My latest: how (not) to talk about Christian nationalism, in CT
This morning Christianity Today published my column. Titled “How (Not) to Talk About ‘Christian Nationalism,’” it argues we should retire the term entirely, because it has ceased to refer to anything concrete while functioning in our discourse as a slander term for “politics and people to my right I dislike.” It’s true, though, that there are things worth worrying about that go under the label, like racism and lawlessness; we should just talk about those things instead of a huge umbrella term that no longer picks out anything specific in the world (or picks out far too much). Here’s how the piece starts:
Some years ago, the Reformed philosopher Alvin Plantinga gave a useful definition of fundamentalist. He noted that, in academic settings, it served as little more than a smear word; he offered an expletive I can’t print here, so let’s just substitute son of a gun.
Where it retained any content beyond the smear, Plantinga argued that fundamentalist meant “considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.” Thus did academics, journalists, and many Christians come to deploy fundie to mean a “stupid [son of a gun] whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of” their own. And because there’s always someone to one’s right, the F-word is essentially relative: It has no stable reference, but it certainly can never refer to me.
These days we might say the same about Christian nationalism. The phrase has lost all substantive content. In nearly every conversation, it has little reference beyond those “stupid [sons of guns] whose political opinions are considerably to the right of mine.” Allegations of Christian nationalism can mean almost anything: Maybe the accused is a literal Nazi. Or maybe he’s just a lifelong Republican whose big issues are abortion and tax rates.
