Should Christians Be Afraid of Christian Nationalism?
Controversy erupted late last month when the New York Times reported that Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito once flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag at his New Jersey vacation home. The paper alleged it was a symbol “for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.” After the story broke, a number of government bodies worked to strip the symbol from public spaces. For instance, the city of San Francisco announced that it has removed its own version of the flag from a municipal building.
The flag was originally adopted by New Englanders to show support for the American Revolution. The men who fought and died at Bunker Hill proudly flew it in defiance of British tyranny. The flag is even the official maritime ensign of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Until last week, it had nothing to do with imposing Christianity on government. But that matters little to the media—the outrage at Alito for his choice of patriotic imagery is part of a larger moral panic about “Christian nationalism.”
In his new book, Who’s Afraid of Christian Nationalism?, Mark David Hall contends that these liberal fears of theocracy are ill-founded. While there certainly are noxious elements o the right advocating for some kind of “Christian nationalism,” he convincingly argues that they remain very much in the minority. Populist authoritarianism poses real challenges to American constitutional order, but Hall demonstrates that the building threats to religious liberty should be far more concerning to the body politic.
This panic over “Christian nationalism” predates the rise of Donald Trump by at least a decade. Some on the left were expressing their concerns as early as 2006, when President George W. Bush and his evangelical supporters were tarred as religious extremists. Now most of the establishment media hold up Bush as a kind of “elder statesman,” a palatable alternative to Trump. But this only shows how far the goalposts have shifted regarding the definition of “Christian nationalism.”
Read more at the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty Online.
