Christian Nationalism is "hardly an existential threat," argues deluded professor

Mark David Hall argues critics of Christian Nationalism are exaggerating the very real threat it poses

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During a recent podcast, a Christian scholar argued that certain critics of Christian Nationalism are hyperbolic about the threat it poses to our country. If federal, state, and local governments embraced a kind of symbolic preference for Christianity, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.

Mark David Hall, a professor at the late Pat Robertson’s Regent University and author of Who’s Afraid of Christian Nationalism: Why Christian Nationalism Is Not an Existential Threat to America or the Church (affiliate link), made the comments during an episode of the Law & Liberty podcast.

Mark David Hall (screenshot via YouTube)

At one point, Hall argued that constitutional scholars like Andrew Seidel, investigative journalists like Katherine Stewart, and academics like Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead were conflating a mostly symbolic government preference for Christianity with something that’s racist, sexist, and militaristic.

He also implied this term was conjured out of thin air around 2006.

I’ll jump in if I may. I think it’s important to recognize that literally no one in America [was] using the phrase Christian Nationalism until about 2006, when a steady stream of books started coming out by Michelle Goldberg, Katherine Stewart, and Andrew Seidel, and others.

And they [were] describing a complete toxic… mess. It’s Christians who want to take over America for Christ, and favor white Christians above all others. So we want to bring back Jim Crow, we want to have religious illiberalism, we want women to be in the house and barefoot. And that’s literally—that’s what book after book says. And these are mostly, I call them the polemical critics, often journalists or activists.

But [then] we get academics involved. Someone like a[n Andrew] Whitehead and [Samuel] Perry define Christian nationalism as an ideology that idolizes and advocates a fusion of American civic life with a particular type of Christianity in culture that includes assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism, and on and on they go.

There’s a lot of wishful thinking going on here.

While the popular understanding of what we’d call Christian Nationalism may be relatively new, it’s hardly an original concept. George W. Bush was promoting it when he limited stem cell research in 2001 at the urging of Christians who call it abortion and conducted his “War on Terror” infused with religious rhetoric. Those beliefs helped Ronald Reagan get elected twice. Whether it was the Moral Majority or the Religious Right, conservative Christians have long pushed for a country in which their faith-based beliefs, not facts and certainly not what’s good for minority groups, shape public policy. Christian Nationalism simply clarifies what they’ve believed for a long time because it’s never been more obvious what its proponents are doing.

But wait! It’s not even a new term! Warren Throckmorton, who’s spent years detailing the threat of Christian Nationalism, points out on his website that the literal phrase was invoked decades prior to 2006 and that it very clearly described a form of Christianity that was—wait for it—racist, sexist, and militaristic.

If you think about what conservative Christians want today, it’s very much a nation in which men are providers and women are caretakers, where minority groups are further marginalized for the benefit of white people, and where non-Christians (and even non-conservative Christians!) are treated as second class citizens who are forced to submit to Christianity in schools and work and government.

Elsewhere in the episode, Hall said he wasn’t a fan of Christian Nationalism… but also, if it were to be implemented, it wouldn’t be a huge deal. (As Throckmorton points out, Hall says that with the same energy that Senator Susan Collins gives whenever she insists she’s “concerned” about what Donald Trump is doing while never taking any concrete steps to prevent him from doing whatever the hell he wants.)

Hall believes adopting Christian Nationalism would simply take us back to the 1950s “minus the racism and minus the sexism”—which is both wildly delusional (since racism and sexism are baked into conservative Christianity) and weirdly nostalgic (because the 1950s were horrible for a lot of people for reasons that don’t just boil down to gender or skin color).

I would say Christian Nationalism, as I define it—that is someone who believes that America was founded as a Christian nation and who wants governments to favor Christianity above other religions, I would say that it is a problem and I’m very critical of even that version of Christian Nationalism in my book.

But if that gained the ascendancy, I think, in effect, it would return America to where we were in the 1950s, minus the racism and minus the sexism.

So you might have prayer in public school, you might have Congress declaring America to be a Christian nation, “In God We Trust” gets put on our money, and “under God” gets put in the Pledge.

Again, these are things I can make good, prudential, biblical, and other arguments—constitutional arguments—against, but it’s hardly an existential threat to our country!

And that’s what people like Sam Perry and Andrew Whitehead go around saying—that Christian Nationalism is an existential threat to our constitutional order and to the Christian church. And that’s where it just becomes ridiculous, right? It’s claiming that something is a big, huge, scary monster when, in fact, it’s just problematic, in my humble opinion.

Hall went on to argue that Perry and Whitehead define “Christian Nationalism” in a way that makes Christians look really bad because a lot of people subscribe to different elements of their broad explanation: “51.9 percent of Americans fully or partially embrace this racist, sexist, toxic stew,” he argues. But by his definition, which is much more succinct and therefore "responsible," a much smaller fraction of Christians subscribe to it. So it's not a big deal.

In my book, I come up with what I think is a responsible definition of Christian Nationalism, and I define it in the American context: A Christian Nationalist is one who believes that America was founded as a Christian nation, and today, that governments—state governments and the national government—should favor Christianity above other religions.

So we should do things like have distinctively Christian prayers in public schools. Congress should formally declare America to be a Christian nation. They certainly support having “In God we trust” in their coins and things of that nature. And if this is what we mean by Christian Nationalism, about 20 percent of Americans are Christian Nationalists.

And I’m against all those things I just mentioned, but let me point out that they have nothing to do with racism, sexism, militarism, and that sort of thing.

Notice what Hall says is not a big deal: Symbolic references to Christianity.

So what if Congress says we’re a Christian nation?

So what if “In God We Trust” is on the money and “under God” is in the Pledge?

So what if kids have to pray to Jesus in public school?

It’s easy to think those things are minor when they represent your religion and when you believe no one’s forced to accept Christianity. But when the children of Muslim or atheist parents have to step out into the hall because they don’t want to participate in a Christian prayer, they’re ostracized. When LifeWise Academy takes kids out of public school to be indoctrinated, there’s pressure for non-Christian students to join. When you’re told by the government that Christianity is the default religion, there’s an implication that you’re not a True American™.

Keep in mind that those smaller symbolic gains create a path for larger more destructive ones. The Supreme Court has already opened the door for public education funding to shift toward private Christian schools. They’ve already allowed Christian coaches to inflict their religion onto the public school students they work with. They’ve overturned abortion rights by citing religion, and they’ve made it harder to access healthcare because of religion, and they will eventually do the same with marriage equality (and the same logic could apply to interracial marriage).

That’s what Christian Nationalism gets us. It’s not harmless or symbolic. That religion is harming our country because the most powerful people in the government subscribe to a brand of Jesus worship that believes harming people who aren’t like them is all that matters.

And when the best defense of Christian Nationalism is that it would turn back the clock 75 years to a time when America was far less diverse and countless people were forced to stay in the closet because of who they were—and, yes, when civil rights were still not codified into law and when women had very little control over their own bodies—it’s a really shitty argument.

It’s easy for Hall to wax nostalgic about all this because the nation he wants to return to has always had a seat for him at the table. He would suffer no consequences under that old regime. The rest of us would. That’s why it’s important to name the problem and highlight the consequences. Especially when evidence of conservative Christian cruelty is all around us.

Donald Trump has surrounded himself with conservative Christians who treat him like a savior—and, like Republican politicians, either support it fully or are too cowardly to criticize anything he does—and that means there’s a direct tie between their religion and his actions. Christianity cannot be separated from anything Trump does from now until the end of his presidency.

We need more people calling it out, not pathetic scholars downplaying the seriousness of what’s happening right in front of us.

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