Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
Politics and Religion
Un-Baptizing American Christian Nationalism

Un-Baptizing American Christian Nationalism

Last updated on: June 5, 2024 at 6:33 pm by Ted Peters

Un-Baptizing American Christian Nationalism 2024-06-05T18:33:01-07:00 Ted Peters

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Un-Baptizing American Christian Nationalism

How do you like the phrase, “Un-baptizing American Christian Nationalism”? I think it aptly applies to hordes of Christians fleeing the label ‘Christian’ in order to dis-identify with the phantasmic Christian nationalist (CN) dragon. The CN dragon spits fire. So, Christians Against Christian Nationalism (CACN) are dowsing it by broadly spraying disapprobation.

On June 4, 2024 Brian Kaylor and Beau Underwood launched their new book, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism. Up until this point, I’ve been arguing that the specter of American Christian Nationalism (ACN) has provided a smoke screen for anti-evangelical execration. It appears now that Kaylor and Underwood want to extend their odium to mainline Protestants and even to Civil Religion. So, it appears.

Here is what I take as the central thesis of this new book. Mainline Christian denominations made a…

“…comprehensive effort to merge church and state, thus setting the stage for Christian Nationalism that today inspires evangelicals and Pentecostals to storm the U.S. Capitol, push for Christian practices in public schools, and advocate for a host of other problematic mergers of God and country” (Kaylor and Underwood 2024, 18).

In other words, today’s ACN among evangelicals and Pentecostals is the protégé of yesterday’s mentoring by mainline Protestants who advanced Civil Religion.

Un-Baptizing America in Baptizing America

Baptizing America or Un-Baptizing American Christain Nationalism. Click for book.

Perhaps the most accurate sentence in the new book is this one: “As attention to Christian Nationalism rises, the concept ironically becomes more ambiguous” (Kaylor and Underwood 2024, 6). Kaylor and Underwood expand the term’s ambiguity to include “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance along with National Prayer Breakfasts and allusions to divine providence in presidential speeches. With these as criteria, we would have to fear Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address as an existential threat to our democracy.

My regular complaint in this Patheos series on ACN and CACN has been this: the ambiguity of terms such as ‘American Christian Nationalism’ provides a smokescreen for ACN’s critics to condemn nearly everyone they don’t like. Usually, it’s the evangelicals who get slammed. Now with Kaylor and Underwood, it’s the entire history of interaction between Protestant Christianity and the Enlightenment. I for one thank God for providentially marrying Christian insight with Enlightenment reason so we could birth children such as equality, dignity, democracy, the rule of law, and a mission to expand freedom around the globe.

Un-Baptizing America’s Civil Religion

Kaylor and Underwood include in their line-up of CN culprits the history of Civil Religion. It was Bob Bellah, a colleague of mine here in Berkeley, who in 1967 painted the picture of Civil Religion we all recognize. Philip Gorski at Yale is putatively today’s expert.

Yes, America’s Puritan history and inclusion of religious symbols in its identity has some awkward chapters. But one enduring and wholesome value in Civil Religion is that it holds America under the judgment of a higher justice. If America fails in its responsibility to exact justice, God will render judgment against America just as God treated ancient Israel. And just as God judged America for the sin of slavery in the Civil War, as Abraham Lincoln tells it. Here is the key passage in Robert Bellah’s corpus.

“…participation in the sacred through one’s citizenship does not involve the worship of the American nation but an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality” (Bellah 1967, 18).

Great Seal of the United States.

I thank Kaylor and Underwood for citing this passage. This passage clearly affirms how our inherited Civil Religion is anything but the kind of naïve nationalist ideology that justifies any tyranny that one’s nation might inflict. It demonstrates that Civil Religion does not fit the metric CACNers use to measure ACN.

It is my evaluation that Kaylor and Underwood provide a weak argument. One of the byproducts is that their definition of ACN is so ambiguous that it fails to distinguish between the revolutionary threat of theocracy, on the one hand, and garden variety patriotism, on the other.

Conclusion

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m a signatory to the Christians Against Christian Nationalism Statement. I applaud CACN plus Kaylor and Underwood along with numerous other scholars who are forthrightly taking a stand against ACN. They are correct when they declare that ACN ideology is idolatrous and dangerous.[1]

Yet I fear that allowing the parameters for defining American Christian Nationalism to wander aimlessly this direction and that — without a discriminating core definition — risk prejudicing us against evangelicals and other patriotic traditionalists who are innocent of the charge.

PT 3243 Un-Baptizing American Christian Nationalism

PT 3200 Christian Nationalism Resources

▓

Ted Peters

For Patheos, Ted Peters posts articles and notices in the field of Public Theology. He is a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and emeritus professor at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union. His single volume systematic theology, God—The World’s Future, is now in the 3rd edition. He has also authored God as Trinity plus Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society as well as Sin Boldly: Justifying Faith for Fragile and Broken Souls. He recently published. The Voice of Public Theology, with ATF Press. See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com and blog site, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/publictheology/ .

▓

Notes

[1] In his A Public Witness article, “Aiding and Abetting Christian Nationalism,” Beau Underwood criticizes me for denying the existence of Christian Nationalism. And, by denying its existence, he says that I’m guilty of aiding and abetting this extremist ideology. Underwood is clearly mistaken here. It appears he has not read this Patheos series.

References

Bellah, R. (1967). Civil Religion in America. Daedalus 96:1, 1-20.

Kaylor, B., & Underwood, B. (2024). Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism. Minneapolis: Chalice .

Peters, T. (2023). The Voice of Public Theology. Adelaide: ATF.

Politics and Religion

Christian Nationalism

Evangelical

General Christian

progressive Christian

Christian Nationalism

Christians Against Christian Nationalism

Civil Religion

Mainline Protestant

Robert Bellah

About Ted Peters

For Patheos, Ted Peters posts articles and notices in the field of Public Theology. He is a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and emeritus professor at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union. His single volume systematic theology, God—The World’s Future, is now in the 3rd edition. He has also authored God as Trinity plus Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society as well as Sin Boldly: Justifying Faith for Fragile and Broken Souls. He recently published. The Voice of Public Theology, with ATF Press. See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com and blog site, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/publictheology/ . You can read more about the author here.

Previous Post

May 30, 2024

This was a Disgrace! Sin 12

Next Post

June 11, 2024 Mirroring Russian Christian Nationalism

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Afterlife America in Crisis Ancient Alien Apocalypse Art Artificial Intelligence Astrobiology Astrotheology Atheism Big History Buddhist Catholic Christian Nationalism Christmas Comparative Theology Death Ecology Ethics ETI Evangelical Evolution Existential Questions Free Will General Christian Hermeneutics Hindu https://www.patheos.com/blogs/allsetfree/2020/12/sins-we-need-to-talk-about/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Christians+For+a+Better+Christianity&utm_content=43&lct Interreligious Islam Jewish Justice Latter-Day Saints Literature Literature and Theology Lutheran Methodism Mormonism Nonreligious ontology Orthodox Pagam Prayer progressive Christian PT 6 Dignity Public Theology Race racial justice Religious Liberty Romance Satan Scapegoat Science & Religion Science and Religion social justice Spirituality SR 8 Transhumanism Systematic Theology Taoism Ted Peters UAP UFO Uncategorized War

Select a Month September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

True or False: Joshua made the sun stand still over Gibeon to give Israel more time to defeat their enemies.

Select your answer to see how you score.

FALSE TRUE