A Nation of Christians Is Not Necessarily a Christian Nation

We cannot equate Christian power with Christian justice.

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Of all the remembrances of January 6, the most searing for me was a simple tweet thread. It came from a Presbyterian pastor named Duke Kwon, and it was a photo compilation of Christian imagery on January 6. There were crosses, Bibles, public prayers, and Christian flags amid the tear gas. In fact, Christian flags and symbols were on the front lines of the fighting, carried like men used to carry regimental colors into battle. 

It’s hard to think of the worst image, but the picture below—which combines the Christian flag with an American flag and a Trump flag—almost perfectly captures the syncretism of Trumpist Christianity:

I’ve written at length about Christian nationalism generally and the specific version of Christianity that was suffused throughout Trump’s effort to steal a national election. But I want to write about something a bit different, about the definition of a “Christian nation” and the sense that America is (or was) a Christian nation that is now moving to a “post-Christian” future where it will become increasingly difficult for faithful Christians to find a home here and to feel welcome in their own communities.

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  1. Kurt Von Fuchs

    Great article thank you David. The cynic in me says it would've been much easier when you first asked a question did you say no no no. I do have one point of difference, the various Christian factions in America and around the world often take wildly diverse interpretations of the gospel of Jesus. I do not believe we all worship the same God.

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    Alyssa

    I am a Christian who no longer fits anywhere, politically. The past events have done more to encourage my walk with Christ than the previous decades. For all of us who believe, what is happening in the world should be contrasted in sharp relief against the mercy and grace we're offered and should be offering. We have politically charged, fear-based messaging from the "church" that only God can overcome.
    That being said, your essays are a breath of fresh air and prove I am not actually alone. Thank you for hearing and speaking truth. You provoke thought and conversation in a winsome way and your faithfulness is GREATLY appreciated!

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    Ben Connelly

    Was Israel a Jewish nation in the Old Testament? It sure didn’t always live up to that. I realize that’s very different because it was established as a Jewish nation in a way that we were most definitely not. There was no antidisestablishmententarianism. But I still think it’s an instructive comparison.

    There’s no doubt that America is becoming a more secular nation. There are good and bad things about this. Tom Wolfe gave an excellent lecture (at Brown I believe) in the year I was born in which he argued that Nietzsche was right and that humanity had killed God. I think it’s undeniable that the prevailing forces and trends in our society are pushing against religion and tradition and community. I don’t think an integralist approach is the answer. But neither do I think the phenomenon doesn’t exist.

    My larger point, David, is that you can be entirely right in everything you’ve said in this column and still be leaving out important details, out of your desire to challenge your audience rather than confirm their preexisting beliefs.

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    Rosey

    Unpacking this "Christian Nation" topic begins with recognizing a type or class of Law that underpins social contracts, at an existential survival level. They are Nature's Laws. The negative effects of their violations are baked into them, the positive effects are their natural fruit. Homo sapiens have followed these rules so long they are baked into our DNA. They inform the casts and story lines of our mythologies. Over millions of years of survival, tribes that learned and sustained these existential rules by rituals and manners couched them in terms of a Divine agency. This narrative informs, for example, the very popular writing of Dr. Jordan Peterson today.

    It is obvious to me that 17th and 18th Christianity and the non-sectarian champions of the Enlightenment were educated and informed by these Natural Laws. More precisely, these Natural Laws were the baby in the sectarian (Christian) bath tub. Hence, our Founders rejected the establishment of a state church -- bath water, for the Bill of Rights -- Natural Law's baby.

    All the above to say Christian America is politically broken hearted because Christianity has lost its voice in defense of Natural Law. There is a lot of nuance to this. For example, Natural Law informs us empirically that males and females are similar in specie but materially dissimilar in biology and psychology. Recognizing and enshrining these differences are elemental to our survival, such as the nurturing of nuclear (male-female pair led) families, transmission of knowledge by respect of social hierarchies, and such. So the Natural Law codifications are, for example, do not commit adultery, honor your father and mother, do not steal, do not murder, and so on.

    No doubt, some of the Church's public repudiation is well deserved, such as its hypocrisy of unpunished pedophilia -- which is clearly a bug, not a feature. Or Islam's apartheid racism against non-Muslims -- clearly a feature, not a bug.

    Obviously, a full throated treatment of this topic is book length, so I'll conclude with this. The real problem with this "Are we a Christian Nation Any More" is mistitled. Perhaps the right headline is, "Are we fucking with Natural Law Too Much?"

    For example, our social contract has collapsed birth rates below replacement level that will self-evidently collapse the welfare state unless the economy's cash flow generator can move off of human labor-based wages (another book-length curiosity). Which means Natural Law demands you "be fruitful and multiply at least a male and female to adulthood" (which, BTW, is Jewish law).

    Is allowing men to pretend to be women and destroy women's opportunities as a class of human beings, as JK Rowling rightly argues. It's against Natural Law to not treat males and females differently where the differences matter for our survival.

    If we throw out the Natural Law baby parts of Christianity and not preserve them by other methods, we are socially suicidal. Said another way, the essence of Christianity is "Love thy neighbor as thyself, and love the Lord with all thy heart and mind. This sums up all the Laws and their explanation (the prophets)." Christians rightly despair when they are vilified, for to them, this core ethic is what they see being rejected. Again, there's nuance, but that's the nub of it, and rejecting this essential ethic is choosing a social contract based on not loving our neighbor.

    And that's fuckery.

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    Gwen

    Thank you so much for this wonderful article! Listening to you on the French Fry Friday and reading The French Press has helped my Christian walk and allowed me to have well articulated discussions with other believers and non believers about living the new life that God has given all of mankind thru his Son, Jesus Christ. This is a true blessing and I look forward to reading your articles.

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    John D. Wright

    This is a great article David but it's a bit of a rerun from the podcast.

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    Ed

    I think the Post-Christian indictment of this country is primarily a cultural statement. Fifty or a hundred years ago, church attendance, or at least a nominal profession of faith, was so nearly universal as to be a social requirement in this country. People upon being asked if they were Christian supposedly responded "Of course I am Christian, I'm an American!" That linkage no longer exists, which I think is a good thing though it has its hazards, one of which, as you note in the column is that the widespread adherence to the Christian precepts that underlie our constitution are eroding. On the other hand, I think church attendance nowadays has a much closer relationship to the percentage of actual believing and practicing Christians than it has in the past. I think most of the true Christians who affiliate with Trump (they exist!) will, in time, see the inherent idiocy of the alignment for what it is. Right now, the joys, benefits, and rewards of being part of the mob are too present. Shame will follow.

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    John Kennedy

    David, you're not old enough to have seen "anti-Christian hostility"; what you experienced was anti-"Christian" hostility. By the time you were born, the name of Christ had been associated with bigotry and hatred in this country for centuries. It takes no less than a miracle for people to receive the message that God loves everyone, especially in a society that's still reeling from all that nonsense about sinners being in the hands of an angry god. When "Christians" today insist on expressing their "Christian sexual morality" (to use your example) instead of sharing God's grace, the message received by others is nothing but a reminder of that bigotry and hatred.

    At this late hour, we Christians must make every effort to make sure that we are preaching the pure grace of God. Our messaging, whether it's spoken out of our mouths or written on our tee shirts, must be void of the least bit of moralism if we are to accurately represent God to unbelievers. The apostle Paul confined teaching Christian morals to Christians; to unbelievers, he became all things to all people that he might win some (I Cor. 9:22). That takes a lot more effort than most "Christians" are willing to put forth these days. All they're doing is replacing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with social causes of their own choosing. Those who really care about reaching unbelievers realize that it only makes sense to let them first receive Jesus as their Lord and then, only when the Holy Spirit resides within them, teach them how to live holy lives.

    It's only because so many "Christians" get this wrong that some of them are now being cited for hate speech. Though they see this as an infringement on their religious liberties (although perhaps it is God's last resort for making them filter out their hateful legalism and get on with preaching the Gospel), this is not anti-Christian hostility. For that you'd have to go elsewhere in the world where you'd be exiled or executed for saying you believed Jesus is God's Son. Being sued for not selling a gay couple your cake doesn't come close.

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  9. Eugene Lovell

    This is a very good and thoughtful article. I was always taught the First Amendment, with respect to religion, was inserted into the Constitution for the protection of the religious faithful. Any government, organized by men, will be inherently flawed. Christians should rightfully celebrate this separation. This article amply demonstrates why.

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  10. Mary Brownell

    Thank you for this piece, David. It is a great follow-up to a discussion I had yesterday with my siblings and siblings-in-law at our weekly Sunday afternoon Zoom meeting.
    Yesterday, we discussed the book "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and the movie "Twelve Years a Slave". In the last month or so, we have read and discussed the autobiography of Frederick Douglass and the movies "Beloved" and "The Butler".
    A common theme has been the "tension", as David calls it, between the "Christianity" practiced by slave owners and that of their slaves and white abolitionists. As Abraham Lincoln noted, these people all read the same bible, but interpret it differently. The white slave owners found passages in the Bible to justify their ownership and debasement of generations of fellow children of God, created, like they were, in His image and likeness. The enslaved people, and to this day, their descendants, as well as the white abolitionists, professed the Christianity represented by a God who loved all His people so much that He came to earth as one of them and suffered and died out of love for them.
    David's eloquence on this topic in his Sunday "sermons" is a great gift for us.
    I will be forwarding this piece to my family.

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