The Religion of American Greatness

What's Wrong with Christian Nationalism

Paul D. Miller

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781514000274
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politik & Staat

ECPA Top Shelf Award WinnerLong before it featured dramatically in the 2016 presidential election, Christian nationalism had sunk deep roots in the United States. From America's beginning, Christians have often merged their religious faith with national identity. But what is Christian nationalism? How is it different from patriotism? Is it an honest quirk, or something more threatening?Paul D. Miller, a Christian scholar, political theorist, veteran, and former White House staffer, provides a detailed portrait of—and case against—Christian nationalism. Building on his practical expertise not only in the archives and classroom but also in public service, Miller unravels this ideology's historical importance, its key tenets, and its political, cultural, and spiritual implications.Miller shows what's at stake if we misunderstand the relationship between Christianity and the American nation. Christian nationalism—the religion of American greatness—is an illiberal political theory, at odds with the genius of the American experiment, and could prove devastating to both church and state. Christians must relearn how to love our country without idolizing it and seek a healthier Christian political witness that respects our constitutional ideals and a biblical vision of justice.

“AMERICA IS WINNING AGAIN. America is respected again. Because we are putting America first. . . . We’re taking care of ourselves for a change, folks. . . . You know they have a word, it sort of became old fashioned, it’s called a ‘nationalist.’ And I say, really? We’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am? I’m a nationalist. Okay? I’m a nationalist.” President Donald J. Trump proudly spoke these words to a crowd in Houston in October 2018. The crowd roared its approval and broke into a chant: “USA! USA! USA!”1

The media treated this as news, but to close observers it had been evident for a long time.2 Trump plainly was not a conservative as defined by the political right since the 1950s. It was at first hard to identify Trump’s place on the political map because nationalism had been underground, so to speak, for a few generations. In its place, conservatism, as articulated by thinkers like William Buckley and Russell Kirk and practiced by statesmen like Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, served as the quasi-official ideology of the political right. Conservatism stressed the paramount value of human liberty within a framework of limited government. But Trump had at various points endorsed abortion, trade restrictions, gun control, and other positions at odds with the modern Republican Party and the conservative movement. Trump did not use the rhetoric of liberty, limited government, or constitutionalism. He talked about national greatness, cutting advantageous trade deals, and looking out for “America First.” Trump’s success illustrated a broader phenomenon. By 2016 it had become evident that “conservatism”—its intellectual coherence, philosophical depth and rigor, and the consonance some saw between it and biblical political theology—was the working ideology of a tiny circle of intellectuals, not the voice of a broad movement. The political right was—and, in fact, had long been—far more indebted to nationalism than to conservatism. Donald Trump recognized this reality and rode it to the White House.3

American nationalism is infused with the rhetoric and symbols of Christianity. When Trump pitched himself as a champion of regular Americans, he repeatedly and explicitly cast it as an appeal to Christians. In June 2016 he told the Faith and Freedom Coalition, “We will respect and defend Christian Americans.”4 In August 2016, he told a group of pastors in Orlando, “Your power has been totally taken away,” but under a Trump administration, “you’ll have great power to do good things.”5 In September 2016, Trump told the Values Voters Summit, “[In] a Trump administration, our Christian heritage will be cherished, protected, defended, like you’ve never seen before. Believe me.”6 At the same venue the following year, after his election, Trump reminded them of his promise. “I pledged that, in a Trump administration, our nation’s religious heritage would be cherished, protected, and defended like you have never seen before,” he claimed. “That’s what’s happening. . . . We are stopping cold the attacks on Judeo-Christian values. . . . We will defend our faith and protect our traditions.”7 In June 2020, amid nationwide protests against police brutality and racial injustice, Trump posed for a photo holding a Bible in front of St. John’s Church, a historic church one block north of the White House (after police forcibly evicted protesters in the area) to “show a message of resilience and determination” according to the White House Press Secretary. Days later Trump said he believed “Christians think it was a beautiful picture.”

Nor is this recent: American Christians have long merged their religious faith with American identity. In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, Americans regularly described the United States as a “new Israel”; in the twentieth century, as a “Christian nation.” When they do so, they are expressing a collection of beliefs: that to be a faithful Christian in America, one must be loyal to the American nation; that the American nation is defined in part by Christian values and Christian culture; that it is, in some sense, the outworking of Christianity in political form; that it may enjoy a special relationship with God; and that American Christians should ensure their government keeps Christianity as the predominant ordering framework for our public life. American national identity has long been defined by many Americans to include Christianity as a necessary part of it. Since at least the Civil War, Americans have regularly read 2 Chronicles 7:14 (“If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land”) and Psalm 33:12 (“Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD”) and applied it to themselves and the United States: Americans are the people called by God’s name, and the United States is the nation whose God is the Lord. Seen in this light, the Christian Right, a broad social and political movement that arose in the late 1970s, is not new in its effort to define the United States as a Christian nation. Rather, the movement stands solidly within the tradition of American Christians—mostly White—who define their sacred and secular identities in terms of each other. The Christian Right is the latest in a long line of White Protestant American nationalists.

In response to Trump’s campaign pitch aimed at them, 81 percent of White, self-identified evangelical voters cast their votes for him, and they remained a core base of his support throughout his presidency. Their acceptance of Trump suggests that many American evangelicals have accepted nationalism as their political philosophy: at a minimum, as something that is consistent with their faith; at most, as the necessary political implication of Christian belief and practice. In a recent survey, a staggering 65 percent of Americans believed it was “fairly” or “very” important that a citizen be a Christian to be “truly American,” including 75 percent of those scoring highest on measures of nationalism.8 In other recent polls, 29 percent of Americans believed that “the federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation,” and almost two-thirds that “God has granted America a special role in human history.”9

Christian nationalism asserts that there is something identifiable as an American “nation,” distinct from other nations; that American nationhood is and should remain defined by Christianity or Christian cultural norms; and that the American people and their government should actively work to defend, sustain, and cultivate America’s Christian culture, heritage, and values. Historians have often argued that a generic Protestant Christianity served as the de facto established religion of the United States until the 1960s. A Christian nationalist is someone who believes that historical fact is normative for today, that the United States should return to the days of a quasi-official, nondenominational (Judeo-)Christian establishment that privileges Christian norms, values, symbols, culture, and rhetoric in American public life and public policy. They do not advocate repeal of the First Amendment, but they do favor a strongly “accommodationist” interpretation of it in which the government is permitted to favor religion over irreligion, and even favor America’s historically predominant religious tradition (i.e., Christianity) over new or different ones. Christian nationalists believe that the American nation was, is, and should remain a “Christian nation”—that America’s identity as a Christian nation is not merely a historical fact but a moral imperative, an ideological goal, and a policy program for the future, which also means that defining the nation’s religious and cultural identity is rightfully part of the government’s responsibility.

What are the origins, historical development, key beliefs, and political and cultural implications of American Christian nationalism? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? What is its relationship to the ideals of the American experiment? What does nationalist governance look like in practice, and what effects has it had on American society and the world when they have had opportunities to pursue their agenda in the past? What is the difference, if any, between nationalism and patriotism? What is the right way to love one’s country? To these historical and political questions, we can add a host of theological ones. What is the relationship between Christian nationalism and Christianity? Between Christian nationalism and other forms of Christian political engagement? Does the Christian faith permit, or possibly even require, its adherents to believe in the tenets of nationalism? In short, do American Christians have to be nationalists? Do Americans have to be Christians? These questions raise broader and deeper questions about the relationship between religion and politics, questions that have been asked ever since the Pharisees used a question about taxes to suss out Jesus’ take on collaboration versus resistance toward civil government, and about humankind’s ultimate loyalties.

THE ARGUMENTS OF THIS BOOK

This is a book about the historical development, key beliefs, and political, cultural, and theological implications of Christian nationalism. I argue that Christian nationalism is a bad political theory, illiberal in theory and practice, and at odds with key features of the American experiment. In chapter two I clarify what exactly nationalism is, broadly understood. I review the conventional distinction between nationalism and patriotism, and I affirm the positive value of patriotism for both practical and theological reasons. I start with an affirmation of patriotism because I want to stress that my critique of nationalism is not a rejection of all forms of loyalty and affection for our worldly communities and, in fact, some kind of local affection is an important safeguard against the unhealthy kind. I then review the academic literature on nationalism to define the concept, draw its boundaries, and help distinguish it from patriotism. Nationalism is the belief that humanity is divisible into internally coherent, mutually distinct cultural units which merit political independence and human loyalty because of their purported ability to provide meaning, purpose, and value in human life; and that governments are supposed to protect and promote the cultural identities of their respective nations.

I then take up the difficult question of American nationalism and its relationship to Christianity. In chapter three I review the arguments from advocates of Christian nationalism to define the ideology. American Christian nationalism defines America as the cultural nation of “Anglo-Protestantism,” as some of its scholarly advocates have recently avowed. Christian nationalists believe that the American government should sustain and defend the nation’s Anglo-Protestant cultural identity to remain faithful to America’s past, ensure the survival of American liberty, and secure God’s blessing.

I then move on to critique Christian nationalism. In chapters four and five I argue that there are some clear problems with any form of nationalism: cultures have blurry boundaries, which means they are a poor foundation for political boundaries. When governments try to force political and cultural boundaries to overlap, the effort inevitably leads them down an illiberal path. Governments end up treating minorities—ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic, or otherwise—as second-class citizens, or worse. I argue that governments should not try to promote or enforce a national cultural template. State-sponsored cultural engineering involves the government tilting the playing field, or putting its thumb on the scales, to favor one cultural template and disfavor others. Far from promoting national unity, the effort promotes national division and fragmentation because nationalism is simply another form of identity politics.

Christian nationalism is, in effect, identity politics for tribal evangelicals who confuse their particular culture for the nation as a whole. Evangelicalism, when it indulges in this kind of political engagement, is acting less like a religious community seeking to embody the universal faith than one among many particularistic or tribal ethnoreligious sects lobbying for power and prestige. In short, nationalism, considered as a political theory, is arbitrary, incoherent, and illiberal. If taken to its logical conclusion, nationalism undermines the foundations of a free and open society, including religious freedom and racial or ethnic pluralism. I also show that Anglo-Protestant culture is not necessary to sustain the political institutions of liberalism and democracy. In chapter six I review “nations” and “peoples” in the Bible, critique nationalists’ misuse of the Bible, and discuss how Christians today should think about “the nations” and about ancient Israel. I suggest that nationalism, in its ideal form, is a kind of idolatry.

In chapters seven and eight I argue that, in light of the previous chapters, it is easier to see the Christian Right as the latest instance of White Christians’ efforts to push for a strong Christian American identity—or, to put it another way, the Christian Right has always included a strong element of nationalism among its goals, mixing uneasily with Christian republicanism. To the extent that it is nationalist, the movement’s political agenda is rooted more in cultural particularity than theological universality. Much of American evangelicalism is acting more like a cultural tribe, an ethnoreligious sect advocating for its own power and protection, rather than a people from every tribe and nation advocating for universal principles of justice, flourishing, and the common good.

That is troubling by itself, but there is another problem. Many evangelicals do not recognize the difference between their particular culture and the common good; they believe that advocating for one must include the other. The effort to pass off their particular culture as a universal template for the nation is fraught with dangers, both for itself and for the nation. The movement is illiberal, as other nationalist movements around the world and its predecessors in American history have been. Even though the Christian Right today does not overtly appeal to racist or sectarian arguments in the same way as past nationalist movements in American history, it is nonetheless complicit with illiberalism—an illiberality that continues to show up in how nationalists think about race, racial inequality, and our responsibility (or lack thereof) to remedy the sins of the past. In chapter nine I use this way of understanding the Christian Right to explain its relationship to Donald Trump.

In chapter ten I suggest the outlines of what I hope is a sounder theology of the nation. Despite my critique of nationalism, I do not believe the answer is to reject nationality altogether. We can find some suggestion in the Bible that God blessed humanity with corporate political memberships as one layer among many in our multifaceted identities. The challenge is to find a way to embrace and celebrate our particular differences while avoiding the idolatry that so often attaches to them. Nations are not evil, but the record of nationalism in history is overwhelmingly one of idolatry and oppression. I conclude with a broader reflection on American politics and culture and with a note on the role that pastors and churches might play in the work of repair.

Is the marriage of Christianity with American nationalism a forgivable quirk over an unimportant doctrinal matter, a lovable excess in patriotism and piety? The burden of this book is to show that nationalism is incoherent in theory, illiberal in practice, and, I fear, often idolatrous in our hearts. Christian nationalism in American history has been devastating to both church and state, in the nation’s race relations, its foreign policy, and in the church’s witness. The marriage represents an American and evangelical version of Caesaropapism, the appropriation of the church’s moral authority and evangelical zeal to the cause of secular greatness. It can be hard for Christians to recognize this because, truthfully, America is unique and, compared to other great powers today and in ages past, relatively just and humane—and of course it is true that Christianity has been extraordinarily influential in the nation’s history, politics, and culture. But that is part of the problem: When America is most just, it is most tempting for Americans to treat it as a precursor to the kingdom of God, reducing the church to the chaplaincy of American nationalism. The opposite case is an even greater problem: When America is at its worst, when it does not live up to its creed—as happens sadly all too often—American Christians nonetheless continue to act as cheerleaders and defenders of the nation, Christians have blessed sin and called evil good. We have taken the name of Christ as a moral fig leaf while shilling for the whore of Babylon.

DEFINING TERMS

This book deals with abstract concepts like culture, religion, heritage, ideology, and more. One of the key points of discussion is whether and to what extent “ideology” is...