Crossroads -- Does anyone really know what 'Christian nationalism' means?

Definitions matter when activists mix politics and religion

If you entered an evangelical megachurch and looked around, could you spot the “Christian nationalists” sitting there? What if you were in a Black Pentecostal church?

Believe it or not, this next question is relevant: What if you visited a mainline Protestant or Catholic congregation? 

We are not talking about folks with MAGA hats. Of course, it might help to study bumper stickers on the cars, minivans or trucks parked outside.

During this week’s “Crossroads” podcast, we veered into this culture-wars minefield while discussing the viral MSNBC comments by Politico scribe Heidi Przybyla about the scary people who now run the GOP:

 … The thing that unites them as Christian nationalists, not Christians because Christian nationalists are very different, is that they believe that our rights as Americans and as all human beings do not come from any Earthly authority. They don't come from Congress, from the Supreme Court, they come from God.

Yes, paging Thomas Jefferson. That was the short version of the quote that exploded into social media. What Przybyla said was more complex than that, when the next few sentences are added:

The problem with that is that they are determining … what God is telling them. In the past, that so-called 'natural law,' it is a pillar of Catholicism for instance, it has been used for good in social justice campaigns. Martin Luther King evoked it in talking about civil rights. But now you have an extremist element of conservative Christians, who say that this applies specifically to issues including abortion, gay marriage. …

In other words, Przybyla was using a “Christian nationalism” definition in which claims of inalienable rights are dangerous when applied to “conservative” moral and cultural issues, but the transcendent truth claims fine when used by progressives.

In the podcast, this pulled us into the maze of the dozen or so competing definitions of "Christian nationalism" that news-consumers might encounter in the wild. I recommended a recent USA Today op-ed by Daniel Darling pointing readers to the work of the Neighborly Faith organization, which has a detailed, 14-point definition. Darling noted that these researchers found that: “Only 5% of Americans self-identify as Christian nationalists, and only 11% of Americans fit the category of 'adherents.’”

Wait, there's more.

The survey also found that the conflation of conservative Christian Republicans with Christian nationalists is in error. While 60% of Christian nationalists are Republicans, 40% are either Democrats or independents. And only 17% of Republicans are adherents to Christian nationalism.

For more surprises, listen to the podcast and then, please, share it with others.

Crossroads podcasts are produced by Rational Sheep and Lutheran Public Radio. This mini-post was written for Religion Unplugged.