 The Peace of Christ to all of you. Greetings from Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary. My name is Drew Straits and I teach New Testament here at AMBS. I want to warmly welcome you to this short seminar titled, Political Idolatry, Countering Christian Nationalism. I'm a follower of Jesus who is deeply concerned that white Christian nationalism presents an immediate threat, not only to democracy in the United States, but also to the church's public witness. The church is desperate for spaces like this to define Christian nationalism, share corporate wisdom, and to ask so what questions? What should we do? How can we mobilize a social movement of Christians against Christian nationalism? And so I'm so glad that you all are creating a space like this in your own context today. Over the last two years, really since 2020, a number of books have been written by historians, sociologists, some lawyers, and a few scholars of religion that deconstruct what white Christian nationalism is, where it came from, and how we got here. This work of deconstruction is so important because it helps us to name the parts of Christian nationalism that are incompatible with the life and teachings of Jesus. It helps us to understand what the objects of our resistance are. As someone who trains pastors and leaders, though, I'm a bit concerned that we are behind the ball on questions of reconstruction. What does effective and realistic everyday strategies of resisting and disorienting white Christian nationalism look like? What does a protest movement look like that bears witness to the nonviolent gospel of peace? I won't pretend to have my finger on the pulse of a comprehensive solution. At the end of the day, we need an interdisciplinary, ecumenical, multi-generational, multi-actor peace-building movement in order to interrupt Christian nationalism's influence. No singular personality cult pastor, celebrity scholar, or theologian can fix the problem before us. Either we are in this together or we are not in it at all. Before I discuss some action steps for challenging Christian nationalism, I want to invite us into a posture of prayer and lament. This is a moment where the church needs to show up. It is also a moment that the church needs to own. With that in mind, let's go before God and pray this prayer by Walter Bregman from his book, Prayers of a Privileged People. This is a prayer that has become very important to me since 2015. Let's pray. We name you King Lord Sovereign. We trust you except sometimes we do not. We take matters into our own hands. We fashion power and authority and sovereignty enforced by law and bureaucracy and weapons. We think to make ourselves safe. And then learn staggeringly how insufficient is our product, how thin is our law, how ineffective is our bureaucracy, how impotent are weapons. We are driven back to you, your will, your purpose, your requirements. Care for land, care for neighbor, care for future. We name you King Lord Sovereign. So undemocratic. And in naming become aware of your status, of our status before you. Loved, sent, summoned. We pray in the name of the loved, sent, summoned Jesus. Amen. The first thing that Christians against Christian nationalism can do to disorient and interrupt Christian nationalism is to break our silence. Silence is compliance. Silence and deference toward theologies of oppression is not an effective strategy of resistance. As the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King spoke in his speech, The Trumpet of Conscience, in the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. Silence before injustices in the world is a form of complicity in those injustices. And when we break our silence, we increase the visibility of those parts of Christian nationalism that are incompatible with the Gospel of Christ. As Jamar Tisby writes, the subtler threat of Christian nationalism is a kind of ubiquity that leads to invisibility. For so many white Christians, Christian nationalism isn't Christian nationalism. Rather, it's just Christianity. People don't even see it, and that's the deadliest threat. So we are facing a bit of a double-edged sword here. On the one hand, Christian nationalists think that Christian nationalism just is Christianity. On the other hand, the non-Christian watching world looks at Christianity and all it sees is white Christian nationalism. The next thing we need to do is to define Christian nationalism. This is crucial because it's impossible to resist something unless you can name the objects of your resistance. Or as Kimberly Crenshaw writes, where there's no name for a problem, you can't see a problem. And when you can't see a problem, you pretty much can't solve it. I want to be absolutely clear today that the problem that we are trying to solve is named white Christian nationalism. And it's impossible for us to resist it unless we can understand what it is. Thankfully, in 2020, two sociologists named Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry published a remarkable book called Taking America Back for God, Christian Nationalism in the United States. Whitehead and Perry's book is the first sociological, data-driven analysis of white Christian nationalism in the United States. In other words, it's not just the latest musings of what a theologian or historian thinks white Christian nationalism is. It's actually an argument built on fact-based, scientific-based evidence, real-time data from the Baylor Religion Survey. If you have not had time to read this book, I encourage you to get yourself a copy if you want to learn more about what white Christian nationalism is. Or if you don't have time to read it, I also wrote a comprehensive review of it that is on Scott McKnight's blog with Christianity Today. I wrote that review specifically for pastors, leaders, and organizers if you Google my name and the title of their book, it should come up. I encourage you to read that if you want to know more. Whitehead and Perry define Christian nationalism as a cultural framework, a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and value systems that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life. The Christianity of Christian nationalism represents something more than religion. As we will show, it includes assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, along with divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism. Here's the key part. It is as ethnic and political as it is religious. In other words, for white Christian nationalists, their ethnoracial identity is interrelated and overlapping with their partisan political allegiances and also their religious identity. According to Whitehead and Perry, there are four responses among Americans to Christian nationalism. The first group are what they call rejectors. This comprises 21.5% of American society. The next group is what they call resistors of Christian nationalism. This group comprises 26.6% of American society. The third group is what they call accommodators of Christian nationalism. This is the biggest group. It comprises about 32.1% of U.S. society. And the fourth group are ambassadors of Christian nationalism, and they comprise 19.8% of U.S. society. According to Whitehead and Perry, key predictors of ambassadors are identification with political conservatism. Belief in the Bible is the literal word of God, religious practice. They believe the founding fathers are Christians, even though this idea has been proven to be mostly a myth by scholars like Mark Knoll and John Faya. They believe that America is on the brink of moral decay. They believe that God requires the faithful to wage war for good. Only 16% of them reside in cities, and ambassadors tend to believe in the rapture at the end of history. In my mind, some of the most significant takeaways from taking America back for God are this. Whitehead and Perry offer us more definitional clarity for us to understand what Christian nationalism is and what its value systems are. Second, they show that white Christian nationalism is not strictly about religious revival, but rather about political power, boundaries in us versus them, boundaries in order. Most provocatively, they show that ambassadors in particular tend to be religiously disconnected from faith communities and at odds with biblical values like hospitality, peace, and justice for the poor and oppressed. What do we do with that? Many Christian nationalists are not consistently even participating in a faith community and live a life or a set of values that are often at odds with teachings from the biblical narrative, especially those of the life and teachings of Jesus. In addition, Whitehead and Perry show that among Christian nationalists, one does not have to go to church or hold to Orthodox Christian beliefs to be a Christian nationalist. In other words, there's a kind of secularization among some very conservative purported Christians here in the United States of America. They show that Christian nationalism gravitates toward nativism or an anti-immigrant ideology, xenophobia, a fear of strangers. Their data suggests that they strongly gravitate toward white supremacy and in some more extreme cases among ambassadors, participation in the white power movement, homophobia, militarism, patriarchy, and authoritarianism. So how did we get to this place? How did we get to a place where the crucified, border-crossing, neighbor and enemy-loving Jesus has been transformed into this whitewashed, militaristic, xenophobic, Rambo-like Jesus? Rainn Wilson, otherwise known as Dwight Schrute from The Office, tweeted something to this very idea a few years ago on Twitter. He wrote that the metamorphosis of Jesus Christ from a humble servant of the abject poor to a symbol that stands for gun rights, prosperity theology, anti-science, limited government that neglects the destitute and fierce nationalism is truly the strangest transformation in human history. So how did we get here? Historians have been able to trace much of this back to evangelicalism in the 20th century and other movements that go even deeper into United States history. But there are other more modern things that have taken place that have proliferated bad theology. To be sure, I think we need to have some hard conversations about social media in the church. One in five Americans affirm QAnon conspiracy theories and so do one quarter of evangelicals. In fact, research shows that misinformation spreads six times faster than true information on the internet. During the 2016 election, the top 20 fake news articles on Facebook generated more clicks than the top 20 real articles from every major publication combined. According to psychologists, fake news distorts the truth because it reinforces a human tendency to accept information that affirms our beliefs. Psychologists call this confirmation bias. Fake news is especially good at evoking confirmation bias when paired with information overload or what some call data saturation or high volumes of articles that have been shared hundreds and thousands of times with thousands of likes and thumbs up. This is an excellent way at leveraging confirmation bias because it can cause the brain to process information with the emotion centers of the brain rather than those involved in the reasoning or logic centers of the brain. In addition to this, this can stimulate a dopamine rush that can create an addiction, an online addiction to sharing misinformation, fake news, and that can ultimately radicalize people's psychologically speaking. Another study recently came out by a group of psychologists with the proceedings of the American Political Science Review. They showed that Americans tend to share disinformation not because they are uneducated or misinformed, but rather because they hate their ideological opponents. Pastorily speaking here, this is of significant concern. How are congregants in our churches using social media? Is social media radicalizing them? Is it being used to psychologically manipulate their brains into dark corners of the internet with disinformation and theologies of oppression, theologies that are incompatible with the life and teachings of Jesus? In addition to social media, we need to have some hard conversations about structural problems in our society that are stimulating radicalization. For those of you who don't know, neoliberalism is the word we use to talk about the governing philosophy of our time. Neoliberalism has created a pervasive culture of income inequality, hustle culture, personal branding, gig economy, and pressure to create the entrepreneurial self. I won't pretend that I have immunity from all of these social pressures in our society. This is truly a pervasive phenomenon that influences all of us. Bruce Rogers Vaughn recently wrote a book called Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age. Rogers Vaughn is a theologian whose specialty is psychotherapy. He talks about the three orders of suffering in the history of the world and talks about a third order of suffering that is induced really and stimulated by the neoliberal order. The first order of suffering is the human condition, death, grief, separation, illness, natural disaster, physical pain, so on and so forth. The second order of human suffering is human on human evil, war, robbery, sexualized violence, murder, etc. The third order of suffering according to Rogers Vaughn is depression, anxiety, addiction, intense shame, and personal failure. He writes that the people I now see tend to manifest a far more diffuse or fragmented sense of self, are frequently more overwhelmed, experience powerful forms of anxiety and depression too vague to be named, display less self-awareness, have often loosened or dropped affiliation with conventional human collectives, and are increasingly haunted by shame rooted and a nebulous sense of personal failure. How do we deconstruct these structures that are causing harm and reconstruct human collectives where we can all flourish amidst difference? Can the Church enter into these kinds of spaces and empower us in our disarray, in our stress, our addiction, and anxieties to live a life of flourishing with God and with neighbor? Also in acknowledging these structures, can we become more empathetic toward those who've been commodified by the neoliberal order including some Christian nationalists? And in becoming empathetic, can our empathy disorient the ideologies of hate and xenophobia that fund white Christian nationalism? The next thing we can do to challenge white Christian nationalism publicly is to talk about political idolatry. In ancient Judaism, idolatry was something that happened in the mind of the worshiper. It was not something that happened in your heart, rather it was a form of what Moshe Halbertal and Abishai Margallit call cognitive error. They write that idolatry is perceived first and foremost as an improper conception of God in the mind of the worshiper, thereby internalizing sin. An idol, then, is an object of power that co-ops our theological imagination, distorts our knowledge of God, and ultimately leads us into what the rabbis called avodah-zorah, or strange worship. In this sense, Christian nationalism is a worldview where one's theological imagination has been co-opted by state power. It is a form of strange worship. Over the last couple of years, the Department of Religion at the University of Alabama collaborated with the the Smithsonian Museum of American History to archive images and videos from the January 6th insurrection. I've spent many hours studying these images, and I have been profoundly jarred by how many of the insurrectionists are praying to Jesus and worshiping Jesus as they laid siege to the center of American democracy. This archive of images and videos can be found at a website called Uncivil Religion, and I've got a QR code here for you to link to it if you want to go look at some of these images and videos on your own. This passion for praying to Jesus as insurrectionists laid siege to the U.S. Capitol is especially present on the floor of the Senate when the now famous horn-studded shaman started praying to Jesus Christ on the floor of the Senate chamber. I actually transcribed this prayer in a video and I want to read it together right now. As I'm reading it, I want to ask this question. If idolatry is an improper conception of God in the mind of the worshiper, then who are these insurrectionists praying to? I mean this as a serious theological question. The shaman prayed, Jesus Christ, we invoke your name. Thank you, Heavenly Father, for gracing us with this opportunity for this opportunity to stand up to our unalienable rights. Thank you, Heavenly Father, for being the inspiration needed to these police officers to allow us into this building, to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists, and the globalists that this is our nation and not theirs. That we will not allow the American way of the USA to go down. Thank you, divine, omniscient, and omnipresent Creator God for filling this chamber with your white light and love, with your white light of harmony. Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots who love you and that love Christ. Thank you for blessing every one of us who is here now. Thank you, divine Creator God for surrounding us with divine, omnipresent white light of love, protection, peace, and harmony. Thank you for allowing the USA to be reborn. We love you and we thank you. In Christ's holy name we pray, amen, to loud cheers among these insurrectionists on the Senate floor. If you have the space and time, I encourage you to actually pause the seminar at this time and discuss with one another what stands out to you in this prayer. What disturbs you about this prayer? What actually sounds familiar to you in this prayer? Feel free to do that now if you have the space and time. To understand idolatry, we need to go back to the biblical narrative. In the biblical narrative there are two metaphors for idolatry. The first is the marital metaphor of idolatry. This is the metaphor of idolatry that dominates the ways that we conceptualize idolatry today. In the marital metaphor, the threatening third party is another God. It is the worship of another God. The political metaphor, on the other hand, is much more complex and is not one we are particularly familiar with in the church today. In the political metaphor, the threatening third party are kings or queens, political authorities and sometimes even their bureaucrats, institutions including the military, economy, or even taxation. In fact, during the life of Jesus, a sectarian Jewish movement broke out called the fourth philosophy. The fourth philosophy believed that even the act and gesture of paying taxes to the emperor was an act of political idolatry, something encroached on God's sovereignty. The threatening third party in the political metaphor can also be royal ideologies, discourses of power and oppression. If we are going to map out these metaphors, the marital metaphor is very binary. It is very black and white. God, the husband, is in an exclusive covenantal relationship with Israel the wife. This is a very patriarchal metaphor and sometimes even a misogynistic one according to some passages. Israel or the wife commits adultery or betrayal against God the husband when she worships a third partner or worships another God. So this model is very binary and black and white. The political metaphor on the other hand is triangular and much more complex. In this metaphor, humans are in an exclusive covenantal relationship with the one God and they commit adultery or betrayal when they worship a human king and or political institutions. The political metaphor, though, is especially complex because there is no need for a third party or to worship another God to create a situation of disloyalty. Rather, the subject does not have to transfer the sovereignty of God to another person. He or she can actually just take it by herself or even divide up God's sovereignty and power to their peers or bureaucrats or political system. This introduces the problem of deification. As Moshe Halberthal and Avesheimer Gallant write, the biblical problem with a powerful person is how to prevent the tendency toward hubris and pride and thereby self-deification. One way from managing royal hubris in the Old Testament was what we call the Deuteronomic Law of the King. When Israel was transformed into a monarchy from a theocracy the Deuteronomistic historian, the author of the book of Deuteronomy wrote the Law of the King in Chapter 17. In the Law of the King, the Deuteronomist prescribed the king from accumulating weapons, women and wealth and every day the king was to read this law daily in order to not exalt himself above other members of the community. That's actually a pretty powerful metric I think, maybe even for some of our modern politicians. What are their attitudes toward women, towards weapons and wealth? Maybe this could be a helpful metric for determining one's fitness for office even in our modern context. So the question before us is what are you thinking about the political metaphor of idolatry is this? When does our loyalty to political institutions betray our loyalty to Jesus in God's kingdom and lead to strange worship? In other words, how exclusive is the reign and rule of Jesus Christ? And at what point does loyalty to a political system become an act of betrayal? What are the reasons for understanding this relationship between loyalty to Jesus and loyalty to state power? I'd like to suggest that strange worship and betrayal happens when loyalty to state power distorts our exclusive loyalty to the life and teachings of Jesus. Strange worship and betrayal happens when loyalty to state power inspires and or legitimates harm toward our neighbor. Strange worship and betrayal happens when loyalty to state power sees the state rather than the unarmed multicultural church as the primary context for Christian action and witness. Strange worship and betrayal happens when pledging loyalty to the state critically inverts the value we place on our baptismal identity. In fifth, strange worship and betrayal happens when loyalty to state power stimulates a hierarchical ethnoracial caste system. Put another way, when our ethnoracial identity like when whiteness or white supremacy becomes our controlling narrative we create an ethnoracial hierarchy in society that is incompatible with the way of Jesus and the way of the early church. So our question as Christians against Christian nationalism is this. How do we disorient erroneous desires for power, boundaries and order? How do we challenge political idolatry? One way we can do that is by telling the whole story of Jesus Christ. By talking about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus including the teachings of Jesus so that we can animate publicly the ways that following Jesus is incompatible with the values of white Christian nationalism. I have some discussion questions for you. The first question is this. Where do you see Christian nationalism in your community? Why is it important to be able to define and understand Christian nationalism? What is one feature of Christian nationalism that most troubles you? How do we reorient Christian nationalist lives around the life and teachings of Jesus in a church body? This question is especially significant knowing that many ambassadors and possibly even some accommodators are not consistently even participating in a church body. As you know by now there's a spectrum of attitudes and postures toward white Christian nationalism. With that mind I encourage you to take on a posture of curiosity, a posture of empathy and a posture of assertiveness as you are discussing these questions in your own context. Also of course a posture of neighborly love. If you have interest in going deeper on some of these so what questions, next year I will be teaching a four week short course through AMBS's Church Leadership Center from April through May 9th. The title of this short course is Resisting Christian Nationalism with the Gospel of Peace. I'm seeing this short course as a kind of summit for pastors, congregants, leaders and organizers to come together to share corporate wisdom to dig deeper into the biblical narrative to think critically about ways that we can challenge white Christian nationalism the good news of the God of peace, this God who is incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth, who has shown us a way to reconcile humans to God and also human beings to one another. Blessings to all of you and thank you again for creating a space to talk about white Christian nationalism in your own context. Take care.