We’re All Christian Nationalists Now

We haven’t divested from empire. We’ve just traded one for another.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash (edited)

I keep having déjà vu.

I remember loading the car to leave for vacation and seeing the yard sign stuck in the California grass: “Yes on 8”. The stick figure family—husband, wife, son, daughter—didn’t match mine. I remember wishing that passing Prop 8 would restore my parents’ marriage too.

I recall sliding into the car after a few hours of pirouetting and plie-ing to classical music and being shoved into the seat by the exigent appeals of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh. The world was coming to an end every Saturday afternoon during the ride home from the studio.

More than 15 years later my phone is still flooding with the same urgency. Some quote Romans 1 and Psalm 139, bemoaning our nation’s slide into moral evil. Others quote Deuteronomy 10 and Matthew 25, lamenting our nation’s plummet into callous disregard for fellow image bearers.

We’re all Christian nationalists now.

We all claim to know what Jesus would do if He were here. We all cry for policies to be shaped by our own reading of Scripture and claim that those on “the other side” have no respect for the sacred text they quote.

A child of 1990s American fundamentalism, homeschooled from cradle to high school graduation, I’ve been through the process of disentangling my faith from the political movements that defined my upbringing. My current political persuasions are unimportant. I don’t need to list all the ways I’ve changed to prove my street cred. As I’ve changed I have seen many of my peers change too.

But I also keep noticing all the things we’ve carried with us from the extreme places we grew up to wherever we end up landing in the vast land to the left of it. As we set out for new political and theological horizons the steady hum of anxiety tags along as a stowaway in our luggage. We have denounced the Religious Right, but not their rhetoric. We have shed their positions, but not their paradigm.

We’re still shackled to the vision of a righteous nation we were given in our youth. We haven’t divested from empire. We’ve just traded one for another. The same anxiety we felt reading the Left Behind series and standing outside Planned Parenthood with graphic posters of dismembered children still surges in our bone marrow, undiluted no matter how many times we exhale.

“Rest is resistance,” they tell us, so we try making soup and snuggling our kids and posting about it on social media in a feeble attempt to complete the stress cycle. But we’re still sneaking countless glances at Instagram and adding “call my representatives” to our daily to-do lists.

Some of us make an attempt at prayer, if we still believe in that sort of thing. But like turmeric that can best be absorbed by the body when paired with black pepper, we act as though prayer's redemptive effects can only be unlocked by political activism. By itself, what can it really do? Silence is complicity, we’ve heard—it might even be violence—and no one can hear our anxious whispers to an invisible deity.

Raised as the “Joshua Generation” we remain convinced that we are America’s hope. The bestselling inspirational-devotional biographies of our youth continue to inspire us. We imagine ourselves as a reincarnated Corrie ten Boom in a new century of global chaos. We will risk arrest for our resistance. We will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with undocumented immigrants as their quiet lives are threatened with deportation. Our sacrifices will be remembered, we think, as we pull into the Trader Joe’s parking lot.

Ephesians 2:10 circles in the back of our minds. We were created in Christ Jesus for good works, and God prepared them beforehand, that we should walk in them. But there are just so many fresh crises calling for our attention, how are we supposed to figure out what is ours to do?

Do we join a march for immigrants or one for climate action or both? Do we choose just one issue to stay informed about? What if our fellow Defenders of Democracy™ on social media find out we’re exhausted enough just trying to potty train our two year old and make Valentine’s for our son’s kindergarten classmates and finally schedule the sitter for that date night and do our homework for women’s Bible study and pick up ingredients for the church potluck and actually stay focused during work meetings and what will they say if the thought of adding one more things just makes me want to cry?

But if we read the rest of Ephesians, all in one sitting, as it was intended, we might see that the works God preordained for us to do are all listed right there in chapters four, five, and six. To seek unity in our local congregations and honor before outsiders through such simple things as gracious speech, kind actions, and relational purity. To image Christ in our marriages, parenting, and employment, and to rely on the Spirit to strengthen us in the face of persecution.

When we get home with our vegan soup ingredients or our responsibly-sourced stew meat we can’t resist the urge to pull up Facebook and see what latest conspiracy theories our MAGA family members are spouting. Jesus says to them, “Be free,” but the hum of our anxiety has crescendoed to a shrill whine, so we can’t hear Him saying it to us, too.

But one day—maybe here, in the shadow of this empire that will always be empire, or maybe when we finally stand face-to-face with Jesus—I’ll feel déjà vu again. But I won’t just be recognizing old patterns repurposed for new causes. Instead, my heart will recognize the peace I was created for, a peace that feels like coming home. Finally, like

Paul J. Pastor

so beautifully described, I’ll be able to trade my fight, flight, and freeze responses for a feast.

And I’m willing to bet on the blood of Jesus that some of those MAGA family members will be sitting right across from me, the steam from our soup bowls rising like incense.