I didn’t want to be doing this.
Ten years ago, I was a student pastor at a large Suburban North Carolina church. Though I’d been writing a blog for a while, it had been for an audience comprised largely of parents of teenagers and youth pastors. I touched on ministry, parenting, religion, grief, the Church-at-large, but rarely on politics, and certainly not with any specificity.
Yet, as the 2016 presidential campaign season unfolded, I began to notice a disconcerting shift happening, not just in my church but in those all around the country and in those who attended them. The longer Donald Trump remained in the race, the more self-professed Christians softened their criticisms of him, many beginning to justify and explain away words and deeds they’d have passionately condemned in any other instance and at any other time. The hard-and-fast rules they previously declared about morality slowly became less rigid. The supposedly immutable truth of right and wrong was now suddenly up for debate. These moral compromises brought a sense of foreboding about where the Church was headed, and our nation because of it.
As Trump emerged as the Republican nominee, I realized that as someone in spiritual leadership, I had no choice but to declare his predatory, exclusionary campaign of hateful dehumanization incompatible with the openhearted, neighbor-loving, peace-bringing Jesus. I knew I needed to speak out with absolute clarity.
And to be honest, I thought I’d be in good company.
I expected an outpouring of passionate clergy to raise their prophetic voices and to condemn the unholy coalescing marriage of Church and State.
I assumed that most Christian people would dismiss Trump out of hand, naming his vile behavior as the very immoral sickness Jesus spent his life and ministry warning his followers to fiercely resist.
Boy, was I wrong.
And now, more than ten years later, America (and an increasing portion of the world) is staring at a coming Evangelical theocracy born out of tens of millions of Christians’ slow collective soul transaction: the price of supermajorities, oil reserves, Supreme Court seats, and human rights rollbacks. Like the devil with Jesus, Trump brought Evangelicals to a high place overlooking the land and promised he’d give them everything in exchange for their obedience and adoration. Only this time, the devil won. White Christian Nationalism is having its day in the sun, and the disparate, expansive community Jesus imagined is being culled down to white Republicans.
And as I watch the rest of this weary nation pushing back against the impending onslaught of these power-mad, self-appointed soldiers in God’s anti-woke Army, I realized something important:
We don’t need all people to confront white Christian nationalism in America.
Most of them have already done so.
The vast majority here has beenconfronted by it and forced to respond to it, simply by virtue of their levels of melanin, by their place of birth, by their inclinations to love. Long ago, they were drafted into a vicious holy war, not of their own choosing but one of necessity, of survival.
Marginalized people, vulnerable communities, and oppressed human beings in America have always opposed perversions of religion and craven power grabs, because those efforts have always targeted them. MAGA Republicans and Trump Evangelicals are simply the most recent (and arguably most successful) purveyors of legislated prejudice and church-sanctioned racism.
And what is needed in this pivotal juncture in our collective national story is a vocal and visible countermovement, birthed from the very same place as this widespread heresy: It needs other white Christians to stand the hell up.
Christian nationalism isn’t a Black problem.It isn’t a Muslim problem.It isn’t a queer problem.It’s not an Atheist problem,not a Jewish problem,or an immigrant problem.
White Christian nationalism is a white-Christians-living-in-America-who-care-about-the-teachings-of-Jesus, problem.
We’re in this national crisis because white, professed followers of Jesus have constructed a movement that minimizes, ostracizes, and disregards the voices of minority communities. If those communities’ efforts to advocate for and protect themselves were enough, the MAGA movement and a second Trump term wouldn’t even be a reality. The fact that they are means that others need to bring their collective hearts to the fight, those who, to this point, have been uninvolved.
It’s time for white, Jesus-loving Christians to directly, consistently, and forcefully oppose Christian nationalism.
This will mean partnering with the broad coalition of dissent already opposing legislation and protesting the inhumanity of this Administration.It will mean individually initiating difficult conversations: moments of micro activism at kitchen tables and coffeeshops and bible studies; alongside family, neighbors, and church friends; not allowing nationalism to go unchallenged in those small spaces.
It will mean local church communities taking a stand against attacks on immigrants, on transgender people, on the poor, on the teaching of history, on books and public school teachers, and on refugees, even if this brings conflict and triggers an exodus from the pews.It will mean church ministers having the courage to name and condemn the ways the Church is participating in the dehumanization of foreigners, the vilification of queer people, the diminishing of people of color, the subjugation of women, the worship of America, the weaponizing of religion; not because such things are political misdeeds, but because they are morally reprehensible and antithetical to Jesus’ teachings.
White Christian nationalism isn’t just an existential threat to this nation; it’s a sickening, collective sin that flies in the face of Jesus.
It’s time white Christians who see and know this stood and were heard, no matter what the cost.
If not, ten years from now, we will be unrecognizable as a nation and the white American Church will have killed Jesus once and for all.
