A Christian Nation

Endless revelation

The late Christopher Hitchens used to make a lot of hay out of the phrase supposedly uttered by Miriam A. Ferguson, the first female governor of Texas, in response to a proposal that Bibles in Spanish be introduced in public schools: “If the King’s English is good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for the children of Texas.” Ma, as she was affectionately called, was an anti-Prohibition Democrat who issued thousands of pardons, opposed the Klan, introduced sweeping labor reforms, and, in all likelihood, did not say what Hitchens said she did. In fact, it seems that the saying is one of those unattributable chestnuts dragged out to mock know-nothings whenever they reveal their embarrassing, often dangerous penchant to elide God and country, cross and flag, faith and patriotism. It should be getting more use these days that it is.

A week or two ago, a MAGA commentator whose day job is running a reactionary Onion rip-off made a series of posts on X about Catholics in Gaza. In response to the IDF’s attack on the Holy Family Church, which killed three civilians, and the subsequent condemnations of Israel’s conduct by Pope Leo XIV and Cardinal Pizzaballa, this spritely fellow claimed first that “there are 200 professed Catholics still living in Gaza and they all support Hamas,” and, second, that while there were “true” Christians still in Gaza, their practice must be clandestine, since the only visible Christians are those who exchange their support for the regime for religious liberty.

Holy Family Church, Gaza. (Source: Vatican News)

On its face this was just another contribution to the genocidal kettle logic beneath the continued support for Israel’s slaughter of Gazans: it isn’t happening, and they deserve it. The opprobrium—obvious and obviously correct—that hailed down had mostly to do with the moral monstrosity of this particular variant of victim blaming. But I was struck more by those who came to his defense, along what now seem like two basic lines that have converged on a single point.

The first was against the kind of criticism I just mentioned. Defenders confirmed that, contrary to the most basic moral discernment, this slander against Palestinian Christians is perfectly valid, since the targets were, after all, Palestinian. This horrifyingly common position really doesn’t warrant discussion for its content, since its effects are evident for anyone who wants to see. It’s the kind of sentiment that brings to mind Noam Chomsky’s lament in American Power and the New Mandarins: “by accepting the presumption of legitimacy of debate on certain issues, one has already lost one’s humanity.” The mind reels daily, but these are the conditions under which we have all lived for a long time now.

The second line of defense was against those attacks coming from inside the house, as it were. Among the gales of criticism this commentator was subject to were anti-Semitic jabs against the supposedly “Judaized” Christianity that allowed him to support Israel. This, apparently, is one of the fault lines in MAGA world currently revealing themselves: on the one hand, opposition to Israel as a Jewish conspiracy undermining American sovereignty, and on the other hand, unwavering support for Israel as an ally and bulwark in the civilizational war against Islam. All of this is said quite openly and explicitly by its various partisans, as though these were legitimate political positions and not the fevered ravings of a Streicher or Fritsch, updated for a postcolonial world. Now, the internal fractures of the MAGA movement are not really of interest to me, except insofar as they seem to let loose the noxious fumes circulating just beneath the surface of our shared political life.

One such poison, which aspires to colorlessness and odorlessness, though you know when it seeps into the room, is Christian nationalism. This is, of course, hardly a new feature of American life, but one of its most curious and powerful features is its ability not only to reinvent itself but to appear constantly as though it has just emerged from a long struggle to be born. But this is not simply a question of delusional self-advertisement. One could argue, critically or approvingly, that the country has its roots not only in Protestant Christianity but in a particular kind of Protestant Christian dissent, that authentic American Christianity is inherently iconoclastic, and builds its power by positioning itself against a supposedly repressive status quo. It’s easy to forget, for example, that the Puritans were not so named for abstemious moral teachings—they were actually comparatively relaxed about that sort of thing, especially in matters of sex—but for their desire to purify the Reformed church of its remaining Catholic influences. The proximate source of its current iteration is Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority of the 1970’s and 80’s, which presented itself as an underground movement finally emerging from the shadows, a vox populi long suppressed by the machinations of, if you can believe it, gay communists. “It’s time for God’s people to come out of the closet,” Falwell was often heard to intone, without a hint of irony. Even today, the movement is fundamentally polemical. The prominent Christian nationalist theologian Douglas Wilson, on the FAQ of his own blog, answers the question “what is Christian nationalism?” with the following: “Christian Nationalism is the view that secularism is a hollow construct, now plainly revealed to be bankrupt.” Only “additionally,” does he make any positive claim for himself.

This reactionary-as-revolutionary pose is a constant on the American right, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s a powerful and highly-sustainable self-image, to be forever on the march, forever on the verge of triumph, the promised land forever just over the horizon, if only the next and last opponent can be cleared away. The past has no place in this image, except insofar as it lays out a vision for this glorious future, driving the Christian solider onward. Liberals get a lot of grief (rightly, in my opinion) for leaving the work of politics up to the “moral arc of the universe,” but there is nothing so teleological as the conservative American mind, all the more certain for how many inconvenient people stand in its way.

It was therefore no surprise to find that when the initial burst of controversy over the slander against Palestinian Christians died down and its broader implications began to appear, many on the right refused even a family resemblance to those sheltering at the Church of the Holy Family. One commentator was offended by how many people with foreign-sounding names tried to argue with him about Christianity. Another insisted that American Christians have no need of “ancient communities,” because they have the Bible.

Now, the first of these claims is simple, adolescent xenophobia, and was roundly mocked as such. The second is more interesting, because it shows just how distinctive American Christian nationalism is even from its Protestant antecedents. One of Martin Luther’s foundational teachings is that of sola scriptura or “scripture alone,” which holds that revealed scripture is the primary source of authority in doctrinal development, against the Catholic teaching that both scripture and Church tradition are equal sources of divine revelation and therefore mutually sustaining sources of authority. Now, as you might have guessed, I much prefer the Catholic view on this, in large part because it just makes better sense: even if we grant the supposition that scripture is divinely inspired, that does not mean that our access to the text is irrelevant to that inspiration. For many of the Church Fathers, scripture’s divine source is active only in the interpretative task of its dissemination, that is, in the community and tradition of the Church. In other words, “The Bible” only exists because of the Church, even if the Church only exists because of the Bible. (I don’t mean the Roman Catholic Church or any other denomination, but the full communion of Christian history, in all its variety.) Luther doesn’t exactly dispute this, but because of his more foundational teaching of total depravity—that all human action is thoroughly corrupt, and so requires God’s superabundant grace for salvation—doctrinal authority must have its source placed well beyond our influence. For Luther, scripture is as mysterious as revelation itself.

It goes without saying that this is hardly what American dispensationalists, evangelicals, and fundamentalists mean by “The Bible.” The literalism that marks these movements sidelines, ignores, and even rejects as subversive obscurantism questions about translation and interpretation that appear in most of Christian history at the center of theological debate and self-understanding. For these churches, the faith is not a calling to be pursued or a mystery to be discerned; it is an identity one holds or does not, a nation to be defended by any means necessary. The universalism proclaimed in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female,” can only be ignored or distorted beyond recognition in order to make such a nationalism a viable form of Christian practice and belief.

Christian nationalism is a profound distortion of the tradition, a distinctly modern form of ideological tyranny, that, like its many constituent parts and tributaries—capitalism, the nation-state, biblical literalism—demands the reduction of human multiplicity to a single term held out above all others as superior. For this movement, to be Christian is to be American, and vice-versa, deviation from or even complication of which constitutes disloyalty and heresy. In other words, it demands fealty in the name of freedom.

Many of us have long-since learned to think of this as a distinctly American phenomenon. While there is good reason for that association, it covers over just how strange a development it is for a nation founded on the rejection of inherent authority and elevation of procedural government and law, to say nothing of its historical reliance on immigration and multicultural encounter for its social development. Of course, this is a rosy retelling of American life—I only mean to point out its best aspects, its highest possibilities. There, at those heights, despite its many failures and deceptions, contradictions and crimes notwithstanding, there is something in America that is antithetical to the whole project of Christian nationalism.

For years now people have been saying that Palestine is the center of the world. There are many ways of thinking about this proposition, but the relevant one at the moment is the extent to which all the forces of the global political order have converged on this one crisis and dropped, intentionally or otherwise, the various guises concealing their true natures. But what is revealed, except in a few cases, is less often a simple identity or purpose, and more the contradictions underlying our collective self-understanding. There will be few, perhaps, who are surprised by the chauvinism displayed by American fundamentalists. But the explicit sacrifice of fellow Christians on the altar of nationalist militarism should leave no doubt as to the distinctiveness of this religious formation, and the depth of the fracture in our own society, between those who accept even the possibility of a common humanity, and those who see only identity.