(Presbyterian News Service) — During a recent installment of A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast, hosts Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe asked pastor and author the Rev. Dr. Brian Kaylor to talk about how mainline Protestants have helped build Christian Nationalism. Listen to their hour-long conversation here.
Kaylor, a Baptist minister with a Ph.D. in political communication, is president and editor-in-chief of Word&Way. His most recent book, co-written with the Rev. Beau Underwood, is Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism.
“Christian Nationalism didn’t develop in a vacuum created only by conservative evangelical Christians,” the hosts asked Kaylor. “How have Protestant and progressive Christian actions contributed to the rise of Christian Nationalism, even if inadvertently?”
“This is not a Trumpian problem. It didn’t even rise with evangelicals,” Kaylor said. Rather, as they began their research for the book, he and Underwood began to notice a pattern: “All the evidence that evangelical leaders would point to” in order to “claim we are a Christian nation were things that mainline Protestants had helped put into place,” Kaylor said.
One is inserting the phrase “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance, which Congress enacted at the urging of President Dwight D. Eisenhower after he’d worshiped at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., in February 1954. Knowing Ike would be in attendance, the Rev. George Docherty said in his sermon that “to omit the words ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance is to omit the definitive factor in the American way of life,” the Washington Post reported.
In the days following Docherty’s sermon, bills were introduced in Congress to add the phrase, and Eisenhower signed the act into law on Flag Day — June 14, 1954.
In his sermon, Docherty “used language that if a pastor preached it today, we would call it Christian Nationalism,” Kaylor said. “He says the quiet part out loud, that an atheistic American is a contradiction in terms. He says they are spiritual parasites. He civically excommunicates a group of Americans from the body politic because of their religious beliefs.” This, Kaylor said, from a pastor who 11 years later marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama, following Bloody Sunday. Docherty had King preach at the church concerning the Vietnam War just two months before King was assassinated in 1968.
“Christian Nationalism cuts across the political and religious continuums well beyond the stereotype today of conservative evangelicals,” Kaylor said, although the role mainline denominations have in perpetuating Christian Nationalism is smaller now than it was in the 1940s and 1950s, when “if you grew up in a white Christian church in the United States, Christian Nationalism was just the air you breathed.”
“We have to do the difficult work now of separating what’s American and what’s gospel,” he said. The work is especially apparent during some of the services even mainline churches continue to offer around patriotic holidays such as the Fourth of July.
“Our mission with this book was to look at the history and also the present,” Kaylor said. “Jesus warned us we cannot serve two masters. … We do the friendlier, cuddlier, nicer version of Christian Nationalism. It’s not storming the Capitol and beating up the police, but that doesn’t mean a dangerous heresy hasn’t crept into our churches.”
“A lot” of moderate and progressive congregations “are willing to do the hard work. I see this a lot in some of the same ways you see with the journey on antiracism,” Kaylor said. “We see churches and denominations in the mainline tradition that are doing the biblical work of truth-telling about their history and ways of trying to detox from racism today in all forms. That’s the same work we need to do with Christian Nationalism.”
“But I don’t think in the mainline tradition we have recognized, like we have with racism, how much we actually have been part of the problem and how much it is still in us today.”
Christian Nationalism “is fueled by war,” according to Kaylor. Dating back to the Cold War, “we needed to mark that God was on our side, and if we didn’t do this, maybe God wouldn’t bless us enough,” he said. “Maybe we wouldn’t win [the Cold War] if we didn’t officially recognize God in our Pledge of Allegiance.”
Placing the American flag in church sanctuaries also began during a time of war, he noted. “For most congregations, that’s a tradition that started during World War II,” he said. “In the long arc of Christianity, putting a flag in the sanctuary is a new thing.” When Christians from other countries visit U.S. churches with an American flag, they’re usually surprised, he said — even confused and at times alarmed. “It’s not something you see in other countries,” Kaylor said.
“That’s why I think Christian Nationalism is a unique challenge for those of us in the U.S.,” he said. “It’s more dangerous speaking out against that kind of Christian Nationalism because it’s also challenging our own nation’s empire.”
Kaylor pointed out that in progressive houses of worship, “we liked challenging [former presidents] George W. Bush for authorizing the invasion of Iraq and Donald Trump when he was doing military stuff. But there was a whole lot less attention to Barack Obama’s drone warfare. He was the drone warfare president. He was assassinating and killing lots of people that way, but it was more in the shadows and more of a video game style. People were dying, including innocent civilians, and it didn’t get the same level of attention and outrage.”
The time has come to fight the merger between churches and partisanship, Kaylor said.
“For those of us [Millennials] who still haven’t left, who still love Jesus, who still want to see people experience what we believe, how do we offer that alternative?” he said. “To suggest God loves Americans more than anyone else is a heresy. I think we need to offer the alternative more forcibly.”
“Some people in the pews will be turned off by it, but some will be excited to find a community that’s trying something different — a different way of experiencing God in the world and in this society.”
New installments of A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast drop every Thursday. Listen to previous editions here. This article was originally published by the Presbyterian News Service.
