Christian Nationalism – Peculiar Faith

The Fourth of July is, well, a bit complicated for Episcopalians. As Anglican Christians, we’re “in communion” with the Church of England, which still functions as a state church (King Charles III is officially the head of that church, but no, we American clergy do not owe allegiance to the British Crown).

Many of us try not to be smug about that whole Revolution thing as we take pride in the separation of church and state in the U.S., but then remember we have very little reason to be—the State of Oklahoma now requires teaching the Bible in public schools; the Ten Commandments must be displayed in Louisiana schools; the Speaker of the House of Representatives wants to use the Bible as the basis for legislating; and the hard-working staff at Americans United for the Separation of Church and State are likely sleep deprived and running out of room on their website’s homepage for listing all the flare-ups of theocracy appearing on the American landscape.

Honestly, just being any kind of committed (it’s hard not to say “real”) Christian today makes living in the United States not just a little complex and usually quite daunting if not horrifying. I want to love my country; I loved it uncritically in my youth, as many did back in the 1960s and even 1970s (I have enduringly fond memories of perching on my father’s shoulders as a small child and watching the flag-waving parade go back in my Midwestern home town). I do not want simply to scowl and scoff at anything remotely patriotic.

Sitting on the brink of the American Independence Day holiday, navigating a path between that rock and hard place will mean returning once again in my prayerful reflections to some ancient history.

Sixteen centuries before the current rise of Christian Nationalism in the United States, St. Augustine faced the imminent collapse of the Roman Empire. The collapse unfolded over many decades, but a common date used for the empire’s definitive demise is 476, when a Germanic king finally sacked Rome and deposed the emperor. Waves of Germanic barbarians had been attacking various outposts in the northern parts of the empire for quite some time before that, and some of those incursions put the city of Rome under threat on multiple occasions. This was deeply shocking to most of Rome’s citizens, who never imagined the “eternal city” would ever fall.

While Christianity had taken root as the “official religion” of the Roman Empire (a milestone set in motion by the emperor Constantine in the early fourth century), there were plenty of citizens who still practiced older or “pagan” forms of religious traditions. Many of them started to blame the Christians for Rome’s weakness and argued that the empire needed to return to its more ancient pagan roots. Even some Christians were deeply distressed by Rome’s instability given the widespread assumption that the promised and hoped-for “Kingdom of God” was nothing other than Rome itself.

In response to all this, St. Augustine wrote his now classic book The City of God, which appeared in the year 426. Augustine weaves together some complex arguments concerning a number of interrelated topics, but one of his key points is this: the collapse of Rome is not a failure of God’s promise because no earthly city can or ever will be the hoped-for heavenly city. In every time and place, he writes, what God calls the Church to do is always the same: create Eucharistic communities that bear witness to the transformative love of God, a love that transcends every civic border.

I’m thankful for Augustine even as patriotism is now more fraught for American Christians than ever before, and those complexities have been growing with the emergence of a robust movement of White Christian Nationalism. It behooves all of us, especially in this election year, to understand the twin threat posed by this movement to both our democratic institutions and the integrity of the Gospel.

A good place to start concerning White Christian Nationalism is with a recent CNN article, including the important caveat that “Evangelical Christianity” is now more brown than white and not at all nationalistic. Another helpful resource is an interview on the PBS Newshour with a former Christian Nationalist pastor. Where I currently live, in western Michigan, we’ve witnessed the direct results of this movement on county government, and with a helpful and hopeful coalition of clergy and Christian lay people actively opposing that nationalist takeover.

At a time when many Christians still think of patriotism as a Christian spiritual discipline, it’s worth returning to Augustine’s ancient insights. As Christians, our loyalty belongs not to any nation or empire but only to the Gospel and to the community of God’s people called “church.” Our true and lasting hope as Christian people, in other words, is not the ultimate triumph of any particular nation-state, not even the United States of America, but the transformation of every human society with the grace of God.

Catholic theologian William T. Cavanaugh (currently teaching at DePaul University in Chicago) has written extensively about these issues, including Augustine’s vision of the Church. His books on politics and the Eucharist have shaped a great deal of how I think about the significance of parish life and the difference faith communities can make and should make in the world.

Rather than adopting “American values” (whatever those might be) God calls us to promote Gospel values for the sake of God’s whole creation. Or as Cavanaugh puts it, “the task of the church is to interrupt the violent tragedy of the earthly city with the comedy of redemption” at the heart of the City of God. (A thirty minute presentation by Cavanaugh at a conference in France offers a good overview how he thinks about Eucharist and politics, not separately but always together.)

These days, just voicing critiques like these can earn one a great deal of disdain, even prompt physical threats, or at the very least make one vulnerable to being called “anti-American.” So let me be clear again: even though my Australian shepherd dog River and I will not be going to the local fireworks display this weekend, I do love my country, and I am grateful for the many gifts of this modern democracy.

“Every Tribe, Every Nation,” Marsha Vosburg

But the United States is not a Christian nation; there is no such thing as a “Christian Nation.” There are many nations on Earth and Christians reside in nearly every one of them, linked to each other by the sacramental bonds of unity called the Body of Christ.

Whatever freedoms and privileges American Christians might enjoy as Americans can best be used to strengthen that global network of Christian communities—not for the sake of the Church’s triumph, either, but for the sake of that abundant life Jesus said he came to give to all (John 10:10). Or as The Book of Common Prayer puts it, for the sake of “promoting justice, peace, and love”—regardless of anyone’s citizenship.

Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Kevin Bacon recently gave me a visceral view of what an apocalyptic Advent looks like. Their recent Netflix film Leave the World Behind also starred Mahershala Ali and Myha’la, but Roberts, Hawke, and Bacon matter for the “old world,” which I’ll describe shortly.

But first I need to recall the kind of Christian tradition I grew up in, which relegated “conversion” to an interior matter of the heart. By confessing one’s sins and turning to Christ as Savior, one leaves the old self behind for a brand new life ahead. This turning away from the old to embrace the new, moreover, is meant to happen just once; conversion is a moment in time.

There are some biblical texts to support that view of the spiritual journey, but not many. The prophets of ancient Israel and the overall arc of the Christian Testament certainly affirm the importance of what the modern West calls “personal conversion,” but the emphasis falls squarely on the transformation of the world and not only the “heart.” Depending on the particular biblical book or writer, a changed heart might be a prerequisite for a changed world, or it might be a result, but they never remain in isolation from each other, at least not for long.

This notion of social change and a world transformed has been difficult to imagine for many of us in the “comfort class” of the modern West. As the modern world increasingly made life easier (especially for white people in the middle and upper classes), biblical denunciations of the “world” and equally bracing declarations of a new world coming sounded not only unlikely but a tad bit embarrassing. Transporting that transformation onto the interior landscape of each individual made the whole religious enterprise much more palatable—and far less biblical.

So along comes Sam Esmail’s film adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel, Leave the World Behind, which is perhaps the best Advent movie ever made. When a privileged white couple physically leaves the metropolitan world of New York City for a remote getaway spot on Long Island, they quickly realize that have taken parts of their “old world” with them—not only their reliance on modern technology (which is oddly and increasingly crumbling over the course of the film) but also their own latent racism and class privilege, which no longer insulates and protects them (if it ever really did), and which they must let go, like so much technology baggage that no longer works, anyway.

I grew up enchanted with Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and My Best Friend’s Wedding, had a crush on Ethan Hawke in Dead Poets Society, and of course fell in love with Kevin Bacon in Footloose, the soundtrack of which one of my dearest friends and I listened to while we drove from Chicago to San Francisco for our Big Gay Adventure. That these three actors clearly show their age in the film is a perfect image of the old world being left behind, while Mahershala Ali and Myha’la—whose work I barely know but whose talent is breathtaking—embody beautifully a new world emerging.

I know I’m not the only one who has been feeling generally “off” for quite some time, often fighting back tears or struggling to grasp the world around me as if through gauzy filters. Yes, we’ve lived through a global pandemic, but that seems more like a symptom than a cause of some deeper malaise so many of us are shouldering and which we just can’t shake. Amanda Sanford, the Julia Roberts character in Leave the World Behind, delivers a somber, rather insightfully prickly, and spot-on speech to her younger companion-of-color roughly half through the film. Amanda is an advertising exec who doesn’t like people and hasn’t felt right about the world for decades—and yet she has kept on keeping on, and now…well, I won’t spoil the film for you.

I cannot help but hear the gorgeous opening notes of Handel’s Messiah, the text of which many Christians heard this past Sunday morning from Isaiah (40:1-11): “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.”

This God of comfort so many of us are longing to encounter—perhaps only because we at last hear the word “comfort” said out loud—this is the God whom Isaiah tells us to expect and make ready to meet: “Prepare the way for the Lord,” Isaiah says.

And out from the desert steps John the Baptist, whom the lectionary also gives us on the second Sunday of Advent (Mark 1:1-8).

Wait. That can’t be right! What kind of comfort is this that shows up in a wild figure wearing ludicrous clothing and eating a ridiculous diet? Divine relief looks rather unkempt, or maybe just scorched and frazzled, like the image by French artist Lynda Miller Baker.

That image of John can remind us just how out of place he is in the grand story of modern Western progress. Most Americans love that story in much the same way we love to narrate the success of our own lives—the success that comes under a rather pitiless scrutiny in Leave the World Behind.

Starting back in the eighteenth century, with the birth of liberal democracies and the industrial revolution and the invention of everything from electricity to antibiotics, the very notion of progress itself seemed to be woven into our shared destiny—a destiny ordained by God!

Speaking truthfully about modern Western history presents a very different and much messier story, one with enduring heartache, and considerable suffering, and ongoing violence. I want to promote healing for such a world, but I wonder now whether it all just needs to be left behind. Is that John’s message from the wilderness? Isaiah’s?

This much seems clear: the way forward for people of faith, the “good road,” or the highway for our God as Isaiah described it, is mapped with change and transformation, not with progress. That word “progress” comes saddled with the same baggage as the word “evolution.” Far too many people think both of those words mean that everything is constantly getting better. Evolutionary biologists would beg to differ, of course, and so would most historians.

Believing in “progress” usually requires practicing denial and refusing to see what must change—a whole world that needs to be left behind, or in the image of the second letter of Peter, burned up (3:8-15). True to classic Advent themes, the lectionary also gave us alarming apocalyptic images of all things passing away and even melting, and perhaps for reasons both Rumaan Alam and Sam Esmail would enthusiastically endorse.

We wait for “new heavens and a new earth,” Peter says, because we need a world where “justice is at home”—and this present world is not it, not without dramatic change.

This is the rude message of the prophets that come to us every year in Advent. As Carl Jung once insisted, “Every transformation demands, as its precondition, the ending of a world—the collapse of an old philosophy of life.” And that’s what Christian traditions mean by “conversion”; that’s why the prophets preach repentance; that’s why the new liturgical year begins with Advent, not Christmas.

Rather than a single moment, conversion is a lifelong journey of change, and rather than unfolding on an interior landscape only, it kindles a fire on the world around us. And this is exactly why paying attention is not only a banner for Advent but a primary discipline in nearly every one of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions.

Keep awake and pay attention—not to how your own story is “supposed” to go or the way a community ought to run or where we think God should show up, but pay attention to how things actually are, at this very moment, and pay attention to the voice of one crying out from the wilderness—repent, slow down, turn around, and change your course.

Or perhaps we need to say it as clearly as Alam and Esmail do: leave the old world behind.

If we do that—or rather, in all the many ways we do that—we declare along with Mark that this is just the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

“Gospel”—that’s good news. Neither Advent nor Mark will let us embrace its goodness until some things change; our hearts, yes, but also the world.

White supremacy, patriarchal domination, ecological destruction—those are just some of the pieces of an old world from which I have benefitted enormously as a white male, and the cost is unbearable.

That world needs to be left behind, and there’s no time to waste.

Tag: Christian Nationalism

Loving My Country by Rejecting Nationalism