So, is that a bad thing? It depends on what one means by it.
An article a couple of years ago at MSN.com reported on a piece in the Washington Post that addressed Christian nationalism and in which the Post tried to clarify what's meant by the term. Christian nationalism, according to the Post, is "an ideology that says Christianity is the foundation of the United States and that government should protect that foundation."
If that's what we're to understand by "Christian nationalism" it seems rather innocuous.
A lot of people believe that the foundational principles of the United States, the freedoms included in the first amendment, for example, are rooted in a Judeo-Christian worldview, and that the founders, whether or not they were Christians themselves, were heavily influenced by the Christian culture in which they lived.
Indeed, the concept of liberty and justice for all is, historically speaking, a uniquely Christian idea, and the claim that Christianity influenced the founding of this nation is clear to anyone who has read their Tocqueville.
Most people believe, moreover, that government should protect that foundation by protecting the principle of religious liberty.
So, if that's all Christian nationalists, believe then almost anyone who is a Christian in the U.S. would be ab defino a Christian nationalist.
But further along in their column the Post adds a twist that subtly alters the definition:
As part of our research, we examined the percentage of Americans who, over the past 15 years, said they agree or strongly agree with this Christian nationalist statement: “The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation.”So now they appear to implicitly define a Christian nationalist as one who wants the federal government to officially declare the U.S. to be a Christian nation.
Here we should balk.
It's one thing for a citizen to acknowledge that the U.S. was founded on Christian principles and to expect the government to protect the principles upon which the nation was founded, the principles contained in all of our founding documents. It's quite another for a citizen to hold that the federal government should declare the U.S. to be officially Christian.
It's hard to picture specifically what such a declaration would even mean in practice. Would it entail making Christianity a state religion, a circumstance which our founders, for good reason, explicitly sought to avoid?
As the founders knew from Europe's experience, state religions can be oppressive, and receiving state favoritism often corrupts the religion.
However much Christianity influenced our founding it seems unwise at this stage in our history, a stage in which there's far more religious diversity present in our population than was present 250 years ago, to formally declare the U.S. to be officially a Christian nation.
Nevertheless, if ever a conservative Christian is called a Christian nationalist the Christian would do well to ask his or her interlocutor what they understand a Christian nationalist to be. Quite probably the accuser won't be able to answer.
