The Christian Jihad
Is the “religious freedom” promoted by the Christian Nationalism that is sweeping the country (and described in this book) responsible for the dramatic decline in religious affiliation and attendance in America?
In other words: is the version of Christian faith and practice espoused by Christian Nationalists in the United States able to appeal to any but the right-wing, fundamentalist cohorts that fuel its energy and fund its activities?
In other words, can their version of “Following Jesus” capture the hearts and minds of those who believe in education, democracy, pluralism, and equality? Or must we abandon what they call Christianity in order to live both as disciples of Jesus and also as advocates of a global human community that welcomes all and honors all?
These are the questions that arise from my reading of this stunning book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, by Katherine Stewart.
These and other questions I will put to her when she is my guest in The Meetinghouse on March 31. At that time, I and others will welcome her to Hendersonville, North Carolina. She is scheduled to give a public lecture sponsored by Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Not since I read The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist (thank you Rev. Dr. Kevin Cosby!). have I devoured a book so well researched and written, so compelling and convincing in its argument, and so troubling in the story it tells (thank you Philip Allen!).
Stewart traces the rise of Christian Nationalism in our country. I wrote about some of this last week in my column “Remembering the Rushdoony.”
She describes The Blitz, the coordinated strategy of crafting legislation related to such things as public and private education, abortion, government, and of course, “religious freedom.” The goal is to use state governments as “laboratories” for injecting religious ideas, values, and rules into all aspects of American culture and law, for honing their skill in ruling, first, the country, and then, the world.
She recounts the history of the right-wing effort to stack the state and federal judiciary with those who share their disdain for the separation of church and state. This, more than anything (as we all now know), explains the adoration Christian Nationalists have for Donald J. Trump. And the Supreme Court Trump put in place is already, in ruling after ruling, granting to their White Catholic/Evangelical Christianity the preferred and protected status they seek.
(Next week, I will write on why this effort to secure preferred status before the courts and in the county will backfire, why it will create a backlash of resentment, hostility, and rejection.)
Most disturbing, Stewart analyzes the global reach of this Christian Nationalism, how it is connected to Russia (with its renewed collusion between the dictatorship of Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church), how it is all part of a renewed battle to assert Christian Civilization against Global Liberalism: the rebirth of the Crusades, or what we can call the Christian Jihad.
“Under President Trump,” she writes on page 248, “The United States has become a flashing red beacon of hope for a new, global, religious, right-wing populist movement …. You could call it a kind of global holy war.”
Their enemies are liberal education, democracy, immigration, abortion, gay rights, and pluralism. Its friends are religious indoctrination, totalitarianism, nationalism, and the criminalization of abortion rights and gay rights. They long for the day when their kind of Christianity rules the world.
Nowhere in the literature of Christian Nationalism is there a concern for war and peace, wealth and poverty, climate and food justice, or human rights. Everywhere there is the lament of grievance that conservative Christians are marginalized and persecuted by the cultures and governments of global liberalism.
Which raises this question: how is it that a movement in the United States so focused on undermining our federal government and limiting its presence and power can have as its core aspiration the take-over of federal power (courts and regulatory agencies, for instance) to enforce its version of culture, civilization, and Christianity?
“We need to challenge them,” Stewart writes, “in the name of the nation we actually have—a pluralistic, democratic nation—where no one is above the law and the laws are meant to be made by the people and their representatives in accordance with the Constitution” (276).
I look forward to asking Katherine Stewart these questions, and many more, when we welcome her to western North Carolina during the last week of March!
(February 2022)
