this episode and others like it are brought to you by the generous support of my patrons on patreon if you'd like to help support this channel join our growing Discord server and get early access to every video consider becoming a patron at [Music] patreon.com/crashcourse da Plaza and the JFK Memorial are right over there got the Dallas Symphony Orchestra playing over there and right over there is the pro Museum but right here is First Baptist Dallas in the summertime the church holds an event they call Freedom Sunday a patriotic service blending piety and politics imagine a cross between Easter and the 4th of July where congregants are decked out in Red White and Blue Wave American flags cheer at indoor fireworks and worship to The Battle Hymn of the Republic just as they would with any traditional hymn in 2020 the annual service climaxed with Pastor Robert jeffris preaching to the congregation a sermon titled America is a Christian Nation in which he spoke out against the idea that the founding fathers intended the country to be a secular Nation without religious influence with church and state totally separate that version of American History belongs in the same category as the story of George Washington and the cherry tree it is an absolute myth the truth is America was founded primarily not exclusively but by primarily by Orthodox Christians and they founded this country upon the unchanging Foundation of God's Eternal truth and furthermore our founders believed that our success as a nation depended upon our faithfulness to God's Eternal Word though it is completely Politically Incorrect to say the truth is this America was founded as a Christian Nation and our success as a nation depends upon our Fidelity to God's word Jeff's rhetoric is not unique services and sermons like this have been held all over the country it's just one piece that fits into a larger Narrative of evangelicalism revisionist History conspiracy theories xenophobia and Grassroots politics that's found its way into the spotlight over the last decade this Unholy marriage of religion and politics is The Narrative of American Christian nationalism that's no doubt a phrase you've seen and heard a lot of it's an ideology that believes that the US was always intended to be a Christian Nation that it's backslidden into horrid liberal secularism and that it desperately needs to be reclaimed by Christians and rededicated as a nation for God and these aren't Fringe beliefs either according ording to the Pew Research Center 60% of Americans believe that the founders intended the country to be a Christian Nation 45% believe that it should be one today and of that 45% more than half believe that the Bible should influence us law and take precedence over the will of the people Christian nationalism is the framework that animates these ideas it's been diagnosed as one of the key components in Donald Trump's victory in 2016 it's been cited as one of the ingredients that led to January 6th it's no doubt going to play a big role in the 2024 election we've got prominent Republicans self-identifying as Christian nationalist Lauren bobert is literally calling for the dissolution of the separation between church and state that is not how our founding fathers intended it and I'm tired of this separation of church and state junk that's not in the Constitution it was in a stinking letter and it means nothing like what they say it does and all of this is why some are calling the movement the single biggest threat to Religious Freedom in the country and as someone who isn't religious but who is interested in religion nonetheless watching all this play out has been not just troubling but curious and part of the reason for that is that there's a war being waged amongst American evangelicals a group that most people see as pretty unified but before we get to that what exactly is Christian nationalism is it just regular old conservative Christians gone nuts is it the tiny church at the end of your street well not really it's [Music] complicated one of the most helpful resources we consulted in understanding what Christian nationalists believe why they believe it and what's really going on underneath it all from a historical perspective is this book taking America back for God by sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry now this book was published before January 6th and before the 2020 election but even though the events referenc in the book may not be completely up to dat the conclusions that the authors draw are more relevant than ever to study the movement the PA Drew data largely from the 2017 berer religion study conducted by Gallup respondents were asked to rate their level of agreement with six individual statements to gauge their orientation towards Christian nationalist ideas and from those answers they divided people into four separate categories across the Spectrum those who reject Christian nationalism outright those who resist it who accommodate it and to act as an ambassador for it now what they found is pretty interesting clearly people are all over the place on this it's not at all binary there are people who are fully in support of these ideas just as there are those who are strongly opposed to it in every respect but most people are somewhere in the middle agreeing with a couple points over here but disagreeing with a couple others over there just as interesting and vital in understanding the movement is looking at the demographics of the respondents because the people who make up these four categor ories are perhaps not entirely who you think they'd be there's a perception that Christian nationalism is just a bunch of white conservative evangelicals but that's not entirely true in some ways Christian nationalists do lean in the directions that you'd probably expect those who land in the accommodator and Ambassador categories do skew older white Republican they live in the Bible Belt or the Midwest and they're less likely to be college educated but to try to claim that the whole picture is inaccurate Whitehead and Perry stress this constantly throughout the Book quote Christian nationalism and white evangelicalism are not at all synonymous for example almost a third of those in the reject column people who do not agree with the movement at all identify as Protestant or Catholic in fact nearly a quarter of evangelicals overall land in the reject or resist categories accommodators and ambassadors skew female while resistors and rejectors skew male it's not exclusively white 65% of black Americans are either accommodators or ambassadors it's not even exclusively Republican Republicans are the majority of course but a full onethird of respondents who identify as Democrats wound up Landing as an accommodator or an ambassador all this to say there's way more Nuance to the makeup of those in this movement yes there's overlap with conservatism and there's overlap with evangelicalism but Christian nationalism is not either of those things in totality to understand it you have to look at it as its own individual cultural framework within that I think there are three core ideas to understand in order to grasp what Christian nationalism really is the first is the truth that Robert jeffris and loads of others have promoted that America was founded as an explicitly Christian Nation that the founding fathers always meant it to be so and that founding documents like the Constitution are basically just as divinely inspired as the Bible itself debating the accuracy of that is less what I'm interested in here what I am interested in is what emerges from it what stems from this worldview is the elevation of American into just as important an identity as Christian and these two things become so tied up with one another so intertwined that they're Inseparable to be an American is to be a Christian and to be a Christian is to be an American I'm sure you've heard the phrase American exceptionalism before well Christian nationalism just adds this whole other dimension to that now America isn't just the greatest country on Earth no it's the new Israel where God will establish his kingdom America is the city set upon a hill that Jesus proclaims in The Sermon on the Mount in fact multiple presidents have explicitly labeled the country as such Americans are God's chosen people and if you disagree well you're just a secular liberal out to squash religious freedom it's a worldview that clearly doesn't have a lot of nuance to it it's a very black and white binary mode of thinking one that views the world in terms of Purity and Corruption America and American values are pure because they're defined by Christian values and the rest of the world is corrupt and inferior quoting Whitehead and Perry to embrace the cultural values of other nations is inherently polluting making our society just like the societies from which refugees flee what emerges from all this is exclusion and protectionism Us and Them Superior and inferior we'll come back to this later but doesn't that kind of seem like it sort of clashes with the whole Jesus being the savior of the world thing or gee I don't know the verse in Philippians that says Christian citizenship is in heaven not earth or how about this verse from the book of Acts that says God shows no partiality but accepts people from All Nations you know there's a refrigerator magnet style phrase you may have heard of before it gets tossed around in Evangelical circles Jesus plus nothing equals everything well Christian nationalism is like a warped version of that it's Jesus plus America equals everything but where did did this come from how did this become a thing historians are agreed on this America was not founded as an explicitly Christian country and the founders were pretty in favor of the whole separation of church and state thing so how did these ideas become so prominent well there's not really an easy answer or one particular person or event that started all this when you start looking into the origins you find evidence all over the place I mean literally you can go back over 500 years in 1493 Pope Alexander V issued a papal bull basically a public decree from the pope himself that gave Spain the Divine Right to discover and Conquer non-Christian lands this is what's called the doctrine of Discovery a handful of lines on a sheet of paper that gave Columbus and others like him The Sovereign right to assume ownership over lands in the new world Native Americans well they're more like occupants not owners therefore the land was free to be both conquered and converted so so all those years ago we can already see the melding of these ideas this was like Christ's instruction to go out into all the lands and spread the good news but with the added benefit of getting to claim those lands at the same time good news for the settlers not so much for the locals so hundreds of years ago we can already see a glimmer of Christian nationalist ideas and there have been numerous variations of this ever since this notion that the US is God's Kingdom on Earth but what's more pertinent is looking at the times and circumstances in American history when it really gains ground jump forward to the 20th century and the years following World War II and we can see this happening pretty explicitly this is the second core idea Christian nationalism is rooted in cultural insecurity so it's the late 40s early 50s what's going on the Red Scare are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party communism is this gigantic existential threat to humanity to the United States States and to Christianity plus you have the regulations and reforms of FDR's New Deal thought of by industrialists as socialism creeping its way into the country and in response to the combination of these things you have all these nationalistic ideas promoting Faith freedom and American Christian identity rise up you have the Christian nationalist party and the John Burch Society both formed for the express purpose of combating communist forces who are dead set on destroying religion you have efforts albeit unsuccessful to amend the Constitution to include Jesus's name and declare the United States a Christian Nation In God We Trust is adopted as the official motto of the country under God is added to the Pledge of Allegiance so much of this isn't Christian in theology or even practice but rather is a weaponizing of religion as a means of pushing back against perceived threats as Whitehead and Perry put it Christian nationalism becomes more Salient during times of societal unrest economic political or cultural upheavals cause Americans to fall back on their core identities traditions values and narratives about themselves to bring order out of Chaos in some cases as with American Christian nationalism myths traditions and identities that were not originally part of the nation's core can be manufactured for the purpose of establishing order since the mid 20th century such manufactured ideas have presented in ways both large and small for instance I'm sure you've heard about the moral majority in the 1980s we've talked about that on the channel before but there are smaller ways that these ideas spread one in particular that's interesting is The Homeschool movement which really picked up steam in the 1970s it's here that you sometimes find curricula built on pseudo-historical ideas of the country's supposed Christian identity there's a discredited historian named David Barton whose work here is pretty key in propagating these ideas we do have a Godly Heritage in America but we've been robbed we have to get involved and take it back a Godly Heritage is the foundation of America and the church must take right ground by the time you get to the 21st century and the 2010s in particular it's not too difficult to see the kinds of economic political and societal insecurities that have given birth to this most recent strain of the Christian nationalist virus the financial crash millions of people losing their homes their jobs their livelihoods the birth of the gig economy precarious work labor rights and job benefits being Stripped Away wages stagnating all these things and more contribute to the growth of movements as varied as the te Party Movement Christian nationalism or Occupy Wall Street they're all animated by a growing discontent that's been simmering for years some of these movements like occupy have at least something resembling a sensible class analysis others like Christian nationalism not so much instead latching on to the most exclusionary and reactionary interpretations of a religious tradition to them the US is backsliding into apocalyptic Sodom and gomorah territory and God requires the faithful to wage war for for his glory again it's all very binary black and white good guys versus bad guys kind of thinking you ever watch the show Lost this just kind of reminds me of that we're the good guys Michael Good Guys Good Guys Good Guys good guys we are the good guys in my experience the people go out of their way to tell you that the good guys are the bad guys so American Christians are rendered Heroes but absent a class analysis the villains in this framework wind up ultimately looking a lot less like DC or Wall Street Elites and more like immigrants and members of the LGBT community that's because the response to cultural insecurity is to insulate the movement's goals of restoring stability and taking America back are just as much if not more so about ejecting a perceived Outsider as they are about instituting Christian principles at a governmental level so historically who comes along and Taps right into that build that war build that war build that war Build That Wall Build That Wall now in none of this am I trying to bash Christians or religious people of any flavor although I'm not personally religious I'm not anti-religion by any means religion can be a wonderful thing in a person's life and weirdly that's kind of the point that I'm leading to in all of this because as the data has shown this is all actually less of a religious movement and more of a political and cultural one the god of Christian nationalism isn't so the abrahamic god the God is America back in November of 2015 I ate dinner with one of President Trump's biggest supporters this person explained to me that America is the Last Hope of Christianity that America is the Last Hope of Christianity and I thought that I simply misheard that it could not that could not have been what he was saying this person was well known as a a Christian leader an apologist for the faith it simply could not have been true so I corrected him I corrected him he said you mean Christianity is the Last Hope of America right he said no America is the Last Hope of Christianity that's Christian nationalism this is the great contradiction the great oxymoron of the whole movement and the last core idea that leads to understanding it America is Christianity savior not the other way around this may bear the label Christian but it's not some new Great Awakening Christian nationalists aren't even necessarily religious zealots they're Fanboys obsessed with a product that product being the idea of America itself and actually the statistics bear this out one of the most insightful data points of Whitehead and Perry's research is that commitment to Christian nationalism and commitment to genuine religious practice are often completely opposed Americans who are more religious who attend church more often who pray more often and who read their Bible more often are actually more likely to support gun control less likely to ostracize immigrants less likely to espouse anti-black or anti-muslim sentiment and yes are less likely to vote for Trump in fact to quote from this article from the Atlantic it seems clear that Christian nationalism attracts a lot of adherents who rarely go to church themselves a prri survey published earlier this year showed that only 54% of Christian nationalists and just 42% of those who are sympathizers with the ideology attend church regularly time and again Whitehead and Perry write where Christian nationalism ziggs religious practice zags now clearly there are still a lot of religious zealots in the movement but to me this is kind of the punchline in all of this if the research here is correct Christian nationalism isn't very Christian this is this isn't about spreading the good news it's about gaining political power and it's doing so by hijacking the Christian label and you know what the most demonstrative image of all that is that sums it all up it's Donald Trump in 2016 standing in front of a crowd holding up a Bible and acting as though it's the most precious thing in the world to him and then opening it up and mispronouncing the name of the book He's reading from two Corinthians right 2 Corinthians 3:17 that's the whole ball game where this Spirit of the Lord right where the spirit of the Lord now you remember how I mentioned earlier that there's a war being waged amongst American evangelicals over all this well there's been quite a lot of activity from a lot of folks in that Arena writing and speaking out against Christian nationalism big conservative Evangelical names like Russell Moore Timothy Keller and writers at sites like the Gospel Coalition and so to end all of this I wanted to talk with someone to give us more of an on theeg ground approach AJ hey man how you doing pretty good how are yall good we're just getting a few more things set up here so I got connected with AJ shortly a preacher from Atlanta who also runs a new channel here on YouTube called The Holy shift show and I think his perspective on all of this and on how Christian nationalism perverts Christianity is really valuable the language of the Gospel itself where it talks about the good news of the Son of God actually uh is is riffing on some of the language that the Empire used to use for the emperor so when a new emperor was born it would it would make a proclamation to the to the Mediterranean world that the good news of the Son of God has been born this Emperor you know Augustus or Caesar or whatever and so when the gospel starts using that language it's saying that okay the center of the Empire Imperial power is not your savior and uh Salvation actually comes from from the margins for God to say that the the savior is born in Nazareth which was on the margin of Israel and Israel itself was on the margin of the Roman Empire is to say that Imperial power and the the central power is not the place where salvation and wholeness and healing and freedom is going to come from uh it's it's just not going to come from the centers of power how has it been engaging with your congregation on these topics um have they been open to having their opinions changed are they aware that some of these beliefs they hold may be in contradiction to the Bible um if you met any resistance there uh in my experience which of course is is limited um um social location can have a pretty significant factor on on how open someone is to criticizing uh American Structures and so if you're you know if you're studying scripture and analyzing you know what America looks like from a Biblical perspective if people find themselves in a in a socially and economically marginalized place in life they tend to be less resistant to critiquing America you know uh for obvious reasons I think um those who find themselves in more Central places socially and economically in American Life are much more resistant to offering critiques of America uh because they would then be critiquing the status quo which they're benefiting from uh so there's there's some incentive there to to not critique America or or structures in that way uh so so it's it's a mixed bag it's a mixed bag sometimes people get get really defensive and don't want to hear anything about the critique of America in any way whatsoever to critique America would be to critique the gospel itself but even those even those who are Central even those who are more Central socially and economically in in the culture they're still willing to to Grapple with it and and think about how America could do better and all this stuff but typically what what I've seen is that even no ma no matter how much critique someone is willing to give uh of American Structures if the narrative starts shifting towards people who are experiencing financial hardship are not experiencing it because they have made some sort of huge mistake or have made some sort of huge failure but it's more of a structural reason that people experience financial hardship that's sort of like an off off-limits uh way to look at things is there a particular passage you would point to from the Bible um to help a congregant understand that maybe some of these beliefs that they hold within Christian nationalism are opposed to the teachings of the Bible so specifically with um anti-national I mean Christian nationalism acts 15 acts 15 is about as explicit as it as it gets acts 15 is a is a part of the story where the early church had been had been spreading and a lot of non-jewish people had been coming to the faith in Jesus as the as the Messiah and so the early church generated this question okay well what do we do with all these non-jewish people flowing into the faith are we saying that they're automatically a part of of our community of God now or are we saying that they need to also adopt Jewish custom and law for themselves in order to consider themselves part of us you know part of part of the community and the very very clear answer that acts 15 gives is that no uh Gentiles do not need to become Jewish in order to be reconciled uh with God and that I think touches on the heart of uh Christian nationalism because no one needs to be no one needs to be American uh to be reconciled with God no one needs to be American or some version of American or some version of anything at all anywhere period to uh be considered as loved and reconciled to God uh because that's just not the message of scripture the message of scripture is that God's love is absolutely Universal and given to all people without any preconditions whatsoever and it's an invitation to participate in relationship with God and God's love in bringing healing and goodness and life and mutuality and support and love to the world it's not about it's not about being in the right you know in group uh by any stretch of the imagination there's a little story in Galatians 2 where Peter who was a disciple of of Jesus and this is after acts 15 in the Jerusalem Council where Peter used to eat with Gentiles in Antioch which was to the to the north and uh he didn't have any problems with it but sometimes some representatives from the church in Jerusalem who were obviously you know Jewish Believers in Jesus as a messiah would come to anti to check on things and you know Fellowship probably and just stay connected in different ways and one time when Paul and Peter are there Peter got up from the table that he was sitting at with Gentiles and and sharing a meal with them because some representatives from the church in Jerusalem arrived and he gets up and leaves because he doesn't he doesn't want those uh the Jewish Believers to see him eating with Gentiles and Paul absolutely loses his mind over this and actually he says that Peter's action in doing that calls into question the very truth of the Gospel itself uh and so in in places like that and in places uh all over the place in Paul you can see that the center of the Gospel is kind of this overcoming superiority complexes where we're not looking down on others that we are all that we are all equally loved and invited by God to participate in the fullness of Life uh which is connection to to God and connection to others and um and that that in my mind is very much against what Christian nationalism teaches and thinks that is a perfect answer I think and I think that's actually a great spot to to end the episode so AJ thanks for coming on we really appreciate having you here thank you all we'll see you see you I mentioned at the beginning of the episode that videos like these are made possible thanks to my patrons on patreon now that second thought is a fully independent operation again patreon is the single best way you can support the work we're doing here we actually just moved into a new little office space which you saw some of in today's video it's been really cool to start building it out into a proper studio for all our projects but it's also another expense we have to manage we are a small team we don't have industry backing and we only have one reliable sponsor now because we're serious about only collaborating with people we think are doing good work if you'd like to help keep this channel afloat and 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