 |
| Straight White American Jesus argues that Christian Nationalism is the greatest threat to both American democracy and Christianity. |
Today we heard a talk on campus arguing that Christian nationalism is a myth - by which the speaker seemed to mean that it is made up, not real, just a "bogeyman" used to accuse one's political opponents and to scare voters.
Offered as evidence for this was Mark Hall's book Who's Afraid of Christian Nationalism: Why Christian Nationalism is not an Existential Threat to America or the Church. The book argues that the threat of Christian Nationalism is exaggerated, not that Christian Nationalism is a just a myth.
Christian Nationalism is the conflation of the state/nation with Christianity, when the interests of the state and the interests of Christianity are fused. It could be briefly defined as “an ideology that idealizes and advocates for a fusion of American civic life with a particular type of Christian identity and culture.” Of course this is a real thing. While we can debate the threat level of this ideology, its reality and role in American culture seems beyond question at this point. It is also a well-documented phenomenon in other parts of the world - such as in the far right Christian movements in Poland.
There is not one Christian Nationalist party or organization that we can point to; it is a more diffuse phenomenon. Catherine Wessinger, the well-known scholar of new and radical religious movements, sees Christian Nationalism as part the "Euro-American Nativist Millennial Movement" which has existed at least since the early twentieth century. It is a milieu, as described in 1972 by Colin Campbell as "an underground region where true seekers test hidden, forgotten, and forbidden knowledge." In this sense, it is a set of culturally proscribed ideas, phrases, beliefs, attitudes, and sentiments that emerge now and again as movements, parties, and groups.
While Christian Nationalism is a real thing and a real threat, there is no doubt that the term has been used loosely by people on the Left to condemn and shut down people on the right. It has been rolled out too often, finding Christian nationalists everywhere. It has been used reductively to exclude conservatives without allowing them to have nuanced positions. It has played a role in cancel culture and used to discount people without sufficient hearing.
Denying the reality of Christian Nationalism is disingenuous. The term points to a real problem. However, we shouldn't use it to paint with too broad a brush - not all Christian conservatives are Christian nationalists.
 |
| Hank Hanegraaf tells us that "Wokeism is the most dangerous cult in the world. |
In this way, it is similar to the way "Wokeism" has been used on the Right.
Wokeism, at its core, is simply becoming aware that one's life is embedded in a field of power relations and that some of those power relations leverage the concept of race as a political tool.
In this sense, wokeism has its roots in the idea of "critical consciousness" theorized by Paulo Freire in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in English in 1970. For Freire, critical consciousness is a process by which oppressed people come to understand the social forces that produced or contributed to the disadvantaged and disenfranchised conditions of their lives. By "reading the world" in a way that made power relations apparent, oppressed people could develop agency and work for better lives and a better world.
In a sense - if I can stretch the metaphor a bit - this is what Thomas Jefferson was doing in the Declaration. His list of monarchical abuses was an attempt to raise the consciousness of colonial Americans by making apparent the social forces that were contributing to their disenfranchisement and then encouraging them to take revolutionary action to change their situation.
Has wokeism been "taken too far" or been overextended and misused? Of course, it has been used to over-politicize situations, to cancel political opponents, and used to find injustice everywhere. It has been disruptive to community life in various ways. It has been weaponized by even relatively privileged people to justify absurdities.
But it has also been misused by the Right to shut down minority communities and their valid complaints. It has been used in an uncompassionate way to justify not listening to others and not caring for other people and their struggles, and to mock and ridicule political opponents just to win a political point. It has been used to dismiss without consideration the real social and cultural shaping of our reality. It has become a rallying point of disinformation - such as all the controversy on social media over women's boxing at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.
Both these terms have been unfairly and inaccurately weaponized in the political fights of our day - these political struggles aren't petty, there is actually a lot at stake. But if we value our pluralist democracy, we need to be better about not reducing these idea to shallow tropes and dismissing our opponents with overly-generalized mischaracterizations.
