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I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it: White Christian Nationalism is the greatest threat to the witness of the church and to the future of democracy in the United States.

Some of the most violent attacks and most scandalous abuses have occurred under the banner of white Christian Nationalism.

Blue sky background with american flag on flag pole and church steeple in foreground — Photo by Brad Dodson

Sociologists Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry who co-wrote the new book, The Flag and the Cross (I had the privilege of writing the foreword), break it all down in their latest opinion piece for the Washington Post.

They write…

White Christian nationalism can be messy to define, but it’s critical to recognize its three animating impulses: freedom, order and violence — the ideology’s holy trinity. The freedom belongs only to Americans these nationalists see as like them (White men). The order is to be imposed on all those they don’t (everyone else). And righteous violence is to be deployed as necessary to achieve this twisted vision.

From the Buffalo massacre, to the “great replacement” theory, to efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade, all of these seemingly unrelated crises have connections to white Christian Nationalism.

What stands out in Gorski and Perry’s assessment is the brief description of the narrative that white Christian Nationalists believe.

America was founded as a Christian nation; the founders were traditional Christians; the founding documents are biblically based; God has therefore bestowed immense wealth and power on America and given it a mission to spread freedom and religion around the world; but that mission and those blessings are now threatened by the presence of non-Whites, non-Christians and non-native-born people on American soil.

Every group has narratives they use to define their origins and explain their identity. When those narratives rely more on fiction that fact and take on supernatural, even divine weight, they morph into myths.

The controlling myth of white Christian Nationalism says that God has specially elected the United States as a chosen nation and ideas of what constitutes a “true” American must be zealously, even violently, defended.

It leads to all sorts of efforts abuses such as racism, xenophobia, sexism, and the pursuit of power at all costs.

The authors of the article are quick to point out that white Christian Nationalism is not shorthand for “white evangelicals.” The two are not synonymous and many white evangelicals rightly recoil at white Christian Nationalist mythology.

We cannot, however, ignore the ways that this mythology spreads through Christian leaders, churches, and organizations.

White Christian Nationalism is not the only myth that perniciously affects society, but it is the one that consistently undermines the faith they claim to profess and that puts democracy in peril.

There are better narratives than the myth that white Christian Nationalists perpetuate. We should both know their story and tell a better one about truth, freedom, and flourishing.

Read the rest of the article HERE.

Have you seen signs of white Christian Nationalism’s myth at work in your civic or religious community? Comment below.

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Footnotes by Jemar Tisby

The Myth that Powers White Christian…