A History of Christian Nationalism
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Hey, how you doing? It's Ramteen here. Before we get started, we want to thank you all for listening to ThruLine. Without you, this show doesn't exist. And we've got a way for you to actually help us out by telling us what you like and how we could improve the show by completing a short anonymous survey at npr.org slash ThruLine survey. It takes less than 10 minutes, I promise. And it's free.

And you'll do all of us here at ThruLine a huge favor by filling it out. That's npr.org slash ThruLine survey. Thank you so much. And now, on to the show. April 1777. Two years since the first shots of war rang out at Lexington and Concord. America is thawing after a cold winter. George Washington and his troops have notched two big victories in New Jersey.

But thousands of revolutionaries are dead. Their leaders are worried about war-wariness, disease, desertion. But Reverend Nicholas Street, he feels confident, really confident. He's a Congregationalist minister in Connecticut, and he believes America's victory is preordained by God. He preaches a story to his congregation.

We are ready to marvel at the unreasonable vileness and cruelty of the British tyrant in endeavoring to oppress, enslave, and destroy these American states. And yet we find the same wicked temper and disposition operating in Pharaoh, King of Egypt, above 3,000 years ago.

The story of America, he says, is the story of Exodus.

The Israelites are captive in Egypt for 400 years. Enslaved in Egypt by Pharaoh. They made them to serve with rigor, and they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, allowing them no straw and yet requiring the full tale of brick. And they've lost hope. They've lost themselves. They've lost sight of God. And God raises up someone to lead them to freedom, and that's Moses.

He rallies the Israelites and he leads them out of Egypt. And when they endeavored to make their escape from this cruel and oppressive tyrant, Pharaoh pursued after Israel with a great army unto the Red Sea.

The Israelites are escaping, and as they cross the Red Sea, God opens up the Red Sea and parts it such that they can cross over. Everybody, all the Israelites crossed dry land on the other side, and then Pharaoh and his armies have charged in behind them. And when the Egyptians arrive in chase, the waters, of course, crash together. And the Red Sea closes, and they drown.

They can't pursue the Israelites any longer, and they are free. We in this land are, as it were, led out of Egypt by the hand of Moses. And now we are in the wilderness, Egyptians pursuing us. There is the Red Sea before us.

I speak metaphorically, a sea of blood in your prospect before you, perhaps. Even before our country was founded, the colonists who came here used the story of Exodus to justify their journey. And when they got here, they used it to justify their exceptionalism. They saw America as a country forged against all odds to be a haven for God's faithful.

Today, that belief has morphed into a worldview broadly described as Christian nationalism. It's a particular understanding of what it means to be American. What does it mean to go back to 1776? Is it about going back to horses and carts and pitchforks and muskets?

Or is it about going back to the values and morals of our forefathers that were grounded in the laws of heaven itself? And then I realized that it was the church that didn't just inspire, but it was the church that was the reason why America was founded in the first place. That rocked my world. It's true that references to God and Christianity are sprinkled throughout American life.

Our money has "In God We Trust" printed on it. Most of the United States presidents have chosen to swear their oath of office on the Bible. Christian nationalists want more, and more explicit Christian foundations for the country. At their core, Christian nationalist beliefs are rooted in the idea that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, that its laws should reflect Christian values,

In practice, it can mean ending your speeches with God bless America. It can mean advocating for more prayer in schools or requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments. It can mean restricting abortion, same-sex marriage, and gender-affirming health care.

And versions of these beliefs are widely held by Americans of different ages, races, and backgrounds. In 2022, a Pew Research poll reported that 45% of Americans believe the country should be a Christian nation.

More than half of those people said the Bible should influence U.S. laws even more than the will of the people. In this episode, we're not going to debate whether those Americans are right, whether the U.S. should be a Christian nation. But what we are going to do is try to understand where that idea came from, what it can mean for people, and how it's become so powerful.

I'm Randa Adedfattah. And I'm Ramteen Arablui. On today's episode of ThruLine from NPR, the complicated relationship between Christianity and the United States. This is Amanda from Bend, Oregon, and you're listening to ThruLine. I love this show. Thank you so much for making it. I learn something every time I listen.

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John Winthrop steadied himself on the deck of the ship Arbella. Winthrop and roughly 1,000 Puritans, English Protestants who sought to reform the Church of England, had spent months crossing the Atlantic. They'd chosen to abandon their homes and their livelihoods for a place they'd never been. A place where they would have to start over completely, with only an idea to guide them. To do more service to the Lord, free of the Crown's oversight.

200 of these settlers would die within a year of their arrival. Winthrop, at 41 years old, had left his family behind in England to serve as the governor of the new colony. And he knew if this group of persecuted Protestants was going to survive, they had to form a tight-knit community. A community bound together by their faith and by their vision.

And so with that in mind, legend has it, at some point during their voyage, Winthrop stood up before his shipmates and uttered a phrase that would shape American history. The phrase, a city on a hill, comes from, well, it comes from the book of Matthew. It's biblical. Catherine Brekus is a professor of history of religion in America at Harvard Divinity School.

He spelled out what he thought should be the obligations of the settlers to one another. They were supposed to bear one another's burdens as their own. They were supposed to be charitable to the point where it hurt. We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.

And it's their obligation to set a model for what Christianity should look like for the rest of the world. The part of the speech that often people forget about is that after he said that, he warned them that if they failed to do that, if they failed to live up to their Christian obligations to one another, that they would be punished. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and

and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us. We shall be made a story and a byword through the world.

So what he was trying to do was to remind these settlers of the importance of what they were doing. But he also was underlining that they were special, that God had made a covenant with them, just as God had made a covenant with the Israelites in the Hebrew Bible, that

and that they had an obligation to live up to that covenant as God's chosen people and to provide a model for the rest of the world. Most of the white settlers to the 13 colonies were Protestants. Lots of different denominations of Protestants. In New England, they were Puritans, spiritual descendants of John Winthrop and his adherents in Massachusetts Bay.

But in the South, most of the colonists were Anglicans. And in between were all the other Protestants escaping religious persecution. The Quakers, Lutherans, Anabaptists, the radical Protestants. Sometimes when I talk to people about Christianity in early America, they say, well, there are lots of Protestant groups, but they were all Protestant groups.

And that's not the way they saw one another. There were a lot of tensions among Protestant groups, which made the thought of having any kind of established church on a national level almost impossible. Whose church would it be? Which Christian church? Whose Christianity would be the dominant form? Because there isn't a single Christianity on the landscape today, just like there was not a single Christianity in early America.

With that said, what do you make of this argument that even if these were the ideas that framers might have written down, they're still swimming in Christianity. The society was deeply influenced by Christian ideas, right? How much did that seep into their ideas of what we now kind of call the original ideas of the American project?

I think that Christianity was inescapable culturally in the world of the revolution. This was true even for people who were less enamored of religion itself. I think a good example of this is Benjamin Franklin, who was fairly skeptical about religion and admitted uncertainty about the divinity of Jesus.

When the Constitutional Convention was meeting, he proposed that the new seal of the United States should be an image of Moses parting the Red Sea and leading the Israelites to freedom.

And so here you can see, here's someone who's skeptical about Christianity, but his association with freedom is this story from the Hebrew Bible. And I think that shows you the kind of cultural power of Christianity in this period. There were other doubters too.

Thomas Paine openly criticized organized religion. And then there was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, what he did was he really admired Jesus as an ethical figure. So he went through the New Testament and he cut out all the miracles. And he created his own Bible out of what was left, which wasn't very large. But it was basically about Jesus as a model for how to be a good human being.

As a new country was being formed, both religious and political leaders spoke out in support of separation of church and state. Baptists and Quakers supported it on religious grounds. Jefferson famously wrote that a, quote, wall of separation must exist between religious leaders and the federal government.

The separation of church and state and what the Founding Fathers meant by it is a flashpoint in the debate surrounding Christian nationalism today. Some Christian nationalists say they don't have a problem with separating the institutions of church and state, but that divorcing morality from the state is a bad idea, if it's even possible.

Others claim the founders came up with the First Amendment as a way of protecting the church from political influence, not vice versa. The Republican activist David Barton has been a leader in this line of thinking and has even claimed the U.S. Constitution contains direct quotes from the Bible.

Those claims, for the record, have been debunked. I often get asked, you know, was the United States founded as a Christian nation? On a formal level, the answer is absolutely no. The founders provided for separation of church and state.

Article 6 of the Constitution says there will be no religious test for office holding. In other words, you know, you didn't have to believe in God to be president of the United States. The First Amendment guarantees that there is no state church or federal church the way that there was in England, where the Church of England was established before.

So, you know, in one sense, this is a nation that's founded on the idea of religious freedom. But at the same time, most of the people who were in the new nation at the time of the founding, they assumed even though the United States was going to be a place of religious freedom, that the nation would probably continue to be mostly Protestant.

No one could have foreseen at the time the waves of immigrants that would come from Ireland and Germany, the Jews who were fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. So I think from the very beginning, people were really not sure where religious freedom would lead. And almost immediately, things got complicated.

Both during and after the revolution, American Protestants had seen themselves as a persecuted religious minority. They used the story of Exodus as an allegory for the founding of the United States. They'd seen themselves in the oppressed Israelites.

One of the things that is so ironic or tragic about the use of this story is that American revolutionary patriots were telling the story about themselves at the same time that they were literally holding slaves. And this was not lost on African-Americans at the time.

and also some white patriots who called out the hypocrisy of Americans claiming this identity as the enslaved Israelites when they themselves were practicing slavery. There have always been Christians who were abolitionists, who were pacifists, who welcomed immigrants. But it's also true that throughout the colonial period and well into the 19th century, many American Christians cited the Bible as a justification for slavery.

Some churches provided financial support for the slave trade. Others censored stories in the Bible, including the story of Exodus, so that enslaved people would not be inspired to rebel.

And as time went on, others also pointed out how the unifying Christian fabric of the early colonies was now being used to violently oppress others. In the 1830s, when the U.S. government began to carry out the Trail of Tears, a Pequot Methodist minister named William Apis compared white Protestants to Pharaoh.

When a wave of Catholic immigrants came to the U.S. during the 19th century, they were also ostracized by the Protestant majority. One American preacher accused the Catholic Church of intentionally flooding the country with immigrants in order to destroy Protestantism and democracy. Protestant Americans rioted and burned down Catholic churches and convents.

It's really important to recognize that this sort of belief that the nation has a special covenant with God, that it's a chosen nation,

that it takes multiple forms and there are very ugly forms. This was true in the wake of the Civil War, where we had a short period of reconstruction, where it seemed as if freed people in the South were going to be granted full rights of citizenship.

And then we had this sort of closing down of that around the idea that America, the United States, was supposed to be a white republic and that Black people should be excluded. If you've ever seen the movie, the famous movie, Birth of a Nation, which was responsible for a lot of racial violence after it was issued in theaters...

The film tells the story of a northern family and a southern family who are separated by the Civil War. And in the end, they come together. There's intermarriage between the two families. And the very last scene of the movie...

is a vision of these two couples, you know, who cross the northern and southern divides, sort of dreaming of a better future. And this image comes up on the screen, and it looks like heaven. Everybody's dressed in what looks like togas, so it's kind of like the Roman Republic. Everybody in heaven is white. And as these people are sort of rejoicing in heaven, Jesus starts materializing on the screen.

And Jesus is white. And the message at the end of the film is that the United States has healed its divisions and we are a white republic who are under the guidance of a white Jesus. Birth of a Nation became one of the most widely watched films of its era. In the years after it was released, it would earn the modern equivalent of $1.8 billion dollars.

It was the first movie ever screened inside the White House. And President Woodrow Wilson was a fan. Coming up, white Jesus takes the national stage. Hi, this is Megan from Rhode Island, and you're listening to ThruLine.

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So I was a really angsty kid. I was anxious. I overthink things. I would lay in the driveway on my back and look up at the stars as a 13-year-old and wonder, what's the meaning of life? For me, there was just big questions like, why are we here? What are you supposed to do with your life? What happens when you die? And when I went to church, I found answers to all of those questions. And there was not a lot of need to do long division.

There was not three years of catechism. There was not 10 years of meditating, hoping for a breakthrough. There was an instant conversion and then locking in the meaning of your existence and everyone else's. This is Bradley Onishi. He's now an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco. And as a teenager in Southern California in the 90s, the church gave him a profound sense of belonging. You know, I think what happened for me was

I was invited to church in eighth grade by a girlfriend. And my plan as I tell the story was, this is a genius way to get out of the house on a Wednesday night. Rose Drive Friends Church takes up most of a block on a busy street in Yorba Linda, California.

On Sundays, its parking lots fill up. And on weekday mornings, a line of cars drop off kids at Friends Christian Middle School next door. Rose Drive is an evangelical church. Among their core beliefs is the idea that the world is, quote, broken by sin and corrupt. And the way to redeem it is by turning away from sin and towards purity and God.

At Rose Drive, that means abstaining from premarital sex, denouncing gay marriage, speaking out against abortion. And Bradley Onishi says the stakes are high. This isn't about building a single household or even a nation in God's image. It was about saving the world, one person at a time. The first time he visited, Bradley says he was initially skeptical he'd fit in as a part of that world.

This is the 1990s. Okay. Yeah. So I'm like thoroughly into the Pearl Jam Nirvana grunge movement. I've got, I think like pink hair at this point. And my guess is when I go to this church that they're going to be like Ned Flanders from the Simpsons and be like, who is this young punk rock, you know, individual, get him out of here. And in reality, it's,

I show up and there's like some 20 something guys teaching some, some kids my age how to play the guitar. And those 20 something guys have like tattoos all up their arms. And they're like, what's your name? Who are you? Nice to meet you. Cool hair. And I'm like, Oh, okay. I thought that was going to get me thrown out, but yeah. Nice to meet you too. So the visceral reaction was like surprise and delight, but also just like, Oh, this is safe. I can come here and be me. And yeah,

The church became this place where like I had another family. My parents got divorced when I was starting middle school. I felt like it was a place where I could unravel myself into the warmth of a community that would do nothing but love me. And that is not something you can replicate easily anywhere. And so when people want to know like, why would you join up in a place like this? I'm like,

There's a lot of people that would say, why would you not if you can feel seen that way? By the time he was in high school, Bradley was fully committed to the church. And that meant evangelizing its vision. On his first day of school, he showed up an hour early to pray with 150 of his classmates at the flagpole. He and his new friends handed out anti-abortion pamphlets at school. After school, they talked to people about God's plan outside the movie theater and at the beach.

My identity became thoroughly enveloped by my Christianity. I was a child of God. I was part of the kingdom of God. I was a servant of God. And in my mind, the kingdom of God superseded all other identities. Bradley Onishi grew up biracial in an Orange County, California that was overwhelmingly white.

But when he walked into Rose Drive Church, he says any discomfort melted away because everyone was there for the same God. He became part of a powerful lineage of American evangelicals who, over the course of decades, shaped American politics. And some of them got their start right where Bradley was, in Orange County. Orange County in the 50s and 60s is farmland. It's bucolic.

But after World War II, the defense industry sets up in Southern California. Huge electronic complexes spring up near California's great city. And so now there are defense jobs. There are jobs at manufacturers and factories that are based around American military might. California has the largest pool of skilled laborers.

and much of the country's top talent in the new fields of space, rockets, and missiles. And if you move to this place, like my parents, my mom's parents did in 1958 from West Tennessee, you're going to get great weather. The houses are cheap as chips, believe it or not. And you're going to get a really well-paying upper middle class job. The Golden State has just become the largest in the Union. People have been coming for more than 100 years, and still they come.

So you get there and you're hardwired into the defense industry, which means you're hardwired into the Cold War. Right. You hate communism. Right. You love America. And you also love God because they're godless over there. So we're like, we're America, we're capitalist, we're individualist, and we're Christian. And the churches don't really have networks there. So lone entrepreneurial ministers set up megachurches.

If you've driven everywhere all week, there's no sense unfastening your safety belt on Sunday. Welcome to Southern California's original walk-in drive-in church. Hey, come over here to the Crystal Cathedral. We're going to have a service that only lasts 50 minutes. You don't have to be at church two hours today, Rick. Don't worry. And you know what? You don't even have to get out of your car. I'm the preacher. I'm going to stand up on a platform in the parking lot of this drive-in movie theater.

And we'll sing and we'll have the sermon all in the car. By the time this service comes to a close, more than 10,000 people will have streamed in and out of this church to worship in the beautiful glass sanctuary and in the privacy of the family car. You can wear shorts.

How's that sound? And when you get there, my sermons are going to be anti-communism all the way through. And so Orange County becomes this place that anti-communism, capitalism, and a certain individualistic Christianity all enter into this perfect storm. And it gives you some of the country's first mega churches. It gives you some of the country's biggest, most expansive church campuses.

It gives you a place where Barry Goldwater in 1964 gets a majority of the vote. That's fascinating. And you brought up Goldwater. Can you just talk about who Barry Goldwater was? What his political strategy was to win a place like Orange County? So Barry Goldwater is a longtime Arizona senator. He was born and raised in Arizona. America needs a change. Freedom needs a chance.

And the Republican victory is the way to it. He decides to run for president. And amidst the Cold War, amidst the increasing diversification of the country, amidst the civil rights movement, Barry Goldwater said these are going to spell the doom of the country. Now, my fellow Americans, the tide has been running against freedom. Our people have followed false prophets.

We must and we shall return to proven ways, not because they are old, but because they are true. What we need is a libertarian government that is small and does not interfere with citizens' lives. Freedom under a government limited by the laws of nature

As a senator, Barry Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, he said the federal government had no place telling states whether they should desegregate their schools. His presidential campaign would become famous for pushing the Republican Party towards the extreme right at a moment when racial tensions were rising in the United States.

And at the same time, Goldwater pulled a subset of American evangelicals along with him. The things he was saying weren't exactly revolutionary. American politicians have, as we established, been invoking God since the Revolution.

But Goldwater explicitly connected what he saw as America's divine destiny to the Republican Party. He didn't position religion as separate from politics, but essential to it. Barry Goldwater famously said at the Republican National Convention in 1964, that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.

And let me remind you also. And to me, that's a watershed moment because he lost that election to Lyndon Johnson in a landslide. But his appeal went straight to the kinds of white conservative Christians I grew up with. Biggest and most ruckus Goldwater supporters were in Southern California. He gave a permission structure for extremism that still resounds today. If you want your country, you've got to be a radical.

If you're not a radical, you're not one of us. Is that message parallel to what messages were being sent in churches? Very much so. He was drawing a line around who's a real American. He's drawing a line around who is right under the eyes of God. He wasn't a thoroughly religious man, but he referenced God all the time. He split the world into us and them.

And that was something conservative white Christians were used to. Yeah, you're either with us or against us. There's no room for debate and dialogue. We don't want a kind of conflict in the community. You either adhere to this or get out, one or the other. And Goldwater gave voice to that extremism as a political philosophy.

And his foot soldiers took it home. Paul Weyrich, the founder of the Heritage Foundation, got his political start under Goldwater. So did Dana Rohrabacher, the congressperson, so did Richard Vigery, and so many of the people that went on to shape conservative politics in the 20th century.

Between 1960 and the 1980s, those political strategists helped turn American evangelicals into a powerful voting bloc that was much bigger than Orange County. The seeds were planted by the economic boom and wave of patriotism that followed World War II. Then, during the Cold War, President Eisenhower signed a bill that added under God to the Pledge of Allegiance.

At the time, a Presbyterian reverend in Washington, D.C., preached, quote, In the coming decades, the civil rights movement, second wave feminism, and opposition to the Vietnam War would create a new left pushing for social change in America.

And some Christians pushed back in the name of God, America and capitalism. You can see that happening in the 1980 election when the Republican Party strategically built alliances with ministers to get Christians to the polls. They mobilized around issues like tax exemption for a private religious university, which the IRS had rolled back when the school refused to desegregate.

They opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have prohibited gender-based discrimination in the United States. And when neither of those strategies proved universal enough to draw in the voters it needed, the Republican Party pivoted to abortion. It would become a defining fault line in American politics and cement the religious rights control over a new form of Christian nationalism.

In their view, people on the left... They think they're above things like the Pledge of Allegiance. They're above this patriotism. They're above things like God. It's an attack on God, on Christianity, and it's an attack on Western civilization. What the left has done is it's replaced Christianity with secular humanism. God, family, it all kind of evokes an image, this is America, and the flag, a symbol of what we stand for.

In the summer of 1980, the new leaders of the religious right met up in Dallas, Texas. It's a gathering of pastors and ministers who are concerned with the nation's state and the nation's decline. And also in attendance was the Republican nominee for president, Ronald Reagan. And then when it was his turn to speak, he gave one of the most famous lines of his campaign. He said, I know you can't endorse me. I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing. Thank you.

When the Israelites were about to enter the Promised Land, they were told that their government and laws must be models to other nations, showing to the world the wisdom and mercy of their God. To us, as to the ancient people of the promise, there is given an opportunity, a chance to make our laws and government not only a model to mankind, but a testament to the wisdom and mercy of God.

And those who felt like they were on the outs of American society now saw an avenue to the very center of power. Coming up, a Christian nationalist vision for the future of the United States. Hey, this is Nekra Ab Abara from Salt Lake City, and you're listening to Blue Line from NPR.

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The broadcast opens with an arc shot of the American flag. And as the camera rises above the bright red and blue of the star-spangled banner, a symphony orchestra explodes into song. A message flashes across the massive LED screen behind the 100-person choir. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. ♪

Freedom Sunday is an annual worship event at First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas. The church seats 3,000 people. More, watch online. Welcome to Freedom Sunday at First Baptist Dallas. We're so glad you're here. That's senior pastor Robert Jeffress. He brings another speaker on stage, a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy Reserve. And these men are firm but clear.

America is in grave moral jeopardy. I want to say to you today, as I pause right here in the reading, I'm a little concerned in our culture today in America that we're going down the wrong path and we need a turn. So when go time hits, you will glorify God and honor him and you can begin to silence the ignorance of foolish people. It's a call to action.

But, he emphasizes, it is not a call to arms. And let me be real clear here. I'm not talking about insurrection. You hear me? That doesn't line up with this. This is a distinction leading Christian faith leaders have felt compelled to make recently, especially since the events of January 6th, 2021.

After the January 6th riot at the U.S. Capitol, a coalition of more than 100 pastors and other faith leaders wrote an open letter condemning the role that radical Christian nationalism played in feeding the political extremism that led to the violent insurrection.

As mobs of rioters stormed up the steps of the Capitol, some of them carried banners with Bible verses. There were flags with Christian symbols, crosses, a four-foot-tall painting of Jesus wearing a Make America Great Again hat. When a group of rioters broke into the Senate chambers, they stopped to pray. Thank you, Father.

And so if we, you know, we think about January 6th, I was initially so shocked to see all those Christian crosses in the crowd.

And then I started thinking about the rhetoric that I've heard for years from some conservative Christians, where the argument has been that the government is no longer supporting Christians the way that it used to, and that Christians have to resist the government in order to save the nation. So the government and the nation are not the same. And they say the government is corrupt and we need to replace the government and

Critique the government, maybe even overthrow the government in order to preserve the special divine mandate that God gave the United States. Catherine Brekus says this type of rhetoric is related to demographic changes in the United States. In the early 1990s, about 90% of the population identified as Christian.

Now we're down to about 66%. Christians have had a really privileged place in American culture, and that privileged place is disappearing. And it means that there is anger, there's fear, there's grief. I think in this country,

There is a sense for many people that if Christianity is not the predominant cultural factor, then you lose the lingua franca that everybody speaks. And this is really key. Even if you don't go to church regularly, you still are participating in a kind of national movement.

Civil religion. Yes. And so you may not be a three times a week Bible study person, but you may be somebody who's vehemently on Facebook saying, I want this to be a Christian nation because it feels to you like that's the fabric that ties together the story of your nation, even though so many of your fellow neighbors and citizens don't share that story and they have a different God that they worship or a different understanding of things. And that's exclusionary. It's hurtful.

In retrospect, Bradley Onishi says the beliefs he subscribed to as part of Rose Drive Friends Church were Christian nationalism. He no longer identifies as part of that movement, but he still remembers that sense of belonging that drew him in. It didn't matter if you were from Mexico or from Thailand. It didn't matter if you were from Germany or from the United States. If you were part of the kingdom of God, that's all that mattered.

So it was totally fine and welcome to be a person of color in that space. It was not like someone was going to say, what are you doing here? But what was going to happen is if you celebrated that, if you brought the cultural dynamics of that into the space, then it was going to be sort of like, hey, we're Christian here, not...

We're not like super Asian, you know, that's not like, we're not going to celebrate like your quinceanera if that's what you want. Cause like, that's not right. It may be part of your culture, but that's not necessary to be part of the kingdom of God. That's a Mexican thing. That's not a Christian thing. Right. But the Christian thing, unbeknownst to me at the time was always coded and contoured in a kind of white American context. Right.

When did you start to become aware of that dividing line or that this kind of nationalism or patriotism interwoven with your Christianity as you started to like get older and were a member of the church? 9-11. I'm 20 years old at that time. I'm a full-time minister. I'm married to my high school sweetheart. And 9-11 happens. And the responses from my community were really about,

Americanism. This is about us getting justice. This is about us getting those who did this to us. And so when you think about folks who are different than us, if they're not Christian, they may not be real Americans. And if they're not Americans, they may not be Christians we need to invest in. What did you do then? That must be a terrifying realization.

You know, after 9-11, I started to doubt a lot and I started to question a lot. And that continued. The problem was my entire life had been enveloped by this community. I did not have any friends outside of this church. I had no professional aspirations or training outside of being a minister. I was married already. And so the idea of changing my relationship or my partnership was going to be incredibly devastating and was almost unthinkable at that time.

I was also, on a day-to-day basis, a pastor to 200 teenagers who needed me. In March 2005, Bradley accepted an offer to study theology at Oxford University. He moved to the United Kingdom. And within six months, my whole world changed. I realized that the ethical framework, the biblical framework that I'd been taught, made no sense to me in terms of its coherence or its worldview. I realized that

Many of the people at my church were good people, but the conversion that I had to Christ was also a conversion to American nationalism. My worship of Christ on the cross was also reverence to the American flag. And it was easier for me to see that living abroad than it was living in my hometown. I had to figure out what was important, what was good, what I valued, what I cared about. It was a really wild process.

I lost a lot. I got divorced. I lost a lot of my community. When I would go home after that, people in the coffee shop or the cafe would turn the other way or pretend they didn't see me and act like they didn't know me. But I gained the ability to formulate an understanding of the good and the divine and the valuable in a way that I had never done before. And that was really, truly an amazing time.

Today, Bradley has moved on from being a Christian nationalist to studying the movement's resurgence. He's written a book called Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next. He co-hosts a podcast called Straight White American Jesus. And he says one of the most compelling factors driving some Americans to this movement is fear.

That is exactly what is happening. There is the recognition that as the decades go on, the country is less and less Christian. It's less and less white Christian. So there is 100% a fear of cultural decline. Among white Americans, Christian nationalist beliefs are closely tied to political support for the Republican Party.

But the beliefs themselves cut across racial lines. According to one study, about 20% of white Americans sympathize with these beliefs, as do around 20% of Black Americans. That gets at the next thing I wanted to ask. Like, what's the big deal? Because I think plenty of people would say, like, what's the real danger in people wanting a country to be more Christian? I think the danger is, it comes when we say,

We're going to try to impose one story of the beginning of the world, God, the divine, whatever may be, on everyone else. And so you may not be somebody who adheres to this, but we're going to impose it on you anyway. What does that look like on the ground? What it looks like on the ground is 9% of Americans, according to Paul Jupe, Tennessee University, think that only Christians should be citizens. Wow. Wow.

So if you think only a Christian should be a citizen, now you're saying unless you become a Christian, you don't get to vote, you don't get all the rights of citizenship. Wow. So they're imposing what they take to be a Christian worldview on everyone. The percentage of Americans who identify as Christian has gone down in recent years.

But studies have also shown that when the United States finds itself in crisis, Americans are more likely to say that it's important to be Christian to be truly American. I think we're really at an inflection point or a turning point. When I look forward, I'm alarmed by some things and I have hope for other reasons. What I'm alarmed about is

is the growth of this movement, the sense of grievance that's within it, and the intense fusion of religion and politics, which means that people are bringing to politics this sense of ultimate good and evil are at stake.

And therefore, I have to fight to the death over these issues. This seems to me like a frightening time. The reason for hope is that I do think we have the power to decide what we want our nation to look like today. I do think it's really important to understand our roots and to understand the difficulty of

that Americans have always had trying to figure out who we should be in terms of our commitment to religious freedom. At the same time, I don't want us to be so beholden to what the founders said that we can't

think creatively about who are we now? We are a very religiously diverse nation in a way that Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Hamilton, they never, never would have imagined this. I would love to beam them down from, let's hope they're in heaven. They would be completely flabbergasted by the American religious landscape today.

To be a Christian who loves your country is not to be a Christian nationalist. To be a Christian nationalist is to be somebody who thinks that because you're Christian, you get more of the country than anyone else. So it's one thing for us to strongly disagree in the civic square and do everything we can to

to stop a Christian nationalist movement that would impose itself on all of us and limit everyone's freedom and lead to violence. It's another thing to treat the rank-and-file folks sitting in small towns and churches across the country as less than human. They're people who want community, they're people who want belonging, and they want a story to their life that is meaningful and significant. We have to understand that we all desire community, belonging, and meaning.

And we all need resources for creating that in our own lives. This is what they're doing. To treat them as anything less than a fellow human being, that's not a way forward.

That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me. And... Sarah Wyman. Casey Miner. Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Christina Kim. Devin Katayama. Lina Muhammad. Irene Noguchi. Thank you.

Thanks also to Thanks also to

Voiceover work for this episode was done by Evan Frolov and Devin Katayama. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Sarah McClure. This episode was mixed by Kwesi Lee. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes...

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