Preachers to Stand Up to Christian Nationalists.

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In contemporary America, though, the practice of Christianity is starting to seem abnormal. Measures of religious observance in America have shown a steep decrease over the past quarter century. In 1999, Gallup found that seventy per cent of Americans belonged to a church, a synagogue, or a mosque. In 2020, the number was forty-seven per cent—for the first time in nearly a hundred years of polling, worshippers were the minority. This changing environment helps explain the militance that is one of the defining features of Christian nationalism. It is a minority movement, espousing a claim that might not have seemed terribly controversial a few decades ago: that America is, and should remain, a Christian nation.

There is no canonical manifesto of Christian nationalism, and no single definition of it. In search of rigor, a pair of sociologists, Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, examined data from various surveys and tracked the replies to six propositions:

The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation.

The federal government should advocate Christian values.

The federal government should enforce strict separation of church and state.

The federal government should allow the display of religious symbols in public spaces.

The success of the United States is part of God’s plan.

The federal government should allow prayer in public schools.

Respondents who answered more often in the affirmative (or, in the case of the third proposition, the negative) were judged to be more supportive of Christian nationalism, and the scholars conducted interviews with fifty subjects, to get a better sense of who believed what.

Perry expanded this argument last year in “The Flag and the Cross,” which he wrote with the sociologist Philip S. Gorski. For many people, Gorski and Perry argue, “Christian” refers less to theology than to heritage. Drawing on their own survey, they found that more than a fifth of respondents who wanted the government to declare the U.S. a “Christian nation” also described themselves as being “secular,” or an adherent of a non-Christian faith. Paradoxically, so did more than fifteen per cent of self-identified Christians. This last data point might be a sign that “Christian” is starting to become something more like “Jewish”: an ancestral identity that you can keep, even if you don’t keep the faith. There are, of course, plenty of nonwhite Christians in America, and even nonwhite Christian nationalists. (In the earlier book, Whitehead and Perry reported that Black Americans were in fact more likely than any other racial group to support Christian nationalism.) But Gorski and Perry argue that in American politics Christian nationalism has often served as a white-identity movement. They note, for instance, that white Americans who support Christian nationalism are likelier to evince disapproval of immigration and concern about anti-white discrimination. And they worry that “white Christian nationalism is working just beneath the surface” of American politics, ready to trigger an outburst, as it did on January 6th. “There will be another eruption—and soon,” they write.

The strangest thing about the debate over Christian nationalism is the assumption shared by many of the participants. The sociologists see a fearful tribe, resentful of a country that won’t stop changing. Exponents see a small but indomitable movement, standing strong against a tide of secularism.

Christians Against Christian Nationalism

As Christians, our faith teaches us everyone is created in God’s image and commands us to love one another. As Americans, we value our system of government and the good that can be accomplished in our constitutional democracy. Today, we are concerned about a persistent threat to both our religious communities and our democracy — Christian nationalism.

Christian nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy. Christian nationalism demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian. It often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation. We reject this damaging political ideology and invite our Christian brothers and sisters to join us in opposing this threat to our faith and to our nation.

As Christians, we are bound to Christ, not by citizenship, but by faith. We believe that:

People of all faiths and none have the right and responsibility to engage constructively in the public square.

Patriotism does not require us to minimize our religious convictions.

One’s religious affiliation, or lack thereof, should be irrelevant to one’s standing in the civic community.

Government should not prefer one religion over another or religion over nonreligion.

Religious instruction is best left to our houses of worship, other religious institutions and families.

America’s historic commitment to religious pluralism enables faith communities to live in civic harmony with one another without sacrificing our theological convictions.

Conflating religious authority with political authority is idolatrous and often leads to oppression of minority and other marginalized groups as well as the spiritual impoverishment of religion.

We must stand up to and speak out against Christian nationalism, especially when it inspires acts of violence and intimidation—including vandalism, bomb threats, arson, hate crimes, and attacks on houses of worship—against religious communities at home and abroad.

Whether we worship at a church, mosque, synagogue, or temple, America has no second-class faiths. All are equal under the U.S. Constitution. As Christians, we must speak in one voice condemning Christian nationalism as a distortion of the gospel of Jesus and a threat to American democracy.

A working definition of Christian nationalism

With such a broad question, one place to start is by forming a working definition.

Christian nationalism, in short, is a worldview where one’s theological imagination is coopted by state power. It exchanges the church’s loyalty to the Lord of Peace for a false god fashioned by the myth of American exceptionalism.

In fact, Christian nationalism is a form of political idolatry that distorts our knowledge of God and neighbor through a xenophobic, racialized and militarized gospel that is at odds with the life and teachings of Jesus.

Not sure how you can convince yourself you are a christian and a right wing ethnonationalist.

"The human mind is the most deceitful of all things. It is incurable. No one can understand how deceitful it is.

As for the technical step by step process I don't know, but the Bible's theology very much describes what allows it to be done, humanity's sin nature and the resultant pride, arrogance, and selfishness.

One sample,
https://biblehub.com/parallel/jeremiah/17-9.htm

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My understanding is that there still white christians who legit believe that black people are not human, For example in the christian bible school in South Africa it was taught (and I suspect still being taught) that when Noah collected two of every species on the Ark he also bought two black people (I kid you not).

In America white christians believed (right up to the late 1960s) that sons of Ham were condemned by god and cursed.

While thousands of people have tried to interpret Noah's curse, Mr. Haynes writes: ''Scholars of history and religion alike have failed to comprehend that pro-slavery Southerners were drawn to Genesis 9:20-27 because it resonated with their deepest cultural values.'' Too often, he writes, historians have a superficial knowledge of the Bible, and scholars of religion have a limited knowledge of Southern culture.

Like other scholars, Mr. Braude concludes that later social and economic forces turned Ham into a justification for slavery. ''Before the 16th or 17th century, the racial interpretation of Ham is absent or contradictory,'' he said in an interview. ''The clearest element is in Islamic culture, but even there it is contested and not universally accepted.''

The Noah's ark claim I have not previously heard that I remember.

This from the New Your Times way back in 2003 alludes to the time-honored practice of pretzel-twisting scripture to support what your sinful self is going to do anyway,
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/01/arts ... onale.html

“working in God’s kitchen.”

This white boy just got done working in his own kitchen after a 9pm grocery shopping trip.
$118 USD ain't buying what it used to.

High today was forecast to be around 92F, 33.3C, and this defective body no longer handles heat as well as in the California desert and the southeast swampland like I grew up in.

Naptime is approaching fast.

But yeah, mankind's inhumanity to other groups of mankind is legendary.
Especially in Georgia, Virginia, South Carolina, where I grew up, where a lot of it was white mankind to other mankind, red and black specifically.
And that people supported it while claiming to be followers of Christ has to be the absolute award winning poster child for cognitive disconnect or whatever the phrase is; they definitely documentably had that deceitful mind mentioned earlier.

"Red and yellow black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world."
How so very very odd that adults who profess to love Jesus (mis)use (and abuse) Jesus to justify doing exactly the opposite of that.

Okay this defective body is about out of both physical and mental energy.

Y'all have a good night/morning/afternoon as per time zone.

Not sure how you can convince yourself you are a christian and a right wing ethnonationalist....but I guess that what most white Americans and white South Africans believed (and probably still believe)

"most white Americans?" I think that's a bit of a stretch, even for you. I can't speak for South Africans, but attaching "most" to a statement like that is just blatant assumption.

Do I think some whites still think that way? I know they do. And when they make remarks at a table that are racist, 4 out of the 6 people sitting with them will be looking at them with disgust. So NO, not most. Some, yes. They aren't finding the welcoming committees they once did, though.

And then there is the awful truth
As of 2001, as many as 87% of Christian churches in the United States were completely made up of only white or African-American parishioners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_se ... ted_States