Did the RNC Just Nominate the Worst Presidential Candidate Ever?

Disclaimer: This blog post was planned and partially written before the despicable attempted assassination of Mr. Trump on July 13. I categorically deplore all political violence and am thankful that Mr. Trump was not seriously injured or killed. Still, I think the following needs to be carefully considered.

Last week, I conjectured that the current Supreme Court Chief Justice is in the running for the worst in the history of the U.S. Now I am raising the question of whether the Republican National Committee this week nominated the worst presidential candidate ever.

According to Mary Trump, ex-President Trump’s niece, they did. Three days before the beginning of the Republican convention on July 15 in a Substack post, Ms. Trump said that her Uncle Donald is  

The public media’s focus was on Pres. Biden from June 27 until July 13. On June 28, after Biden’s “disastrous” debate performance the previous day, the New York Times editorial board posted an opinion piece titled, “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race.”

For nearly two weeks, there was an onslaught of newscasts and posted/published news articles questioning Biden’s suitability to be re-elected President. Strangely, very little was said about the suitability of Trump being re-elected—until last week.

On July 11, the editorial board of the NYTimes posted an impressive opinion piece declaring that Trump is “unfit to lead” the country. (If you haven’t seen that post, please take a look at it here.)

The next day, Dana Milbank, the prominent Washington Post journalist, posted an article (here) asserting, “The national discussion needs to shift back to where it should be: on Trump’s fitness for office.”

Also on July 12, Ms. Trump (b. 1965), posted “Joe Biden Deserves to Be Elected” on her Substack blog. She pointed out that while Biden was having a press conference with NATO leaders last week, “Donald Trump, fascist and kisser of dictators’ asses [sic], hosted the autocratic prime minister of Hungry.”

She concluded, “Pres. Biden knows what he’s doing. So does Donald. Only Biden wants what’s best for the people of this country. Donald wants only what’s best for him—and what’s best for him will destroy this country and get a lot of people killed.” Strong words from Mary, who has a Ph.D. in psychology!

Nevertheless, Donald Trump was unanimously nominated as the Republican candidate for President on July 15.

Why might Trump be declared the worst presidential candidate ever? Well, many more reasons could be set forth here, but consider these:

    ◈ Trump is the only ex-President to be convicted as a felon—and in addition to those 34 convictions, he has been charged with 54 other felonies. No felon has ever before been a major Party nominee for President, although Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party candidate, was an imprisoned felon in 1920.*¹

    ◈ Trump is the only President to refuse to hand over the power of government to his elected successor.­ Rather than conceding, he sought to manipulate the electoral college vote to his favor on January 6, 2021, and promoted insurrection activities. And he still contends the election was “stolen.”

    ◈ Trump has publicly stated he will seek revenge on his political enemies if he is re-elected. A year ago, ABC News posted, “Trump's unprecedented campaign pitch: Elect me to get revenge on the government.” He apparently (and alarmingly) intends to use the Department of Justice for that purpose.

    ◈ Trump has been heavily influenced by The Heritage Foundation in the past (they recommended the three Supreme Court justices that he appointed), and it is quite certain that if elected he would implement many of the proposals in their “2025 Presidential Transition Project” (aka “Project 2025”).*³

    ◈ In addition to the specific reasons given above, in general, Trump can be considered the worst presidential nominee ever because of the existential threat he poses to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the ongoing democracy of the United States.

In light of the attempted assassination of Trump last week, should those who support the Democratic candidate for President not say negative things about Trump? Is that what fueled the assassination attempt, as some Republicans have charged? There is no evidence at all of that being the case.

What I have written here is not “hateful rhetoric” but a carefully considered opinion based on what Trump has said and done from 2015 to the present.

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*¹ On Nov. 2, 1920, Eugene V. Debs received one million votes in the U.S. presidential election on the Socialist Party ticket while in prison serving a 10-year sentence for a speech protesting World War I. He was arrested and convicted in federal court under the Espionage Act of 1917.

*² Project 2025 has often been in the news in the past few weeks. One recent, helpful explanation of it is found in this Washington Post article.

Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, has stated that Project 2025 would lead to a “second American Revolution” and would be “bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Sen. J.D. Vance, the Republican Vice President nominee, has strongly endorsed Project 2025. Among other things, he has written the foreword to Roberts’s new book, Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America,” due to be published in September.

*³ It is noteworthy, and completely inexplicable, that back in 2016 Trump’s pick for Vice President referred to him, the Republican nominee for President, as “America’s Hitler.” (Here is the link to what he wrote.)

 

 

 

Original Sin and the Supreme Court

Miguel A. De La Torre is an acquaintance with whom I have had delightful personal conversations and whose written work is always thought-provoking as well as (to me) questionable. “Rejecting Original Sin,” his article posted on Good Faith Media (here) on May 13, is no exception.*¹ 

“We must reject the heresy known as ‘original sin’.” Upon reading those opening words of De La Torre’s brief essay, I decided to write this blog article about it, but last week I altered considerably the content of what I planned to say in the envisioned article.

What Miguel rejects is primarily the traditional interpretation of original sin by Augustine in the early part of the fifth century and then by the Protestant reformer John Calvin in the sixteenth century. Both believed in the historicity of a literal Adam and Eve and the biological transmission of sin.

I agree with Miguel’s rejection of original sin as propounded by Augustine and Calvin. However, he did not deal with the neo-orthodox theologians such as Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr. They affirmed original sin but rejected the idea that it is a hereditary trait passed down from Adam.

Niebuhr emphasized the paradox of human nature, where humans are both created in the image of God and yet profoundly flawed. This duality explains why humans are capable of great good and great evil. I think that is a correct assessment—and it may not be so different from Miguel's point.

“I argue not for human depravity but simply for their stupidity.” Those are the striking words with which De La Torre ends his essay. Upon reading that, I wrote in the margin of my printed copy, Is he replacing original sin with original stupidity?

Perhaps we humans are not born sinful as declared by traditional Catholic and Calvinist theology nor born “righteous” (basically good) as asserted by much contemporary liberal theology. Maybe we humans are just born stupid.

Just as original sin doesn’t mean that all humans are equally sinful in how they manifest their sinfulness, neither does acknowledging “original stupidity” mean that all humans are equally stupid. Rather, we are all prone to think, say, and do stupid things.

And that is what led me to think seriously about the U.S. Supreme Court. Back on April 30, my blog post began with the adage called Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” I conjectured that many of Trump’s followers may not be guilty of either.

But in analyzing the Supreme Court’s recent decisions, perhaps they were made not because of malice stemming from “original sin” but because of stupidity.

A “dangerous political heresy” were the words used by the new Republican Party regarding the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision issued in March 1857. That ruling by Chief Justice Roger Taney is widely regarded as the worst Supreme Court opinion ever.

In recent years, though, the Supreme Court has made a series of “stupid” decisions, beginning with Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010). Jimmy Carter called that ruling “the most stupid decision that the Supreme Court ever made.”

Back in November 2022, the eminent Robert Reich posted a Substack article titled ”Why I still think John Roberts is the worst Chief Justice since Roger Taney.”*² He says that Roberts was “the moving force” behind Citizen’s United.*³

Last month, on June 28, the Supreme Court issued an opinion that overturns Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. That same day, environmental journalist Jameson Dow (here) wrote, “Among many incredibly stupid opinions the court has issued recently, this is among the stupidest.”

But just three days later, Donald J. Trump v. United States, a stupider decision was handed down, and especially because of that ruling, Roberts may well replace Taney as the worst Supreme Court Justice ever.

Decided by a 6-3 vote on July 1, Roberts wrote the majority opinion, holding that presidents could expect absolute immunity for acts related to key powers granted under the Constitution.

If because of the desire for power (an aspect of Eve’s “original sin”) of political agencies, domestic and foreign, and because of the ignorance of the voting public (“original stupidity”) of U.S. citizens, Trump is re-elected President, the nation will most likely soon see the disastrous effects of the Court’s ruling.

May it not be so!

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*¹ For biographical information about De La Torre, see this helpful Wikipedia article. As noted there, Miguel completed his Ph.D. at Temple University in 1999. My daughter Karen was also doing graduate work in religious studies at Temple at that time and received her Ph.D. the following year. It was through her that I first became acquainted with him.

In a December 2018 blog post, I was somewhat critical of De La Torre's emphasis on hopelessness. I was intrigued, then, by Brian McLaren’s quite positive reference to De La Torre’s ideas about hope/hopelessness in “Hope Is Complicated,” the fifth chapter of Life After Doom, which I wrote about in my June 29 blog post.

*² Reich (b. 1946) worked in the administrations of presidents Ford and Carter and was a Cabinet member of presidents Clinton and Obama. In 2008, Time magazine named him one of the Ten Best Cabinet Members of the century. His Substack post can be found here.

*³ In 2013, Roberts wrote for the court’s conservative majority in Shelby County v. Holder, gutting the Voting Rights Act’s requirement of prior federal approval for voting changes in states with a history of discrimination. For those of us who believe that voter rights should be protected for all, that also was a “stupid” decision. 

Confronting Life After Doom with Resilience

Those of you who are regular readers of this blog are likely aware that I am a big “fan” of Brian McLaren. In a March 2017 blog post, I placed him on my list of “Ten Most Admired Contemporary Christians,” and he is on my list of “Top Ten” theologians and/or philosophers by whom I have been influenced.*¹

Beginning with McLaren’s book A New Kind of Christian (2002), the first of a trilogy that was significant theology written as novels, I have read many of McLaren’s fifteen sole-authored books and learned much from them.

In a March 2018 blog post, I made extensive reference to his 2006 book, The Secret Message of Jesus, in which he emphasized that the Kingdom of God is more about society than about individuals.*²

That emphasis on the Kingdom of God being primarily about human society in the present world rather than the heavenly realm where individuals are transported upon death is a major reason many contemporary conservative Christians do not regard McLaren highly.

Brian (b. 1956) first wrote about the growing global ecological crisis in Everything Must Change, his 2007 book which I finished reading in June 2008. I thought it was so significant that in 2020 I placed it on the list of my favorite non-fiction 21st-century books.*³

Since I don’t include more than one book by the same author in my list of favorite books, I have replaced McLaren’s previous books in the list just mentioned with Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart, which was published the middle of last month.

McLaren’s Life After Doom is essential reading for all of us who know about and care about the future of life on planet Earth. On the dust jacket, environmentalist Bill McKibben says this book is as “rich and thoughtful as all of Brian McLaren's work, but with a particular urgency!” I fully agree.

Early in “Welcome to Reality,” the second chapter, McLaren succinctly sets forth the diagnosis of the predicament he examines throughout the book: “Our global civilization as currently structured is unstable and unsustainable” (p. 23).

Some scientists and eco-theologians, especially William Catton, Jr., and Michael Dowd, have made this same diagnosis.*⁴ But this is the first time a major Christian writer has analyzed that predicament so thoroughly and so clearly—and with a pastor’s heart.

Throughout this challenging book, McLaren explores four possible scenarios for the years ahead. In the second chapter, he calls those scenarios 1) “Collapse Avoidance,” 2) “Collapse/Rebirth,” 3) “Collapse/Survival,” and 4) “Collapse/Extinction.”

Since it is clear that he thinks only the last three are feasible, at the end of the first chapter he warned his readers that the following chapter would be “rough sledding.” Then chapters three and four are “pastoral” in nature: he helps his readers face the fearful future in ways that are not debilitating.

How can/should we live life after doom? In the fourth/last part of his book, McLaren elucidates what he calls “a path of agile engagement.” Michael Dowd’s emphasis on “post doom, no gloom” provided helpful light for these dark times. McLaren’s last chapters are even more beneficial and encouraging.

In chapter 17, Brian repeatedly stresses that despite all the ugliness, “beauty abounds.” In the next chapter, he cites and heartily agrees with the words, “It is a magnificent thing to be alive in a moment that matters so much” (p. 224).

Chapter 19 emphasizes the need to live with the dream of the kingdom of God which is “not a destination after death: it is the higher, bigger, vaster, deeper way of life here and now” (p. 236).

The following chapter is “Find Your Light and Shine It.” If we do that, even in this time of doom, we can have “an abundant life, a meaningful life, abounding with beauty … whatever the future may hold” (p. 249).

“Whatever you do, it matters.” Those words (on p. 253) are the crux of McLaren's final chapter, which closes with 15 numbered paragraphs expounding that basic assertion.

So, even if we are—or because we are(!)—living life after doom, let’s live resiliently, not giving up, giving in, or giving out. Paraphrasing Maya Angelou, let’s do the best we can until we know better—and then, let’s do better!

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*¹ I first published that list in my book subtitled The Story of My Life from Birth until My 82^nd Birthday (2020).

*² That emphasis was also the title of  #7 in my book Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now (2019).

*³ In the 2023 updated version of my life story book, I replaced McLaren’s 2007 book with Do I Stay Christian? which was published in 2022.

*⁴ In Appendix 1, McLaren lists what he considers the five best books dealing with “our predicament.” The first is William Catton’s Overshoot (1982)—and “The Most Important Book You’ve Never Read,” my 2/23/23 blog post, is about Catton’s book. Then McLaren gives Michael Dowd’s videos as the first of the five best video/audio resources. Many of you will remember that I have written about Dowd several times, the first being in my 1/25/22 blog post. McLaren mentions that Dowd was his friend who died while he (Brian) was writing this book.

 

Are You (a Supporter of) MADD?

The 4-Ls series of blog articles ended on May 30, but this post harks back to the first L. It is about the unnecessary and preventable loss of life of many thousands of people each year in the U.S. 

Do you know who Candy Lightner is? I didn’t until this past March when I heard a church woman talk about her in a worship service at First Baptist Church of Kansas City (Mo.).

Ms. Lightner, whose name was Candace Doddridge when she was born in May 1946, had the devastating experience of having her 13-year-old daughter Cari killed by a drunk driver in May 1980. Just four months later, she founded MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving.)

By 1985, MADD had grown into an international organization with over two million members in more than 400 chapters worldwide and an annual budget exceeding $12,000,000.

Amid allegations of financial mismanagement, in 1985 Candy left the organization she founded, but MADD has continued to be a strong organization to the present day.

While writing this article, for the first time I made a contribution to MADD and became a supporter. (Click here if you’d like to do the same.) The receipt I received notes,

Gifts from friends like you have helped cut deaths from drunk driving in half over the last four decades. More than 450,000 lives have been saved, and we’ve been able to compassionately serve more than 900,000 victims [bolding added].

In 2011, Lightner started a new organization. It is called We Save Lives and focuses on reducing drugged, drunk, and distracted driving. It is still active, but it seems to be less effective than MADD.

Surprisingly, Lightner said in a 2002 newspaper article (see here) that MADD had “become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned. I didn’t start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving.”

In that article, she also said that she disassociated herself from MADD because she believed the organization was headed in the wrong direction, that is, putting too much emphasis on not drinking.

Accordingly, she doesn’t encourage people not to drink; rather, she wants people to “drink responsibly”—and that is the same appeal made in beer advertisements I hear while listening to baseball or basketball games on the radio.  

Candy seems to think that it is not alcohol that causes so many traffic fatalities, it is drunk drivers who cause those deaths. That sounds to me very similar to those who oppose gun control when they say it is not guns that kill people, it is those who do not use guns responsibly. Aren’t both technically correct?

Most people who drink alcohol do not drive drunk, and most gun owners do not misuse their firearms and shoot other people. But are we OK with the number of people who die each year both as a result of gun violence and drunk driving?

Despite all the good work that MADD has done, a large number of people die in drunk-driving crashes every week. According to this website, the U.S. Department of Transportation states that over 13,500 people died in alcohol-impaired driving traffic deaths in 2022. Then they say, “These deaths were all preventable.”

If there were a U.S. airplane crash that killed more than 200 people, it would be considered a major tragedy and would long be in the national news. Except for the terrorist-caused crashes in 2001, the last U.S. airplane crash with 200+ fatalities was TWA flight 800 off the coast of New York in July 1996.

But think about it: there is now an average of about 260 deaths caused by drunk driving in the U.S. every week of the year! But these deaths don’t make more than the local news.

If MADD has, indeed, saved more than 450,000 lives in the last four decades, and I have no reason to dispute that claim, I am truly grateful and plan to continue supporting their work.

Doesn’t more need to be done, though? Will we just ignore the likelihood that far more than 260 people will be killed by drunk drivers during the first week of July? Or is that something that causes us to be/support MADD?

Seeking a Raceless Gospel and a Desegregated Church

Recently I have been thinking about race and racial segregation. Last month I finished reading Starlette Thomas’s impressive book Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church. Then on June 2, I learned about the end of segregated schools in Kansas. 

Starlette Thomas, according to her website, “is an author, activist, visual artist and race abolitionist.” She has a Doctor of Ministry degree from Wesley Theological Seminary. Her book was published last year under the same title as her doctoral thesis.

Dr. Thomas is currently an associate editor at Good Faith Media (GFM) and the director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative. That program is

a didactic, multifaceted ministry of communication that decenters the sociopolitical construct of race and its progeny for the sake of Jesus’ gospel and in hopes of practicing an inclusive hospitality for a raceless ‘kin-dom’ of God to come.

In the fifth and final chapter of her book, and just before one of the many times she cites Galatians 3:28, Starlette writes, “The raceless gospel, rooted in baptismal identity, is an embodied ecclesiology that aims to drown out all competing identities” (p. 90).

On the following page, she asserts her belief that “human beings were not created to be color-coded”; rather, “all bodies are created equal” and “our allegiance to a racial group directly conflicts with our baptismal identity.”

Because she embraced that decisive identity, Starlette has been on a spiritual journey “of decentering whiteness, decolonizing identity and deconstructing race.”*¹

The Madam C. J. Walker School was built about 1860 to house the Black students of the South Park area in what is now the city of Merriam in Johnson County, Kansas. A new building was constructed in 1888 after Johnson County organized School District No. 90. 

Black and White children went to the school until around 1900 when the school district began separating the students based on race, and the South Park Grade School was built for White students.

In 1947, the school district built a new South Park Grade School for White students using taxpayer funds. Black students had to continue attending the two-room, markedly inferior Walker schoolhouse even though their parents had to pay taxes for the construction of the new South Park School.

The following year, Alfonso Webb filed a lawsuit with the Kansas Supreme Court in the name of his sons who were second and first grade students at Walker School. That case was won in 1949 and Black children were allowed to attend the South Park School.*²

That decision in Kansas was a precursor of the Brown v. Board of Education lawsuit. In May 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court settled that case by ruling unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.*³

Why are there still so many segregated churches since segregated public schools have been ruled unconstitutional for seventy years now?

At the end of the first chapter of her book, Dr. Thomas cites the well-known words of MLK, Jr.: “It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning” (p. 29, citing an address King delivered in 1957).

In that seminal talk, King stated, “Racial segregation is a blatant denial of the unity which we have in Christ. Segregation is a tragic evil which is utterly un-Christian.” Starlette’s advocacy of the raceless gospel is her endeavor to continue doing what King was urging Christians to do 67 years ago.

Fortunately, most church segregation now is not because of opposition to integration so much as it is because of the importance of the Black church for its members. (In this regard, consider ”The Downside of Integration for Black Christians, Jemar Tisby’s 2017 essay.)

King declared that the church “cannot rest until segregation and discrimination are banished from every area of American life. It has always been the responsibility of the Church to broaden horizons, challenge the status quo, and break the mores when necessary.”

Starlette Thomas is currently endeavoring to do that admirably—but in a way that doesn’t bypass “the beauty of particularity” seen in the Black church.*⁴

What can we who have benefited from White privilege do to promote the raceless Gospel and to combat the vestiges of racial segregation?

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*¹ These words are from Starlette’s column titled “The Raceless Gospel as a Proclamation of Somebodiness,” which was first posted (here) on Good Faith Media’s website in April. Also, please consider reading this June 5 “conversation with Starlette Thomas” about her book.  

*² On June 2, two of Alfonso Webb’s five daughters (and he also had five sons) were honored guests at Rainbow Mennonite Church, and I was able to chat briefly with one of them. The former Walker schoolhouse, enlarged and completely remodeled, is now the Philadelphia Missionary Baptist Church, and June and I much enjoyed attending their Sunday morning worship service yesterday.

*³ My blog post on May 10, 2013, was titled “Brown v. the Board of Education.” Here is a link to that post, if you would like to read it (again).

*⁴ The quoted words are from Felicia Murrell’s book, And: The Restorative Power of Love in an Either/Or World (2024). This link will take you to an article with the author being interviewed about that insightful book. 

Enjoying and Expanding Liberty

Liberty is the fourth of “the 4-Ls,” and this post is the last of the five-part series that I started on March 9—and it is not completely coincidental that I have written this article in Liberty (Mo.) where my wife and I have lived since 2005.**

The school song of Seinan Gakuin, the large school system in Fukuoka City, Japan, where I served for 36 years (1968~2004) as a university professor and the last eight of those years as Chancellor, contains the Japanese words for Life, Love, and Light, the first three of the 4-Ls.

But I thought/think Liberty needed/needs to be emphasized also. 

In my May 10 post on Light, I linked light to truth—and then truth is linked to Jesus’ words about freedom/liberty in John 8:32: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (CEV). And there are other important words about freedom/liberty in the New Testament.

According to Luke 4:18, in the synagogue of Nazareth, Jesus read these words from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me…To proclaim liberty to the captives…To set at liberty those who are oppressed.” Then Galatians 5:1 says, “Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free” (NKJV).

Since I was emphasizing the 4-Ls at Seinan Gakuin where about 98% of the students and more than half of the faculty and staff were not Christians, I didn’t talk/write a lot about these Bible verses. But I did regularly emphasize the close connection of liberty to the light of truth.

Also, I always talked about liberty being accompanied by responsibility, emphasizing that true liberty doesn’t mean freedom to do as one pleases; it is not a license for self-centeredness. Liberty means we are not enslaved by another person or by the power of any ideology (“ism”).

There is both negative and positive liberty, and both are important. Negative liberty means freedom from, but positive liberty means freedom for—and emphasis on the former should include stress on the importance of the latter.

Serious problems arise when only negative liberty is emphasized and liberty is used in inappropriate ways. For example, liberty is misused when it means “free speech for me but not for thee.”*¹ In this connection, consider these limited and inferior uses of liberty/freedom in the U.S. now.

◈ The “Freedom Caucus” in the U.S. Congress. According to Wikipedia, this U.S. House caucus was formed by Republican Representatives in January 2015 and “is generally considered to be the most conservative and furthest-right Congressional bloc.”

◈ “Freedom Summer” in Florida. As part of what Florida Governor DeSantis calls by that name, his Transportation Department has declared that only the colors red, white and blue can be used to light up bridges across the state. (For what that implies, see this May 23 Washington Post article.)

◈ Liberty University in Virginia. Jerry Falwell’s university changed its name to Liberty Baptist College in 1976 and to Liberty University in 1985. A Washington Post March 2015 article was titled, “Virginia’s Liberty University: A mega-college and Republican presidential stage.”

Liberty, nonetheless, is an important traditional value of the USA. The Declaration of Independence speaks of the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And since 1831 Americans have sung about their nation being the “sweet land of liberty.”  

Even though the scope of those thought to have the unalienable right of liberty in 1776 or 1831—or even in 1942 when the Pledge of Allegiance was officially adopted—was much too narrow, it has increasingly been recognized as meaning liberty and justice for all.*²

On January 6, 1941, President Roosevelt delivered what is known as the Four Freedoms speech, declaring that people "everywhere in the world" ought to have freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

These are freedoms that we all should be able to enjoy and seek to expand. And the liberty expressed in those four freedoms is still badly needed in the world today.

Further, we citizens of the USA must work energetically to preserve those (and other) freedoms in the light of the Christian nationalists who are seeking theocracy and of the Republican candidate for President, whose speeches (past and present) evidence racism, xenophobia, and a trend toward authoritarianism (fascism?).

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*¹ My wife and I moved to Liberty about three months after our marriage in 1957 and enrolled as students in William Jewell College, from which we graduated 65 years ago this month. We lived in Liberty again during the 1976-77 academic year. Then we bought our retirement home in Liberty and have never regretted our choice in the least. Somewhat tongue in cheek, I have sometimes said, slightly altering Paul Revere’s famous words, Give me Liberty until my death.

*² These words, harking back to 1798, are the title of the editorial in the March/April 2022 issue of Liberty magazine, a Seventh-day Adventist publication established in 1906. Please take a look at this article if you want to learn more about the context and meaning of those words.

*³ The U.S. Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy in 1892. The original version was later expanded, but from the beginning, it ended with the words “with Liberty and Justice for all.” For more about this, see my August 30, 2021, blog post about Bellamy (here).

Note: It is also problematic when liberty is conflated with libertarianism. That political philosophy, which over-emphasizes negative liberty, strongly values individual freedom and is skeptical about the justified scope of government, especially the federal government. 

Resisting White Christian Nationalism

“Christian nationalism” has become a widely maligned target for many in the mainstream and left-wing news media, for many former (especially “exvangelical”) Christians, and for many “nones.” But there are also Christians who (mistakenly, I believe) promote that position.

The term “Christian nationalism” is used, and misused, in a variety of ways, and it is not easy to define it non-controversially. Here, though, is a succinct definition by two sociologists that gets to the heart of the matter:

Christian nationalism is a cultural framework…that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life.*¹  

MORE² is a local group in the Kansas City area,*² and its “clergy caucus” is actively resisting White Christian nationalism—and it should be recognized upfront that Christian nationalism is largely promoted and abetted by White (and male) Christians.

The picture above is of a poster given to each of us who attended the May 9 rally sponsored by MORE² and held in Quindaro, Kansas City (Kan.). Stephen Jones, co-pastor of the First Baptist Church of Kansas City (Mo.), is the leader of the clergy caucus, and his church emphasizes the Beloved Community.

There are many good resources for learning/sharing about the meaning of White Christian nationalism and its threat to democracy and religious freedom in the U.S. Here are some of those for you to consider:

◈ The Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty (BJC) has long been working on issues related to religious freedom and church-state separation. At the meeting on resisting Christian nationalism organized by Pastor Jones in Kansas City on March 7, a staff member from BJC was the guest speaker.

In 2019, the BJC launched a new movement called “Christians Against Christian Nationalism.” In December 2022, Time magazine ran a rather lengthy article about Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the BJC, and the work of that new group she started.

◈ The documentary movie Bad Faith was released on March 29, and it is a highly informative film depicting the growth of the Christian nationalist movement in the U.S. from the 1970s to the present. I encourage you to read about this powerful film on their website*²—and to see it, if possible.

In stark contrast to my high praise of Bad Faith, it is strongly criticized by some conservative evangelicals. For example, a review on MovieGuide.org says that it is “a bad, abhorrent piece of progressive propaganda” produced by “Christian socialists” such as William Barber, the “heretical black activist.”

◈ Jim Wallis’s new book The False White Gospel was published on April 4, and as I wrote in my review of that book,*⁴ he avers that the old heresy of white supremacy is now operating with a new name: white Christian nationalism.

That heresy, he says, is “the single greatest threat to democracy in America and to the integrity of the Christian witness” (p. 17). 

◈ The Summit for Religious Freedom, conducted by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AU) was held in Washington D.C. on April 14. The May issue of Church and State (C&S), AU’s monthly periodical, is largely about that. I encourage you to read about it here. *⁵

As Rachel Laser, the Jewish woman who is the president and CEO of AU, writes in the above issue of C&S, “The wall of separation between church and state is not a wall that divides us; it’s a wall that unites us—that ensures no one is favored, that allows us to thrive in our differences.”

In summary, we who oppose White Christian nationalism need to clearly state what we are for, not just what we are against (as Wallis emphasizes in the last chapter of his book). Broadly speaking, we are for the freedom of religion for everyone.

We are also for the freedom of Black people, Latinx people, Indigenous people, LGBTQ people, immigrants seeking asylum, and others who are so often mistreated and scorned by those who foster Christian nationalism. (I will be writing more about freedom (= Liberty) in my blog post planned for May 30.)

Let’s resist White Christian nationalism and welcome all into the Beloved Community!

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*¹ Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God (2020), p. 10. Whitehead is also the author of American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church (2023).

*² MORE² stands for the Metro Organization for Racial and Economic Equity. It was formed in 2004 and is financed by supporting “members,” most of whom are churches in the area, now including Rainbow Mennonite Church (where I am a member). Ruth Harder (my pastor) spoke at the beginning and end of the May 9 rally.

*³ One of the many prominent progressive Christians speaking in that documentary is Randall Balmer, an ordained Episcopal priest and a professor of religion at Dartmouth College. Balmer (b. 1954) is also the author of Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right (2021). Further, last month he wrote an important article on Christian nationalism, published here.

*⁴ The book review I submitted to The Englewood Review of Books (ERB) last week is available for your consideration here. It should be available on the ERB website before long.

*⁵ Last week I learned that after 20 years of writing for Baptists Today, Baptist News Global, and Good Faith Media, Thinking Friend Bruce Gourley has become the new editor of Church and State.