Sept. 18, 2024

By Rev. Rick King

Part 3 in a series based on Jim Wallis’ book, “The False White Gospel”

Dick Sherlock, my pastor in my young adult and seminary years, was also a trial attorney whose social conscience motivated a lifelong pursuit of both kinds of work, in ministry and the law.

He had a saying that, when I first heard it, startled me with its brevity and insight: “Christian faith is personal, but never private.” To divorce personal faith from social justice is to commit a serious moral and theological error that violates both the Old and New Testaments’ great commandment to love God with our whole selves, and our neighbors as ourselves.

As Jim Wallis puts it, “White Christian nationalists are white first and Christians second, and today right-wing Republicans first and Christians second. Selective theology has always provided the justification for upholding racial and political power—from chattel slavery to the continuing evolution of white supremacy.”

A 2023 Public Religion Research Institute study of 22,000 Americans found that three in ten Americans qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents (10 percent) or Sympathizers (20 percent), compared with two-thirds who qualify as Skeptics (37 percent) or Rejecters (30 percent); and that these percentages have remained stable since PRRI first asked these questions in late 2022.

The same study found that a majority (52 percent) of those who identify as Christian nationalists are regular church attenders.

Theology which places America at the center of Christian dominion and conquest goes back, Wallis says, to before the founding of the United States. It lies in what’s called the Doctrine of Discovery, a disputed interpretation of international law that established a religious, political, and legal justification to colonize and seize land not inhabited by Christians.

The theology behind Christian nationalism is a radically individualistic, fundamentalist evangelical theology that is all about personal conversion from personal sins to a vertical relationship with God, devoid of any outreach into the world, except in violence. What the Rev. William Barber III has called “slaveholder religion.”

Jim Wallis recalls the white, evangelical church of his Detroit childhood as subscribing to a very private reading of John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”

Wallis says, “We always skipped the first part about God loving the world. We never prayed that God would change us so that we could change the world….Without any awareness of the public discipleship which Jesus taught, Christians become vulnerable and susceptible to false political religion.”

And here’s what may surprise us: He says this is not simply a political problem, but a faith problem, for society and for the many individuals who need help to be “set free from their blindness and fear; with an empathetic call to recognize and reclaim their faith and seek to love their neighbors not as ‘others,’ but as other children of God.”

What’s our own denomination, the United Church of Christ, have to say about white Christian nationalism? Check out this pronouncement by national-setting UCC leaders.

Where are YOU seeing manifestations of white Christian nationalism in your life these days?