An Activist Faith Week 7: How Should a Christian View Christian Nationalism?
Reflections on King's "Can a Christian Be a Communist" and Christian Nationalism (longer post)
We cannot accept their creed, but we must admire their dream and their readiness to sacrifice themselves to the very utmost and even to lay down their lives for a cause that they believe in, a cause that they believe is going to make the world a better place. One watches that zeal, and one has to say, “Why is it that Christians don’t have this zeal? Why is it that we don’t have this zeal for Christ? Why is that we don’t have this sense of purpose, this sense of dedication for his kingdom?” Oh, these problems that we face in America and the world wouldn’t be here today if we were as dedicated to Christianity as we ought to be.
Out of all the sermons in Strength to Love, King’s sermon on Communism is the most topical. During the drafting of the manuscript, the FBI issued leaks that one of King’s staff members had been a former Communist, leading to new rounds of questioning amidst a skeptical public. As a result, King had the heavy task of laying out why people should at the very least continue to trust that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was still Christian rather than on the wrong side of the Cold War. After the book’s publication, when people would ask whether King was being influenced by Soviet Russia, oftentimes King’s reply would include a copy of this sermon. The version quoted above is actually a transcript from an audio version, which broadly pointed out that while he objected to state-run communism’s atheistic approach excusing destructive means and emphasizing the state rather than the individual, he was very much okay with the philosophy’s focus on the working class and its critique that the church needed to do more to advance social concern. The audio version’s conclusion is especially epic, arguing that rather than live in fear of communism Christians should instead take it as a challenge to live out our lives in a better fashion.
While this sermon is one of my favorites, I’ve admittedly always struggled with making it applicable. Though it’s actually not that long ago, Cold War communism to my audiences feels like a relic of a distant past, and divorced from that urgency, the conclusion becomes more generic. And when I’ve tried to explain and repackage the sermon, I’ve always found its end effectiveness blunted.
But what if, instead of communism, we substitute Christian Nationalism? As a resurgent movement that’s popped up in the January 6 insurrection, questions about bodily autonomy, and featuring very questionable takes on the Bible, among other places, the prominence and potential of a Christian takeover of society through minoritarian rule methods appears a threat to many onlookers. On a side note, I recently finished Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory examining Christian extremism, and Alberta points out that for many faithful churchgoers like Russell Moore, it appears even more like a political partisan takeover of the evangelical church, as a group Alberta labels grifters and con artists prey on congregants’ fears to promote an unbiblically unholy union between Christian identity and right-wing politics.
And while my automatic response toward these actions is alarm and disapproval, it does beg the larger question: what should our reply be? After all, our general understanding of civil rights movement as also having a religious component should complicate things. On one hand, while being generally hostile to the changes that he helped bring about, King is also cited, quoted, and stated to approve of conservative perspectives, and many (though not all) defenders of Christian extremism will have positive views of King as a man of faith. They also support the larger contours of the civil rights movement. For example, one of the few times Speaker Mike Johnson stood during Biden’s recent State of the Union address was to acknowledge the presence of Selma marcher Betty Mae Fikes.
Also, many more moderate Christian voices disapproving of the nationalist bent claim the civil rights movement as being religiously inspired to defend their participation in politics. Columnist Ross Douthat’s recent column on Christian Nationalism added several potential definitions of the term Christian Nationalism, observing that while the first two describe dangerous behaviors that should be discouraged, the third is actually a net positive for America, and the fourth isn’t actually helpful as a definition. Here they are below:
Definition One: The belief that America should unite religion and politics in the same manner as the tribes of Israel in Leviticus and Deuteronomy (the more extreme case) or Puritan New England (the milder one) — with religious law enforced by the government, a theocratic or confessional state, an established form of Christianity, and non-Christian religions disfavored.
Definition Two: The belief that America is a chosen nation commissioned by God to bring about some form of radical transformation in the world — the spread of liberty, the triumph of democracy — and that both domestic and foreign policy should be shaped by this kind of providential aim.
Definition Three: The belief that American ideals make the most sense in the light of Christianity, that Christians should desire America to be more Christian rather than less and that American laws and policies should be informed by Christian principles to the extent possible given the realities of pluralism and the First Amendment.
Definition Four: Any kind of Christian politics that liberals find disagreeable or distasteful.
Thus, generic assertions of church and state separation don’t really apply, as we need religion’s positive influence in many areas and we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak. Instead, as a society, we rather should aim more at excising out Definition One-level extremism from the church, and that requires we define the term more narrowly and not have it just cover every general way that the church bends more traditional/conservative.
I do think this clarification is helpful, but even as I vehemently disagree with Christian Nationalist renditions of King, I often also find the moderate Christian deployments of him also relying upon color-blind textbook definitions and not often discussing his life with nuance. So, taking these definitions, how did King address similar situations during his ministry?
First of all, King’s life pretty clearly steered away from Definition One theocracy. He took part in many ecumenical exercises and had friendships with prominent Jewish leaders. He did use a lot of Christian imagery but that’s because he was a seminarian and a third-generation preacher so it’s what he was trained to do. He had pretty harsh words in regard to nationalism generally, including this note even before he was nationally famous: “It is nationalism perverted into chauvinism and isolationism that I am condemning. One cannot worship this false god of nationalism and the God of christianity at the same time.” He also downplayed Christian superiority, giving a heated response when the Christian Century (a religiously liberal publication then and now) criticized SCLC’s decision to name a tax-exempt fundraising arm the Gandhi Society in honor of Mahatma Gandhi because they feared it indicated a shift away from previously Christian underpinnings. In reply, King called such fears “narrow sectarianism and a degree of religious intolerance,” noting that Gandhi regardless of his religious tradition stood as an example of making nonviolence practical.
He also took clear stances against many of the fundamental ideals that animate this wing of Christian nationalism. King did generally support the Supreme Court’s initial prohibition against mandatory prayer in Schempp, though he didn’t generally raise the issue. Also, while there was no major church stance on abortion during his day, King did endorse Planned Parenthood and supported family planning as a potential answer to poverty.
Definition Two chosen nation rhetoric is even easier to come up with clear examples against. After all, King, as someone with the calling “to be a son of the Living God,” observed that he had to call out the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.” He constantly noted that America’s rarely lived up to chosen ideals like “all men are created equal” when it comes to racial issues, including in the first minutes of “I Have a Dream,” where he claims that America has issued a promissory note of liberty but “has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.”
Definition Three is more murky. In “Can a Christian be a Communist,” King stated that “I would say to you this morning that one-tenth of one percent of the population of this nation controls almost fifty percent of the wealth, and I don’t mind saying that there’s something wrong with that.” So he definitely opposed the inverse of Definition Four (that Christian Nationalism is whatever Christian politics that conservatives find agreeable). With that in mind, King has a much more clear-eyed view of the “realities of pluralism and the First Amendment” limitation than maybe even Douthat was intending.
That said, he does often retreat back to Christian motivations (for example, see my previous post about nonviolence being often motivated by doing right as much as being practical). One can also see this in two sections of King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, one being the metaphor of thermostats that influence society rather than thermometers that just measure them (so similarly, that Christians should make an impact, albeit positive). The other is that the church, rather than taking stands for racial justice then and now, was/is content watching “behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.” He defined love and concern of neighbor as a Christian value, and extends that logic out to be something the government should promote or at very least protect. Beyond the Letter, King often wryly noted that legislation had a role to play, stating: “the law can’t make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me and I think that’s pretty important also.” So if Christian activism means specifically ensuring laws that respect and protect the personhood of every individual or promote and center general welfare, King would heartily endorse faith-motivated activism.
As for Definition Four, I’ll just leave this seminary essay statement where King stated: “I must be concerned about unemployment, slums, and economic insecurity. I am a profound advocator of the social gospel.” It is telling that Christian nationalists and to a lesser degree the evangelical church at large often use “social gospel” as a pejorative for weakened faith, because at least in the twentieth century it’s this theological school that animated the civil rights movement and earlier progressive movement. One fact that surprised me is that “What Would Jesus Do” (a slogan I grew up with) actually dates back much earlier to Charles Sheldon’s 1896 book In His Steps. Rather than just live pure lives and avoid drugs (although one major progressive plank was temperance), Sheldon’s actual intended use was to imagine a utopia where Christians lived out Christ’s teachings and cared for the poor, supported labor causes, and led to radical social change.
And so, even as Christian Nationalists try to claim King as an ally, even a quick dive into what King actually did and said demonstrates his differences clearly. But to take the sermon structure seriously, what is it that other Christians can and should take away from this current moment? Alberta’s more sympathetic interviewees in his book often seem to wish they could just be pastors and avoid politics altogether. That, in turn, makes me think of King’s thermostat/thermometer metaphor and of Reverend Robert Brown, of being a lukewarm church unable to lend vital aid. Rather than retreat, I do endorse clerical participation, but question how it’s doing it. What would it look like instead to be like Dunbar Ogden in this current moment, to be out in support of justice movements?
Because, as King’s sermon notes, the problem is that when it comes to Jesus, “we’ve identified that name with segregation. We’ve identified that name with exploitation and with oppression and with so many of the evils of history.” This feels especially prescient in the current moment when the church remains identified with sexism, bigotry, and intolerance, often driving people away from Jesus. I grew up in a religious atmosphere that tried to explain this as a secular society’s efforts to take down the church, often citing Jesus’ claim that the world hates him, so it will naturally hate his disciples.
But King has a different answer as to why this is occurring in his sermon: “This is why Karl Marx one day looked out, and this is why others following him have looked out and decided to say, ‘Religion is the opiate of the people.’ It has too often been the opiate of the people.” King admits that one explanation for communism’s success is that the church has failed in living out its creed and thus presenting a reasonable alternative. To extend that beyond communism, sometimes it’s less the devil’s doing but rather the church’s own failings that lead to crises. Put another way, sometimes opposition does not result from a conspiracy of godless heathens trying to tear down God’s kingdom on earth, but because the church’s own actions engender conflict.
And that’s key because how we view current evils dictates our response to them. Growing up I believed that the church needed to double down on its values and to be a fortress against the dangers of the world outside: that “Scriptural truth” (which is rarely that absolute) meant I shouldn’t seriously consider the alternatives. I’ve now repented of that attitude, and now believe it’s critical to listen to what others are saying, and it’s similarly necessary to note when they’re right, to accept reality, and that it’s okay to acknowledge that the church has not always advanced God’s core values of love, justice, and compassion. And while I still like to think I hold Scripture in high regard, I need the reminder that, no matter how much I try, I still fall short of Jesus’ standard and am in need of that same forgiveness from God I preach.
So what can I do, what can we do in response to Christian Nationalism? When it came to communism, King eschewed the typical motivations of fear that typified the Cold War era. Instead he promoted religious zeal, that adherents of faith should work positively toward the change we want to see instead. He approvingly noted that Christians are called to witness in three ways: with their words, their lives, and willingness to even “die for the cause of Jesus Christ” in opposition of evils like segregation. And one can read King’s historical life as affirming this, unlike many voices prominent in the current Christian Nationalist movement that have not similarly gone to jail, been stabbed, and eventually martyred for their cause. Beyond King, so many movement activists willingly endured hardships and real pervasive threats to their personal safety in their belief that the cause they were working for was worthwhile because unmerited suffering is indeed redemptive.
But with that, one of the most scary takeaways from Alberta’s book is the perverse ways that many pastors are incentivized to endorse right-wing aims: following health decrees in 2020 led to empty pews, while anti-Covid screes got thousands of people into previously unknown churches. Fearmongering claims about how secular society is ruining hypothetical children leads to national celebrity and clicks, while devotion to Scripture and discipleship lead nowhere. Alberta lays out how a mobilized right-wing minority funnel financial resources, political power, and media attention as payment for endorsing their politics, and several of Alberta’s interviewees themselves reflect on how that warped their ultimate call to preach God’s word and to inject more red-meat politics to their base. For example, pre-Covid I had never heard of Sean Feucht, and part of me is still a bit confused how some worship pastor has become so newsworthy despite producing so little of relevance.
And even as I still believe (without evidence) such mania has fully set in only in a minority of churches overall and that even many self-identified evangelicals are uncomfortable with current political reality, Christian Nationalist talking points also influence the larger discussions in evangelicalism. No one ever endorsed Trump from the pulpit at any of my churches, we all took Covid as a real threat even before March 2020, and I was free and even encouraged to offer pushback against nakedly political talking points, while I doubt I could have even lasted a month in many of the churches Alberta spotlights. That said, Christian nationalist talking points like Critical Race Theory somehow being dangerous did pop up, demonstrating its pervasive influence even beyond its infected core. So it’s more than just a few oddball thinkers: Christian Nationalism has significant financial resources and zealous adherents that can and often do decisively sway pastors and leaders, and can even challenge entire denominations to follow suit.
By contrast, I don’t know how much I see a structure when it comes to those disenchanted with the current direction of the church: people are leaving in droves, but rarely with similar desires to be famous or wealthy. I’ve benefited personally from some dissenting voices, for example David Gushee’s After Evangelicalism trying to outline some general theological principles (burning children test popularizer), and Rachel Held Evans’ popular theology giving her prominence. But from my admittedly distant vantage point, I feel that exvangelicals, deconstructionists, what have you struggle with the major problem of most opposition movements, that is being more defined by a negative vision (avoiding what you dislike) than establishing a positive one (what you’re hoping for instead). From my own heavily anecdotal experience, a fairly high percentage of people discomforted by church minor doctrines just stop attending: mundane factors already making it hard for people to attend, so the additional inconveniences of trying to find a new religious community that’s different from the tradition you already know but don’t find yourself welcome in anymore does not help (a little personal experience chiming in here).
So I would contend that, even as right-wing Christianity cries persecution and decline, they are better organized than their dissidents. And organization, structure, all that, help support zeal and sacrifice. We don’t emphasize this at all today, but Jack O’Dell, that same aide the FBI accused of being Communist’s primary accomplice in SCLC, himself claims that his major accomplishment in SCLC was fundraising through direct mail appeals, providing the financial resources that allowed unsung heroes like James Orange the ability to do activism fulltime. More generally, civil rights organizations were instrumental in turning out people and getting them to sacrifice. For every solitary activist like William Moore or arguably James Meredith, so many more were directly influenced by veteran organizers like Ella Baker or James Lawson.
And one blueprint to generate more zeal to return to authentic Christianity, one that solidly rejects the MAGA Republican takeover in no uncertain terms as a historical blip disconnected from the true ekklesia, starts with mundane organizing and scaffolding. It starts with reminding people familiar with church but scarred by its politics that true Christianity is about sharing God’s love rather than championing country; embracing sacrifice rather than dominion; radiating love rather than fear. It encourages them to push back against a distorted Biblicism that reduces Jesus Christ to a prop for Republican talking points like distasteful humor suggesting the lesson from the Garden of Gethsemane was that the disciples needed AR-15s. I don’t know how to get some of the parents of my old church’s youth to stop watching Dinesh D’Souza, but I had there the unique opportunity to encourage the youth themselves that following Jesus meant actually ignoring Fox News rather than absorbing its talking points.
I’ll admit that this sounds to me a bit utopian. The “evangelical left,” a term that I was deploying just over a decade ago during my grad school days as a potential future where pastors could deploy social justice language, feels entirely erased today amid fears of Supreme Court dominance and the potential specter of a second Trump presidency. I’ve tried to live out being open in my political views in my own church experiences, and it’s hard. There are many times I’ve chosen expedience over principle, to the point where Iris felt like she had to fight the battle in my stead yet also feared how her words could get people to view me more negatively. I’ve even had to admit that I was wrong in how I approached certain discussions, like when a concerned parent observed that my definition of liberal may not match her son’s and that I had failed to address her concerns with respect and sensitivity. And overall it’s hard for me to see and say how much good I’ve actually did as an insider for about two decades before it abruptly ended just as I was dealing with intense familial health crises. For all the stresses, emotional pains, and hundreds of hours potentially spent elsewhere, I don’t even know how many people’s minds I have helped influence: it has often felt like shouting into the wind, where no one really understood.
One of my most down moments, ironically, was at a staff Bible study, where I shared with Christian academics my struggles trying to keep my church and youth focused on Jesus during Covid: all I received in return were meaningless platitudes and theoretical appeals to neutrality that were divorced from real experience, even as I was actually on the ground level of their discussion. And conversely, I oftentimes felt the most supported by friends struggling to find supportive faith communities for both mundane and political reasons, who saw in my experiences a flicker of a faith that they were searching for but struggling to find support for.
That said, I’ve come to believe that clergy typically play only minor roles in shaping people’s worldviews. I’ve gone through a lot of discipleship programs as both a disciple and a discipler, and real life makes the Biblical ideal of committed, life-on-life, 24/7 on-call model rarely doable. Maybe in those cases we could go do the deep dives into King and look into the church, but in reality it’s mind-boggling to me that people actually had the freedom to go visit Washington either on 28 August 1963 or on 6 January 2021. If King somehow reappeared on Earth and he was going to do another March on Washington, I don’t honestly know whether I would attend: most times I’m too busy trying to just stay afloat. More generally, balancing career, family, hobbies, and studies means that I’m unironically grateful for even one hour a month of someone’s time. I came to accept my calling was not to indoctrinate my students and rally them against the conservative takeover, but instead to live alongside them and be a resource.
And I choose to believe — even despite evidence — that such actions did and can have impact even beyond. Because despite all the focus on clergy, the reality is that religious leaders often defer to the congregation, even back during Jesus’ day. And so for today, the fact that so many rank-and-file church members prefer Christian dominion over sound discipleship, confusing what’s biblical with what’s political, is the fundamental root behind Christian Nationalism. But the cross, as King pointed out, calls us not for earthly victory but rather to sacrifice, to place God above our desires, and to view the country as ultimately secondary and fleeting.
And so I believe, and continue to choose to believe, that by my lived example and by insisting differentiation between Biblical Christian values and political perspectives, that others were challenged to do similarly. And even though I’ve been out of active ministry for a while, I still think it’s important to be vocal: to be one of those Christians that the nationalists have to explain away.
And on Easter, it’s easy to be a bit hopeful. For it’s a day where we remember Jesus’ own ability to overturn the established order of his day, and how the Resurrection hope does change everything and definitely states that yes, God is able indeed. For all the fears that the nationalists wrestle up, in the end I can still hold to the hope that the future church will look very different from their portrayal, and the ekklesia will somehow survive, thrive, and cause the world to give glory to God.