Christian Nationalism and White Christian Nationalism

Understanding the difference is critical for holding the church accountable for its complicity with White supremacy. Almost imperceptibly, God, country, and imperialism have been woven into American Christianity ever since . . .. In many churches, the American flag flanks the Christian flag. (Or didn't you notice?) And the Great Commission defines the mission of the Church.

"What could possibly be wrong with the Great Commission?" you ask. We'll come to that. First, the distinction between Christian Nationalism (CN) and White Christian Nationalism (WCN).

CN is international and historically extends from the root of the Crusades. It metastasized through the Doctrine of Discovery—a 15th-century legal and religious concept, rooted in papal decrees, that empowered European Christian monarchs to seize non-Christian lands, claiming ownership and justifying the colonization, subjugation, or enslavement of Indigenous peoples. Thus, when England, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain went around the globe "discovering" nations of which they had been ignorant, raping, pillaging, and committing genocide in the name of the Lord, they did so with papal sanction and the presumption that "discovery" granted absolute title over lands not inhabited by Christians.

It is the lore of conquest by the sword to establish the cross. WCN comes from the same loins but developed in America under the noxious delusions of Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism. It wrapped the Bible in the stars and stripes and curated a fictive identity somewhere at the intersection of John Wayne and Marjorie Taylor Greene; bravado and brutishness may be an understatement, but they help to convey the rabid and mindless predilection to power and indecency.

Am I the only one noticing media's neck-bending attempt to avoid the descriptor "White Christian Nationalism?" Even well-meaning commentators have taken the bait to lighten the burden of White Evangelicals, who should own the discomfort of their racial stigma. After all, CN and WCN emerged out of whiteness, or more accurately White supremacy. Each evolved from the primordial slime of the Enlightenment pseudo-scientific race classification, which has influenced virtually every modern institution since, including the Church, or more accurately—especially the Church. The European evolution of the Church and White Jesus notwithstanding, something remarkably more insidious poisoned the gospel stream: enter, the Great Commission.

Have you ever wondered why there is so much resistance to social justice in conservative churches? It's because of the Great Commission. It was Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) who first brought this to the frontlines of mission-speak. He had apparently borrowed it from the writings of a Dutch missionary, Justinian von Welz (1621–1668), who had used it as a title for Matthew 28:18–20. For 1,600 years until von Welz, or thereabouts, this Matthean text had primarily served a broader purpose: "as the trinitarian foundation of ecclesiology, not as fanfare for missiology." The Englishman, Taylor, during the heyday of British imperialism and the mission movements, successfully sold this tag in order to motivate the church for the work of global evangelism. His success was not lost on his cousins across the pond, and the proclamation of the Great Commission became the raison d'être of the 19th-century American mission movements.

Largely absent from this description of the Church's mission, as the Great Commission, was the concern for justice. In fact, the primary export, tainted by the assumptions of the ontological superiority of the missionaries and the inherent inferiority of their objects, was Eurocentric culture, as it was associated with righteousness and good over against evil and bad indigenous cultures. So much about the missionaries' prospective converts was cast as evil, bad, and sinful, including but not limited to their skin color, indigenous practices, and way of being. The collateral damage resulting from this ethnocentric reductionism has shaped the general conception of most conservative churches. It has blinded them to the beauty and power of Jesus' personal mission statement: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He anointed Me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord" (Lk. 4:18-19). They are literally unable to see their mission as anything but transactional. This reductionist perspective has resulted in psychic inertia that is—in many conservative churches—impossible to penetrate when coupled with all of the other religious artifacts of White supremacy. Lurking silently beneath every transaction is the instinct to dominate.

This is not to suggest that Matthew 28:18–20 is not a critical aspect of the gospel, but to make it exclusive while ignoring Jesus' emphasis on liberation of the oppressed is to provide a loophole for oppression, while beaming with self-congratulatory accolades about taking the gospel to the "heathen." Being socialized into this unbalanced worldview distorts the central duty of the believer to love God with all your heart, mind, and soul, and your neighbor as yourself. It exposes the seared moral sensibilities associated with White pathology, demonstrated in genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, the gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the assault on the 1963 Civil Rights Act, all of which were perpetrated by people who claim to be Christian.

No, this is not about Christian Nationalism; it is about White Christian Nationalism, the offspring of White supremacy. God and country, and the Great Commission are sown into the very fabric of American Christianity, the evidence of which can be seen each week in almost every conservative church across denominations.

So why does the distinction matter? Because to name only Christian Nationalism is to clean the blood off the knife. It allows White Evangelicals to nod along solemnly about the sins of "nationalism" while never once seeing their own reflection in the indictment. CN could be Hungarian, Brazilian, or Russian. WCN is distinctively American. It wears a cross on one lapel and a flag pin on the other. It sings "Amazing Grace" and celebrates the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. It quotes Matthew 28 while ignoring Matthew 25.

The significance is this: you cannot exorcise a demon you refuse to name. White Christian Nationalism is not a fringe fever. It is the baseline. It is the air in the sanctuary and the water in the baptistry. It has been hiding in plain sight behind the flag drapes and the Great Commission rhetoric for generations. Calling it what it is—White Christian Nationalism, born of White supremacy, nursed on the Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, American Exceptionalism, and sanctified by a mission paradigm that has no room for justice—is the first act of repentance. White Christian Nationalism has been the ghost in the machine all along and nothing will change any time soon.

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