Oct. 24, 2024

By Rev. Rick King

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

By supplanting the gospel of unity with a false gospel of political power, white Christian nationalism has exacted a great cost to the reputation of the church. Its proponents judge political candidates not by their values and character, but by whether they will be powerbrokers for their ethnocentric self-interest and justifiers of their entitlement to governing the country they still believe to be promised as their own (Jim Wallis, “The False White Gospel,” 188).

“There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28)

During Bible study on Tuesday, as we were discussing the story of David wanting to build a house (temple) for God and God saying “no,” the issue of Manifest Destiny came up.

You may have to go back to high school U.S. history class to recall it, but John L. O’Sullivan, the editor of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, coined the term in 1843 in a piece protesting European meddling in American affairs during the westward expansion of U.S. territory. Eventually, readers seized on his reference to “divine superintendence,” and the idea quickly took on a life of its own.

When I was serving a four-month stint as a bridge pastor at Boulder Mennonite Church in Colorado in 2017, the Mennonite General Conference was deconstructing what’s called the “Doctrine of Discovery,” in which the Church gave religious justification to Christopher Columbus and other explorers in the 1400s to seize territory and either convert its indigenous citizens to Christianity, or kill them.

Mennonites, being a pacifist group, were among the first to recognize the need to repent and make reparations to Indigenous tribes in the U.S. and Canada to atone for cultural damage caused by the Doctrine of Discovery, of which Manifest Destiny was the U.S. expression.

Why am I telling you all this? Because white Christian nationalism takes this as one of its origin stories, claiming a divine right to conquer and dominate all who aren’t white, Christian, straight, cisgender, or male.

Tribalism of any sort is antithetical to the gospel. It’s part of the “false white gospel” Jim Wallis writes about in a chapter titled “Our Community is not a Tribe,” using the call of Galatians 3:28 to do away with the divisions of Greco-Roman society in Paul’s day as a guide to the work you and I need to be doing now. Although much cultural damage has been done by Christians in the name of God, we are as bound and gagged by it as those whom Christians and the Church have victimized.

Wallis recounts the story of communities that closed down their public swimming pools: They drained them and even cemented them over, rather than allowing Black residents to swim with White residents in the face of desegregation that required the pools to be open to anyone, regardless of skin color. The result was that NO one could swim in these public pools, all because White city governments were trying to keep Black people out.

Just as it was ego and not faith that motivated King David’s desire to build God a house when God didn’t need one, tribalism is rooted in pride that wants to claim divine justification for the quest for personal power and agendas that have nothing to do with the Christian community or our faith.

Where are YOU seeing tribalism at work in your daily experience? What steps can you take to keep from normalizing it?