)
- But “heathen” is an unstable identity, because it denotes a condition that ought to be cured. A heathen is someone who has not yet been exposed to and converted to Christianity.
- The heathen and Christianity is divided
- Africans and their descendants were sometimes held to be heathens of a peculiar sort, because they were considered to be both a Biblical people and a cursed one: descendants of Canaan, the son of Ham and grandson of Noah
- He was making a version of an argument that appears throughout American history: that this country is not truly Christian enough. (FD)
- the nineteen-fifties may have been the most pious period in American history; it was the decade when the phrase “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance (1954), and when “In God we trust” was adopted as the country’s official motto (1956).
- By then, politicians were talking less about heathenism and more about a new adversary; many, like Senator Joseph McCarthy, believed that America was “engaged in a final, all-out battle between Communistic atheism and Christianity.” In America, Christianity works best as an organizing principle when there is a strong non-Christian force to organize against.
- In place of Christian nationalism, he advocates something more abstract: an acknowledgment that “Anglo-Protestant culture” has shaped America’s ideals, and a hope that those ideals will endure, even as culture changes.
- George W. Bush was a high-water mark for Christian politics. Bush launched initiatives to support “faith-based organizations,” and brought a missionary’s fervor to the promotion of democracy in the Middle East and, much more successfully, aids treatment in Africa. By contrast, Trump was perhaps the least Christian President in modern times; although he kept his promise to anti-abortion Christian voters by appointing three Supreme Court Justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, he seemed to view this not as a moral triumph but as a favor for a special interest.
- Christian-nationalist beliefs reflect a tribal or partisan identity, but they can’t tell us why so many self-identified Christians seem uninterested in the religion itself.
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