Chris Lange, FISM News
It’s an election year, a time when Americans are fed a steady diet of hyperbole with a generous side of apocalyptic warnings of impending doom, should one candidate or the other prevail.
For Democrats, “Christian nationalism” is the “hysteria du jour,” as one writer put it.
Biden campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt declared last week that “Trump allies” are working to “infuse ‘Christian nationalism’” into a possible second term for the former president. Though Hitt did not offer a precise definition of the term, she warned her social media followers that “Nationwide abortion bans, attacks on same-sex marriage, and restrictions on contraception” are the “horrifying reality being openly discussed by Team Trump and the likely architects of his second term agenda.”
Hitt’s tweet included a link to a recent Politico article warning that “an influential think tank close to Donald Trump is developing plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas in his administration.”
Writers Alexander Ward and Heidi Przybyla supported this assertion by pointing out that Trump speaks with Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget under the former president, “at least once a month.” Vought is the president of The Center for Renewing America, an organization that the article described as “a leading group in a conservative consortium preparing for a second Trump term.”
“CRA’s work fits into a broader effort by conservative, MAGA-leaning organizations to influence a future Trump White House,” they wrote, citing a “document drafted by CRA staff and fellows.” According to the article, the paper outlines key objectives for a second Trump administration, on which “‘Christian nationalism’ is one of the bullet points.”
Two paragraphs later, readers discover that “[t]he documents obtained by POLITICO do not outline specific Christian nationalist policies.”
Przybyla said during an appearance on MSNBC last week that Trump is surrounding himself with an “extremist element of conservative Christians” who support “so-called natural laws” in a quest to eliminate “abortion and LBGT rights,” as reported by Real Clear Politics.
“The thing that unites them as Christian nationalists…is that they believe that our rights as Americans and as all human beings do not come from any Earthly authority,” Przybla said. “They don’t come from Congress [or] from the Supreme Court, they come from God.”
The unmitigated horror!
She went on to issue a prescient warning that the country is dangerously close to being ruled by “men…determining what God is telling them.”
Other liberal outlets have similarly warned readers about the dangers posed by conservative Christians who vote.
USA Today, for instance, linked Trump supporters who believe in God-given rights to “the tragic events of Jan. 6, 2021,” pointing out that “a handful of the violent rioters donned explicitly Christian symbols.”
New York Times writer David French explained in an op-ed published this week that Christian nationalists – or “supremacists,” as he put it – are the “illiberal authoritarians who want to remake America in their own fundamentalist image” and dismantle the Constitution.
SO, WHAT, EXACTLY, IS CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM?
Jared Bridges, editor-in-chief for The Washington Stand, wrote in a recent column that “[t]here are probably more definitions for Christian nationalism currently than there ever were Christian nationalists — whatever that means.”
He noted that the Family Research Council explored the subject of Christian nationalism at a 2022 symposium and concluded that it is a term primarily used to describe Christians whose political beliefs and actions are guided by their faith.
Bridges pointed out, however, that “[f]or the American Left, the concept of Christian nationalism is simply a tool which they can use to draw lines against political action by those who oppose their agenda.”
He noted that “Veggie Tales” creator Phil Vischer described Christian nationalists as individuals who want “to suppress the vote of people who aren’t Christians.”
Vischer appeared in leftist filmmaker Rob Reiner’s documentary on the subject titled “God and Country.”
Reiner told Newsweek earlier this month that the movement traces its roots to the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that state segregation laws are unconstitutional.
“A big swath of the population…didn’t like this idea,” he said. “So, they created religious schools where they could keep Black people from integrating the schools,” sparking “this movement of bringing religion, or their idea of a religion, in maintaining the separation between Blacks and whites.”
Christian Post reporter Jon Brown wrote in a scathing review of the film that it “demonize[s] Christians with inflammatory insinuations that invoke the Third Reich, while at the same time deriding them for having a persecution complex because they fear a growing cultural hostility.”
Mark Tooley, a Christian Post op-ed contributor, said in a Feb. 24 article that the left “sweepingly deride[s] conventional Christian conservatives as Christian Nationalists.” He added, however, that there is a distinction between the two groups.
According to Tooley, Christian Nationalists tend to be “post-liberals who want some level of explicit state-established Christianity.” The American Conservative explained in a January 2022 article that conservative post-liberals “share a skepticism of globalization, both economic and military—often promoting a national industrial policy that would enable American self-reliance.”
Conversely, Christian conservatives, by Tooley’s definition, are essentially “classical liberals who affirm traditional American concepts of full religious liberty for all.”
Tooley explained that both groups want a “Christian America;” the difference is that Christian Nationalists “want it by statute.”
‘IF THIS IS CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM, SIGN ME UP!’
David Harsanyi, senior editor for The Federalist, recently referred to the left’s “‘Christian nationalism’ scare” as “a ginned-up partisan effort to spook non-Christian voters.”
Harsanyi, a self-described “nonbeliever,” pointed out, however, that Christian nationalism sounds a lot like “the case for American liberty offered in the Declaration of Independence.”
“The entire American project is contingent on accepting the notion that the state can’t give or take our God-given freedoms,” he wrote, concluding that Christian nationalism, therefore, represents “the best kind of ‘extremism.’”
Harsanyi also references a recent social media post by historian Tom Holland, who wrote: “This is the bind post-Christian America finds itself in. It can no longer appeal to a Creator as the author of its citizens’ rights, so [it] has to pretend that these rights somehow have an inherent existence: a notion requiring no less of a leap of faith than does belief in God.”