Christian Nationalism Examined: A Call for Inclusion and Faithful Representation with Philip Amerson

Greetings. This is Phil Amerson with the podcast

To Be and To Do. And, today, I

wanna do a little, sharing with you around the whole

notion of Christian nationalism.

In Indiana, we have a lieutenant governor who Micah

Beckwith, who is a pastor, and he,

claims that he's a Christian nationalist. And recently,

he actually talked about how important it was to

close out, funding for diversity, equity, and

inclusion, saying it was a way to get back to what god

intended for America. You know,

the so called Christian nationalism is mushroomed across

our nation and body politics. There have been lots of books,

that have pointed this out. Andrew Whitehead, who

teaches at Indiana University in Indianapolis,

wrote one entitled taking America back for God.

Tim Alberta has written a wonderful book entitled The Kingdom, The

Power, and the Glory. I encourage you to take a look at

either one of those books. Part of what they help us know

is that this is not a new phenomenon.

It is something that's reappearing, buried deeply in the

soils of our common life. I suspect

if you're like me, when you were in elementary school

or junior high, you learned the long, long

word, antidisestablishmentarianism.

I learned that it was the longest word in the English language. Later, I found

out it's not quite. It only has 28 letters.

So according to the Merriam Webster dictionary, it's the

fourth longest word. I won't try

to spell or pronounce the top three,

but the folks at Merriam West Webster say that,

anti disestablishmentarianism

is little used, and so maybe it doesn't qualify

for the dictionary any longer. But let me tell you something

about the history because it's related to Christian nationalism.

Anti disestablishmentarianism arose

from historic struggles in Britain over the role of

religion in the government. The

word argues religion, the Church of England in this

case, should get special privileges,

government benefits, support, and patronage.

Increasingly, I think this is one of the

challenges we face in The United States.

Some think that this nation should be exclusively

Christian. This form of Christianity is

called dominionism. It's it's that we're to have

dominion over everything else, and, really, the Christian

should be the ones in charge.

This is called a restorationist project to restore

The United States to what it originally was. Of

course, this is a simplistic narrative

about our nation's founding that isn't rooted in reality.

There were many cultural and religious expressions.

Even Jefferson referred to our nation as a

great experiment of where there's diversity that's a

part of our religious structures.

In fact, the first amendment of the US constitution known

as the establishment clause. Do

you hear that? Anti disestablishment clarivance.

What's the word again? Opens with these words.

Congress shall make no law

respecting the an establishment of

religion or prohibiting the free exercise

thereof. So The United States was

something fresh, never seen before.

It was birthed as the American experiment, something

untethered to a monarch or a single

religious set of beliefs or church.

Evangelical scholar Kevin DeYoung acknowledges

an understandable hunger right now among Christians

for something like Christian nationalism.

However, he concludes, after looking at some of

the books that have been published supporting this restorationist

belief, that biblical instincts are

better than nationalistic ones, And

the ethos of Christian nationalism projects

of the Christian nationalism project fails,

he says, the biblical smell

test. Kevin DeYoung offers a clear

window on the rootage of such narrowly

drawn beliefs that are rooted more

in grievance than research. He says,

quote, the message that ethnicities

should make that that ethnicities should mix,

that heretics can be killed, that violent revolution

is already justified, and that our nation

needs a charismatic C like leader to

rise raise our consciousness and galvanize the will of the

people may bear resemblance to certain blood

and soil nationalisms of the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries. But de Young says

it's not a nationalism that honors and represents the

name of Christ. He concludes Christian

nationalism isn't the answer the church or our

nation needs. I

agree. As a teenager in the early nineteen sixties, I

remember sermons in churches where I attended

where it was said that if John Kennedy were elected,

our nation would become Roman Catholic, and the pope would

control everything that happened. A majority of US

voters fortunately didn't buy that argument, and

we were blessed with the gift of John Kennedy

with all his faults, he still helped us open

wider the doors of what it means to be

a nation that welcomes everyone.

Then a few years after Kennedy was elected,

in my early adulthood, I remember hearing the

evangelist Tom Speaker, an African American

preacher who I can recall said,

All the pictures of Christ that I saw were Anglo Saxon,

middle class. He was a Protestant Republican.

He said, There is no way that I could relate to that kind of Christ.

Skinner painted the image of a white Jesus

wrapped in an American flag. He was

saying that Jesus long marketed by the

American church wasn't a faithful representation

of the dark skinned Jesus of the

gospel. Teaching in a United

Methodist school in The Republic Of Panama

in those years, I was further shaped by the

awareness that the Christian faith and the Christian

church is so much broader. Today,

Christian nationalism continues to market a fraudulent version

of who Christ was and who he is for us

today. Some call for a

great replacement, where non

Christians are moved out of power and out of

the country. They're engaged in some kind

of plot to give birthright privilege to white

Americans. You remember that awful

torchlight parade and the chant in Charlottesville,

Virginia in 2017. Don't you wear

carrying the torch? White nationalists were

chanting, Jews will not replace us.

Such entitlement beliefs are not only

profoundly racist and antisemitic, but they

are not faithful to US history or the Christian

message. Whether as Christians

or patriotic Americans or both, how shall we respond?

Well, let me close by remembering the words of a British

Methodist preacher, a fellow named Donald English, who

used to carry his soapbox into Hyde Park in London,

and he would preach in the afternoons. And one of the

great lines that he would deliver when he was preaching

was, the world has enough

salesman of the gospel. What we

need now are a more are more free

samples. This is Philip Amerson

wishing you the best in saying, let's be a sample for what

Christianity really is about, and it's not about

excluding anyone. God bless.