An Encouraging Direction

Okay–I’m becoming (cautiously) optimistic about the upcoming midterm elections. (If that optimism proves unfounded, I may abandon this platform, climb into my bed, and generally check out…). It isn’t just the polls. Anyone paying attention can see the incredible difference between the quality of most of the candidates who are running as Democrats and the assortment of sorry wanna-be’s running as Republicans.

But even assuming that those Democrats succeed at the polls, even recognizing that most of them are both competent and well-intentioned, there are systemic barriers that will prevent them from making the sorts of changes that most Americans want to see. I have frequently posted about those systemic flaws: gerrymandering, the filibuster, the Electoral College, the incredibly damaging Citizens United decision that has allowed people with money to dominate the voices of the electorate in general…There are others.

Even assuming an election result that a majority of us will applaud, the challenge facing newly-elected lawmakers will be to resist a return to a very flawed status quo. So I was gratified to come across a Vox article describing a “radical” Democratic plan to “change America” by addressing those systemic flaws.

As anyone who’s been paying attention knows, the Trump administration has been busily implementing Project 2025. That document wasn’t simply a reactionary policy agenda–it was also an outline of how to wield power without being hobbled by that silly thing called democracy–and certainly not by those tired constitutional constraints known as checks and balances.

This administration has “fundamentally broken” the federal government.

The administration has managed to fire or push out hundreds of thousands of its employees and tear up the procedures that govern policymaking and implementation. It has also demolished the guardrails that protect democracy from power: bulling through constraints on executive authority, usurping Congress’s core responsibilities, and attacking the civil rights and electoral rules that underpin American democracy.

Trump’s administration has made the federal government “structurally incapable of enacting appropriate fixes to those problems.”

No matter what happens on November 3d, the next two years promise to be chaotic, with a wounded and demonstrably insane lame duck in the White House. (Even if the aging and visibly ailing Trump dies in office, J.D. Vance is unlikely to be an improvement.) So the “radical plan” under consideration requires that a Democrat win the Presidency in 2028.

One good sign is that the plan’s core ideas “have real buy-in among both congressional Democrats and the top 2028 presidential hopefuls.”

The brain trust involved does not see its goal as simply restoring the pre-Trump status quo. Quite the opposite: Their central premise is that the government was broken before Trump’s second term. The hope now is to use Trump’s demolition derby as an opportunity to (ahem) build back better: to take the federal government, at once a tangled mess and an authoritarian menace, and turn it into a 21st-century democracy.

The plan would create a competent government able to implement properly enacted policies. It would also “right-size” and constrain the presidency with new rules to prevent abuses of power. The article lists several of the goals:

A new, vastly simpler and politically protected set of rules for hiring and promotion in the civil service;

Creating entire agencies and Cabinet positions dedicated to battling corruption and inefficiency;

Overhauling federal privacy laws to facilitate legitimate information-sharing while constraining DOGE-style data theft;

Reviving a never-passed bill that would cap the president’s ability to declare emergencies at a 30-day duration;

Eliminating barriers that block policies at the front end, like the Paperwork Reduction Act, while creating new judicial remedies for federal abuses — like permitting citizens to personally sue government officials who violate their rights;

A rewrite of the 1946 law that governs the basic rules about how the executive implements policy;

Funding community-based organizations that can both assist in effective policy implementation and organize against federal overreach;

Rewriting the basic structures of US government by blowing up the filibuster; Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico statehood; and overhauling the Supreme Court — though these remain far more contentious than the others.

The article notes that these goals require some difficult trade-offs, especially between efficiency and the restraint of power–not to mention the “major question” whether even a Congress dominated by Democrats would be capable of passing such reforms.

The Vox article has much more detail on the people and ideas that are involved with what we might call Project 2029. It’s well worth reading.

America has a lot of work to do.

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Apostasy And Politics

To continue the subject of White Christian nationalism…a recent book by Robert P. Jones is worth highlighting.

Jones is the founder and president of the Public Religion Research Institute, and the author of previous books exploring the intersection of religion and public life. His new book is Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy.  An interview with Jones in The Guardian , begins by noting that the book supports Godwin’s Law–the theory that as a discussion grows longer, the probability of invoking Nazis or Hitler approaches 100%.

Jones definitely goes there. He writes that “This is our 1933,” and he begins the book by detailing the rise of the Nazi party and the complicity of the German people, very much including Germany’s Christians and their churches.

Jones cites Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor imprisoned for opposing Hitler, remembered for the poem First They Came. But for the first four years of Hitler’s reign, he notes, Niemöller did not fully oppose the Nazis. He later regretted that he and the Protestant German church did not speak out sooner.

Jones argues that the current democratic “backslide” that America is experiencing is directly aided and abetted by an “apostate” white Christianity, and as evidence, he cites Trump’s language on the campaign trail.

This dehumanising language, talking about immigrants as vermin, and this racial purity language, like they’re ‘poisoning the blood of our country’. What does that mean? If they’re poisoning the blood, what’s the pure blood? We know where that story goes.”

This critique is not coming from an atheist or agnostic; Jones grew up as a Southern Baptist who went to church five times a week. He earned a master of divinity degree. His opinions are not those of an outsider to the Christian religion; they’re the result of research and the growing concerns he has expressed in several previous books. (He wrote The End of White Christian America in 2016, White Too Long in 2020 and The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future in 2023.)

In Jones’s diagnosis, white American Christianity has committed a profound act of apostasy by trading its spiritual core for political dominance. By endorsing anti-democratic tactics, white Christian institutions have become the primary engine behind the country’s autocratic slide.

Jones attributes this backsliding–this apostasy–to demographics, noting that In 2008, White Christians were 54% of the population. By 2014, that percentage was 47%, and today it is 41%.  Among White evangelicals, the decline has been even steeper. Today, they are barely 13% of the population. “Faced with shrinking numbers and cultural marginalisation, white evangelicalism embraced not spiritual renewal, but existential panic – creating fertile ground for Trump’s demagoguery.” White evangelicals have rallied to Trump’s promise to restore an America where their churches were powerful and most people looked like them.

Jones points out that the movement has abandoned its previous rhetoric of values in favor of an overtly anti-democratic Christian nationalism that says ‘We believe this country belongs to us, and we’re going to use the power we can to claim it.’” He notes that the relationship is overtly transactional: Trump essentially says “if you’re for me, I’ll be for you,” and evangelicals respond by forgiving and overlooking a “whole host of sins” for the promise that he is going to restore their dominance.

He acknowledges the extreme danger of giving “Christian warriors” like Hegseth and Vought the power to do enormous damage, but refuses to give in entirely to pessimism. He is encouraged by the emergence of the genuinely Christian voices I wrote about yesterday, and says that he hopes his book will help White Christians recognize that they face a decision not dissimilar to the one that confronted the Christians in Nazi Germany in 1933.

It’s a wake-up call to see the bright lines that are being crossed, to be clear-eyed about how dangerous that is, and for those readers who are Christian – particularly white and Christian – to realise we have a particular responsibility to offer a different version of faith. Because it is our faith that’s been hijacked and used to legitimise this illiberal, anti-democratic, authoritarian movement that’s running rampant and taking over in the US.

I want to believe that there are more Christians like Jones than there are like Pete Hegseth and Micah Beckwith…

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Those UnChristian Christian Nationalists

A recent article in the Guardian reported on a study of Christian nationalism in Great Britain., and apparently, the movement there has a lot in common with the one in America. Mostly, rampant hypocrisy.

The study is yet another addition to the copious available research showing that “Christian nationalism” is definitely nationalist, but not very Christian, “being driven largely by people who rarely attend church and are more concerned with defending the country’s Christian heritage.” In the group most closely identified with Britain’s Christian nationalism movement, just 13% attended church weekly, and fewer than a third (31%) prayed weekly. Only 47% expressed an interest in the Bible. They were, however, “strongly hostile to immigration and Islam.” Only 19% agreed that Christian values required welcoming and supporting asylum seekers and only 30% supported the equal treatment of religions in public life.

At a time when crosses have been carried at Unite the Kingdom rallies and crowds have chanted “Christ is King” at protests, the research challenges the idea that the growing prominence of Christian nationalism in Britain reflects a revival of Christianity.

Instead, the findings suggest that Christianity is increasingly being invoked as a marker of British identity amid wider anxieties about immigration, Islam and cultural change.

Sounds familiar.

The article quotes a bishop of the Church of England, who pointed to the important distinction between cultural Christianity and actual practising faith. Another cleric who was quoted focused on  the starkly different attitudes evidenced by those who are practising Christians, as compared with those who loudly claim the label.

Here in the U.S., those practicing Christians have finally begun speaking up about the (mis)use of the label. Christians Against Christian Nationalism is a national group established in 2019; it describes its mission as “a sustained effort to resist Christian nationalism and the threat it poses to our faith and to religious freedom for everyone.” Faithful America is a progressive Christian organizing group–it held a “Preach and Pray to Confront Christian Nationalism” event the weekend before Flag Day, an event that was cosponsored by other groups, including the evangelical Red Letter Christians and Vote Common Good. It also offers a preacher’s toolkit with background on Christian nationalism and Scriptural references, among other resources.

Perhaps the most interesting and positive sign of Christian resistance to the political use of Christianity is the unprecedented number of White Christian clergy and seminarians running for office as Democrats in the midterms. While Black Christian clergy have previously identified as Democrats and run for office, this year I’ve identified at least six White Christian pastors in addition to Texan James Talarico (a Christian seminarian) who are running for office as Democrats.

Interestingly, some come from evangelical backgrounds and–together with those from mainline denominations–have chosen to identify and run as Democrats and progressives in 2026. One is Lutheran minister and Iowa state senator, Sarah Trone Garriott. Another is Justin Douglas of Pennsylvania, who cites his Liberty University background (!) and 20 years in the ministry as reasons to support him.

I’ve been particularly fascinated by the candidacy of Kansas pastor Adam Hamilton, the senior pastor of the Resurrection, a United Methodist Church, which he grew to be the largest United Methodist congregation in the United States. Hamilton strongly supports separation of church and state, and defines Christian nationalism as an ideology that uses faith to draw lines between “us” and “them.” He has compared its extreme historical and ideological undercurrents to movements like the Ku Klux Klan and Nazism.

Sociologist Andrew Whitehead is a pre-eminent scholar of Christian nationalism. In his book Taking America Back for God, Whitehead wrote that

Christian nationalism prioritizes political power, privilege, and authoritarian consequentialism over democracy, choosing power over the teachings of Jesus…It justifies violence, demands exclusionary boundaries, and seeks dominance rather than serving marginalized communities.

These welcome (albeit overdue) efforts by genuinely religious Christians are incredibly important.

Those of us who are “other,” who are Jewish or Muslim or Atheist or “nothing in particular,” lack the credibility and authority to point out the multiple ways in which Christian nationalism deviates from actual Christian theology. That’s an argument that must be made by adherents who take the religion and tradition seriously.

Not that Indiana’s elected Christian nationalists–most prominently Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith, Attorney General Todd Rokita, or Senator Jim Banks– will listen…

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Let’s Hear It For Polarization

During a “catch-up” breakfast wth a good friend, the conversation turned to political polarization. My friend wondered aloud why political disputes today seem so much more antagonistic than when we were younger. My own theory–which will not come as a surprise to regular readers–is that we are no longer arguing about policy–we are arguing about values and morality, beliefs far less amenable to compromise.

Following our breakfast, I opened the day’s New York Times, and discovered–in an essay by Thomas Edsall –that a political scientist I respect has come to a very similar conclusion.

Lilliana Mason is a professor at Johns Hopkins University. In 2018, she authored “Uncivil Agreement,” a groundbreaking book about the the dramatic shift in political argumentation.

In the book, Mason described how in recent decades, on both the American right and left, voters’ multiple social identities — race, religion, ideology, cultural outlook and party affiliation — increasingly aligned. The result: Elections became matters of political life-or-death struggles as the parties turned into antagonistic social groups.

More recently, and more pertinently, in an article published in The Journal of Democracy, Mason argues that “Polarization Is Not the Problem.” I found her analysis dead-on. While I am among those who mourn the decline of civility–I wrote about it quite recently, as a matter of fact– I absolutely agree with her about the nature of the struggle we are having, and the danger of using a proposed return to more polite discourse as an excuse for a failure to confront it.

Mason wrote:

Partisan polarization is not the greatest threat to U.S. democracy, but a symptom of a deeper struggle over who belongs and deserves equal rights.

Rapid gains by racial minorities, women and L.G.B.T.Q. citizens have produced an ethno-nationalist backlash whose adherents now wield disproportionate power through the Republican Party. This conflict has intensified partisan animosity and moral disengagement, but a “both sides” diagnosis obscures the asymmetry between a faction seeking to reverse social progress and those resisting it.

Polarization is therefore less the disease than democracy’s immune response to an unpopular, anti-democratic movement.

Suppressing that response in the name of civility would only strengthen the movement and imperil pluralistic self-government. The United States can still become its most inclusive democracy, but only if leaders defend equal rights and voters hold accountable those who will not.

As the linked article points out, Mason is not a voice in the wilderness; her analysis is shared by other academics, both here and abroad. In a paper titled, “It’s Not Polarization; It’s the Radicalization of the Political Right,” an associate professor at the University of Amsterdam argues that there is a crisis across advanced democracies “resulting not from mutual divergence but from the one-sided transformation of the political right: the mainstreaming of authoritarian rhetoric, the normalization of conspiracy and hate as political strategies, and the systematic dismantling of institutional guardrails.” He argues that “Casting authoritarian threats as mutual breaches of etiquette is not simply a misdiagnosis: It is an abdication of responsibility.”

Yphtach Lelkes, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees, pointing out that in Germany before Hitler, Spain before Franco and Italy before Mussolini, mainstream political actors had been willing to accommodate authoritarian movements. He added that he takes “a Goldilocks view of polarization–Too little polarization leaves out the diversity of ideas, viewpoints and maybe even the anger needed to make progress. Too much polarization creates the conditions for many of the problems we’re seeing today.”

Marc Hetherington, who teaches at the University of North Carolina, argues that today’s polarization has resulted from a shift in what had previously constituted the dominant disagreement between Democrats and Republicans. The argument has shifted from a debate about how much government should do to a far more visceral “how much racial, social and cultural change should the U.S. engage in.” The debate now is a  disagreement about social change and the various “rights revolutions” that have benefited African Americans, women, and L.G.B.T.Q. folks. He argues that it is MAGA’s rejection of those racial, social, and cultural changes–changes that have produced greater equality for a range of previously marginalized groups– that is the primary source of today’s polarization.

Which brings me back to the analysis I shared with my friend at breakfast.

We no longer argue about how to achieve largely agreed-upon ends. We no longer argue about how government should go about combatting discrimination or poverty or ameliorating disease. Today’s Republicans are attacking the ends. They don’t want to combat discrimination or feed hungry children or ensure that Americans have access to health care.

We are inhabitants of different moral universes.

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