How White Christian Nationalism Threatens Our Democracy
What do White Christian Nationalists want – and how can we stop them from getting it? We addressed those questions during a recent conversation I hosted at Georgetown University.
On Wednesday night, the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University, where I am founding director, hosted a conversation highlighting the dangers of White Christian Nationalism to our democracy and our Christian witness.
Our guests, each of whom offered a unique and valuable perspective on White Christian Nationalism, were the Most Rev. Michael B. Curry, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church; Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee and a lead organizer of the group Christians Against Christian Nationalism; and Samuel Perry, a sociologist at the University of Oklahoma who is among the nation’s leading experts on conservative Christianity and American politics, and co-author of the books Taking America Back for God and The Flag and The Cross.
The conversation was a powerful mix of the scholarly and theological, pragmatic and political.
As I said in my opening remarks, we must confront a rising ideology that is rooted in America’s Original Sin: The sin of white supremacy. That old ideology is undergirded by an old heresy – with a new name: White Christian Nationalism. I would say that White Christian Nationalism is the single greatest threat to democracy in America – and to the integrity of the Christian witness.
At this very moment, White Christian Nationalists are working to disempower black and brown Americans through an age-old tactic: voter suppression.
In states across the country, trained activists and even armed vigilantes are planning to aggressively challenge voters in poor black and brown neighborhoods. Why? Because they’re not the “right kind” of Americans. They are not white Americans.
In the words of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a MAGA Republican who served in the Trump administration and is now a leader in the White Christian Nationalist movement, the people whose votes they are trying to suppress: “walk like us and talk like us, but they do not want what we want.”
So what do White Christian Nationalists want – and how can we prevent them from getting it? Those were the topics of the conversation at Georgetown, which I am glad to share with you through the video below.