Not Just Evangelicals: The Christian Nationalism Problem in Mainline Christian Spaces
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Brad speaks to Dr. Brian Kaylor and Beau Underwood about their new book, "Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism." They discuss how those Christians who are often thought of as liberal and/or progressive not only shaped key Christian nationalist dynamics of the present moment, but also perpetuate them in various ways.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty, University of San Francisco, here today with a great episode.
Got two parts.
Gonna first start with Bo Underwood, Brian Kaler, who wrote a fantastic book called Baptizing America, How Mainline Christians Help Build Christian Nationalism.
Many of you will be familiar with Brian Kaler, Dr. Brian Kaler, who is the editor of Word and Way, and he's been the president there since 2016.
He's an award-winning author and writer, and somebody who has just been all over the place, CNN, Houston Chronicle, Kansas City Star, and so on and so forth.
He's written four books, Vote Your Principles, Party Must Not Trump Principles, Sacramental Politics, Presidential Campaign Rhetoric in an Age of Confessional Politics, and For God's Sake, Shut Up.
He's previously served as associate director of ChurchNet and is somebody who's been on the show a couple times and somebody I count as a wonderful colleague and a really important voice on all of these issues.
Bo Underwood also is at Word & Way and is an ordained minister in the Disciples of Christ denomination, which is a mainline denomination, has worked at Sojourners, and again, as somebody who I've communicated with for years on these issues and whose voice I really appreciate.
This is a really important book because in an age where we talk a lot about Christian nationalism, where there are books and podcasts and folks on the TV talking about it, they contribute something that I've not seen anywhere else.
They're talking about how mainline Protestants have contributed to what we now call Christian nationalism.
Mainline Protestants, if you're not familiar, are those who are often considered more liberal or progressive.
They have a different approach to scripture, different approach to ethics, different approach to theology than their evangelical Protestant counterparts.
When you think of mainland Protestants, you often think of churches that are LGBTQ affirming, that have social justice platforms, that approach faith in ways that just seem a little contrary to the kind of evangelical, apocalyptic, biblical inerrancy approach that we often see with evangelicals and fundamentalists.
So, as a result, you don't get too many people interrogating the presence of Christian nationalism in mainline Christian denominations or churches.
And yet, the data shows us that there is a Christian nationalist problem in those spaces.
If you look at the PRRI survey, from 2023, it shows that 33% of mainline white Christians are either adherents to or sympathizers with Christian nationalism.
So, one out of three folks in this space are on the Christian nationalist spectrum in some way.
And so the fact that we don't talk about that is fascinating, and I think Brian and Bo will really unpack for us why we need to talk about it, how mainline Protestants actually help to build momentum for the Christian nationalist moment we're in right now.
And what's at stake by recognizing everything going on there.
In the second part for subscribers, I'm going to talk for a few minutes about the reactions to the bridge collapse in Baltimore and how the conspiracy theories and the ways that right wing politicians have have used this to fracture the nation is a sign of something that's really, really problematic for our country.
So if you're a subscriber, stick around.
Going to be talking about that for a few minutes.
And obviously, if you're not a subscriber, subscribe now so you can get that content along with our bonus episode just coming out tomorrow and all the other great stuff that we do.
Including at Free Listening.
Thanks for being here, y'all.
Here's my interview.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Just introduced these folks to you in my intro, but want to just welcome them now into today's episode.
And that is Brian Kaler and Dr. Brian Kaler, excuse me, Brian, and Bo Underwood.
Brian, you've been on before and just we've had great conversations.
And Bo, I feel like we've just communicated about so many important issues and articles and things over the years.
It's great to have you on the show.
Y'all have written just a really important book, and I think a book that, in a field of books about Christian nationalism, in a time when Christian nationalism is popping up everywhere we look, this is truly a unique work because it addresses something that I have not seen anyone else address in any substantive way, and that is Christian nationalism and mainline Protestant Christianity.
And so I think the first thing we need to do is to discuss what it means to be mainline.
I think a lot of folks here listening are used to like hearing about evangelicals.
They're listening here.
Charismatics.
They, they're very familiar when they imagine a Christian in the United States, they're imagining Sean Foyt or whoever may be Lindsey Graham or in my, when I'm old, I used to tell my students like Tim Tebow used to be somebody they used to love thinking about.
It used to be George W. Bush.
It used to be folks like that.
All that to say, Beau, give us a real useful definition here of what it means to be a mainline Christian.
Absolutely.
Before I do that, though, you hit the nail on the head.
We really wrote this book because we believe you can't understand where we're currently at with Christian nationalism if you don't look at how we got here.
And part of what's been missing in the story of how we got there was the role of mainliners.
So, we write this as people who are appreciative of the mainline church, but also think the mainline church needs to have a reckoning.
This was an idea that we have discussed for some years.
We weren't seeing it out there.
And so we wrote this essay for Religion and Politics in January of 2023, kind of a trial balloon of the argument.
Thought somebody will shoot it down or some historian will correct us, explain why we got it wrong.
And instead, we got a lot of great responses from historians, scholars of Christian nationalism, even mainline church leaders saying, this is a story that needs to be told.
And so here we are trying to tell it in more detail.
So appreciate you having us on.
And yes, when we talk about the mainline church, We're talking about a particular tradition within American Christianity, sort of broadly speaking, you know, you can divide American Christianity into the Catholic tradition, the evangelical tradition, and the mainliners with a few other groups sort of on the fringes in terms of just size.
So, mainliners are about a third of the American Christian landscape.
When we think about mainliners, we can classify them a couple different ways.
One is to talk about just belonging.
There's sort of these seven historical denominations.
You've got the United Church of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, the ELCA, the PCUSA, the United Methodists, the Episcopalians, and the American Baptists, who are kind of the seven sisters of the mainline.
And so people who belong to those traditions are called mainliners.
But more importantly than that, you've got a spirit, you've got an ethos, a theological approach that is defined by an openness, an openness to ecumenical engagement, to working across denominational lines, and an openness to understanding that we don't have the whole corner on truth.
So mainliners aren't going to be the ones who fight with you about doctrine.
They might be the ones that fight with you about governance and polity.
There's nothing better than a mainline church board fight.
But it's usually over at the process as opposed to substance.
And so we mainliners tend to be really ecumenical unless you want to violate Robert's Rules of Order.
I love this so much.
I have so many skits that I've written and no one's ever seen about like Methodist committees and stuff, so I just love that you brought that up.
Bo, I'm going to stay with you and ask you one more question here, and that is, you just gave us this great view of the mainline churches as open, as not tied to doctrinal strictness.
This is not a place where you are going to get kicked out of the church if you don't line up All the way with the teaching on everything from the atonement, maybe all the way to reproductive rights, where there are certainly churches, in my own experience, in evangelical traditions and others, where that's the case.
So that brings up a question I think some people might answer.
Well, all right, so these are the liberal Protestants.
These are the progressive Protestants.
These are the Protestants who might believe in evolution.
These are the Protestants who might have some views on reproductive rights that are close to mine as somebody who's not religious.
Why would we then be in a place that we have to talk about Christian nationalism?
Because this is the sector of American Christianity that I would think, okay, we're good.
No, no Christian nationalism in that space.
So, you said the name George W. Bush at the beginning of our podcast.
He himself is United Methodist, right?
So, we do have a spectrum of folks in the mainland tradition that sort of range from moderate to progressive, but you also have, more importantly, historical reasons.
So, obviously, the Episcopal Church was a state church over in England and came over here was a state church in some places as well.
So, you have this kind of historical lineage of the church and state being really tied together.
Obviously, a little bit different scenario when you're talking about Baptist traditions, the American Baptist.
So, in some sense, some of the mainline traditions and the United States kind of grew up together and grew together.
But then you also have this period really in the early, mid, and later 20th centuries where the mainlines exercised tremendous cultural and social power.
And they, whether it was naively, whether it was cynically, they understood or believed that what was good for the mainline was good for society and vice versa.
And so they said, you know, basically thought like, if we go advance the cause of Christ from our tradition, it's going to be good for society as a whole.
And the society was a lot more homogenous than that it was now, and so there wasn't as noticeable in terms of the friction or the dangers of that post.
Now, of course, when these Christian nationalists today say, well, what is good for society is what we think is the right Christian thing to do, we're recoiling at that.
But it's interesting to know that the impulse is the same, even if the ideas are really different.
So there is this impulse to imposition in some sense of, hey, if we expand our religious vision, that'll be a good American vision.
And when we hear Mike Johnson say that, as you say, we recoil.
But there are, as your book just points out in great detail, such a strong historical occurrence of that same impulse coming from the mainline traditions.
I think this is a great place to stop and talk about civil religion, the idea of an American civil religion.
So, Brian, I'm going to come to you.
What's a good working definition of civil religion and how does it play into the kind of impulse to merge the Christian and American visions that Bo just talked about?
The concept of civil religion was one that we knew we had to deal with when working on this.
And as you know, in your own scholarship, usually the theoretical chapters like the least exciting and most difficult to actually get to work together.
And this was definitely one that we just kept going back and forth on trying to unpack Robert Bell's work on civil religion and this idea that there is this unifying religious language and symbols.
That, you know, help bring the nation together, but has often been used to distinguish as something different than Christian nationalism.
And we kind of unpack that looking backwards from the advantage that we have now in a post-January 6th world of a couple of things.
That one, some of the examples that Bella gave as civil religion, today we would call Christian nationalism.
And so we unpack some of the examples that he gave in his original essay in kind of looking at, well, what does that mean today?
But then the other thing that we know is that even if his civil religious contract worked back then, that there really was this unifying non-sectarian religion or religious ethos that could kind of bring Americans together, that no longer works today.
So when Bellow first wrote his essay on civil religion in 1967, 92% of Americans identified as Christian.
And this was a largely Protestant Christian nation.
Over two-thirds of Americans identified as Protestant.
And so that only left 3% Jewish, 3% of another faith, and only 2% who claimed no faith at all.
You flash forward to what we've got today and you've got a third of Americans that are not claiming that label anymore.
The Jewish faith has held the same at 2%.
We've seen a growing number of people of other faiths at 8%.
But 21% of Americans, the so-called nones, N-O-N-E's, claim no religious label.
And so what might have been unifying, or largely unifying back then, is no longer so now.
And I think that's the bite that we're seeing with Christian nationalism.
It's why it's less democratic.
Because it starts to push so many more Americans out of the public sphere.
But we would also say that it wasn't as innocuous as it seemed back then when Robert Bell was writing about it.
Sure, 92% of Americans maybe felt unified under this general Christian ethos, but that still left some people pushed out.
Defined as not fully American because they were not Christian.
It just wasn't as problematic as it is today.
So that's both what we see happening in civil religion, It was less harmless than it felt at the time, but it's even more problematic today.
And that civil religion often turns out to be just a kinder, gentler version of Christian nationalism, or maybe the gateway drug to Christian nationalism.
So if you study religious studies or political theology, Robert Bella's work on civil religion is like one of the first things you read.
You know, I remember being in my, the very first quarter of my PhD program at UCSB reading Robert Bella.
And so, friends, if you've not read that essay, he really does make this case that the United States has a kind of national religion, that we have holy places, you know, in D.C., the Capitol and the monuments, that we have rituals, that we have doctrines, right, that as Americans we all can ascribe to.
And it kind of maps on.
In a way that is correspondent to a kind of monotheistic understanding of living under the transcendence of a God who founds the country and participating in a civic square that's founded by more than simply human will.
There's this idea of an American civil religion that unites us as Americans.
And as Brian just said, That was never unifying, because there were always people who didn't fit into that, right?
I'm thinking of my great-grandparents who started a Buddhist temple on Maui, going back to the 30s, and they would have certainly not been people who would have been included in Bella's definition.
But then now, it's even more just glaring, as Brian, you say.
I want to just stay with you, Brian, though, and ask you, all right, so we know that if I'm somebody who's not religious, Even if I'm somebody who's a Hindu, Buddhist, even if I'm Muslim, I might feel like, hey, I read the civil religion essay.
I don't think I fit that well.
This is a Christian nation sort of deal.
But you're a Christian.
Why is civil religion not good news to you?
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I've always been bothered by civil religion because of the attempt by Bella to take our sacred symbols and our sacred language and then make it something generically American as the American way of life.
And that is deeply problematic.
I mean, we take something as simple as adding under God to the pledge, which is one of the examples that Bella uses in his initial essay.
As civil religion, as something that was supposed to be unifying and, you know, bringing us all together.
And it raises two different issues there.
First of all, if this isn't the Christian God, if this is some unifying American God, then who is this God that I'm being asked to pledge allegiance to?
I'm being told it's not the Christian God.
And yet, as a Christian, I pledge allegiance to the Christian God.
And so there's some sort of competing vision here.
And if it is the Christian God, then when we're asking school kids, for instance, who don't follow the faith or are of a different tradition or no faith at all, to say this as part of their pledge to be a good American, we're asking them to take God's name in vain.
Because it's not something they actually believe in.
So either way, it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't approach there with civil religion.
And so that's been a problem that we have as Christian ministers with civil religion, that not only did it not always seem as inclusive as American as it needed to be, it also was borrowing too much from religion, being too much like a competing religion.
All right, so we have this, here's what we've established.
Mainline Protestants are on the whole more moderate or progressive politically, usually, usually, than their evangelical counterparts.
They're about a third of our sort of Christian American landscape at the moment.
They've had an outsized effect on the United States history, especially the 20th century.
So I think this is where we can start to ask about the history that reveals the influence that mainline Protestants have had on some of the Christian nationalist elements we still see in our public square.
So I'm going to talk about the National Prayer Breakfast.
A lot of folks listening are picturing Mike Johnson, they're picturing Jeff Charlotte's work on the family, the video, the book, whatever may be.
Mainline Christians, however, had a role in shaping that event and creating what it is today.
Throw it to either one of you.
Give us just a snapshot of that history.
I think today, every time the National Prayer Breakfast comes up, we all think evangelicals and we think about Christian nationalism today.
And rightfully so, as Speaker Johnson moved it into the Capitol.
I mean, it's something that's become even more problematic.
But it is something that's coming out of the mainline tradition, the member of Congress who Was the individual most responsible inside of Congress and bringing this about was an American Baptist layman.
He spoke at the opening one and he led as a chair for 17 years this event.
And so that's, you know, that's a significant thing.
And when you start to look at who's speaking and who's praying at these opening ones, it's an Episcopalian and it's the American Baptist and it's a Methodist.
These are the initial speakers.
And even some of the key figures who are leading the family and, you know, we're indebted to Jeff Scarlett's work on helping do that and we rely heavily on them, are themselves coming actually from the mainline denominations.
And that honestly is a bit of surprise to us when we start digging into that.
I'm sure it's gonna be a surprise to others as well to realize that these figures that we have been talking about and been concerned about with the family, Behind this are actually coming from, you know, Methodist tradition and United Methodist tradition, and then later a Presbyterian USA member.
These are the people that have been leading the family.
And so it's really surprising when you, you know, unpack the history and realize, wow, evangelicals might be the ones fueling it and gaining from it politically today, but they're not the ones who created the National Bread Breakfast.
Let's go to another one.
That's the idea of one nation under God.
I recently gave a talk and talked about how I thought having one nation under God in the pledge of allegiance is a Christian nationalist saying, and I posted that on Instagram and Twitter, and the comments are all, you know, listen, buddy, it's in the pledge.
Sorry.
It's a Christian nation.
It's in the pledge.
So just deal with it.
I'm wondering why that is not exactly accurate.
So, I'll let Brian handle the history piece here in a minute, but I just want to name, Brad, that you're identifying what we think is an important element of this conversation.
So, we have all these David Barton-like figures, these folks who are out there talking about America as a Christian nation, and when they're challenged on that and they say, well, here's my evidence for it, and they quote the founders selectively, then they also start pointing to things like the Pledge of Allegiance or the national motto on God We Trust.
And a lot of these things that they're citing as their data, as their evidence for how we know that America is a Christian nation, and how they can advance their Christian nationalism, are these things that Mainliners helped make happen.
So, your experience is exactly what we're talking about.
That here's something that Mainliners probably thought was innocuous, and yet here it is being used to advance Christian nationalism in 2024.
And it indeed does have quite the mainline history.
I think the example of under God in the pledge is really significant in thinking about not only the role that mainline Protestants have played in helping build Christian nationalism, but how this idea of what we might have called civil religion back in the 60s and 70s was actually Christian nationalism and was never as unifying as we were just talking a moment ago, was never as unifying as perhaps Robert Bell and others have suggested.
And so we have the The key figure, and we know this from the story, that there was one pastor who gave a sermon, and knowing that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was going to be sitting in the pew of his Presbyterian Church USA congregation on that particular Sunday, and he gives the sermon.
And the whole point of his sermon was to convince the President of the United States that we should have under God in the pledge.
And it is amazing how quickly things moved in just a matter of weeks and getting this like through Congress and to the president's desk.
And I mean, you know, we both of us have preached sermons and we've never had people excited.
People remember the sermon the next week.
I mean, so, you know, this is an amazing impact.
I mean, credit to his rhetorical abilities.
It was a very successful sermon.
But what's really fascinating is what he does in that sermon.
And we spend quite a bit of time unpacking and going through the rhetoric in his sermon.
Not only is he developing these Christian nationalistic ideas about American history and what we should be as a nation.
What's even more significant is how open he is.
He says the quiet part out loud about what this means for those who aren't Christians.
In this sermon, the sermon to Eisenhower and some other people who just happened to be there that Sunday morning, to convince them to put under God in the Pledge of Allegiance, he calls atheists spiritual parasites.
I mean, so from the beginning, he is very clear in framing that to put under God in the Pledge is to not only mark this as a Christian nation, but it is also to mark out atheists as not good Americans, as not fully Americans.
So we think that's what under God was all along, was Christian nationalism.
It's there in the founding document, the founding sermon of this being added to our pledge.
So, you know, we're with you 100%.
I also like to joke that, you know, the guy who at least is largely credited with writing it was a Baptist minister and a socialist Baptist minister.
That, we don't know how often to put those two terms together today, but he left God out of it.
So, you know, that wasn't so bad after all.
To preach a sermon and then have it inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance, that is pretty impressive.
Bo, I'm wondering if we can talk a little bit about your ministry and I'm wondering about the church context.
I think one thing that I want to ask about are the racial makeup of mainline denominations and how those might veer toward a kind of white majority.
And how what you talked about earlier might come into play.
You talked earlier about mainline Protestant denominations, say, in the 1940s, 50s, having a lot of power, a lot of influence, and there being a sense of white Christians being able to shape our civil Our American public square, our policies, our laws, our pledge, our money, our so on and so forth.
I'm wondering, as we move into an era that is identified as Christian Nationalist, if the Christian Nationalism you see in mainline denominations is a function of whiteness and sort of the desire for a kind of a certain social order?
As much as it is about a Christian vision for the country and for its laws, I guess what I'm asking here is, it seems as if some of that vision to have a sense of influence over the country is not only one of a religious vision, but it's one in which during the time that y'all are looking at, This is before the Civil Rights Movement.
This is before 1965, immigration reform.
This is before we became what we will be soon, and that is a majority-minority country.
How does all that play into this for people listening at home?
Yeah, I mean, I think you're getting straight to the crux of the matter here.
So, we know from the social scientists who study Christianity now that, you know, one of the things that this belief in this ideology correlates with is those seeking to fuse these American and Christian identities also support things like restricted voting rights.
They have higher or less tolerance for interracial marriages.
They support more discrimination towards LGBTQ plus people.
There's all of these things that are really a sort of retrograde now that are correlated with Christian nationalism.
So we see that it's being used as a way of trying to prop up a social order that is called Christian, but is really quite outmoded and never should have been inmoded, so to speak.
And really what we're calling from the book is for the mainline church to do what it really has on race, We, you know, a lot of mainline traditions have really had a reckoning when it comes to their participation in slavery, racial injustices of the past.
Not that they're perfect now, but they are trying to interrogate themselves and become, as we call it in my denomination, an anti-racist church.
And wonderful needs to happen and needs to continue, but let's have a similar conversation about our complicity in the sins of Christian nationalism in the past.
And part of what we hope this book will do will be a resource for mainline churches to have those conversations in Sunday school, small groups, as a sermon series.
We know it's scary, right?
I mean, we know part of what pastors face, what I face is, well, you want to talk about that flag in the sanctuary?
That is a scary conversation.
But there are ways to have it that are helpful and that can be constructive and can make your church healthier and, we think, a stronger Christian community if you do it the right way, and we hope this resource will help people do it the right way.
What I've noticed in many of the circles I run in, and there's a lot of folks who say proudly, I'm ex-evangelical, right?
A lot of proud ex-evangelicals.
Okay, great.
And then I get asked in interviews, okay, so you're an ex-evangelical?
And I say, sure.
And then they say, were you a Christian nationalist?
And that's a line that even now I see a lot of my ex-evangelical comrades kind of wincing.
Because it's kind of like you said, hey, were you a white supremacist?
It's like, not sure.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Even though it was 10 years ago, not sure I want to go there.
And I always say I was a Christian nationalist.
I was.
Yes.
This is going to be a weird question for both of you, but Beau, I think your ministry experience is speaking right to this.
Is it almost easier to approach a congregation and say, should we interrogate the ways that our denomination was entangled in something like a history of enslavement, rather than approaching the person in 2024 and saying, hey, I think we're complicit in Christian nationalism, like all the The evangelicals across the street.
Do you want to talk about that?
Because I'm pretty sure you're a Christian nationalist.
So, do you want to get lunch and maybe discuss your Christian nationalism, go over to Panera, have a tea?
Like, that seems really hard as a minister because I can see people being like, nope, I'm not, what, me?
I don't, I'm not Sean Foyt.
Leave me, I'm not Mike Johnson.
Get out of my face.
So, is that fair, Beau, or how do you see that working on the ground?
I'm going to do what any good conversationalist does, I'm going to complicate the question farther.
So, I think a lot of our racism has become less overt, and so in some sense we've dealt with the easy stuff, and now we're working really through the hard stuff that's obviously more difficult to eradicate.
The Christian nationalism stuff is still very overt.
And so we're still coming to understand it.
So yes, we've seen some people reject that label, cringe at that label, because maybe they don't fully understand what it means, or they don't want to sort of think that their faith and their patriotism don't easily go together.
But we all, we just as we are all racist to some degree, we're all Christian nationalists to some degree, right?
It's a spectrum, even those who study it sort of lay out that there's a spectrum here that people fall upon.
I used to preach in one church in front of a flag, right?
I was at another church where it was in D.C.
and there was lots of fusion of religious and civic identities and a very progressive congregation even.
We participated to celebrate Boy Scouts Sunday where the scouts who we want to support the scouts, especially they become under attack from more evangelical circles for being more inclusive towards LGBTQ plus siblings.
And yet, on Scout Sunday, they come in and often churches will say the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag and present the colors before worship starts or as part of worship.
That's Christian nationalism, and so we just have to recognize that we can be patriotic without lighting off firecrackers in a sanctuary, right?
And we should be able to be Christian and talk about a God who has transcended above the nations, for those of us who are Christian, and not have to be, you know, nationalistic partisans.
Like, that's just not what this is supposed to be about, and these things need to come apart more than they have traditionally in our society.
Let me ask you, Brian.
Let me give you a quote from the book and just get your reaction.
I hope I wrote this quote.
You're asking him about what I wrote versus what he wrote.
We're living in the political timeline mainline Protestants established.
This goes right to what I was asking Beau, because we're living in a political timeline that every time I open the news, and I open the news a lot to do this show, we see something new about Christian nationalists, Christian extremists, the destruction of church and state, the separation of those things, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, attacks on reproductive rights in the name of God, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And here you are saying the political timeline that I see when I open up the news is one that mainline Protestants established.
Talk to me about that.
Yeah, I mean, that's what, as we were working the book, we just kept coming onto that all of the, quote, evidence that, you know, David Barton and Speaker Johnson point to that say that we're supposed to be a Christian nation.
Those are things that mainline Protestants put there.
One of the last moment that make it in the book, I mean, we were, we were wrapping this thing up and then this moment happened and we're like, well, we've got to put this in, is when Mike Johnson was elected Speaker.
I mean, we're like, our deadlines start in the book.
We're like, well, we got to put this in there because he points to In God We Trust there in gold letters on the House chamber during his first remarks after his election as Speaker and to talk about his vision of what he thought America was supposed to be.
And so we went back and looked at the history of how that phrase ended up in that spot.
And it wasn't evangelicals like Mike Johnson that put in God We Trust, that stamped God there on the wall behind the House chamber.
It was mainland Protestants who put it there, and put it there as a retort to, like, fight back against the Supreme Court for, quote, taking God out of school with a school prayer decision, which is another one of those things.
The prayer that the court was ruling against was a prayer that mainland Protestants helped write and then defended and wanted in our public schools.
And so, when you look at all of these things that are happening, that we're still wrestling with, these topics, the things that evangelicals are pushing for today, they're things that mainline Protestants put us on this path.
And so then what we're trying to call people to do is saying, hey, if you're troubled by Christian nationalism today, and we hope you are, we assume that if you're listening to this pod, there's a high chance that you're concerned about the anti-democratic, violent threat of Christian nationalism.
But then we need to understand how we got here to truly be able to address the root causes.
And then also, if you're from a tradition In the mainline church, it's easy to point at those conservative evangelicals and being like, man, those people over there are really dangerous.
And they are.
Don't get me wrong.
But it's cathartic to say that they're the only problem and not look at the way that we're discipling people in our own congregations, even in moderate and progressive churches today, still discipling people to view Christian nationalism, maybe a softer, kinder version.
And I think we've seen the impact of generations of Americans being discipled in mainline Protestant churches, individuals like Donald Trump, a product of the mainline Protestant church, being discipled into seeing the Americanism and Christianity as one and as synonymous.
So much there.
I, you know, as you were talking, I was thinking as somebody who's Japanese American, that Asian Americans have been fighting the model minority myth for generations now.
And the model minority myth is basically a myth that says, Hey, you're the good minorities.
So you, you should, instead of fighting white supremacy, you should look at all the other racial minorities in the country and judge them as, and I'm almost hearing from you a kind of Mainliners are the model Christians, and therefore, instead of interrogating ourselves and fighting white supremacy, we should just look across the street to the people who are doing the Reawaken America tour and say, they're the problem, not us.
Hey, let me ask you this to close, Beau.
What is the role in today's climate where we do have a Reawaken America tour, where we do have Speaker Johnson touting the kinds of ideas about the separation of church and state being a myth?
Where we have Marjorie Taylor Greene saying, I am a Christian nationalist proudly, so on and so on and so on.
What should be the role of mainline Protestants in today's public climate, political climate?
Because you are a mainline minister, you are a clergy in this tradition.
What is it that you would hope folks who are part of this broad tradition would see their role today?
The whole last chapter of our book is really kind of a practical way of approaching this that can make a difference.
We know that Christian nationalism can feel like such a big problem that it's hard to know how we can bite off of it, how one little church, one Christian, one pastor can truly have an impact.
And so, we have some very concrete ideas there.
But ultimately, it comes down to is, I know that the fundamentalists, the evangelicals who are participating in this, the Gregalox of the world, they don't care what I think, right?
I have no influence over them.
I can scream and yell at them all day.
It might feel cathartic, but it's not going to do anything.
So where I have influence is in my own tradition and with my own church.
And so the more that we can work on ourselves and create sort of a counter witness, right, a distinctive community that says there's another way to be Christian, We think that sort of differentiating ourselves in that way will make us more attractive and more faithful as a Christian community.
So, what we're really encouraging here is if mainlanders can work on themselves, they might end up, you know, I don't want to use this, I'll use this word in a different way, right?
They may end up doing some evangelism and sort of showing the country there's a different way to be a follower of Jesus that doesn't have all the ugliness of Christian nationalism.
And then we think that would be good for their churches, we know it'll also be good for their souls.
Anything to add to that, Brian?
In the year 2024, I mean, the fight against Christian nationalism is really important.
I mean, democracy is on the line, and so we need to do some work.
And we do think that the best places that we're going to see progress made is with the mainline denominations.
You mentioned earlier, Brad, that you admit that you were a Christian nationalist.
It's one of the things I appreciate.
I mean, in your book, Preparing for War, I mean, you're very upfront at the very beginning, you can kind of imagine, like, Man, would I have been there, like, on January 6th if I hadn't left that culture?
And I appreciate your honesty, because it's one of the things that I've reckoned with as well.
I came—Bo's always been a mainliner.
I came out of the conservative evangelical world and now in the mainline world.
And I know that Christian nationalism was both there and in my current context as well.
Because if you grew up in a white Christian church in the United States, Christian nationalism is just in the air you breathe.
And so we'd like to make some progress wherever we can and get the churches that are willing and ready to do the work, to do that difficult work starting where they can.
And so that we hope in a year like this, when Christian nationalism is part of the conversation, that we can make some significant progress.
Because it's not just good for Christianity as we're ministers, you know, hoping to see that go well.
It's also good for America.
It's good for everyone to create a vision of a pluralistic democracy where all people are truly welcome, where no one is cast out as not fully American because of their faith or their beliefs, that no one is called a spiritual parasite, where Yeah, I appreciate that very much.
And I appreciate the courage it took to write this book because I think it's not a book that is going to win you a popularity contest.
And so, you know, there's going to be folks in your own backyard who are kind of like, you know, why don't you talk about nice things instead of trying to get us to confront things that are really Uncomfortable, just to be very honest.
We joked a lot while writing that we were writing to make all of our friends angry.
At some point we even take a shot at our own publisher.
We know our own publisher's past in promoting books and hymns that promoted Christian nationalism, so we're an equal opportunity offender.
Yeah, I think we put the acknowledgments that we were impressed the publisher wanted to put this book out in the world, because it has no natural audience.
If you're a Republican, a Democrat, an Evangelical, a Mainliner, you're not going to like this, but we think you need to hear it.
I just appreciate that very much.
All right, where can folks find you, and what's the best way to link up?
Obviously, you two are working together on Word & Way, and that's a place that they can find regular writing and regular updates.
What are some other places that one might connect with you, Beau?
Yeah, so Brian and I write together and some other voices from time to time at our sub-stack, which is called a Public Witness, publicwitness.wordandway.org.
And of course, the book is out for pre-order wherever you find, you know, wherever you usually come across your books.
But our publisher would love it if you'd get it at chalicepress.org.
And to incentivize that, they're going to provide a promo code for all listeners of the podcast.
It's BAPodcast, Bat Passing America Podcast, and it'll give you a 33% off the cover price.
Wow, that's good.
Okay, great.
How about you, Brian?
Yeah, well, I spend almost all my day writing for Word and Way.
So publicwitness.wordandway.org, but we also have Dangerous Dogma, where you've been on as a guest, and we have many other similar guests that you share.
And so that's for podcast listeners.
Well, thanks for listening to my interview, y'all.
I hope you enjoyed it.
I hope you learned a lot.
I want to turn now to what I promised at the beginning, which is a kind of reflection on some of the responses to the bridge collapse and incident in Baltimore from last week.
And I think most of you are aware now that there have been many conspiracy theories and other reactions to the bridge collapse that have really not helped the situation.
But I wanted to give voice to, I think, one particular aspect of this that is really troubling to me.
And in order to do that, I want to first turn to a piece by Greg Sargent at the New Republic.
I just have to say, Greg Sargent's work is work I consistently appreciate and turn to for insight on these things.
So here's what Sargent points out.
As COVID-19 raged in 2020, Donald Trump sneered that bailouts for Democratic states were unfair to Republicans and mused aloud, About using quarantines to protect red states from diseased blue state residents.
Last year, when a train hauling toxic chemicals derailed in eastern Ohio, MAGA personalities transformed it into an insidious parable about woke Democratic elites supposedly scheming to abandon the virtuous white heartland.
So in response to the bridge collapse, here's what we've seen from just a couple of Republican representatives.
Representative Dan Muser slammed President Biden for calling on Congress to fully fund the response to the Baltimore collapse.
Muser said it's outrageous and he doesn't think the repair should be done in their entirety.
And he demanded that some of this money must be taken out from the ridiculous EV expenditures, talking about electric vehicles.
Similarly, Sargent writes, Nancy Mace, South Carolina, blamed the collapse, in part, on the Green New Deal.
Mace says that too much of the bipartisan infrastructure law funded decarbonized and public transportation, supposedly taking money from traditional roads and bridges.
Her lament is odd, Sargent notes, as she voted against that infrastructure bill and all of its spending on roads and bridges.
So she's saying that she wants more money for roads and bridges, but she voted against the bill which would have given more money to roads and bridges.
Some Republicans are arguing that because the collapse wasn't a natural disaster, we should look to insurance coverage and the shipping company in order to fund the repairs.
In fairness, some Democrats have also made similar suggestions, but the Democratic stance is also that new federal funds absolutely should be appropriated because it's critical.
Some GOP lawmakers are already treating future funding of the Baltimore response as a future concession on their part.
Representative Jeff Duncan says Congress should not spend one more dime of additional infrastructure money before a border wall is built as if the need for disaster relief can be used to extort Democrats into funding MAGA priorities in return.
Now it does get worse and I think some of you have probably already seen this.
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