Christian Nationalism is a loosely-aligned ideological movement seeking to establish Christianity as a state-authorized religion in many countries across the globe. In the United States the movement has been advanced primarily by Christian evangelicals and biblical fundamentalists who seek to eviscerate the First Amendment prohibition against any state-authorized religious tradition. Central to the movement is the claim that the United States was founded by and for Christians — a presumptive “fact” that justifies a dominant role for Christian doctrine in every domain of influence in American culture, including government, education, industry, the media, the arts and entertainment, as well as the religious sphere itself. The ultimate goal is to establish a Christian theocracy in America. This aggressive campaign to take full control of American culture has been covered widely in the press and deserves our serious attention. Nothing less than national identity is at stake.
What They Get Right
Much in the media coverage of Christian Nationalism has been unfairly harsh, dismissing the movement as little more than a dangerous carnival of crazies. To be sure, there is much in the substance of Christian Nationalism that is untenable, but taken in fundamental and abstract terms, the objective of the movement is laudable. The movement clearly understands — as many among us do not — that a stable and durable culture requires at its core a compelling narrative tradition providing citizens with an orientation in nature and in history. To carry on without a widely shared and satisfying mythos, informing us about human origins, human nature and human purpose, is to invite anarchy. Imagine a football team where each player is informed by a different playbook. Not a very promising outlook. Whatever we may think of Christian Nationalist ideology — or any other religious ideology, for that matter — we should not assume that they have misperceived what is at stake.
The importance of mythos as a narrative strategy for assembling and maintaining cohesive cultural traditions cannot be overstated. Nothing succeeds at mustering individuals into “a people” (demos), like a story, and every religion has one at its core. We may ask how stories come to have such impressive powers of coagulation. It may be, as psychologists tell us, because the human brain is wired to think in narrative terms. Our experiences are stored in episodic memory, whence they can be retrieved and used to predict the future, or to make sense of the business at hand. When faced with uncertainty we make up stories to guide us; we understand other people in terms of storylines. And not least of all, stories give us a sense of personal and group identity. On top of all this is the fact that stories are more effective than reasoned arguments when it comes to influencing the beliefs, values and behavior of others.
Of course, not all stories are equal; nor are they all used for the same purpose — some entertain, some inspire, others explain. What makes religious stories unique is that they attempt to explain everything. What I mean by this is that a religious myth presumes to tell us all we need to know about the world and about human life. Any story that offers a final and ultimate account of all facts, and just happens to make life meaningful in the bargain, is bound to attract an audience. This is precisely what religious myths do. They present a narrative account that unifies cosmology and morality. In doing so, they violate the notorious naturalistic fallacy by attempting to fuse facts and values. And they accomplish all this by using heavy-duty metaphors. The Abrahamic traditions illustrate this nicely. Judaism, Christianity and Islam each use the root metaphor of God as person to explain how things are in the world around (facts), as well as which things matter for human welfare (values). As creator of the universe, God is understood to be the ultimate explanation for all facts; and as author of the moral code, God is also the ultimate justification for all values. Each religious tradition has its own distinctive root metaphor to do the work of integrating matters of truth and goodness (e.g., the Tau; the Dharma; the Logos; the Cosmic Egg, et al.).
The point of all this is to suggest that every religious tradition, including Christian Nationalism, gets at least one important thing exactly right: Each puts forward a vision of a cosmos infused with values — just the kind of “all-in-one” wisdom that everyone seems to want. Any such tradition that offers a coherent — albeit, fallacious — narrative that integrates cosmology and morality, in terms that are both intellectually credible and emotionally satisfying, will have potential for galvanizing a robust national identity.
What They Get Wrong
In addition to committing a logical fallacy, most of what Christian Nationalists get wrong stems from the fact that, although the world has changed dramatically since the first century, the mythos, the thinking, has remained substantially the same. The Bible remains the final authority on all matters concerning cosmology and morality. We still have a personal God, who created the universe by fiat and with purpose. We still have a moral code, issued by the creator and obligating humans to submit to the divine will, as it is recorded in scripture. And we still have a judgment day when the faithful will be glorified with God, while the reprobate will be condemned to eternal suffering. These ancient beliefs are presumed to justify a divine mandate to Christianize the nations of the world.
A thorough critique of all the “wrongs” that arise by disparaging centuries worth of human discovery and ingenuity, in deference to ancient texts written for ancient times, would fill volumes. Indeed, it already has filled volumes. And just to be clear: The critique applies not merely to Christian Nationalism, but to all ideologies, religious and secular alike, and it amounts to this: What many ideologies get seriously wrong is their failure to take on board much of what has been learned about the world and humanity over the past 500 years. And it might be added that the most consequential of these failures has to do with human self-understanding. If we get our self-understanding wrong then we’re likely to get everything else wrong, like economics, education, politics, legal system, religion . . . all the domains of cultural influence and identity coveted by Christian Nationalists. We need to get these things right.
Getting Things Right
It was Alexander Hamilton who famously wrote: “In disquisitions of every kind, there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasonings must depend.” In the case of disquisitions about human nature the primary truths are these:
1) human beings are natural creatures
2) human beings are social creatures
Natural Creatures
The contemporary scientific account of human origins has much to say about our nature and how we should live. About four billion years ago, when the earth’s chemistry was right, single-cell organisms began to appear, and to mutate, and to proliferate. For the next two billion years the story of life was a story about the evolution of tiny, ambitious, solitary, single-cell critters scavenging for a livelihood in what might be called a biotic anarchy. The first signs of truly multicellular life forms showed up around two billion years after the appearance of single-cell creatures. That’s quite a long time coming, suggesting that the evolution of multicellularity was pretty complicated. The difficulty is this: How do you get lots of tiny individual cells to work together to create larger, complex organisms? Think about it . . . if you’re a single-cell organism then everything is all about you. Whatever energy you have will be spent on getting the resources necessary to keep you alive and reproducing. Nothing else matters. But if you’re a larger organism with lots of individual cells then it seems obvious that your individual cells will have to direct some of their energy toward creating and maintaining the larger organism. It is also obvious that they can’t sacrifice all their resources because then individual cells would flounder, shrivel up, and die. And if that happens the larger organism would be doomed as well.
Basically, multicellular life amounts to a delicate and complicated balancing act between the needs of individual cells and the needs of the collective assembly of cells. On average, the human body is comprised of about 35 trillion cells, each one taking in nourishment from elsewhere in the body, and each one giving something back to the body in the form of a specific function, such as building tissues and organs, delivering nutrients throughout the body, protecting and healing the body, storing energy, transmitting information and so much more. Altogether, there are about 250 different cell types in the human body, performing thousands of specific functions.
So multicellular life is all about a balance between giving and taking. Cells take in nutrients from the body and in exchange they perform essential functions for the body. Incidentally, the one exception to this principle of cell balance is the cancer cell. Cancer cells perform no functions; they take from the body but they give nothing back. They are the anti-social narcissists of the body, the self-serving grifters. It’s all about them. Cancer cells operate on the same principle as the first single-cell organisms; that is, they have no duties beyond serving their own self-interest.
Social Creatures
The exquisite organization and the balanced dynamics of the human body occur almost automatically, orchestrated by genetic instructions. But the central organizing principle of all multicellular life — i.e., the balancing act between parts and whole — operates not merely at the level of biological systems. It is the central organizing principle in social systems as well. The secret of success in any social system lies in the balance between individual flourishing and social solidarity. Individuals seek to satisfy their material and emotional wants and needs, and meanwhile, the social order requires these same individuals to create the conditions for stability and cooperation as it pursues short and long-term collective goals. The interests of individuals, and those of the body politic, are therefore in constant tension because individuals always tend to want more than their share, whereas the collective always tends to demand more than individuals can bear. At the same time, the interests of individuals and those of the collective overlap. Cells and body, persons and state, are mutually contending and mutually depending.
We can now see that creating and maintaining a social order faces the same difficult challenge as that faced by the first multi-cellular organisms; which is, to construct a non-zero sum social system in which the tension between individuals and the collective is minimized, while overlapping interests are maximized. The goal is to achieve a balanced equilibrium of giving-and-taking.
And how do we accomplish this? At the level of individual cells the problem was solved by genetic algorithms, ordained by evolution to optimize solutions to complex problems. The more challenging the problem, the more complex the solution. Larger animals, like mammals, have evolved various pro-social emotional systems that promote zero-sum interactions. Humans have inherited an impressive suite of pro-social emotional systems — e.g., affection, sympathy, gratitude, remorse — which were sufficient for the maintenance of small, stable, closely related, social groups. As social groups grew in size and complexity, however, the genetically conditioned emotional systems became less effective. The genes needed the help of more complex and nuanced behavioral algorithms for negotiating more complicated and emotionally challenging social environments. Help eventually arrived with the ad hoc invention of extra-genetic (learned) rules of behavior.
The Invention of Politics and Religion
As just mentioned, our genetically conditioned emotional systems were sufficient for maintaining a balanced equilibrium of giving-and-taking in familial bands of hunter-gatherers. The morality of such groups would be mostly inarticulate. Facial expressions would ordinarily suffice for communicating approval and disapproval. But consider how things might have played out when two or three neighboring bands showed up at seasonal watering holes where there would be an ample supply of nutrient-rich wildlife for everyone. Initially, interactions between groups would be rather peaceful, facilitating the exchange of tools as well as much-needed occasions for mate selection. But inevitably, given the predilections of young males, bouts of hostility would break out, calling for the intervention of elders. We may suppose that authority figures would issue verbal commands to settle the dust. These articulate pro-social instructions would embody the same if-then logic we find embedded in the genes that inform emotional systems.
We may speculate that social interactions such as these marked the emergence of political dynamics. Essentially, politics serves the old biological goal of achieving and maintaining an equilibrium of giving-and-taking between individual cells and the body, but in this case it involves using articulate rules, not genetic ones, to regulate the behaviors of individual persons within a body politic. It’s a matter of installing in the brain an extra set of rules for behavior, associated with appropriate consequences for compliance and refusal. The origin of an articulate morality just is the origin of political discourse; yet another turning point in the increasing complexity of human life — with more complexity to come.
The imposition of articulate rules would eventually be called into question by bewildered or resentful individuals who felt a need for rules to be justified. The elders, again, were put on the spot and turned to the explanatory power of story. It is well known that our primitive ancestors used anthropomorphic motifs to explain various natural phenomena, like storms, fires, earthquakes, reproduction, etc. So why not do the obvious thing and use anthropomorphic stories to legitimize rules that might otherwise be seen as arbitrary (e.g., “We obey these rules because the powerful sky god who rewards us with rain and threatens us with floods commands us to obey them”)? Oddly, this account itself bears all the marks of a reverse-engineered just-so story, but something along these lines must have happened in various places and times. And as it did, the distinctive and seductive religious mindset — the confluence of cosmology and morality — took hold.
The claim here is that religion was invented to legitimize and reify rules of behavior. In other words, religion was invented to justify politics. This makes perfect sense when we consider the somewhat cozy partnership enjoyed between politics and religion throughout history. Indeed, many cultural traditions fail to recognize a distinction between the political and the religious. After all, both are engaged in the same task of fostering a balanced equilibrium of giving-and-taking. And yet, the founders of the American experiment went out of their way to insist on dissolving the cozy partnership. In the United States, they declared, religion may be central to personal identity, but NOT to national identity.
The Challenge of Multiculturalism
Religious fervor has often fueled warfare, which was certainly the case in Europe in the wake of the Reformation. England was especially ravaged by the civil wars of the 17th century, which resulted in death for hundreds of thousands, widespread destruction of property, relentless famine, disease and financial ruin for nearly everyone. Eventually the hostilities ended, allowing the British people to turn away from war and tend to the business of restarting the country, not only materially and economically, but socially and intellectually as well. Now was the time for cooler heads to prevail, as they did. Because of the religious fervor problem, there was strong post-war sentiment favoring a culture that was less ideological, more rational, more pragmatic, more tolerant and, importantly, more secular.
The founders of the new American experiment were thoroughly imbued with these progressive ideals and were clear-eyed when it came to preventing religious ideologies from interfering with the new government. Thus, the Establishment Clause in the first amendment to the Constitution reads: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The founders were also enamored of the Enlightenment movement, which championed reason, science, tolerance, freedom, progress, moral integrity, experimentation and practical results. Such topics were vigorously debated for years in public venues as well as various upstart philosophical societies. The general ethos distilled from these debates was this: We shall meet our compatriots at the near-side of metaphysics and get on with the pragmatic business of solving problems. And we may assume that, as the founders debated, they were keenly aware that they were engaged in defining the cultural identity of a nascent, secular nation.
Now, 250 years into the American experiment, we are left to ask about the state and the fate of the founders’ vision. Things are radically different now, not only because the population has grown by hundreds of millions, but more importantly because these millions have brought with them elements from a wide range of cultural traditions. Consequently, our first question must be to ask whether a multicultural society can even HAVE a distinctive identity. Are the prospects for a multicultural society as grim as those for a football team where each player follows a different playbook? Not necessarily, providing that sub-cultural traditions agree to remain sub-cultural (and here we include all religious traditions, even majority ones). To stretch the football analogy a bit further, we might insist on the difference between individualized, sub-cultural playbooks and a common, national rulebook. The common, constitutional, rulebook envisioned by the founders decisively rules out attempts to violate the naturalistic fallacy by fusing together cosmology and morality. Those who need metaphysical justifications for morality are entitled to have them, and all sub-cultural voices are invited into public discourse, but there they must pass muster at the bar of reason, tolerance and constitutional authority. This bar insists that while matters of cosmology may be delegated to science — or even to metaphysics, if you prefer — it remains that matters of consequence for the public good (morality, law) belong to the collective will of the people, as declared in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
This is not the royal “We” of an absolute monarch, driven by whim and greed. Nor is it the imperious voice of religious zealots who imagine that an almighty God has authorized them to rule the world. Nor is it the voice of a brotherhood of unprincipled narcissists who don’t understand how multicellularity works. It is, rather, the voice of an unlikely coalition of pragmatic, squabbling colonialists who had come to exude the strength, courage, pride and self-reliance that comes with the labor and sacrifice it takes to create something of great value against great odds.
Lots of voices here, and the stakes are high. We shall see…..