Christians Against Christian Nationalism: Expert Amanda Tyler brings addresses the RI Council of Churches
"Christian Nationalism suggests that to be a real American, one has to be a Christian—and not just any kind of Christian, but a Christian who holds fundamentalist religious beliefs..."
The Rhode Island Council of Churches held a conference entitled How to End Christian Nationalism featuring Amanda Tyler, Executive Director of Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (BJC), as “she discusses the work to end Christian Nationalism in Rhode Island and beyond.”
Here’s the video of her plenary address:
The transcription has been edited for clarity:
I want to start with a brief introduction to the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, or BJC. We are an 89-year-old advocacy and education organization headquartered in Washington, DC. Our work is all across the country, and as the name suggests, we are from the Baptist tradition. Being in Providence, Rhode Island, I do not need to give my long spiel about how Baptists are not just the Southern Baptist Convention but have very deep roots, and how Roger Williams was one of the early stalwart defenders of religious freedom for all people and how he did that out of his deep theological convictions about soul liberty and the importance of making sure that we had a robust separation of church and state to preserve that soul liberty for each person’s individual conscience. I won’t go much deeper into Roger Williams because you all are much better experts on him than I am.
Our work has centered on the halls of power in Washington, legislative advocacy with Congress, and filing briefs at the United States Supreme Court.
We have filed in almost every church/state case before the court since 1947 and continue to do that. We’re involved in filing briefs in cases that the court is hearing this very term. We’ve also worked and advocated with administrations of both parties over that time. Still, several years ago, we began to sense that more was needed than our advocacy in Washington to fulfill our mission of faith freedom for all people. That was because of these growing violent iterations of Christian Nationalism. It was in 2019 that we started a campaign called Christians Against Christian Nationalism, and the words of James Baldwin are appropriate here. James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” We thought it was important to confront Christian Nationalism head-on and to understand what this ideology was.
I want to start with some definitions because I think it’s important that we have a common framework and language. A general definition of religious nationalism is “a fusion of national and religious identities and goals.” Religious nationalism is a recurrent problem throughout history and around the world today.
Christian Nationalism goes back at least to Constantine, when the Christian religion was chosen as an official religion of the Empire. Christianity, I would suggest, was never meant to be a religion of Empire, as we’ll discuss theologically later in the presentation. Since then, Christian Nationalism has had many different manifestations. Being in Rhode Island, I can’t help but say that Roger Williams was a target of Christian Nationalism in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
We can look around the world today and see examples of religious nationalism in places like Russia, India, Hungary, and several African countries, including Zambia, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. We can see it in Israel. Religious nationalism is all over the world. It is not unique to the United States. That said, because of the unique history of the United States, we have a particular kind of Christian Nationalism, and that is what I’m going to focus most of the time here talking about - but I wanted to start with a definition of religious nationalism because we can’t think about it as completely distinct from what’s happening around the world today.
Christian Nationalism is a political ideology and cultural framework that seeks to merge American and Christian identities.
Christian Nationalism is a political ideology and cultural framework that seeks to merge American and Christian identities. Put another way, Christian Nationalism suggests that to be a real American, one has to be a Christian—and not just any kind of Christian, but a Christian who holds fundamentalist religious beliefs that are often in line with conservative political priorities.
Now hear me well: just to hold fundamentalist religious beliefs or have conservative political priorities does not mean that one is embracing Christian Nationalism, but to believe that to be a true American, that one has to hold those beliefs, that is a definition of Christian Nationalism.
I also want to talk about White Christian Nationalism because, in the United States context, we cannot understand Christian Nationalism without grappling with white supremacy and racial subjugation. That’s how we define White Christian Nationalism. In my talk today and other public comments, I use Christian Nationalism and White Christian Nationalism interchangeably. Still, I prefer the term Christian Nationalism because the term White Christian Nationalism suggests that one has to be white to embrace Christian Nationalism or that one has to be Christian to embrace Christian Nationalism. As some studies show, that is not necessarily the case.
By using the term Christian Nationalism, I am not at all trying to avoid the topic of racism and white supremacy. Christian Nationalism in the United States context creates and perpetuates a sense of cultural belonging that is limited to the very narrow group of people who held power at the beginning of this country. Those people were white, Protestant, Christian, men who owned property. Everyone else had fewer rights to varying degrees from that very narrow circle of people, and White Christian Nationalism perpetuates the idea that because that is how it was, that is how it still should be. White Christian Nationalism pursues policies that limit belonging and full rights to that narrow group of people. The Christian in White Christian Nationalism is less about a given theology or religious identity and more about an ethnonational identity of whiteness.
White Christian Nationalism is not a new thing. It is a relatively new label for something very old. One particularly stark example of White Christian Nationalism is the KKK, now, thankfully, largely a fringe movement, but a hundred years ago a very mainstream organization in this country that used Christian symbols and language, and had a toxic mix of Christian Nationalism, violence, and racism, directing their racialized terror at not only Black Americans, but Jewish and Catholic Americans as well.
We have many examples from our past of overtly white supremacist and racist iterations of Christian Nationalism. Still, we also have less obvious but equally pernicious examples in our current context.
I want to talk about some of the markers of Christian Nationalism. One is this heavy reliance on this mythological idea of America as a “Christian nation.” This mythology suggests Christians founded America to privilege Christianity in law and policy. The history is more like mythology because it is a cherry-picked version. It takes quotes out of context. It overemphasizes the religious biographies of certain founders while deemphasizing founders that are not convenient to the mythology. In some variations, it suggests that the founding documents were divinely inspired. It puts forth the idea that God’s providential hand has been guiding the United States through history in a theological way.
It is a gross distortion of the gospel. John’s gospel says, “For God so love the world.” [John 3:16] It doesn’t say, “For God so loved the United States.” But that’s the story that Christian Nationalism continues to tell. It’s an exaggerated form of American exceptionalism or even civil religion. We’ve seen these examples of civil religion in the form of generic references to God or religion like the national motto, “In God We Trust,” “One nation under God,” and “God Bless America” - these very common statements and phrases that have become so core to the national conversation that we almost don’t even hear them, but they reinforce - every time we say or read those things - this mythology of America as a Christian nation.
This idea undercuts the constitutional history of the United States, a history where the framers made a very deliberate choice to disestablish religion from government control. The founders knew what established religion was and how established religion hurt the ability of diverse populations to live together peaceably - and also hurt religion itself. The founders understood the growing pluralism of the United States - pluralism that is not the kind of pluralism we have today. We didn’t have the same kind of religious diversity at the founding that we do today.
It was the example of the dissenting people at that time—including Quakers, Baptists, and Presbyterians—people who weren’t in the established religions, who were able to advocate for the inclusion of religious freedom in the founding documents.
When trying to myth bust or counteract this mythological history of the United States as a Christian nation, one of my favorite places to go is the United States Constitution. In the United States Constitution, there is no mention of God, Christianity, or Jesus. Article Six, which prohibits religious tests for public office, is the only reference to religion in the original document. My argument is, if the framers were trying to establish a Christian nation, they did so in about the most ineffective way possible - by prohibiting religious tests from the very beginning.
That’s because they weren’t trying to set up a Christian nation. They were trying to set up a nation different from the empires they had declared independence from. They made that official in the first Amendment to the United States Constitution, the first 16 words, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” - dual guarantees of no establishment of religion by government and the free exercise for individuals and organizations. Those things created the framework for religious freedom, an ideal of religious freedom that we haven’t ever fully achieved, but have a constitutional framework to work from. The repeating of the Christian nation mythology ignores this very real history and constitutional text. It continues to threaten religious pluralism and freedom in a pluralistic democracy.
To deepen our understanding of Christian Nationalism, I want to talk about what it is not. I want to talk about Christian Nationalism versus Christianity. First, Christian Nationalism is a form of idolatry because it merges religious and political authority into one. They asked Jesus, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor?” And Jesus turned to the crowd and said, “Who has a coin?” They brought him a coin. It did not say “In God We Trust” on that coin. It was a denarius, and it had the head of the Emperor on it. Jesus said, “Render to the Emperor the things that are the Emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
In that teaching, Jesus was saying the Emperor is not God. But Christian Nationalism merges and confuses these two things and denies that truth. Denying that teaching could lead us to worship an empire or country over God.
Christian Nationalism’s singular pursuit of power at all costs is a gross distortion of the teachings of Jesus. Jesus was always on the side of the oppressed and the marginalized. Jesus said, “The first shall be last and the last shall be first.” Jesus came to turn our idea of earthly power on its head completely. This Jesus bears no resemblance to the white Jesus that is the mascot of Christian Nationalism, a white Jesus who is trying to be this proponent of political power. The Christian in Christian Nationalism is about this ethnonational identity of whiteness and with it carries assumptions about nativism, white supremacy, authoritarianism, patriarchy, and militarism.
Because Christian Nationalism uses the language and the symbols of Christianity - crosses, Bible verses, and images of white Jesus- it looks like the same thing. To a casual observer, it can be confusing. This is what I think is so critical for Christian audiences to grapple with - we have to acknowledge that Christian Nationalism has impacted American Christianity for centuries. There are ways that our religion has been co-opted and infected by this virus of Christian Nationalism. There are places where we have to inspect how our religion has gone away from the teachings of Jesus and toward this pursuit of power.
Here is a very brief history of some of the times throughout American history where we’ve seen this sacrifice of love on the false idol of power. Go back to European Christianity and the Doctrine of Discovery. European Christianity used Christian theology as the foundation of the Doctrine of Discovery. That’s the deadly heresy that it was God’s will for European conquerors to steal land and murder the native inhabitants of North and South America. Once established here, the Church of Empire continued to sacrifice its witness of love on the false altar of power. One example is the Anglican Church, the Empire’s established church in many American colonies, particularly in the Colony of Virginia. In 1667, the Assembly of Virginia was composed entirely of white Anglican men. It was a Christian Nationalist state where your religious identity was wrapped up in your political identity. That Assembly passed a law that said that the Christian ordinance of baptism would not free an enslaved Native American, person of African descent, or person of a mixed race background. They subsumed their theology of baptism to the state’s pursuit of power.
We’re talking about Baptists, particularly white Baptists in the South, who chose power over love when they created the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845 and claimed that slavery was an institution of heaven. And again in 1863, when the Southern Baptist Convention pledged to support the Confederacy in the Civil War. This same false gospel was used to justify Jim Crow segregation and lynching, with church members often being members of the KKK as well.
When we think about Christian Nationalism in our current day [and its impacts on] our democracy, religious freedom, and an authentic Christian witness, we have to understand just how old of a problem it is.
One of the problems that Christian Nationalism has created is that it has altered our idea of what freedom means. From a theological standpoint, when I think about freedom, I go to Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, particularly chapter five, starting in verse one and continuing in verses 13 and 14. “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free, for you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters. Only, do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become enslaved to one another.” This is the freedom of Christ, a freedom to love. But for centuries, we have replaced it with the lie of white supremacy or what Ta-Nehisi Coates has written about as a “white freedom.”
I’m going to read from an essay he wrote several years ago. He called white freedom, “freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak.”
As Christians, and particularly as white Christians, we have to grapple with the way that, for centuries, even our idea of freedom has been changed. Suppose we are going to dismantle Christian Nationalism. In that case, we have to be honest with ourselves, our congregations, our history, and our work in the present.
I will shift from talking about Christian Nationalism and Christianity and how Christian Nationalism differs from patriotism. I want to acknowledge from the beginning that patriotism is a complicated topic. Some people would say that there is no room for patriotism if you are following Jesus. I don’t think I would go quite that far because I will define patriotism as a love of country, and like all loves, it has to be freely chosen. There is not one way to be patriotic. There are many ways to be patriotic. We can love our country enough to want better for it. We can love our country enough to want it to live up to its promises and become a flourishing place for all people. There are many ways to show our patriotism, some of them symbolic and some of them expressive, including exercising our First Amendment rights - our right to free speech, which is under assault right now, our right to freedom of religion, which is under assault, and our right to protest. All of those, I believe, are expressions of patriotism and should be accepted as such.
Nationalism, on the other hand, is an allegiance to a country that demands supremacy over all other allegiances, including, for those of us who are Christians, our allegiance to God, to Jesus. A helpful way to think about this is to ask ourselves, “Is our patriotism causing us to sacrifice our religious or theological convictions?” If it is, it is no longer a healthy love of country and has veered into the unhealthy and dangerous waters of nationalism. In working to dismantle Christian Nationalism, I think it’s important that we distinguish these things from the definitional point of view but also push back against this idea that patriotism requires blind allegiance to national policies.
I want to talk a little bit about how prevalent Christian Nationalism is. I mentioned it’s a very old idea, but it’s a relatively new term, and it is relatively new in social science to try to measure it. Over the last several years, different surveys have been developed. Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry wrote one of the first books on the topic, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, which I highly recommend.
More recently, there has been public polling by the PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute). When these social scientists survey, they do not ask people, “Are you a Christian Nationalist?” Check yes or no. That is not a reliable way to measure for several reasons. Instead, they give statements that track some of those markers of Christian Nationalism that I talked about earlier, and they ask people how much they agree or disagree with the statements. Respondents can strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree, or say, I have no idea what this is.
These are the statements that they used:
That the United States government should declare America a Christian nation.
If the United States moves away from its Christian foundations, it will not be a country anymore.
United States laws should be based on Christian values.
Being Christian is an important part of being truly American. God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.
That last statement addresses one of the most extreme variations of Christian Nationalism, sometimes called Dominion, the seven mountains mandate of the New Apostolic Reformation.
I often get pushback about what exactly “United States laws should be based on Christian values” means, and I think there is some gray area there. The last statement, though, does not have much gray area. That is a pretty clear indicator of an extreme expression of Christian Nationalism.
PRRI then measures the responses on a spectrum - as an orientation towards Christian Nationalism. I made the joke about “Are you a Christian Nationalist? Check yes or no?” But Christian Nationalism is not an immutable characteristic. It is something that every person has an opportunity to either embrace or reject. I don’t think labeling people as Christian Nationalists is appropriate, helpful, or even accurate when we’re thinking about how this ideology and framework operates in United States society. That’s reflected in the way that social scientists study it.
At one end of the spectrum, people who strongly disagreed with all of those statements are called rejectors of Christian Nationalism, and that’s about a third of American society. That’s somewhat encouraging. At the other end, you have adherents to Christian Nationalism, people who strongly agree with all those statements - at 10%. It’s encouraging that it’s the smallest number, but discouraging that it’s that high, particularly given that last statement about dominion over all areas.
The largest percentage is the people in the middle. 60% of Americans are either skeptics or sympathizers. They haven’t fully rejected Christian Nationalism or fully embraced it. That speaks to both how deeply seeded this ideology is in American culture and the challenge of actively dismantling it. When I think about Christian Nationalism, I think of it as this ideology and framework and also as a highly organized and well-funded political movement.
They have to both exist for us to be in the problem that we are today because the movement is just preying on the ideology of the people who live in this country. When we think about dismantling it, we need both sides. To end Christian Nationalism, we can focus on the ideology and cultural framework pieces because if people aren’t buying into this ideology, the movement won’t have the actors to respond to it—as long as we have democratic institutions, which are severely under threat at this moment.
If you look at the adherents and sympathizers together, that’s 30%. Thirty percent of the American public is moving towards Christian Nationalism. It’s encouraging that those who are moving away from Christian Nationalism outnumber them two to one, but discouraging that the people who are embracing Christian Nationalism hold a disproportionate amount of power in this country right now. It is an anti-democratic force forcing that ideology on the whole country.
I want to break it down by education, age, and race. Generally, the more education you have, the less likely you are to move towards Christian Nationalism... The younger you are, the less likely you are to embrace Christian Nationalism. But one troubling thing that showed up in the data is if you’re 18 to 29, you’re more likely to adhere to Christian Nationalist ideas than if you are 30 to 49. Public education has been a target for Christian Nationalism, and some of that strategy might be showing up in younger people who are embracing it more than the generation ahead of them.
Then, by race, this requires more in-depth conversation and shows the inadequacy of some of the questions. I was quite surprised. I knew that Christian Nationalism was present in all racial groups, but in this survey, the percentage of adherents and sympathizers who identified as Black was higher than those who identified as white. 34% Black and 30% white. I’ve had quite a lot of talks with some scholars on Christian Nationalism, including Dr. Jemar Tisby, and he talks about how the interpretation of some of the questions that we had earlier is different from a Black experience. There is an aspirational sense of wanting the United States to live up to the ideals of the United States and Christian values that might not be reflected.
PRRI shows this because they take these numbers about how much people embrace Christian Nationalism and then look at how that correlates to views on other issues like anti-Black racism, antisemitism, and patriarchal views.
There’s a lot of nuance in some of this data, but I also want to point out that Christian Nationalism is in all racial groups - you don’t have to be white, and you don’t even have to be Christian. People often assume that Christian Nationalism is just a problem in white evangelical churches. It is not just a problem in white evangelical churches, though it is undoubtedly the biggest problem in white evangelical churches. You’ve got a 30% average in the country. In white evangelical Protestant churches, it is more than double. Sixty-five percent of the respondents in this survey who identified as white evangelical Protestant are either sympathetic or adherents. That is a remarkable statement, and it points to what is happening in a lot of white evangelical Protestant churches.
What is being taught and worshiped in those churches, to be this far from the rest of the United States population? The only other group that was more than 50% was Hispanic Protestant, which, again, has been heavily influenced by white evangelical Protestant churches. All other groups were below 50% and went from Black Protestant, Latter-Say Saint, white Catholic, white mainline non-evangelical Protestant, Hispanic Catholic, Jehovah’s Witness, and non-Christian religions. But even in non-Christian religions, like Buddhism, 12% embrace Christian Nationalism. Again, you don’t have to be Christian to embrace Christian Nationalism. And because I know I am here with the Council of Churches, I should point out that white mainline non-evangelical Protestants are at 30% - the national average. It is as much of an issue in white mainline churches as it is in the United States population at large - interestingly, they are more likely to be sympathetic to it than fully adhering to it. However, it’s still a problem if we’re sympathetic to it because we are complicit in allowing it to fester.
Finally, I want to look at a map that shows the breakdown state-by-state... This is from 2023. And this is fascinating because the number in Rhode Island in 2023 was 26% among white Americans. It’s now down to 16%. Maybe it’s the people who were asked, but maybe it’s also the efforts to try to dismantle Christian Nationalism, which is encouraging. You’re well below the national average here - doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist - but well below the national average.
I want to talk about how Christian Nationalism shows up in the culture now that we have a good idea of some of its frameworks and iterations. One of the darkest places it showed up in our recent history was on January 6th, 2021. You could not miss the Christian symbols and the symbols of Christian Nationalism that were present during the insurrection at the United States Capitol. Soon after the insurrection, BJC worked with our partners at the Freedom from Religion Foundation to put out a report detailing all of the examples of Christian Nationalism not just on January 6th itself, but in all the lead up rallies, and how the language of Christian Nationalism was used to try to unify a politically disparate group of people and infuse their political cause with religious fervor.
The idea that God had ordained Trump to be president, that any election result that did not end up in him being elected was therefore illegitimate, and that it was God’s will for them to overtake the capitol to rightfully seat President Trump back in office, is an ideology that is fundamentally anti-democratic and trying to subvert the will of the voters. In doing so, it led to extreme violence. But that violence and that ideology did not end on January 6th, 2021. It continued to be fostered over the next four years. Trump was democratically elected [last year]. If he had not been, I truly believe we would’ve seen a repeat of what happened on January 6th, 2021. I don’t know how much that threat of violence impacted how people voted in 2024. But that idea, that continued drumbeat that God had chosen Trump to be elected, was repeated in rallies, online, and in his public speeches - intensified after the assassination attempt. At the Convention, speaker after speaker claimed that God had saved Trump to take office, a statement he repeated during his inaugural address this past January.
I want to talk about the difference between Christian Nationalism, which was present on January 6th, and all the other examples I’ve given here, as well as faith-based advocacy. This is the brain surgery part of the topic. This is something that has to be done incredibly carefully. The takeaway is not to divorce ourselves from the public square. At Christians Against Christian Nationalism, our first unifying principle is that people of all faiths and none have the right and the responsibility to engage constructively in the public square. If we have them, we must bring our identities into our public advocacy, including our religious identities. But we have to do so in a way that doesn’t insist that our theological views be reflected in law and policy. That’s the mission of Christian Nationalism. That’s not how to engage constructively in the public square in a society that protects religious freedom for all people, in a society that has disestablished religion from government control.
We’re seeing a lot of examples of Christian Nationalism, not just on January 6th but in public policy. When Mike Johnson was first elected as House Speaker, in his first public speech he went to the diocese and he said, quote, “I believe that scripture, the Bible, is very clear that God is the one that raises those in authority, he raised each of you, all of us.” This is an anti-democratic statement. It subverts the will of the people who elected candidates to sit in those chairs and claims that God ordained them into some religious office. This is a textbook example of this merger of American and Christian identities into one. We also see how a given theological view or reading of a religious text like the Bible is reflected in law and policy.
Some of these are in State laws that define life as beginning at conception, and in doing so, they often cite scripture. It is important to note that that is a religious belief and not a belief shared by all Christians or people from all religions. A lot of Jewish Americans are challenging some of these laws because from their religious perspective, life begins when breath is drawn, and life doesn’t begin at conception. To repeat “life begins at conception” repeatedly is to take a given religious view and reflect it in law and policy. We see the same thing happening with policy pronouncements - saying that there are only two immutable genders and trying to enact discriminatory laws against transgender people on that basis, and in doing so, often citing scripture as their legal text, as their proof that that is the case. We see it also [in efforts] to define secular marriage as between a man and a woman, often citing scripture. There’s a difference between a government institution and a religious institution of marriage.
Religions are free to define marriage and to conduct ceremonies for whomever they want to, and the government’s definition of marriage should not reflect only this one theological view.
Christian Nationalism also shows up in immigration policy, which is a concern all across this country but very much so here in Rhode Island. I want to go back to the PRRI study. They asked people about their adherence to the Great Replacement Theory. The great replacement theory is the belief that immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background. Of the 22,000 Americans they asked, 36% agreed with the great replacement theory. That is a minority, but still alarmingly too high. However, when they broke it down by how many people adhere to or sympathize with Christian Nationalism, it was more than double.
If you reject Christian Nationalism, you are almost certainly also going to reject the Great Replacement Theory. Similarly, only 35% of all Americans agreed with this statement: Immigrants entering the country illegally today are poisoning the blood of our country. That is alarmingly high. 69% of Christian Nationalist adherents agreed, and 58% of Christian Nationalist sympathizers agreed. This ideology is helping to drive these other discriminatory ideas that are impacting the lives of our neighbors and communities.
Christian Nationalism shows up in our churches and liturgies, in the way that we might have American symbols in our worship spaces, in the songs that we sing, or in the way that we interpret scripture through a lens of American patriotism and not through a gospel of love and a religion that is for all people. Part of the work of Christians and our Christian communities is to interrogate how Christian Nationalism has seeped into our understanding of what it means to be Christian.
Christian Nationalism is in our schools. I know there’s a whole breakout on this this afternoon, but here are some examples of how we see it appear. The teaching of Christian Nationalist mythology in place of a more honest and accurate accounting of history, the use of the term “Judeo-Christian values” is also a red flag that Christian Nationalism might be present. One, the term provides the window dressing of inclusivity but excludes people who aren’t Jewish or Christian. Two, it is insulting or even antisemitic to claim Judeo as a modifier of Christianity. Judaism is an independent religion; it is not just an intro to Christianity, and to suggest otherwise is not respectful. Judaism and Hebrew stories are often interpreted in some of this public school curricula through a Christian lens that is not respectful of Judaism and, at times, openly antisemitic.
We also see Christian Nationalism with new laws pushing the posting of “In Gode We Trust” and even the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. A law passed in Louisiana and pending in legislatures across the country to require “In God We Trust” in every public school classroom, sometimes the Ten Commandments. I don’t have time to go into all of the problems with this right now, but suffice it to say that not only does that send an exclusionary message to kids in those classrooms, it is also quite harmful to religion religious freedom because the government is choosing one version of a religious text as an official government text and appropriating it for its use.
BJC is part of the legal case. We have filed a friend of the court brief in the case that’s challenging the constitutionality of that measure. We also see it in teaching Bible stories in public school curriculum in devotional ways, book and content bans, and in the push to hire or accept as volunteers school chaplains in place of mental health counselors in public schools. In many of those bills, there are no requirements for licensure or even an ability to work with children for these school chaplains, with no limits on what they can do, including proselytizing in public schools. In Texas, parental consent is not required to meet with a school chaplain.
So what can we do to push back? That’s what we’re trying to do at Christians against Christian Nationalism - working in a very large ecosystem with many different groups doing this work. If you haven’t done so already, one entry point to the campaign is to sign a statement at the Christians Against Christian Nationalism website. It is not a statement of faith - as a Baptist, we have no statements of faith - it’s a statement of unifying principles. Lots of different religious expressions have already joined. We invite you to join the tens of thousands who have taken this public stand as part of Christians Against Christian Nationalism. It’s not the only way to engage in the campaign, though. So, there are lots of other ways to engage on the website.
I did write a book last year called How to End Christian Nationalism, which is out now. It’s meant to be a handbook for people who, because of the enormity of the problem, would like some direction on where to get started and how to do so personally - in congregations and then growing out to communities and community organizing. There are discussion questions at the end of each chapter. The chapters are identified as steps; they are meant to be read in the community and could be helpful places for groups of people who want to know where to get started.
Finally, and I think most exciting, what we’re doing right now is we are trying to support the formation of local groups who are looking to do more to dismantle Christian Nationalism. There’s already a ton of advocacy happening. We are not trying to replicate anything that’s already happening. But, if some groups are already doing this or want to expand and partner with us, we can put your group on our website and have people come and find you. More than a hundred people have responded and want to start local groups.
My dream is that by the end of the year, we’ll have groups forming all over this country because I believe that the way to dismantle Christian Nationalism is to start local. We want to encourage faith-based organizing, support people in learning communities, provide some technical support, and provide some speaking and resources in ways that would be helpful to local groups—but also have this be a ground-up project."
After her address, Amanda Tyler took part in a Panel Discussion with the Reverend Darrell Goodwin, Executive Conference Minister of the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ and Angela Howard-McParland, the Justice Resource Manager of the Rhode Island Sisters of Mercy, moderated by Reverend Sarah Reed Jay, Senior Pastor at Community Church of Providence.
Here’s the video:
Amanda Tyler later answered questions from those attending with the help of Reverend Jeremy Langill, Executive Minister at the Rhode Island Council of Churches.
Here’s the video: