by BY JOSHUA ARNOLD/WASHINGTON STAND
Hollywood director Rob Reiner’s new documentary, “God & Country,” released in theaters this weekend, warning Americans of an impending “Christian nationalist” takeover of the country. The Associated Press declared Saturday, “Many believe the founders wanted a Christian America. Some want the government to declare one now.” On Tuesday Alexander Ward and Heidi Przybyla warned in Politico, “Trump allies prepare to infuse ‘Christian nationalism’ in second administration.”
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Such manufactures represent “a coordinated effort” to stoke fear before the 2024 elections, declared Family Research Council Action President Jody Hice, guest host of “Washington Watch” on Wednesday. Their purpose is not just “to rally the Left but, probably even more so … to intimidate and silence Christians who embrace a biblical worldview,” he said.
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The purpose of this yellow journalism is more concerning than its aim. The Left’s “definition of Christian nationalism … tends to be a coat that is cut to fit whatever it needs to fit at any given time,” Regent University professor Dr. A.J. Nolte said on “Washington Watch.” As with donkeys and tails, it gets harder to pin the scare on the elephant after you’ve been blindfolded and spun in circles.
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Some leftist definitions of “Christian nationalism” have little in common with Christianity. Take Reiner’s perspective, “The idea is that America was a born as a white Christian nation, and these people are virulent about returning to that, and they’ll do it at any means necessary, including … violence. And we saw this happen on January 6th.”
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Most Christians would have difficulty recognizing themselves in this description. For starters, Christianity knows no ethnic barriers (Revelation 7:9), Christians are commanded to submit to the government (Romans 13:1), and violence disqualifies a man from Christian leadership (1 Timothy 3:3).
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Reiner’s definition wasn’t particularly concerned with scriptural accuracy, as the entire documentary really served as a “Trojan horse for progressive ideology,” wrote Southern Seminary professor Andrew Walker. His documentary painted institutions as disparate as The Heritage Foundation, Turning Point USA, and Hillsdale College with the same, broad brush, even though the first two aren’t sectarian, and the third isn’t political. Reiner “gives the game away when he talks about ‘white’ Christian nationalism,” Nolte noted, a mistaken “conflation of white ethnic nationalism with Christian nationalism.”
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Some leftist definitions simply equate “Christian nationalism” with social conservatism. Nolte described a book titled, “‘Taking America Back for God,’ by two scholars named Perry and Whitehead.” In the book, “They took six questions, which are generally good questions if you’re trying to measure social conservatism,” and used them as “measures for Christian nationalism.”
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These measures included support for prayer in schools, opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage, and an acknowledgement of Christian principles in America’s founding. “So, what you often find is that Christian nationalism is basically just … social conservatism, sort of relabeled,” Nolte concluded.
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This definition becomes increasingly unrealistic as left-wing extremism puts more and more Americans on the “Right” side of social and cultural policy disputes, particularly where transgender ideology is at play. The coalition opposed to pornographic books in school libraries, for instance, includes not just Christians, but also Jews like Ben Shapiro, Muslims like the parents in Dearborn, Mich. or Montgomery County, Md., and agnostics like Jordan Peterson. The term “Christian nationalism” approaches meaninglessness when used to describe people who are not Christians and might not even be nationalists.
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At the risk of committing an overgeneralization, one might say there was an inverse relationship between the depth of a person’s Christian walk and their espousal of “nationalist policies.” Does that sound like “Christian nationalism?”
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Some leftist definitions of “Christian nationalism” simply mean that it’s bad for Christians to be involved in politics. For instance, “They’re all after Speaker Mike Johnson for his Christian faith,” said Hice. “He’s a Christian statesman who is certainly influenced and guided by his faith,” but “that’s no different from the liberal Left being guided by their secular, or whatever, worldview that they embrace.”
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“Imagine a situation in which a Republican president goes to a church — a church that has been prominently associated with a Republican politics in the past — on a federal holiday, and gives a speech where he talks about how New Testament principles ought to be the basis of our politics here in America. Would the media label that as Christian nationalism, do you think?”
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Over Martin Luther King, Jr. Day weekend in 2023, President Joe Biden spoke from that man’s one-time pulpit in Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, declaring that certain passages of the New Testament described “the essence of the American promise” and inspired his vision to “redeem the soul of America.” Yet, according to the propagandists now loudly decrying Christian nationalism, “that, somehow, was not considered Christian nationalism,” Nolte observed. So, when defining the term, “it kind of depends on who is using the New Testament and whether the media outlets in question like the use to which the New Testament is being put.”
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American Christians are still pleading for a pluralistic society, “that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way” (1 Timothy 2:2). It is totalitarian leftists who seek to de-pluralize American public life by banishing Christians from the public square — and scaremongering about “Christian nationalism” is simply their latest attempt to do so.
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Edited for length