WHITE Christian nationalism in the United States is a dangerous ideology that is not Christianity, but a perversion of it, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Most Revd Michael Curry, said.
He urged Christians to speak up against the current resurgence of white nationalism. “Silence is complicity, and silence creates a context in which something like that can grow,” he said.
He continued: “What we’re actually describing is an ideology that’s not really a religion, but it looks like a religion and invokes language and symbols that have religious traffic. . . If you look at the complex of white Christian nationalism as an ideology, you lay it alongside Jesus of Nazareth, and we’re not even talking about the same thing.”
He urged Christians: “Lift up the text of the New Testament, specifically the four Gospels . . . and let Jesus talk. Anything that claims to be Christian, if it doesn’t match up, then we say, ‘Well, that’s not Christianity.’”
The Bishop was speaking in a seminar, “How White Christian Nationalism Threatens our Democracy”, led by the Revd Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners, and sponsored by the diocese of Washington, Washington National Cathedral, and the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.
Mr Wallis said that white Christian nationalism “is the single greatest threat to democracy” in the US. “It’s also the greatest threat to the integrity of the Christian witness,” he said.
Professor Samuel Perry, from the University of Oklahoma, also spoke at the seminar. He described white Christian nationalism as “an ideology that idealises and advocates a fusion of American civic life with a very particular kind of Christianity.
“That is a Christianity that isn’t characterised by, say, giving my life to Jesus, or wanting to be a good disciple, but it is about white Christian ethno-culture, a traditionalist Christian subculture that characterizes ‘people like us’, that we have been in charge, and that we are the rightful rulers, and our culture should hold sway and it should be institutionalised in American political life.”
The current resurgence gained national attention on the election of Donald Trump as President in 2016.
Bishop Curry recalled being warned by his grandmother of the “hooded men” of the Ku Klux Klan, and agreed that the current manifestation was a revival of Christian-associated white supremacy, which had echoed through the recent centuries of history in the US.
The Episcopal Church made a commitment to developing a response to Christian nationalism and white supremacy in the wake of the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol building.