The Abomination of Christian Nationalism

And the liberal’s conundrum of how to address a Hitlerian big lie

Liberals and humanists are brought up to be tolerant. As individualists, we respect everyone’s freedom to come to their conclusions and to live almost however they want.

But what happens when these liberties are abused not just by criminals who take their freedom too far since they disregard their victims’ equal freedom, but by those who don’t respect the reason why a free society is supposed to be sustainable?

The disgrace of right-wing Americanized “Christianity”

The Evangelical Christian Tim Alberta has written an exhaustive, immersive account of the gross politicization of White Evangelical Christianity in the US. Speaking as an insider, he details how these Christians view Donald Trump as a mercenary figure who will stop the slide of American culture into secularism and progressive modernity.

Alberta points to how this kind of Christianity has become nationalistic so that these Christians see no dichotomy between the kingdom of God and the United States. For them their country is a holy nation, specially blessed by God, which means it must be protected against demonic, ungodly forces, such as the Democratic Party and its liberal values.

Of course, Alberta shows how this is grossly unbiblical and anti-Jesus since they promised that Christians would be vindicated not in any kingdom of men and women, but in the hereafter, in a kingdom ruled directly by God. Augustine made this dualism plain with his distinction between the two “cities.”

As egregious as the Republican Party’s politicization of the religion is, Alberta’s focus on Trumpism trivializes the scale of the absurdity that is any form of organized Christianity. Jesus was a quintessential counterculturalist, but a religion sprang up in his name and became mainstream in the Roman Empire. Consequently, every predominant form of Christianity has been absurd for some sixteen centuries.

It’s easy to get caught up in the doctrinal disputes, as secularists wrestle with how to respond to fundamentalists’ arguments, but the conflict is far deeper than, say, the classical problem of evil, whether the Bible is self-contradictory, or whether God exists.

No, the overriding problem is that Christianity for the masses is a Hitlerian big lie, a lie so outrageous that the lie exploits our civility. Even the opponents give the lie cover because the alternative would be to admit that something monstrous could already be in our midst. We’d prefer to normalize the monster, to call it “one of the world’s great religions,” a time-honoured respectable faith.

So-called Evangelical or right-wing, White American Christianity, at least, is a grotesque absurdity, from top to bottom. No part of the precious American culture these Christians are so desperate to preserve has anything to do with the ethos of Jesus.

Take abortion, for instance. For Jesus, there would have been no need to prolong our species by having multiple babies per family since the world was about to end, and God was about to show himself and bring a day of judgment to our species. That’s why Jesus didn’t start a family, and why he said hyperbolically that his disciples would have to “hate” their earthly family, in comparison with their spiritual one (Luke 14:26). Conservative “family values” have nothing to do with Jesus’s or Paul’s apocalypticism (Matt. 19:11–12; 1 Cor 7:28–40).

More generally, Jesus didn’t speak on this kind of issue because he was caught up in apocalyptic fervor. That is, so focussed was Jesus on spiritual matters that he downplayed politics. As far as we can tell from the New Testament and the historical context, for Jesus, politics in the natural world is fit for demons and their thrones and principalities, and a proper theocracy would be established only after God has unalterably separated the sheep from the goats.

Or take the right to own guns. Jesus was a pacifist who told his followers to love their enemies, to sacrifice everything they own to help the needy, and to care nothing for earthly rewards. According to the New Testament, Jesus adhered to these instructions by living as an itinerant preacher and healer, and by stirring up trouble in Jerusalem and getting himself executed by the state to inspire his followers with his lack of compromise.

The notion that Jesus would be on the side of those who hoard and cherish weapons is a Hitlerian big lie — not just a doctrinal error or a misunderstanding, but a gross, diabolical distortion of the truth, a distortion that abuses the good faith of those who are clearer-minded.

Or take an issue of “wokeness” that so offends right-wing American Christians, such as support for the human rights of gays and transsexuals in public schools. Would Jesus who hung around with lepers prefer to marginalize and demonize these minorities or to emphasize their common humanity and their potential to come to terms with God?

Jesus and Paul weren’t preoccupied with championing heterosexuality and denigrating alternative sexualities. For them, sex and family life themselves were obstacles to grappling with the presumed apocalyptic context of facing our transcendent maker. Thus, bigots would be told to remove the log from their eye (Matt. 7:1–5).

If the supposed problem is that sex-ed is being taught too early or that teens are being forced into sex-change operations because of a fad, those overcompensations would have to be weighed against the multi-century global norm of demonizing these sorts of minorities. Sometimes it’s wise to overcorrect in creating a problem that prevents the return of a much greater problem.

You can go down the list of the “Christian values” that these Evangelicals think are threatened by the resurgence of liberal America, and what you find is just an appalling masquerade. In Christian terms, this right-wing religious nationalist movement is far more demonic than godly.

These fake Jesus-followers are blind even to their plain shadow in the Islamic fundamentalists they demonize. The difference between the medieval totalitarianism of a Sharia society, and a Gilead-style, conservative “Christian” paradise is negligible.

The perversity here is that anti-Christians could be so sanctimonious in professing to be the purest Christians. But one reason their big lies are allowed to stand is that their path is well-worn; as I said, organized Christianity has been inexcusable for most of the religion’s history.

The paradox of the big lie

The more interesting question, though, is what critics are supposed to do about it.

How should we handle “big liars” in that technical sense, as in bullshitters who have no respect for truth or decency and who exploit the principles of liberal tolerance to undermine them from within?

After all, in liberal societies we’re free to think whatever we want. There’s no such thing as a thought crime. Yet the Hitlerian big lie is a crime against good taste. Again, it’s a question of hideousness, of the willingness to exploit people’s faith in humanity to smuggle a monstrous perversion into the discourse.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler accused Jews of perpetrating this kind of big lie (about how Germany lost the First World War):

All this was inspired by the principle — which is quite true within itself — that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.

On the contrary, the big lie was the Nazis’ one about the alleged evil of the Jewish people. Hitler was projecting onto Jews the lengths the Nazis would be willing to go to create a totalitarian society.

But the point is that this is what we’re dealing with in the case of Trumpian Christianity. It’s not a dispute about the facts of natural selection or about the logic of some proofs for God’s existence. It’s not about the interpretation of this or that biblical passage. The culture of right-wing Christianity is obviously grotesque. The emperor has no clothes. The un-American, illiberal monstrosity hides in plain sight.

But nothing like that can be said on liberal grounds because those statements are intolerant and “politically incorrect.” If White Evangelicals obey the law, they’re free in the US (and in Canada and other free societies) to practice whatever culture they wish. Even as authoritarians gain steam around the world, and even as Donald Trump threatens American democracy with his big lie about the alleged stolen election of 2020, liberals have a problem standing up to this threat. Liberals in Weimar Germany likewise couldn’t recognize the Nazis for what they were — which is how the big lie wins.

We prefer to give each other the benefit of the doubt since that’s what it means to be civil in a late-modern society. No one wanted to believe Hitler intended to fight for German honour by conquering the whole world and committing genocide. No one thought he’d have been so deceptive, bloodthirsty, and full of irrational hatred for Jews and other “impure races.”

No one thought as much because we don’t expect such monsters to pop up in our midst. We lock fraudsters, thieves, and murderers away in prison whenever they rear their heads in criminal acts. And we don’t expect sociopaths to be more proficient at fitting in, or at corrupting liberal society like parasites.

The liberal’s predicament

As appalling as this right-wing “Christianity” is on every front, liberalism faces a weakness that’s perhaps just as troubling. The parasitism here fits liberal tolerance like a hand in a glove.

What’s the point of arguing with these Trumpian “Christians” when they think black is white and up is down? You’d have to take them into a room and deprogram them, treating them like children who need to be retaught the basics. But this would be like the illiberal policy that China practices in its re-education programs for the Muslim Uyghurs.

More broadly, what should the liberal’s attitude be towards the audacity of anti-Christians who masquerade as followers of Jesus or Paul?

• Should the offenders be mocked? But how fragile must their minds be to have fallen prey to their politicized cult?
• Should they be ignored? But how dangerous would their festering nationalist movements become when left in the shadows?
• Should their inanities be refuted? But wouldn’t the intellectual treatment only falsify the situation by normalizing outright absurdities?

Ironically, the very existence of this Americanized Christianity is like a miracle, as in a violation of natural regularities, a violation so bizarre that we have trouble recognizing it because our minds blot it out. This is how strangeness can hide in plain sight because we understand things only by filtering and simplifying them with our conceptions. We have no name for true miracles because naturally they’d be too rare to notice. And we have no proper name for the perpetrator of a big lie.

We speak of “right-wing Evangelical Christianity,” but that name provides only the illusion of understanding. Anti-Christian Christianity is a contradiction in terms. This kind of religious organization or political movement is fundamentally nothing — yet there it is with many loud, voting members.

What is nothing that pretends it’s something? And how can we who live in the real world recognize a monster for what it is without losing some of our good faith?

As Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

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