Christian Nationalism

CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM

If America truly did what Jesus would do, how would the political scene and family life of this country look?

Topic 2

WHY CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM?

Yeah, we know it’s a sensitive topic in 2022 America. Christian Nationalism is the belief that there is an ultimate, “God-ordained” way to direct the nation of America. We’ll look at how it began (the vacuum), what it was (evangelical Christianity’s movement into politics) and the after effects (Purity Culture & more).

Christian Nationalism

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RESOURCES

The Immoral Majority: Why Evangelicals Chose Political Power over Christian Values by Ben Howe
"This is a fascinating look inside a world that's a mystery to non-evangelicals like me. But it's also something I didn't expect: Funny and moving. This book will be read for years as an explanation of… the political rise and spiritual fall of an entire movement in 21st century America." - Tom Nichols

The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Jemar Tisby
"With the incision of a prophet, the rigor of a professor, and the heart of a pastor, Jemar Tisby offers a defining examination of the history of race and the church in America.” — Soong Chan Rah

Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Du Mez
[An] engaging history of the shifting ideal of Christian masculinity. . . . Persuasively arguing that the evangelical dismissal of Trump’s flaws is the culmination of believing that ‘God-given testosterone came with certain side effects,’ Du Mez closes with a bruising chapter on recent evangelical leaders’ abuses and sex scandals . . . This lucid, potent history adds a much needed religious dimension to understanding the current American right and the rise of Trump.”– Publishers Weekly

Pure by Linda Kay Klein
“A revelation… Part memoir and part journalism, Pure is a horrendous, granular, relentless, emotionally true account.” – New York Magazine’s The Cut

Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States by Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry
"Whitehead and Perry present a powerful case that, in understanding contemporary American politics, what matters most is not whether individuals affirm a particular religious, party or even ethnic affiliation; what matters most is whether they support Christian nationalism." - Journal of Contemporary Religion

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse
“Provocative and authoritative, One Nation Under God reveals how the comingling of money, religion, and politics created a false origin story that continues to define and divide American politics today.”

Red State Christians by Angela Denker
"What we call 'red states' are an optical illusion--places where religion has been used to pit neighbors against one another so a minority can maintain political control. But what Denker calls 'Red State Christians' are real. They've been cultivated for forty years by the Religious Right, and they've led the charge toward extremism in American public life…." --Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why by Phyllis Tickle
With understated humility, The Great Emergence unpacks the chaos of contemporary cultural upheaval and the religious consequences of the changes we now face. After reading these pages, neither the church nor the world looks the same."--Diana Butler Bass, author

Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence by Sara Moslener
This book historicizes the contemporary purity movement by examining how earlier movements established the rhetorical and moral frameworks utilized by the leading purity organizations, True Loves Waits and Silver Ring Thing. This historical investigation reveals that purity work over the last two centuries has developed in concert with widespread fears of changing traditional gender roles and sexual norms, national decline, and global apocalypse. The book contends that the idea of sexual purity is most compelling at points in history when evangelical beliefs and values appear the most viable explanation for and solution to widespread cultural crises. As historian Angela Lahr has shown, the cultural and political influence of evangelicals is directly related to their ability to effectively address widespread fears. For nineteenth-century purity advocates, it was the ability to address the fear of declining Anglo-Saxon privilege; for twentieth-century fundamentalists, threats of nuclear destruction and communist invasion; and for later evangelicals: the excesses of the sexual revolution coupled with lingering Cold War fears. In each case, sexual purity rhetoric proved an asset to evangelicals seeking to maintain political and cultural influence. By asserting a causal relationship between sexual immorality, national decline, and apocalyptic anticipation, leaders shaped a purity rhetoric that positions Protestant evangelicalism as the salvation of American civilization.
The evangelical purity culture is firmly situated at the intersection of evangelical political activism, nationalism, and millennialist theology. This convergence occurs at points in US history when evangelical Christians have sought to restore or maintain their political influence and have been able to map theological frameworks onto widespread cultural crises. In response to the threat of moral and national decline, the movement provides ethical regulations derived from religious values and nationalist ideologies. At this intersection of nation and religion, purity reformers, now and then, employ theories of rise and decline in order to position sexual purity, and the adolescents who embody it, as the greatest hope for restoring America’s lost innocence.

Pure by Linda Kay Klein
“A revelation… Part memoir and part journalism, Pure is a horrendous, granular, relentless, emotionally true account.” – New York Magazine’s The Cut

White Christian Privilege by Khyati Y. Joshi
“Her argument is simple: Christianity (particularly the European Protestant strain) has been established as the unacknowledged common culture, not simply religion, of the United States, leading to a situation where anything not white, Western, and Christian is seen as abnormal…This brisk overview is a must-read for those interested in America’s Christian foundation.” - Publishers Weekly

The Myth of Colorblind Christians by Jesse Curtis
"Religious history at its best. An immensely clarifying book, it should be required reading for all who seek to understand white evangelicals’ fraught engagement with race over the past half century." -- Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle by Danté Stewart
“Danté Stewart's voice rising is one of the reasons I believe in our common future. It is an honor to be invited into the intimacy, honesty, and inborn wisdom that he offers up in his experiences and insights, his prayers and his theology, his grief and his rage, his exuberance and his love. This book is a kind of map in stories and truths to how we might, as a people, become more whole.”—Krista Tippett

The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy by J. Russell Hawkins
"Hawkins convincingly demonstrates how religion framed, informed, and bolstered South Carolina whites' resistance to racial equality. He further shows how, once the raw biblical justification of segregation acquired a bad reputation, the rhetoric of color-blindness and anti-identity politics carriedthis resistance forward under a more respectable but deceptive guise." -- Carolyn Renée Dupont
Myth of the American Dream: Reflections on Affluence, Autonomy, Safety, and Power by DL Mayfield
"This trenchant Christian critique of American exceptionalism provides an essential, passionate interpretation of the ideals of egalitarianism." - Publishers Weekly