From "Christian Nationalism" to "Christian Zionism" in One Easy Goose-step

What is Christian nationalism?

by Michelle Goldberg | bio

(As an Evangelical, I find myself all too comfortable with the spattering of scriptural idiom that accompanies the writing and thinking of the Christian Right... It has been very difficult to view these fellow-believers as wolves in sheep's clothing, but that is exactly what they are, albeit "knowing not what they do." This revisionist history has deeper roots than any of us realizes...

Stan Moody, author of "Crisis in Evangelical Scholarship" and "McChurched: 300 Million Served and Still Hungry.")

I began the book that would become "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism," shortly before the 2004 election. It was born out of my sense that large swaths of right-wing America were living in what seemed like an all-encompassing alternate reality, and that that reality was slowly, subtlety but inexorably crowding out truth and empirical fact in our national life. As a reporter for Salon, I'd written about the way religious fundamentalists who reject the very notion of secular science were given authority over things like international population policy and domestic sex education. I'd looked into the prevalent end-times beliefs that undergird Christian Zionism and lead some American evangelicals to support the most irredentist Israeli settlers. At conservative conferences where Republican leaders gathered, I would hear the most paranoid John Birch-style conspiracy theories passed off as conventional wisdom. Increasingly, the central cultural divide in America seemed not just political or religious but epistemological .

Often I had a hard time convincing friends and colleagues that people in positions of authority really took their seemingly extreme religious convictions seriously, and that those convictions were actually dictating public policy. Instead, they tended to assume that leaders who mouthed religious rhetoric were just cynically nurturing the false consciousness of their foot soldiers. There's actually something comforting about this view, because it makes ideological extremism comprehensible to outsiders. But I think it's too simple. Hannah Arendt wrote of how observers have often had a hard time taking totalitarian rhetoric seriously, because they assume it must be masking some other material motive. "Since virtually all of European history through many centuries had taught people to judge each political action by its cui bono and all political events by their particular underlying interests, they were suddenly confronted with an element of unprecedented unpredictability," she wrote in "The Origins of Totalitarianism." "Because of its demagogic qualities, totalitarian propaganda, which long before the seizure of power clearly indicated how little the masses were driven by the famous instinct of self-preservation, was not taken seriously."

To write "Kingdom Coming," I traveled all over America, going to megachurches and ministries, attending rallies and conferences, and visiting some of the government-funded faith-based initiatives that, under Bush, have slowly begun to replace secular social services. I immersed myself in the literature of the movement and even took to listening to Christian radio. I began to realize that what I was encountering was as much a totalistic political movement as a religious one. What I describe as Christian nationalism is not synonymous with evangelical Christianity or even Christian fundamentalism. It is, rather, a movement that purports to have extrapolated a complete governing program from the bible, and that claims divine sanction for its campaign of national renewal. It promotes a revisionist history in which the founders were conservative Christians who never meant to separate church and state, and in which America's true Christian character has been subverted by several generations of God-hating leftists. It explicitly condemns the Enlightenment and denies that Enlightenment values had anything to do with our nation's original ideals. The movement's literature is so vast, its alternative skein of pseudo-facts so intricate, that it often seemed totally impervious to outside argument.

And yet increasingly, as members of the movement assume positions of power, government decisions -- whether on stem cells, the role of condoms in preventing the spread of HIV, government funding of religious organizations, proselytizing in the military, and a host of other issues -- are made according to Christian nationalist dogmas. You don't just see it in the federal government -- if anything, it's even more pronounced on the state and local level, where I've often heard officials cite fake facts from Christian nationalist books at contentious school board meetings and the like. Indeed, the teaching of Christian nationalist history may turn out to be the next big educational battle after intelligent design -- a curriculum developed by several leaders in the movement has already been introduced in school districts nationwide.

Over and over again, I kept returning to Arendt, whose work helped explain so much of what I was encountering. "Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself," she wrote.

By citing Arendt, I am certainly not suggesting that theocratic dictatorship is imminent in America. Rather, I'm saying that the Christian nationalist movement has a proto-totalitarian ideology and structure, and that, while it only represents a minority of Americas, it has amassed more influence than those who cherish secularism and pluralism should be comfortable with. What I try to describe in "Kingdom Coming" is a subtle but powerful change in the way our country works -- the slow encroachment of conservative religious doctrines into government policy, the increasing sectarianism pervading politics and public institutions, the shift in the very way our society apprehends truth. As I write in the book, "As Christian nationalism gains influence, it is changing our country in troubling ways, and its leaders say they've only just begun. It is up to all Americans to decide how far they can go."