No, Grandpa (Likely) Ain't a Christofascist
Throwing indiscriminate grenades is bad strategy
Thanksgiving is around the corner. Given our hyper-polarized political environment, many who sit down to break bread with family will soon experience what I, a former center-rightist shoved to the center-left by Trumpism, feel when loved ones signal their partisan virtue with volleys of epithets. Usually, my impulse is to duck. Occasionally, it's to flee. But sometimes, when rhetoric and facts are divorced, I must resist the inner voice that anoints me as a referee.
Which brings me to Grandpa. Someone needs to throw a yellow flag on his behalf.
The most common word on my Threads feed is "Christofascist." Well, at least some days, it seems that way. It's the heartfelt anxiety and hatred many on the Left feel for Christians, especially if they're on the Right. My Facebook feed is the opposite. The most common word often is "Fascist," which expresses the heartfelt anxiety and hatred many friends on the Right feel for Democrats. Both feeds seem to agree that fascism ain't a good thing, and it infects their opponents.
I don't want to get into the heads of folks whose favorite word that does not start with "F" is "Christofascist." They may have in mind lots of justifications for loving their right-wing neighbor with such endearments. But if one of them is that they believe she is a Christian nationalist, out comes the yellow flag. He may wear a MAGA hat and fit Ibram Kendi's version of a racist, but Grandpa (likely) is not a Christian nationalist.
The yellow flag is for making a category error that impedes curing our partisanship. That category error makes things worse by inappropriate indictments that persuade Grandpa he'll find more reasonable neighbors in MAGA. More importantly, it reinforces Trumpism's most potent claim on its adherents: that elite Leftists profoundly disrespect ordinary Americans and that the MAGA movement will restore the respect they deserve.
If you care about conquering Trumpism, then you should care about cleaving conservatives who still embrace democracy from MAGA's clutches. Indiscriminately lobbing "Christofascist" grenades at all conservatives does harm to that cause. Contrary to early reports, a small minority of conservatives espouse Christian nationalism. Understanding the discourses that shape conservative thought and discriminating tactically in engaging them can help us divide and conquer the MAGA movement.
Understanding Christian Nationalism
Let's be clear on what Christian nationalism is. The most rigorous social scientist definition denotes folks who seek a fusion of Church and politics, define national identity in terms of membership in their particular species of Christianity, and justify violence if necessary to advance its proselytizing and extension to near and distant neighbors (Gorski, 2019).
I doubt Grandpa or your bigoted brother-in-law think that hard. Christian nationalism is demanding work. It takes a lot of energy to hate so many neighbors.
I am not a social scientist; I am a theologian. With all due respect to social scientists, Christian nationalism is a Christian heresy and is best understood theologically. We comprehend Christian nationalism by reflecting on two archetypes: the Anglican Church of the Victorian era and the German Church of the 1930s.
British Christian Nationalism
It's anachronistic to locate the origins of nationalism in the rise of England's sense of itself as a nation-state. Other collective identities were more significant. Nevertheless, the seeds are there. One finds in the 16th-century Elizabethan Settlement a fusion of Church and State. Queen Elizabeth was head of State and supreme governor of the Church of England. Citizenship and membership in her Church were a civic bundle. Tolerance of other religions meant dissidents could live peacefully in exchange for accepting diminished citizenship rights. England's evolution into a nation-state coincided with its fusion of Church and politics. Yet, that fusion took the form of resisting Rome's religious hegemony and the geopolitical power of other rising European states. That fusion did not yet constitute Christian nationalism because England's social imaginary located sovereignty with the Queen and not the people.
By Victoria's reign, England's national identity was firmly forged, and its sovereignty was irrevocably located in the people's parliament. Church and State remained fused. Victoria's ships carried to foreign lands a people schooled for more than a century on Isaac Watts' hymns in which the poet rewrote the Psalms, substituting Britain in Israel's place. British imperialism - that subjugated and exploited peoples on every continent - was fueled in part by the unquestioned conviction that Britain was the New Israel, called by God to be the world's pedagogue, teaching the nations what it means to flourish as one people under God, by force, if necessary. The British Empire, with cannons on its forecastle and King James Bibles in its nave, is the first archetype of Christian nationalism.
German Christian Nationalism
The German Christian Church of the 1930s is the second. That fact is well-known, but the reasons need to be better understood. Many people make the connection between the Nazis and Christian nationalism. Still, most don't know what that connection was, and that's crucial.
The Deutsche Christen, or "German Christians," was a movement within the more extensive set of German Protestants who embraced Nazi ideology and embedded it in their self-understanding of what it meant to be a German Christian.
Throughout history, Christians have understood that Christian identity is generated through the unmerited gift of the heart's movement that recognizes Jesus as one's supreme exemplar, master, and Deliverer. I frame that movement using non-traditional language to highlight that Christians historically understand that Jesus delivers us from meaningless, nothingness, and death's abyss by revealing and directing us along the path to human flourishing. Jesus, in this framing, is the ultimate source of revelation.
The Deutsche Christen movement took its cue from Nazi ideology and added race as a coequal source of revelation. You may need to re-read that last sentence, for it is stunning and crucial: the Deutsche Christen movement embraced race - understood as possessing Aryan bloodlines - as divine revelation. Three extraordinary things happen with this claim. First, the Church saw a particular German government - Hitler's new Nazi regime - as divinely given to deliver the German people from its malaise. Second, it named the State's ideology divine revelation on par with the Scriptures. Third, on the question of race, it claimed Nazi ideology trumped the Scriptures, providing the lens through which they are rightly understood (Bergen 1996; Cremer, 2019;.King, 1979; Koehne 2013).
Their claim was that God reveals what it means for humans to flourish through the historical example of those with Aryan blood. Moreover, only such people were legitimate members of the German Church. Leaders with any hint of non-Aryan bloodlines must be purged. Finally, they embraced the Nazi idea that force may be necessary to maintain the purity of the German people through which such divine revelation flows.
When we speak of Christian nationalism from a theological perspective, we denote a dangerous kind of apostasy, idolatry, and blasphemy that justifies exclusion and violence in God's name. Apostasy is the rejection of God's Word. Idolatry is worshiping something unfit to be our ultimate concern. Blasphemy is our declaration that God endorses the falsehoods we speak and perform. Theologically understood, Christian nationalism rejects Jesus's sovereignty and adds the State alongside Jesus as revelatory (apostasy); it divinizes the State, making it one's ultimate concern (idolatry); and it declares God's blessing upon the State's falsehoods and violence (blasphemy). It names the nation the New Israel, supplanting the Jews (supersessionism) and adopting a pedagogical stance towards near and distant neighbors. Christian nationalism coopts Christian language and symbols for the unChristian performance of oppressive power.
Folks who enjoy serenading neighbors with charges of fascism and Nazism should know that the Nazis were anti-Christian. The Nazi elite recognized that fascism was incompatible with Christianity. They made use of the Deutsche Christen movement but planned its annihilation.
21st-Century American Christian Nationalism
Christian nationalism arrived with British colonists and, despite Constitutional protections, remains alive and well in the United States. Mostly, we find it in fringe right-wing extremist groups.
It thrives within a dangerous derivative of Pentecostalism, the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). The Christian symbols evident during the January 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol were carried mainly by NAR members. Except for some language and symbols, NAR is a cult whose Christianity is unrecognizable to most Christians, and its members do not consider those outside their cult as Christian (Taylor, 2022).
Similarly, Michael Flynn's ReAwaken Tour consciously inducts participants into a Christian nationalist cult that is Christianist rather than Christian. Sociologist Rogers Brubaker borrowed Andrew Sullivan's Christianist term to name movements that embrace Christianity not as a religion but as a cultural identity (Brubaker 2017). For Flynn's disciples, the Cross, swaddled in the American flag, signifies they are members of America's White-Christian culture. Therefore, they are protected from dilution by brown immigrants, especially Muslims. Jesus is merely the name Christianists give to the one who paints them White.
More worrisome is the rising tide of Christian nationalism among America's evangelical leaders. Evangelicals and adherents to the New Apostolic Reformation look alike but are distinct, so let me be clear here. I now point to leaders of America's Southern Baptist and non-denominational megachurches. The rhetoric, pageantry, and teaching of many evangelical megachurch leaders increasingly reflect a malignant fusion of Church and partisan politics and the language of holy war against radical secularism. More ominously, our new House Speaker, Mike Johnson, holds several political attitudes consistent with that desire. Increasingly, these leaders embrace partisan ideology as a source of divine revelation alongside the Scriptures, in much the same manner as the Deutsche Christen movement. Their leadership roles are comparable to those who led that movement. They are best positioned to lead an effort to establish a theocratic state. Their trend is concerning.
What about Grandpa?
The key to understanding Grandpa and the others at our tables this Thanksgiving is remembering that we live in infinitely complex and overlapping community circles generated by the stories we tell and the futures we imagine concerning our life together. The stories we tell contain and transmit the values, heritage, language, and boundaries that constitute the fellowship of each circle. Our circles also curate stories of our relationship to more significant associations based on ascribed identities like race, gender, or class and political identities like our nation. We are simultaneously and historically members of many circles, shaped by often competing narratives (Smith, 2015). Every person at our Thanksgiving table has been shaped by many accounts of what it means to be and who counts as an American.
Christian nationalism and radical secularism exemplify illiberal, often anti-democratic, and opposing versions of that narrative. As Phillip Gorski (2019) notes, the latter combines - in contrast with Christian nationalism - some form of "radical individualism" with the hope for the eradication of all religions (Gorski 2019:27-30). Christian nationalism dreams of a theocratic state, while radical secularism seeks to banish religion from civic life.
These two discourses thrive at opposite ends of the public square. Both are outliers in how most Americans think of the separation of Church and politics. Americans have, since our origins, valued freedom of religion, which historically is manifest as a religious free market where religions compete for mindshare, and agnosticism and atheism are valid options. The Constitution's establishment clause prohibits the State from putting a finger on the scale in this competition.
Those competing narratives have been, since the 1930s, part of the air we breathe, swirling around us, vying to become our dominant way of thinking about America's past, present, and future (Kruse, 2015). However, scholars identify three more pervasive discourses that generate competing accounts of America's past, present, and future.
Competing Civil Religion Strands
Gorski (2019) describes American civil religion as a discourse rivaling radical secularism and religious nationalism and argues that an emphasis on it can cure America's hyper-polarization. Civil religion is jargon coined by sociologist Robert Bellah that might reasonably be translated as "public philosophy" or "civic creed." It is a symbolic discourse into which most Americans are indoctrinated in school. It encourages shared ownership of our heritage, national values, and a collective vision for what America strives to become.
America's civil religion remembers heroes like Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington. It draws upon our civic canon to fuel a shared dream of America becoming "a free people governing themselves for the common good" (Gorski 2019:223). That common good ethic includes the commitment to protect from arbitrary power those whose insecurity is denoted by the biblical metaphors of the widow, orphan, and resident alien. It stands firm in its belief that all are equal in essential human dignity. It teaches that all Americans are called to sacrifice so that our neighbors might flourish. It respects liberal institutions as necessary but insufficient protections of liberty. It regards civic virtue as the ultimate means of ensuring the common good.
American civil religion is what most learn at home, school, and in our civic pageantries and celebrations of American heroes. However, American civil religion is not a static and monolithic belief system. It is a discourse consisting of symbols, rituals, and narratives locally curated, constantly contested, and dialectically evolving in response to events. Moreover, it consists today not of one but two distinct discourses, both different from Christian nationalism and radical secularism.
A recent study showed that American civil religion consists of at least two verifiable contrasting discourses that political parties coopt to generate partisan identity. Contrary to Gorski's hope, appeals to those strands strengthen rather than cure partisan divisions.
Political scientist Abigail Vegter and others followed many scholars in adopting Max Weber's typology of religious practice to analyze American civil religion (Vegter et al., 2022). They confirmed two mutually exclusive narratives. The "priestly" version rationalizes and defends America's deeds and received structures, often based on American exceptionalist themes. In contrast, the "prophetic" version contrasts America's deeds and structures with our ideals and calls for reform. The priestly and prophetic strands of American civil religion narrate competing accounts of America, and both are distinct from and compete with Christian nationalism.
The priestly narrative permeates Republican politics. The prophetic version is entrenched among Democratic partisans. Though they share a foundational immersion in the American civil religion, the two strands emphasize different biblical and American stories and symbols that generate distinctive worldviews, values, and political attitudes.
Grandpa - along with most Americans - likely makes sense of his communities and his place in them by locating himself within our shared history as locally interpreted through one of the strands of the American civil religion. Moreover, he likely assesses actions and attitudes observed in the public square based on how they cohere with that locally curated account of our heritage, values, and vision for what America strives to become. The political attitudes of most Americans are not influenced mainly by Christian nationalism or radical secularism but by one of the strands of the American civil religion that compete with them in America's marketplace of ideas.
The Colorblind Judeo-Christian Nation
However, despite what our Thanksgiving pageantry signifies, if Grandpa and your brother-in-law double down on illiberal and anti-democratic ideas, their airwaves have likely been overly saturated with a common mutation of these civil religion discourses.
Sociologist Ruth Braunstein dubs the mutation the Colorblind Judeo-Christian Nation (CJCN) narrative (Braunstein 2021). The priestly strand of the American civil religion mutates in its remembrance of civil rights achievements incorporated into law and cultural norms through President Johnson's Great Society legislation. The corrupted strand absolves adherents of racism charges without committing them to policies to address racism's enduring consequences.
The two healthy strands synthesized the vision of a Beloved Community put forth compellingly by 20th-century civil rights leaders. Judicial and legislative law and cultural mores adjusted their aim: America shall be a colorblind nation, and a good citizen supports laws that treat all people equally regardless of skin color. Discrimination based on race, like anti-Semitism, is culturally taboo.
However, the Great Society also gave birth to a mutation in the priestly strand. This new discourse rationalizes and defends the dominant Anglo-Protestant ethnotradition by generating the CJCN narrative. It broadens the set of those it recognizes as part of mainstream culture to include anyone who embraces that ethnotradition, rebranding it "Judeo-Christian." It redefines American-ness in terms of consent and conformity to the rebranded ethnotradition.
Through this redefinition of national belonging, the CJCN mutation converts race into a cultural category. The discourse promotes a liberal, colorblind ethic. However, it construes anyone who does not live according to its ethnotradition as an outsider. Echoing the Protestant work ethic, which held that hard work was evidence of one's divine election, it construes those constrained by generational poverty, chronic crime, or substandard educational opportunities as irresponsibly rejecting Judeo-Christian norms of rugged individualism, self-sufficiency, and traditional family values. They may be citizens, but they are not legitimate compatriots because they fail to embody Judeo-Christian values. Accordingly, public policies aimed at delivering them from their plight are inappropriate. By converting race to a cultural category in this way, the CJCN discourse enables adherents to see themselves as practicing colorblind and religiously tolerant inclusivity while sustaining established practices of exclusion and privilege (Braunstein, 2022).
Those influenced by the CJCN discourse may sound like Christian nationalists at times because it leads to similar policy preferences. And the plots of their stories share a declension structure that looks nostalgically back to a golden era. However, if you listen closely, you'll notice that the golden eras they cherish and the heroes they celebrate are different (Braunstein, 2022). Moreover, Christian nationalists are overtly exclusive, and Judeo-Christian nationalists see themselves as inclusive and promote the colorblind cultural norm. Also, Judeo-Christian nationalists are considerably less nativist. Most importantly, they oppose the fusion of the Church and the State (Li and Froese, 2023). For these reasons, though they share some conservative commitments, Judeo-Christian nationalists and Christian nationalists are odd bedfellows in the MAGA coalition. A better American story can recall the former to civic republicanism.
It is currently fashionable on the Left to indict all conservative Christians as Christian Nationalists. That may be good sport, but for those who are serious about defeating MAGA, it is bad strategy. Most conservatives are influenced by discourses that oppose Christian nationalism. Grandpa likely is not a Christian nationalist. By discriminating and telling a better story, we can divide and conquer the MAGA movement. Rhetorical grenades that fail to distinguish conservative discourses reinforce Trumpism's appeal.
References
Bergen, Doris L. 1996. Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich. 2nd ed. edition. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Braunstein, Ruth. 2021. “The ‘Right’ History: Religion, Race, and Nostalgic Stories of Christian America.” Religions 12 (2): 95. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12020095.
Brubaker, Rogers. 2017. “Between Nationalism and Civilizationism: The European Populist Moment in Comparative Perspective.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40 (8): 1191–1226. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1294700.
Cremer, Tobias. 2019. “The Resistance of the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany and Its Relevance for Contemporary Politics.” The Review of Faith & International Affairs 17 (4): 36–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/15570274.2019.1681728.
“Evangelicals and Trump: ReAwaken America Shows Us Who Changed Whom.” 2022. Religion News Service (blog). October 31, 2022. https://religionnews.com/2022/10/31/evangelicals-and-trump-reawaken-america-shows-us-who-changed-who/.
Gorski, Philip. 2019. American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present. 2nd edition. Princeton University Press.
King, Christine E. 1979. “Strategies for Survival: An Examination of the History of Five Christian Sects in Germany 1933-45.” Journal of Contemporary History 14 (2): 211–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/002200947901400202.
Koehne, Samuel. 2013. “Nazi Germany as a Christian State: The ‘Protestant Experience’ of 1933 in Württemberg.” Central European History 46 (1): 97–123. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938913000046.
Kruse, Kevin. 2015. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. Illustrated edition. Basic Books.
Li, Ruiqian, and Paul Froese. 2023. “The Duality of American Christian Nationalism: Religious Traditionalism versus Christian Statism.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, August, jssr.12868. https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12868.
Smith, Rogers M. 2015. Political Peoplehood: The Roles of Values, Interests, and Identities. Reprint edition. University of Chicago Press.
Taylor, Matthew, and Brad Onishi. n.d. “January 6th and the New Apostolic Reformation.” Charismatic Revival Fury.
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Taylor, Matthew, and Brad Onishi. n.d. “Michael Flynn – Spiritual Warfare General.” Charismatic Revival Fury.
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Vegter, Abigail, Andrew R. Lewis, and Cammie Jo Bolin. 2023. “Which Civil Religion? Partisanship, Christian Nationalism, and the Dimensions of Civil Religion in the United States.” Politics and Religion 16 (2): 286–300. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1755048322000402.
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