Preparing for War
The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—and What Comes Next
By Bradley Onishi
A Review by Dwight A. Moody
This may be the best book I have read on the subject of White Christian Nationalism (WCN); but I say that every time, it seems, when I pick up yet another book addressing this topic.
Two things make this book stand out. First, it is written from the perspective of the West Coast. Onishi grew up in Orange County, California, and was baptized as a teenager into a bonified WCN congregation: Rose Drive Friends Church. He repeatedly references his experiences there, as a fire-in-my-belly adolescent eager to please the Lord and prepare for the Rapture. I saw a lot of myself in his self-description. This orientation to Southern California gives this book a very different feel; other books, like Robert P. Jones White Too Long, are rooted in the American South, a region more widely known as an epicenter of Right Wing religion and politics.
Onishi spends much of his space going back and forth to Orange County, until he introduces Idaho in chapter 11. And what he introduces is largely new to me: like the phrase American Redoubt. He means by this a region of the country identified by WCN as a destination for relocation by conservative people wanting to escape multi-cultural communities and political liberalism. This process he calls Right Flight. I did not realize the South had a serious competitor for the wackiness associated with WCN.
Second, it is designed very cleverly. Each chapter begins and ends with the same reference point. For instance: chapter 6 on the purity culture opens and closes with his memories of kissing his teenage girlfriend, Alexis. “There was a lot riding on that kiss,” is the way the chapter opens (97), and it closes with this: “We were two young people trying their best to save the whole world through a kiss—and only a kiss” (117). Speakers and preachers are familiar with this rhetorical strategy, but it is rare to see it in a scholarly book.
He does the same thing with the book as a whole, by reference to the January 6, 2021, attack on the capital. He asks the question “Would I Have Been There?” in the title to chapter one (5), wondering how he escaped involvement when others in his high school and church did not. He begins the Epilogue with the same question about the same event. More powerfully, he asserts in the Prologue his basic thesis: “I argue that January 6 was the first battle in MAGA Nation’s war on American democracy” (3). And he ends the book with this sobering assertion: “It was the first violent battle in what they foresee as the coming civil war” (221).
In between this stark assessment is a compelling history of how Orange County became the launch pad for WCN, how Republican leaders Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump provided leadership, how the rise of purity culture connects to the resistance to abortion and gay rights, and how the historical function of myths is being played out right in front of our eyes. This latter unpacking is powerful, compelling, and provocative.
But I have some questions for Dr. Onishi. What ever happened to Alexis? Did she make it out of the WCN trap or is she still caught, and do you know how she feels about your journey? I might even extend my question to include the church: do you know how their current leadership feels about their role in this narrative?
Second, Dr. Onishi did a lot of interviews in 2020; he says so repeatedly in this book. But how many of these interviews were with proponents of WCN (or something close to it that the interviewee would admit to)? That is, it is one thing to interview other scholars, detached even more than Dr. Onishi from the reality being researched; but it is another to interview articulate and informed advocates of what Onishi and I both detest and fear. Are any scholars of religion doing this? Would WCN advocates even agree to such an interview? I wonder.
Third, what is the role of guns in this movement? Onishi (and others) spend little time on this, but it seems to me to be a big issue for them and for the rest of the nation. We read a lot about the growing gun culture in these anti-government communities, and I suspect it plays a powerful role in the narrative provided here, especially as related to the American Redoubt. Am I wrong here? If not, wouldn’t another chapter on this matter be relevant? Or is this matter worthy of a whole new book?
Next, as a Christian minister whose perception of recent American history is very similar to Dr. Onishi’s (and as a person whose teenage enthusiasm as a disciple of Jesus collided with my own journey as a scholar), I was caught by the casual way he confesses to his own religious journey: “While I no longer identify as a Christian … “ (12). Here is another story worth telling!
Which brings me to this final question, one arising from my own ministerial work rather than from my status as a concerned citizen: Is there a version of Christianity powerful enough, authentic enough to counter the rise of WCN and represent what is true, and good, and beautiful about the poets and prophets of Israel and the life and teaching of Jesus—and do so in a way that serves the democratic ideals of our nation?
But the only question that really matters is this: Is Dr. Onishi right about his warning, that we are being pulled toward more violence, that we are facing another civil war? Can this possibly be our future? Are the signs that Onishi sees and describes pointing toward the unspeakable? If this is true, and he makes a compelling case, nothing else matters.
