Tag: Christian Nationalism

With God On Our Side

Military Religious Freedom Foundation

Recent events have gotten the song With God On Our Side stuck in my mind.  Yes, the Bob Dylan original, but also the Neville Brothers version.

The antepenultimate verse:

But now we got weapons of chemical dust

If fire them, we’re forced to, then fire them we must

One push of the button, and a shot the world wide

And you never ask questions when God’s on your side

The final verse:

So now as I’m leavin’ – I’m weary as Hell

The confusion I’m feelin’ ain’t no tongue can tell

The words fill my head, and fall to the floor

That if God’s on our side, He’ll stop the next war

When I was in fourth grade, two things happened. I had a “born again” experience watching a Billy Graham revival. And I learned the lyrics to the fourth and final verse of the Star Spangled Banner, which I still know by heart.

O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand
Between their lov’d home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with vict’ry and peace may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the power that hath made and preserv’d us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause, it is just,
And this be our motto – “In God is our trust,”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

At 9, I was fully inculcated in the mythos of God and country. But by the time I was 16, the linkage began to fray.

Atomic Cafe

Still, I “get” it. When I saw the movie Atomic Cafe in the early 1980s, I was most taken by the songs that linked the struggle for nuclear supremacy with religiosity, none more than Jesus Hits Like The Atom Bomb by Lowell Blanchard.

Everybody’s worried ’bout the atomic bomb

But nobody’s worried about the day my Lord will come

When he hits (great God almighty) like an atom bomb

When he comes, when he comes

Here are versions by the Soul Stirrers and the Pilgrim Travelers.

O.M.G.

I found reports that “US military commanders have been invoking extremist Christian rhetoric about biblical ‘end times’ to justify involvement in the Iran war to troops” to be heretical to true Christianity.

“The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) says it has received more than 200 complaints from service members across all branches of the armed forces, including the Marines, Air Force, and Space Force.”

One noncommissioned officer said their commander had “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. He said that [FOTUS] has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

This is disturbing but hardly surprising. “Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, is known for his embrace of Christian nationalism. He previously endorsed the doctrine of “sphere sovereignty”, a worldview derived from the extremist beliefs of Christian reconstructionism (CR). The philosophy calls for capital punishment for homosexuality and strictly patriarchal families and churches.”

A current meme online: “If your pastor is telling you that murdering Iranians will hasten the return of Jesus, you’re not a church member. You’re a cult member.”

Confronting Christian nationalism

I really loved what Rep. James Talarico, now the Democratic candidate for the US Senate seat in Texas, had to say on the Stephen Colbert YouTube interview.

Jesus in Matthew 25 tells us exactly how you and I and every one of our fellow believers how we’re going to be judged and how we’re going to be saved. By feeding the hungry, by healing the sick, by welcoming the stranger. Nothing about going to church, nothing about voting Republican. It was all about how you treat other people…

Two commandments

JT: My granddad was a Baptist preacher in South Texas. And when I was little, he told me that Christianity is a simple religion. Not an easy religion, he would always clarify, but a simple religion, because Jesus gave us two commandments. Love God and love neighbor. And there was no exception to that second commandment.

immigration status or religious affiliation. And it’s why I have fought so hard for the separation of church and state in the state capital in Texas

JT: That’s right.

JT: Well, because we are called to love all of our neighbors, including our Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, agnostic, and atheist neighbors. And forcing our religion down their throats is not love.

First Amendment
It goes on from there, but you get the point: Christian nationalism is not Christianity.

Project 2025: Personnel and staffing

Christian nationalism

I have looked at Google Trends. Since the week of June 3, there has been a definite upward trend in the number of searches for the term Project 2025, “the extreme right-wing agenda for the next Republican administration.” That’s good. Maybe djt is one of them since he claimed he doesn’t know about it but is opposed to many of its aspects. How are both possible? 

Leading up to the election, I’ve decided to reiterate its tenets. Regarding Personnel and staffing, “Project 2025’s goals for staffing the next GOP presidency reflect Trump’s idea to gut civil service staff and replace them with potentially tens of thousands of MAGA loyalists. The New York Times describes this plot for a second Trump administration as an ‘expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government’ that would reshape “the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.”

When I first searched for Schedule F, I discovered the IRS Form 1040 to report farm income and expenses. That’s not what we’re looking for.

Here’s an article from The Brookings Institute, a hardly liberal think tank, titled The Risks of Schedule F for Administrative Capacity and Government Accountability.

“Weeks before the 2020 election, President Trump unveiled an executive order that would have created a new class of political appointee, Schedule F. The order would have allowed a president to turn any career official with a policy advisory role into a political appointee, removing job protection and opening the door to vastly politicize the federal workforce.

“President Biden rescinded the order, but Trump has made it a central feature of his re-election campaign as part of his effort to take control of “the deep state…” 

“Deep state”

“First, let’s understand the scale of what is being proposed. Among developed countries, the U.S. is an outlier in terms of its existing level of politicization. We use about 4,000 political appointees to run the executive branch, an increase from about 3,000 in the early 1990s… 

“Supporters of Schedule F have proposed converting 50,000 career civil servants into political appointee status. That is a massive degree of additional politicization and the most fundamental change to the civil service system since its inception in 1883. Increasing the number of political appointees would create a new venue where political polarization would undermine the quality of governance by replacing moderates with extremists.”

Or, put another way, the cabal would replace people who know how to do their jobs with political hacks. Naturally, the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) supports legislation to stop it. Unsurprisingly, it was introduced in the House in February 2023, where it languishes.   

Pushback

However, back in April 2024, the “Office of Personnel Management issued the final version of its regulation meant to safeguard the civil service from the return of a Trump-era policy that sought to convert most federal employees to at-will workers.”

In a statement, Joe Biden said, “‘My administration is announcing protections for 2.2 million career civil servants from political interference, to guarantee that they can carry out their responsibilities in the best interest of the American people’… Day in and day out, career civil servants provide the expertise and continuity necessary for our democracy to function.”

“The final rule states that an employee’s civil service protections cannot be taken away by an involuntary move from the competitive service to the excepted service; clarifies that the ’employees in confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating positions’ terminology used to define Schedule F employees means noncareer, political appointments and won’t be applied to career civil servants; and sets up an appeals process with the Merit Systems Protection Board for any employees involuntarily transferred from the competitive service to the excepted service and within the excepted service.”

So djt and his people could reinstate Schedule F, but implementing it would be more difficult.

Christian nationalism

Another tenet of Project 2025 is Christian nationalism. It claims that “centralized government ‘subverts’ families by working to ‘replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones,’ utilizing the biblical language of natural versus the unnatural.” 

More specifically, “Former Trump official Jonathan Berry’s chapter on the Department of Labor states that ‘the Judeo-Christian tradition, stretching back to Genesis, has always recognized fruitful work as integral to human dignity, as service to God, neighbor, and family’ and claims that Biden’s administration is ‘hostile to people of faith.'” 

As a person of faith, I trust my antipathy for Christian nationalism and Christofascism is abundantly clear. 

Christian Nationalism and American Democracy

Christian nationalism makes an idol of the nation

As a practicing Christian, I’ve long been simultaneously fascinated, horrified, and mortified by the link between Christian Nationalism and American Democracy.

One of the triggers this time is the February 29 episode of the NPR program Fresh Air that my friend ADD linked to recently. The piece was called The Impact Of Christian Nationalism On American Democracy. Spoiler: the impact is NOT good.

“Why do many Christian nationalists think Trump is chosen by God to lead the country? We talk with Bradley Onishi about the ties between Christian nationalism and political and judicial leaders. Onishi became a Christian nationalist and a youth minister in his teens and then left the church. He is the author of Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism — and What Comes Next, and he cohosts a podcast about religion and politics called Straight White American Jesus.”

Onishi notes, as I had heard before, that Ronald Reagan said many of the right things to appeal to evangelicals yet never really curried their favor.

George W. Bush was one of them, talking about his “personal relationship” with Jesus Christ, yet never delivered the goods. Onishi gave me new insights about the 2004 W and John Kerry race. The author had indicated to his colleagues that he was positively disposed toward Kerry, who used Matthew 25 language about feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. The colleagues acknowledged Kerry’s position but asked if Onishi wanted to be responsible for all the “murdered babies” that a pro-choice Kerry administration would create.

SCOTUS

As I well remember, Mitch McConnell stifled Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court because 2016 was an election year, yet allowed Amy Comey Barrett’s nomination to SCOTUS, even though 2020 was also an election year. SCOTUS was then poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. All sorts of state laws, often invoking religion, were instituted. The Alabama Supreme Court’s in vitro fertilization ruling was merely the (il)logical next step.

They like djt because he delivered. You may recall that he allowed a group of preachers to pray and lay hands on him. This encouraged the infiltration of a mentality that has taken over everything from school boards to state houses, not to mention the current Speaker of the House.

This mentality makes me deeply uncomfortable. What happened to rendering unto God what was God’s to Caesar what was Caesar? I read that in a book somewhere. Anyway, listen to the recording.

djt 47?

What might djt do with another four years in the White House? A NYT study suggests that it is “useful to take [his]allies at their word simply. One group of them published 887 pages’ worth of words in a dense but fascinating document called “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.”

Among other things, “it calls for the closing or remaking of agencies on ideological or religious grounds. (The Department of Health and Human Services should be known as ‘the Department of Life,’ and the government must ‘maintain a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.’) It portrays the president as the personal embodiment of popular will and treats the law as an impediment to conservative governance. (‘The legal function cannot be allowed to thwart the administration’s agenda,’ it says.)

While the likely Republican nominee has not specifically endorsed the document, the document mentions djt some 300 times. Read the article, which should fill you with dread. 

Moreover…

In What is Christian nationalism? by Rev. Ryan Dunn, a pastor in the United Methodist Church, writes: “Christian nationalism limits who we are in our spiritual identity and who we are in our American identity. And it runs the even more dangerous route towards a belief that the nation is infallible. Christian nationalism makes an idol of the nation–the country becomes an interchangeable object of worship. We believe we serve God by serving the country.”

Check out Crisis Of Faith: Christian Nationalism and the Threat to U.S. Democracy by Edward Lempinen (Sept 2022)

Christian Nationalism Is ‘Single Biggest Threat’ to America’s Religious Freedom. An Interview With Amanda Tyler of the Baptist Joint Committee (Apr 2022)

An ‘imposter Christianity’ is threatening American democracy. Analysis by John Blake, CNN (July 2022)

THE DANGER OF CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM: The First Amendment is fundamental, and it’s under attack by Jace Woodrum, Executive Director, ACLU of South Carolina (Nov 2023)

“I urge you, brothers and sisters, to watch out for those who cause divisions and put obstacles in your way that are contrary to the teaching you have learned. Keep away from them. For such people are not serving our Lord Christ, but their own appetites. By smooth talk and flattery they deceive the minds of naive people.” – Romans 16:17-18, NIV 
Ramblin' with Roger
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