At long last, the religious mainstream is starting to move against the poison of fundamentalist extremists who are being identified as Christian Nationalists. This is long, long overdue and it must be encouraged as much as possible.
Christian Nationalists are those providing the grassroots energy behind the fascist political campaigns of the miserable, failing Donald Trump and his chosen vice-presidential running mate, J.D. Vance.
They are so extremely anti-woman that it has been only in the most recent period that their true colors have become evident in the form of their advocacy for a total ban on abortion, which means a total ban on the right of women to determine what happens to their own bodies.
In what are baby steps but still critical, there are some mainstream churches that are beginning to take this Christian Nationalism head on, including in the form of a YouTube video of a sermon in Texas by state legislator James Talarico, whose powerful words in front of a church congregation correctly asserts that Christian Nationalism is the absolute opposite of true faith rooted in love and against arbitrary control and dominion.
This Sunday, the Rock Spring Congregational United Church of Christ in Arlington, Virginia, is slated to host a seminar led by Dr. Greg Carey entitled, “Christian Nationalism: What It Is and Why It’s Dangerous for Democracy and the Gospel.” It will answer the question of “why Christian Nationalism runs contrary to the gospel and undermines a democratic society,” according to an advertisement.
These first steps are undoubtedly being repeated elsewhere, and I hope it will become a major force this fall in advance of the November U.S. presidential election where the terrifying prospect of the election of Trump-Vance could spiral the world toward chaos and world war.
Up until now, mainstream and progressive churches and synagogues have by and large operated under a general “live and let live” policy concerning different faiths, respecting the rights of individuals and groups to find their own ways in the pursuit of truth and faith. However, in the case of Christian Nationalism, in particular, this can no longer suffice, and the recent shift in attitudes on this question is coming none too soon.
I was a seminarian who graduated with a master’s degree with honors in the late 1960s, in the midst of the acute social ferment of that decade that sought civil rights and an end to the terrible war in Vietnam and suffered the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Democratic presidential front runnier Robert Kennedy, inner city riots, the violent 1968 Democratic national convention in Chicago, the rise of the hippie counterculture in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury and an ongoing profound chaos.
It was clear then, as it is now, that powerful reactionary forces were at work to undermine the efforts at peace and the extension of the promises of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution to elements in our society who were denied them up to that point.
This was the world that gave rise to Donald Trump, who was decidedly on the wrong side of all this, aligned with the brutal “counterinsurgency” efforts through the 1970s to suppress these impulses that resulted in the reactionary administration of Ronald Reagan by 1980.
I, for one, was dismayed by what I saw as a wholesale abandonment of the causes of peace and liberty by the mainstream and progressive religious institutions in that era and a retreat to a form of non-involvement that as a result handed over the reigns of religious leadership to the rising Christian Right.
For the first time in that decade, conservative Christians were retooled to become political and to intervene in the electoral process that got Reagan elected and much more.
We’ve seen in the last 40 years or so what the effects of that have been, and now what passes for Christianity in the minds of so many, including those in the media, is a pale and distant reflection of the robust advocacy of Dr. King and others from back in the 1960s.
So it is high time now for this to change.