HOW TO END CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM

A lawyer and religious activist squares off against Christian nationalism and its far-right-wing tenets.

“A large and diverse community of people is eager to challenge the political ideology of Christian nationalism,” writes Tyler. This community comprises many faith traditions. In the case of her former Southern Baptist alignment, one argument against nationalism holds that “every person must have the freedom to respond to God and that no governmental authority should interfere with that relationship.” Speaking from that tradition, Tyler argues that the conflation of Christianity and government is idolatrous, and in its us-against-them stances, with “us” being able to tell “them” how to live their lives, it violates what Tyler holds to be the most important tenet of Christianity: that one should love one’s neighbor as oneself. Tyler depicts Christian nationalism as an effort to impose state-backed theocratic authority on the entire nation; nationalists, she holds, believe a range of propositions from the sanctity of the Second Amendment to the relegation of women to subservient positions, to say nothing of suppressing religious minorities. Tyler holds that these views have come as part of a package that has dogged Americans from the earliest days but has gathered force in the past few decades, including white supremacist assumptions and the insistence that God favors the United States above all other nations—more idolatry, that. With each prose narrative chapter closing with biblical readings and workbooklike exercises, Tyler’s book offers both good news and bad. The good news is that “large and diverse community.” The bad news, she allows, is that it will take generations to entirely root out Christian nationalism, beginning with one central task: “to directly confront a persistent myth: that the United States is a Christian nation.”

Progressive Christians and secular activists alike will find this a useful handbook in battling the religious right.