A humble request to the Christian Nationalist
You got what you prayed for — your hands on the world's greatest economic and military power. Before you wield all that power, would you mind doing a little theology, for God's sake.
So, you're a Christian Nationalist and this is everything you've prayed for — because of course God wants you to have unlimited power. If we've learnt anything from all that Old Testament smiting, it's that God wants his favourites to have it all, even at the expense of everyone else.
Right?
Hmm, perhaps a theological refresher. I think that's only fair. If you're about to wield all the power in the world in His Name, the least you can do is a little theological reflection to make sure the God you say you follow wants you to do the things you say he wants you to do. I mean, God forbid you get it all wrong!
But what is doing theology? Maybe you've never done it. Maybe all the things you know about God are what you remember from Sunday school, or the Sunday sermons you've snoozed through and barely registered. Scary. You're on the verge of coronating God as king of the world's biggest theocracy and your quaint ideas about the divine and your duties as a 'Christian' might be outdated or even baseless.
Out of interest, when was the last time you worked on the text? By which I mean the Bible. That's your true constitution as a Christian Nationalist, is it not? And by working on the text, I don't mean learning favourite verses, or picking out bits that affirm the ideas you already have. I mean exegesis — wrestling with the text to understand what it actually meant to say — and hermeneutics — wrestling with culture to figure out how the text is relevant to what’s happening now (if it's still relevant at all).
You might also open yourself up to some theological tradition; church history; different critical or literary interpretive tools; epistemological frameworks. Just to give yourself some idea of how divergent different readings of the Bible can be. A robust reading of the text is the best way to learn that sometimes belief, especially dogmatic belief, can deceive us. Sometimes when we talk about 'faith', for example, we mean little more than blind allegiance to a destructive ideology.
Sound like hard work? Sure it is. But you're the one wanting to reframe a powerful, modern nation around the tenets of a religion that's thousands of years old. It seems to me that should be hard work.
If you do want to give theology a crack, can I suggest a starting point. You've heard of the Apostle Paul? Course you have, you're a Christian Nationalist! Paul wrote much of the New Testament after first finding infamy prosecuting (and executing) Christians, before realising he'd been getting it wrong his whole life. Doh! The fact that can happen should give you pause. In fact, the career of Saul the zealot before his conversion sounds a lot like the MAGA nation you promote as the true 'Christian' America.
After Paul's conversion — Paul reckons he met the risen Jesus, who turned out to be very different from the God he'd always believed in — he went away to do theology for about 10 years, to make sure that if God ever gave him responsibility over the way people think, he'd get it right. Because when you get God wrong and behave as if you're absolutely right — and then convince others to behave in the same way — it can have terrible, and irreversible, consequences.
In one of the letters that best reveal Paul's new thinking about God, Corinthians, Paul hints at the framework that he now works from 'as a Christian', to ensure he doesn't fall back into legalistic, fundamentalist ideas and practices — faith, hope and love.
If you were to do your work on the text like I suggest above, I think you'd find that regarding faith, you'd discover in the New Testament that it's not really about what you believe. At least, that's not the priority. Faith is about comprehending something that's occurred beyond what you believe, and coming to an understanding of how it shapes your life anyway. Faith locks on to a story that isn't your own, and also informs the process by which your story becomes aligned with that other story.
The 'story' at the heart of the New Testament can be summarised in one word: reconciliation. This is no small thing. Actually, it's the reconciliation of almighty power with a human race that didn't even ask to be reconciled. That's the whole point of Jesus (fully God, fully human, remember!) — the reconciliation takes place in the very person of Jesus himself, meaning it can't be undone. It just is. But don't miss the important point — this God doesn't wield power to make people fearful, he uses power to reach the lost, his enemies, and the enemies of his people ... in order to bring about reconciliation, even at great personal cost. That's true power. And that's the foundation of the book you say is your constitution as a Christian Nationalist.
So, if reconciliation with your enemy is the point, how might your foreign policy look, as it pertains to what's happening in Gaza, for example, or your diplomatic relations with Iran, or how you deal with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine and how that threatens global stability? Closer to home, how might it inform your so-called mandate to pursue vengeance on people of a different political persuasion?
It wasn't duty or sentiment that drove God to reconcile with the world, according to the story you say you believe in. It was love. And not love as one characteristic of God among others, but love that is actually at the heart of God's being — love that is ontological. Let me explain as briefly as I can.
When the New Testament describes God as a trinity (without actually using that word), it's describing self-other encounter within God as God's very nature — Father, Son and Spirit, differentiated but bound together, relational otherness at the core of what it is to be. That's significant, whether you're a Christian Nationalist or not. It means that if we — human beings — want to tap into our core natures, we must love. I suspect most Christian Nationalists believe that what makes us most human is more power — individualistic, isolationist, protectionist power. But none of those things are elevated in your Bible. The New Testament elevates love as the one thing we experience now that will last into eternity — because without it, nothing is.
So think about it: how might love impact your immigration policies, your social welfare policies, your housing policies, your health policies — particularly as they pertain to the health of those who feel most persecuted by you? Does it make any difference at all to you that the God you say you believe in — the God revealed in Jesus — pursues encounter and reconciliation with the other as an absolute?
When we encounter an other in love, we attain our human potential. Does that change anything about the way you're planning to govern? It should change everything.
And then to hope. When the New Testament talks about hope, what's in view is the resurrection — not just the resurrection of Jesus, but the ultimate resurrection of all things, the fulfilment of what was started in the resurrection of Jesus. Many people have a problem with the idea of resurrection, and I don't blame them — it's the craziest idea ever. It could be a total fantasy. But imagine if it's true! If it's true, it changes everything, just like love.
As a Christian Nationalist, you don't have a choice when it comes to resurrection. You have to believe in it, it's the central tenet of your religion. But have you ever factored what resurrection is into anything you do? Because if you believe in resurrection then you believe in a God whose passion is for the creation of things out of nothing. Which sounds to me a lot like innovation. In fact, you could say that when humans create things out of nothing, there's an echo of God's own creative acts. You might even say those things are sacramental — they embody something in and of themselves about the hope that’s generated when new things come into existence.
You have a great innovator in your midst at the moment. Elon Musk. I think he's a prat, but I can also acknowledge there's something about what he creates that resonates with New Testament hope, and what it means for humanity, not just symbolically but in real, practical terms. Have you thought about framing him that way, instead of playing up to his worst instincts and presenting him as a Bond villain who's going to destroy your enemies? If you believe in hope, then you’ll reconsider how what he creates tells a story different from the one you’ve been telling.
Hope isn't separate from the experience of love encounter or the story of reconciliation that grounds them both — they exist together, so that the story, the encounter and the innovation all speak of a world in which God has entered and created a new way forward for us all — not one in which some people wield power willy-nilly so that others continue to suffer, but one in which the framework of suffering itself is disrupted by the story we believe, the love we experience, and the things we create, so that together we get to experience moments of miraculous reconciliation and opportunities to love and be loved, in order to create wonderful things — yes, a Tesla, or an iPhone, or a space rocket, or even a community charity — that hint at a possible future devoid of death and suffering.
That's theology.
So, Christian Nationalist, it seems to me you're being given an extraordinary opportunity. Yes, you could wield your power as many hope you will — in a fearsome display of vengeance, isolationism, and self-righteousness.
Or you might go back to your true constitution, your Ur document — the Bible — and do some theological work. You might even rediscover the God you perhaps once believed in, or even discover the God revealed in Jesus for the first time. Your newfound 'power' obligates you to at least give it a crack.