Un-Baptizing American Christian Nationalism

How do you like the phrase, “Un-baptizing American Christian Nationalism”? I think it aptly applies to hordes of Christians fleeing the label ‘Christian’ in order to dis-identify with the phantasmic Christian nationalist (CN) dragon. The CN dragon spits fire. So, Christians Against Christian Nationalism (CACN) are dowsing it by broadly spraying disapprobation.

On June 4, 2024 Brian Kaylor and Beau Underwood launched their new book, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism. Up until this point, I’ve been arguing that the specter of American Christian Nationalism (ACN) has provided a smoke screen for anti-evangelical execration. It appears now that Kaylor and Underwood want to extend their odium to mainline Protestants and even to Civil Religion. So, it appears.

Here is what I take as the central thesis of this new book. Mainline Christian denominations made a…

“…comprehensive effort to merge church and state, thus setting the stage for Christian Nationalism that today inspires evangelicals and Pentecostals to storm the U.S. Capitol, push for Christian practices in public schools, and advocate for a host of other problematic mergers of God and country” (Kaylor and Underwood 2024, 18).

In other words, today’s ACN among evangelicals and Pentecostals is the protégé of yesterday’s mentoring by mainline Protestants who advanced Civil Religion.

Un-Baptizing America in Baptizing America

Baptizing America or Un-Baptizing American Christain Nationalism. Click for book.

Perhaps the most accurate sentence in the new book is this one: “As attention to Christian Nationalism rises, the concept ironically becomes more ambiguous” (Kaylor and Underwood 2024, 6). Kaylor and Underwood expand the term’s ambiguity to include “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance along with National Prayer Breakfasts and allusions to divine providence in presidential speeches. With these as criteria, we would have to fear Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address as an existential threat to our democracy.

My regular complaint in this Patheos series on ACN and CACN has been this: the ambiguity of terms such as ‘American Christian Nationalism’ provides a smokescreen for ACN’s critics to condemn nearly everyone they don’t like. Usually, it’s the evangelicals who get slammed. Now with Kaylor and Underwood, it’s the entire history of interaction between Protestant Christianity and the Enlightenment. I for one thank God for providentially marrying Christian insight with Enlightenment reason so we could birth children such as equality, dignity, democracy, the rule of law, and a mission to expand freedom around the globe.

Un-Baptizing America’s Civil Religion

Kaylor and Underwood include in their line-up of CN culprits the history of Civil Religion. It was Bob Bellah, a colleague of mine here in Berkeley, who in 1967 painted the picture of Civil Religion we all recognize. Philip Gorski at Yale is putatively today’s expert.

Yes, America’s Puritan history and inclusion of religious symbols in its identity has some awkward chapters. But one enduring and wholesome value in Civil Religion is that it holds America under the judgment of a higher justice. If America fails in its responsibility to exact justice, God will render judgment against America just as God treated ancient Israel. And just as God judged America for the sin of slavery in the Civil War, as Abraham Lincoln tells it. Here is the key passage in Robert Bellah’s corpus.

“…participation in the sacred through one’s citizenship does not involve the worship of the American nation but an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality” (Bellah 1967, 18).

I thank Kaylor and Underwood for citing this passage. This passage clearly affirms how our inherited Civil Religion is anything but the kind of naïve nationalist ideology that justifies any tyranny that one’s nation might inflict. It demonstrates that Civil Religion does not fit the metric CACNers use to measure ACN.

It is my evaluation that Kaylor and Underwood provide a weak argument. One of the byproducts is that their definition of ACN is so ambiguous that it fails to distinguish between the revolutionary threat of theocracy, on the one hand, and garden variety patriotism, on the other.

Conclusion

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m a signatory to the Christians Against Christian Nationalism Statement. I applaud CACN plus Kaylor and Underwood along with numerous other scholars who are forthrightly taking a stand against ACN. They are correct when they declare that ACN ideology is idolatrous and dangerous.[1]

Yet I fear that allowing the parameters for defining American Christian Nationalism to wander aimlessly this direction and that — without a discriminating core definition — risk prejudicing us against evangelicals and other patriotic traditionalists who are innocent of the charge.

PT 3243 Un-Baptizing American Christian Nationalism

PT 3200 Christian Nationalism Resources

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For Patheos, Ted Peters posts articles and notices in the field of Public Theology. He is a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and emeritus professor at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union. His single volume systematic theology, God—The World’s Future, is now in the 3^rd edition. He has also authored God as Trinity plus Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society as well as Sin Boldly: Justifying Faith for Fragile and Broken Souls. He recently published. The Voice of Public Theology, with ATF Press. See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com and blog site, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/publictheology/ .

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Notes

[1] In his A Public Witness article, “Aiding and Abetting Christian Nationalism,” Beau Underwood criticizes me for denying the existence of Christian Nationalism. And, by denying its existence, he says that I’m guilty of aiding and abetting this extremist ideology. Underwood is clearly mistaken here. It appears he has not read this Patheos series.