Category Archives: Religious Liberty

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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About Those “Christian” Nationalists

A few days ago, I participated in an event sponsored by the Fort Wayne chapter of Hoosiers United for Separation of Church and State. The keynote speaker was Randall Balmer. Balmer is probably America’s pre-eminent scholar of religious history–and an ordained Episcopalian minister– and the local members were justifiably excited to have secured him for the event.

Balmer has written copiously about religious liberty and Christian nationalism; his most recent book is “America’s Best Idea: The Separation of Church and State.” It follows such other titles as “Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right.” I have previously cited an important part of Balmer’s research showing that abortion had nothing to do with the rise of the political Right–that the “pro-life” movement was “developed” some six years after the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade as a cover for the actual motive behind the encouragement of Evangelical political participation, the loss of tax-exemptions by the racist segregation academies that had sprung up in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education.

In his lecture, Balmer took special aim at the intentional dishonesty of today’s so-called “originalists” who claim that the U.S. was intended to be a Christian nation. Because church-state separation has been a focus of my own scholarship, I was familiar with many of the examples he used to demolish that ahistorical belief–Notes on the State of Virginia, and other quotations from Jefferson, the unanimously endorsed Treaty of Tripoli (which began with the phrase that ” as the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,”) and several other examples that rather clearly show otherwise. But I was unfamiliar with several others: Isaac Backus, the Separatist Baptists of Massachusetts, and the Presbyterian Party of New York were all new to me.

Balmer also traced the origins of today’s Christian nationalists, and spent considerable time explaining the threat that politicized and unChristian movement poses to genuinely religious Americans–very much including authentic Christians.

I thought about that presentation a couple of days later, when I read a report from Talking Points Memo about a Hoosier (!) named Charles Haywood and a secretive, far-Right organization called the Society for American Civic Renewal, a men’s only, Christian-only group with “members that include the head of the Claremont Institute, venture capitalists, and GOP donors. It describes itself as aiming to place its members in influential positions in government and business.”

TPM cites to a piece by Eric Erickson that describes the organization as a group of white men (several in the “orbit” of Vice President JD Vance) who are “covertly inserting themselves into the conservative movement in order to propagate their white nationalist, anti-semitic, and Nazi sympathies.”

It’s hard not to wonder how many other secretive organizations exist–orginalizations not yet uncovered that may be working alongside the Society for American Civic Renewal (and the Proud Boys and the Patriot Front and several others) to redefine America and reject the clear language and philosophy of the country’s founding documents and the equally clear intent of the Founders who drafted those documents.

One of the important observations made by scholars like Balmer is the inextricable connection of White Christian nationalism with racism and other other assorted bigotries. Christian nationalists promote White supremacy in a variety of ways– not just by openly attacking minorities, but by insisting that White Americans are the “prototypical” Americans, and attributing positive traits like intelligence and hard work specifically to White Americans compared to other racial groups. (We can see how well that’s working out at Hegseth’s “Department of War.”)

Christian nationalists (mis)use religious language to drive partisan and racial solidarity among White Americans, and to promote White supremacy.

Among the groups identified by Wikipedia as White Supremacy organizations operating within the U.S. are several explicitly “Christian” ones, including the Christian Defense League, the Christian Nationalist Crusade, the Christian Patriot movement…(I hadn’t heard of these organizations, but somehow, I have the feeling that Micah Beckwith, Indiana’s Christian nationalist Lieutenant Governor, is intimately familiar with them…)

I think that ordinary Americans are beginning to awaken to the multiple dangers of White Christian nationalism. The robust turnout in Fort Wayne –and the frequent applause interrupting Balmer’s lecture and our subsequent “conversation”–are signs that real Americans, religious and not, are coming to recognize how profoundly unAmerican this movement is.

There’s a reason so many of these White “Christian” nationalist groups are secret.

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It’s All About “The Other”

Give credit to Donald Trump for one (unintended) honesty: his own racism has made it acceptable for his supporters to express  bigotries that “politically correct” social norms had suppressed. MAGA and Trump have made it impossible to think–as I naively did when we elected Obama–that America was emerging from our original sin, the fear and hatred of “the other.”

Blatantly racist rhetoric has re-emerged with a vengeance. A recent New York Times article quoted white nationalist Nick Fuentes, a prominent Right influencer, explaining that the war on immigrants was a lost cause, that the “Country’s over. We’re already a non-white country.”

For a substantial portion of the American population–and let’s be honest here, it is the portion that still supports Trump–“real” America is a straight, male-dominated White “Christian” nation. Equal status for women, gays ,non-Christians and/or people of color is unthinkable in the country of their fond imagination.

It really is impossible to ignore the virulent racism at the heart of the MAGA movement. In states like Florida and Texas, where governing bodies are controlled by today’s MAGA GOP, the effort to root out “woke” instruction at state universities has accompanied the widespread attacks on that hated DEI. Another Times article has reported on a recent effort at Texas Tech, where officials are using A.I. to identify books and other materials that include topics like sexual orientation and gender identity. The former state lawmaker who heads the five-university system, is spearheading the effort to eliminate what he has called “quite a bit of garbage in curriculum” and has called diversity concerns “leftist loyalty oaths.” (He also says that universities should focus “on degrees that employers want,” equating education with job training.)

ABC news recently reported that Trump wants to remove the tax exemption for private colleges with policies the administration believes are DEI. That proposal would strip private schools and colleges of their tax-exempt status if they provide any sort of targeted help to students based on their race.

The evidence that racism and other assorted bigotries are the heart and soul of MAGA and the Trump administration is too long-lasting and too widespread to ignore.

There was the 2017 travel ban on people from several majority-Muslim countries. The 2018 family separation policy focused disproportionately on Latino migrant families. Trump’s trademark, childish insults include his characterization of Haiti and African nations as “shithole” countries, and his discontinuation of protected status for Haitian immigrants in a shocking contrast to his invitation to and favorable treatment of White South Africans.

A jaunt down memory lane adds to the evidence.

Who can forget his response to the white nationalist riot in Charlottesville, where participants carrying tiki torches chanted “Jews shall not replace us.” Trump insisted that there were “very fine people on both sides.”

How can we miss the racism prompting his persistent attacks on “the Squad,” four Democratic congresswomen of color, especially his telling them to “go back’ to their own countries? Three of the four were born in the U.S. and the other is a naturalized citizen. (Evidently, in Trumpworld, only White folks are really citizens.) 

Trump rose to political prominence with his racist “birtherism” attacks on Obama. He accused a Judge who ruled against Trump University of bias because of his Mexican heritage. He renamed COVID a “Chinese Virus”–an accusation that led to a surge in anti-Asian harassment.  

His anti-immigration campaign has been a constant effort to dehumanize immigrants of color: he has called immigrants vermin and animals, referred to them as aliens and “people with bad genes.” His rhetoric is increasingly compared to  language employed by Hitler in the run-up to the Holocaust.

And perhaps worst–and most telling–of all, the Trump administration has unleashed a lawless assault by masked ICE goons  disproportionately targeting Black and Latino communities, and–despite insisting that they were focusing on “the worst of the worst”– arresting and deporting thousands of immigrants with absolutely no criminal record.

There’s more, of course. Every day it becomes clearer that racism–by which I mean hatred of anyone considered “other”– is the very core of this administration and the MAGA movement. Those of us who continue to wonder how any sane American can support this monumentally corrupt (and increasingly insane) President and his administration of incompetents, grifters and cranks are overlooking the obvious.

My youngest son said it best, after the 2016 election. There are only two kinds of Trump supporters: those for whom the racism resonates, and those for whom it isn’t disqualifying.

 
 
 
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An Upcoming Presentation

On September 19th, I will participate in a program sponsored by the Fort Wayne chapter of Citizens United for Separation of Church and State. The headliner will be Randall Balmer, America’s most eminent religious historian, so I am honored to be included.

The upcoming program is especially timely in Red Indiana, where citizens are embarrassed daily by the Christian nationalists running our state government–most notably Lt. Governor Micah Beckwith, who favors us daily with evidence that he has no acquaintance with the Constitution, and Attorney General Todd Rokita, who panders incessently to MAGA Hoosiers, no matter how unrelated the topic to his official responsibilities.

In a speech in 2004, I explained why “Separation of Church and State is good for the Church and necessary for the State.” I chose that title because if you listen to the rhetoric around church-state issues favored by today’s “Christian” nationalists, you’d never know that the wall of separation contemplated by Jefferson and Madison was seen as an important protection for both authentic religion and government. 

Permit me to offer a bit of accurate history.

James Madison’s views on religious liberty dominated the Constitutional Convention. Madison based his understanding of natural rights and the role of the state on Locke’s “social compact” and he recognized that–  because the exercise of religion requires that each person follow his own conscience– it is a particular kind of natural right. Since opinions and beliefs can be shaped only by individual consideration of evidence that a particular individual finds persuasive, no one can really impose opinions on any one else.

Unlike property, or even speech, Madison insisted that the state simply has no jurisdiction over religion. A just state, in Madison’s view, cannot use religion to classify citizens, and it can neither privilege nor penalize citizens on account of religion.

Madison was hardly alone. Roger Williams, the clergyman who founded Rhode Island in 1636, coined the phrase “a wall of separation” a full 150 years before Thomas Jefferson used it.

We sometimes overlook the importance 18th and 19th century Christians placed upon liberty of conscience—what they called “soul freedom.” Such views were most strongly held by Mennonites, Quakers and Baptists, but they were also part of the beliefs of colonial era Episcopalians, Methodists and Presbyterians.

I often quote John Leland (1754-1841), a traveling evangelical Baptist with strong views of the individual’s relationship to God, the inviolability of the individual conscience, and the limited nature of human knowledge. Leland wrote, “religion is a matter between God and individuals; religious opinions of men not being the objects of civil government, nor in any way under its control.” He also wrote that “the state has no right or leave to concern itself with the beliefs of an individual or that individual’s right to expound those beliefs…The state is to maintain order, not to judge right and wrong.”

My very favorite Leland quote is: “The very tendency of religious establishments by human law is to make some hypocrites and the rest fools; they are calculated to destroy those very virtues that religion is designed to build up…Government has no more to do with the religious opinions of men than it has with the principles of mathematics.”

Were there people who lived at the same time as Madison and Leland who felt otherwise? Of course there were. But it was the position of Madison and Leland that prevailed; it was their view of the proper relationship (which might more accurately be described as the proper lack of a relationship) between church and state that became part of our constitutional structure.

Today, in addition to rampant historical revisionism, there are two common justifications for allowing government to take cognizance of religion—arguments that are mutually exclusive, although often offered by the same people. They are sometimes called the instrumental argument, and the ceremonial justification.

The instrumental argument is best summarized by a bumper sticker that was popular a few years ago: something along the lines of “When prayer was removed from the classroom, guns and teenage pregnancy came in.” (I didn’t say it was a logical argument.) This naive belief that exposure to a denatured and generic religion in the classroom will make students behave is exactly the same justification given for current efforts to post the Ten Commandments—if people see “Thou shalt not kill” on the wall of a public building, well, they won’t kill. (For complex theological reasons I do not understand, this evidently doesn’t work if the building is privately owned.)

Unfortunately, available evidence does not support this belief in the magical powers of religious iconography. The United States is by far the most religious of all the western industrialized nations—and we are also the most violent. The instrumental argument for supporting public religion and prayer is basically “my religion is good for people, so the state should impose it.”

The ceremonial defense of public religion, on the other hand, is the argument that prayer has no effect at all–that it’s meaningless. This is the argument that prayers at graduations and similar venues are merely “traditional” and “ceremonial.” Genuine people of faith find such characterizations deeply offensive. No religion I know of sanctions the notion that prayer is void of particularistic significance and useful only as an archaic (albeit charming) tradition.

This nation’s Founders believed that government neutrality in matters of religious belief was essential if government was to be seen as legitimate, and if genuine religious sentiment was to flourish. You only need look at nations without a First Amendment to see how right they were; European countries have seen state-sponsored religions degenerate into pleasant rituals without vitality, while nations like Iran have employed the force of the state in the service of religious conformity. Both alternatives are instructive.

The Founders would be appalled by our contemporary “Christian” Taliban.

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A Ban On No-Fault Divorce?

When women assert that bans on abortion are part of a wide-ranging war on women, the pious “Christian” activists behind these bans are deeply offended. They are simply trying to protect innocent pre-born babies with those bans! (If a few women with problem pregnancies die as a result, their pro-life beliefs evidently aren’t implicated.) They have no response when we point out that an actual concern for babies would be accompanied by concerns for the well-being of those babies once they emerge from the womb–and that no such concern is being evidenced.

But abortion bans and urges to revert to a “tradwife” existence aren’t the only evidence of a war on women. Christian nationalists keep trying to curtail access to birth control, and there is a little-noticed movement to keep women from leaving abusive marriages.

Lincoln Square recently reported on the growing GOP plan to ban no-fault divorce. According to the report, the White Christian nationalists who currently lead our government want to end no-fault divorce, and  several states have legislation in the works to do just that.

Research shows that in the wake of no-fault divorce, which allows women to leave marriages without having to prove adultery or abuse, domestic violence dropped 30%. Female suicide dropped 16%. Incidents in which women were killed by their husbands or domestic partners dropped 10%.

Lincoln Square looked at the data from Texas, which is considering legislation to repeal no-fault divorce. It found that 99% of Texas divorces are no-fault, and 70% of Texas divorces are filed by women. Under the proposed new guidelines, any woman who filed for divorce would have to be “approved,” and in many cases, the law would require both people in the marriage to agree to the divorce. As the author wryly notes, “Yes. That’s right. A man can abuse his wife, and then block her from leaving the marriage so that he can continue abusing her.”

The AP has looked at the broader movement to repeal no-fault divorce, noting that Republican Party platforms in Texas and Nebraska were amended in 2022 to call for the removal of no-fault divorce and that Louisiana’s Republican Party had considered something similar but declined to do so.

In January, Oklahoma Republican Sen. Dusty Deevers introduced legislation that would have removed married couples from filing for divorce on the grounds of incompatibility. Deevers backed the bill after writing a piece declaring no-fault divorce was an “abolition of marital obligation.”

Similarly, in South Carolina, two Republican lawmakers in 2023 filed a bill that would have required both spouses to file for a no-fault divorce application rather than just one. And in South Dakota, a Republican lawmaker has attempted to remove irreconcilable difference as grounds for divorce since 2020.

None of the sponsors of these bills responded to interview requests from The Associated Press. All are members of their state’s conservative Freedom Caucus.

California was the first state to adopt no-fault divorce in 1969, and other states soon followed. Before that change, anyone wanting a divorce had to prove that their spouse had violated one of the enumerated “faults” recognized by their state. Faults that qualified varied from state to state, but usually included infidelity, incarceration or abandonment.

The system was a particular burden on domestic violence victims, often times women, who could be stuck in dangerous marriages while they try to prove their partner’s abuse in court through expensive and lengthy legal proceedings.

Christian F. Nunes, then-president of the National Organization for Women, became “extremely worried” about the movement to repeal no-fault divorce when Trump won the 2024 election, and Republicans gained control of Congress and trifectas in a number of  states.

“With so many states focusing on a misogynistic legislative agenda, this will turn back the clocks on women’s rights even more,” Nunes said in a statement. “This is why removing ‘no fault’ divorce is another way for the government to control women, their bodies, and their lives.”

Those concerns about the administration’s agenda have grown, as Vice-President Vance has moved steadily to the Right; in a speech in 2021, he lamented that divorce is too easily accessible and criticized laws allowing people to “shift spouses like they change their underwear.” And among the lesser-known proposals in Project 2025–many of which the Trump administration is pursuing–was ending no-fault divorce.

The only consistent through-line of the Trump agenda is its racism and misogyny. The War on Women is only one reason to Vote Blue No Matter Who in November, but it’s an extremely important one.

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