"Justice Takes Sides"

At the start of advent, we created a prayer chain with the kids out of construction paper. They wrote a prayer on a strip of paper, like “God, help people plant more gardens,” or “thank you for my friend” or “stop the coronavirus.” 

We looped them together, removing one prayer a day until Christmas. Since the kids had to think up an entire month’s worth of prayers, my husband Drew and I helped. I had to laugh when Drew took it up a notch”

“Hey, kids, let’s talk about the threat of Christian Nationalism.”

Christian nationalism is on a lot of people’s minds with the 2020 election fresh in the rearview and inauguration day still ahead. Christianity began 2,000 years ago in the Middle East. Christian Nationalism offers an appropriation of Christian theology. It’s a dangerous ideological framework that props up Western pride — God and country.

A conservative version of the cut and paste religiosity preferred by the general population, Christian Nationalism is a hollow take on the historic Christianity. By definition, it seeks to protect dominant culture and maintain the status quo. 

When Rod Dreher wrote The Benedict Option in 2017, I read the book with interest and came away with mixed emotions. A few years ago, I thought that there was something alluring about creating a new Christian version of Amish or Orthodox Jewish pods that are self-sufficient and a-cultural. I wondered whether would it feel like release to opt out instead of being in a defensive posture about my religious identity, or othered in culture. 

Dreher’s new book, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents—with its punchy subtitle and dust jacket that could double for a a post-soviet punk flyer—includes interviews with Russian dissidents who were oppressed for their Christianity and agitating for democracy. In the book, Dreher talks about a slighter and harder to spot form of totalitarianism, which he calls a “soft totalitarianism” where identity politics pushes Evangelicals to the margins. 

Dangerously, Dreher’s argument of the American left’s bent towards soft totalitarianism in Live Not by Lies lines up nicely with Christian nationalist tenets. Dreher is claiming that the left is a “soft totalitarian” threat. But at the same time we have Trump trying to actively overturn the will of the people, knocking over all kinds of democratic norms, calling for opponents to be put on trial for treason, and cozying up to dictators. I’d call that hard totalitarianism from our outgoing president. 

Theologian and Voices Underground Executive Director Gregory Thompson deftly critiques Dreher’s book here, and I hope you’ll read this really excellent take. Thompson writes:

“Dreher has produced a historically reductive, relationally tribal, intellectually superficial, and profoundly self-absorbed work that actually performs what it protests. In the end, this is not a work of Christian dissidence, but of Cold War anxiety.”

Clearly, several arguments are askew in Live Not by Lies, which as a companion to The Benedict Option argues that Christians should live in a suspicious posture and be prepared for coming oppression. It’s not lost on me that conjuring up Cold War imagery strikes a chord with premillennial dispensationalists like my dad who read the book of Revelation in a “literal” interpretation, waiting for the “great king of the north” (that’s Russia) to strike. Clearly, this book will resonate deeply with white boomers who are threatened by a loss of dominance and continue to prepare for the end of days. It’s candy.

A more scathing point from Thompson’s essay highlights how Dreher goes to great pains to travel the world looking for dissidents, when there are a plethora of black and brown dissidents here at home:

“How is it possible that in a book whose goal is to resist totalitarianism in America, the community that has laboured most faithfully to do so is completely ignored?

The reason, of course, is that they do not fit Dreher’s narrative. Unlike Dreher, the African American dissident tradition is clear-eyed about the illiberalism of America. Unlike Dreher, they know that the greatest threat to human dignity and freedom in America is not from outside but from within. Unlike Dreher, they know that a totalitarian state fueled by ideology and maintained by state violence is not a future potential but a past and present reality. Unlike Dreher, they know that hazy evocations of “old fashioned liberalism” conceal a willed naïveté and a cold indifference.”

Last month, I watched a lecture with Color of Compromise author and historian Jemar Tisby. He called out Christian Nationalism as a great current threat: an ideology that conflates Christian identity with American politics. 

But after the election as the pandemic rages on, Tisby also declared that we are "living in a time of rare moral clarity." 

Instead of jumping to a “let's come together” narrative as the church, Tisby argued that we first need to call out a few things: Masks prevent Covid. There was no election fraud. "Justice takes sides,” Tisby told the group. “You can't play the middle between right and wrong."

That right and wrong is rooted in Jesus’s liberation, of his care for the oppressed. It is not reactive or defensive. Jesus is pressed on all sides, and executed by political forces. Yet there is no fear on the cross, but victory through resurrection.

My high school boyfriend used to talk with young seriousness about the separation of church and state, which he’d heard about from his dad, a Lutheran seminarian. I would rather had been ordering Mr. Mistees from the DQ drive through and making out at the seminary lake in between cherry sips than talking about freedom of speech, but the conversation stuck with me. 

We know that America is better and democracy is upheld when all creeds, colors, religions, and beliefs are made welcome. And Christian Nationalism is a force casting many voices to the margins in order to grasp power for one particular group.

Join me in resisting a Christian life built on fear and defenses. Join me in calling out attempts to drive the focus away from practical needs of millions and instead settle on a politicalization of the Western church. Join me in denouncing Christian nationalism along with white supremacy and any other attempt to suppress many to protect the comfort and privilege of few.