No, That's Not Christian Nationalism!
Every reader of this substack knows that I’m all in favor of critiquing Christian Nationalism. But we have to make sure that we are actually critiquing Christian Nationalism.
There is a difference, on the one hand, between using the resources of the Christian tradition in political discourse and, on the other hand, arguing that a vague civic Christianity should be hegemonic. The former is not Christian Nationalism, while the latter most definitely is!
Yet sometimes people forget that!
A recent pundit on MSNBC, Heidi Przybyla (Politico) claimed that the telltale mark of Christian Nationalism (CN) is claiming that rights come from God, not from government or the people. Look, I’m with her in spirit, she’s right about charismatic/apostolic churches as buying big into CN. But I think she’s quite mistaken on the origins of rights in Catholic and Protestant thinking, also a tad confused or imprecise as to what natural law is and how it plays out differently among Catholics and Protestants.
Many journalists sadly don’t get religion and can be pretty hazy on the details. Yet if you get any of the facts wrong, CN apologists will jump all over it to discredit you. So we don’t have the luxury of being sloppy when it comes to critiquing CN, too much is at stake.
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