Christian Nationalism Silences Many Christians

29 December 2025  1 John 2:3-11

“Whoever claims to abide in Him ought to walk just as He walked.”

(1 John 2:3)

“Science flies us to the moon; religion flies us into buildings.”  -- Victor Stenger.

One of the most significant challenges of these days for Christians is that our opponents are fiendishly clever at coming up with devastating labels and one-liners. These attacks are rhetorically sophisticated (note the ABAB synchesis structure in the above witticism) and easily remembered all-purpose smears, and Christians are famously horrible at witty comebacks. 

One of the more recent labels used to attack Christians and Christianity is “Christian Nationalism,” or the even more sinister “White Christian Nationalism.”

What Christians and non-believers can certainly agree on (and in all likelihood already agree on) is that racism, sexism, nativism, and authoritarianism are grave evils that need to be eradicated, and perhaps on the basis of that work there will appear an occasion for having a profitable conversation about Jesus.

Sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry wrote a 2020 book about it, Taking America Back for God, in which they claim that Christian Nationalism “includes assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy and heteronormativity, along with divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism” (p. 10). Christian Nationalists, they say, are more likely to oppose vaccines, fear immigrants, disempower women, and promote racism, and they make up an estimated 52% of the Christians in America. That’s quite a lot of horribles, and despite the fact that no national political or religious figures are in favor of racism, white supremacy, nativism, sexism, or authoritarianism, Christian Nationalism has become a massive brush that smears, and often silences, a great many serious Christians.

So what are Christians to do?

“Whoever claims to abide in Him ought to walk as He walked” (I John 2:3). The most effective response to any attacks on Christians or the Gospel is Jesus Himself, embodied in our lives and abundant in our speech. The problem is not that Jesus is in any way an inadequate response, but that too many Christians don’t know enough about Jesus Himself, particularly as He is presented in the Bible, to resist the all-purpose smears of the secular, non-believing world. Many of the documents of the New Testament, including the gospels and particularly including the letters of John, were written to strengthen Christian communities under attack by people distorting the Christian message to make it more palatable to Romans who did not have the best interests of the Church or faithfulness to Jesus in mind. Faithfulness to Jesus, and faithful exposition of His teaching in scripture, are “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (II Timothy 3:16-17). The most critical pastoral task of the present age is to strengthen people in such faithfulness, and exposition.

“Christian Nationalism” is a poorly defined bogeyman that in nearly all its iterations exists only to tar Christians as advocates of ideas and policies that critics don’t like. It is tendentious in the extreme to say, for instance, that someone who opposes abortion on the basis of her faith is a nasty Christian Nationalist, while a person who opposes racial segregation on the basis of the same faith is not. What Christians and non-believers can certainly agree on (and in all likelihood already agree on) is that racism, sexism, nativism, and authoritarianism are grave evils that need to be eradicated, and perhaps on the basis of that work there will appear an occasion for having a profitable conversation about Jesus. Provided, of course, that there are enough Christians around who know what the Bible says about Him.