Christian Nationalism: Your Kingdom Come
Sunday, 22 December 2024
| Tom Barker
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your Kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
For Christians, the Lord’s Prayer is a microcosm of the gospel message. The opening verses establish our relationship with God: he is our Father, and we are his children. The Prayer also cuts right to the nature of God: that somehow, because of his very nature, he ought to be hallowed or made holy and set apart from ourselves. At this point Jesus’ words seem straightforward; all Christians can unite around this idea of honouring God as Father. The following verse is where it gets interesting. Your Kingdom come. How? Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Right here, right now? The works of William Wilberforce the abolitionist or Rosa Parks the civil rights activist offer a glimpse into what your Kingdom come means. They are amongst a much larger group of faithful believers who make decisions each day to actualise God’s vision for humanity.
Yet there are a growing number of Christians who believe that ‘on earth as it is in heaven’ requires something more than mere discipleship at the feet of Jesus. Rather, Christian nationalists believe that an enmeshment between faith and state is necessary to destroy evil and demonic powers. Gorski and Perry’s seminal book The Flag and the Cross (2022) aptly describes White Christian nationalism as the perpetuation of the myth that the United States was founded by white Christian men to fulfil God’s divine purposes. This white Christian America must be defended (with violence if necessary) against ‘racial, religious, and cultural outsiders’ who imperil the fulfilment of God’s work. As a consequence, Christian nationalists have a strong ideological connection to ‘racism, Islamophobia, gun rights, xenophobia, homophobia, authoritarianism, and traditional views of the family’ (A.L. Whitehead and S.L. Perry, ‘Is a "Christian America" a more Patriarchal America?’, Canadian Review of Sociology 56, no. 2 [2019], 151-177.).
The current manifestation of Christian nationalism in the United States is particularly concerning given the alignment between Christian nationalists and the Republican Party. Some among them stormed the nation’s capital on January 6, 2021, to prevent the confirmation of Joe Biden’s election victory. ‘Jesus is my Savior, Trump is my President’ was inscribed on shirts worn by many and a portrait of a (white) Jesus wearing a Make America Great Again cap was enthusiastically displayed by one woman present (J. Dalsheim and G. Starrett, ‘Christian nationalism is downplayed in the Jan. 6 report and collective memory’, theconversation.com, 6th September 2022). Once they breached the House of Representatives, they paused to pray: ‘Thank you, heavenly Father… to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists, and the globalists that this is our nation, not theirs, that we will not allow America, the American way of the United States of America to go down’.
Your Will Be Done
This twisted Lord’s Prayer is uncomfortable for Christians and people of other faiths or no faith alike. The pursuit of ethnic purity alone – the desire for a white, Christian America – gives cause for alarm. Yet I am also disturbed by the inescapable thought that maybe there is something inherently Christian about this movement. Was Israel not ordained by God to carry out his divine justice? In Deuteronomy 7, Israel is told that, after they drive out the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites from their land, they must ‘destroy them totally… and show no mercy’. This makes the violent instincts of Christian nationalists appear to be a footnote in the history of Christian political violence. In other words, have Christian nationalists got it right and other Christians are just too feeble to really do ‘your will be done’ justice?
I contend not. However complex and confronting the nature of Israel’s role as the hand of God in the Old Testament, one cannot escape his revelation to Moses in Exodus 34 that his name, Yahweh, means ‘the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin’. The remaining verse gets to the core of the mysterious relationship between God and violence, ‘Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation’. So, no matter what this punishment looks like, it must be viewed through the lens of a God abounding in love and faithfulness and his son Jesus. Accordingly, the ethno-religious prejudice and xenophobia espoused by Christian nationalists is antithetical to the love of God and love of neighbour commanded by Yahweh.
On Earth as in Heaven
So, what should ‘on earth as it is in heaven’ look like? In his book Subjects and Citizens: The politics of the gospel (2024), Michael Jensen argues that ‘Christians have become more passionate about a certain type of politics … than about the gospel of Jesus the Lord’. I agree. The crux of Christian nationalism is a substitution of spiritual salvation through Christ for political salvation through Trump. Jesus’ ultimate triumph over evil through his death and resurrection is rendered insufficient by an ideology that dogmatically urges intervention in the political realm for the sake of political survival.
Christians must resist the temptation to transform temporal concerns into divine concerns. As Jesus says in Luke 12:29-31, ‘do not set your heart on what you will eat or drink; do not worry about it. For the pagan world runs after all such things, and your Father knows that you need them. But seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well’.
God is present with his children amidst anxiousness about a changing world. We don’t need to establish his kingdom here on earth; he has already done that through Jesus. Instead, we should hear his call to seek his kingdom which belongs to the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers and those who are persecuted. So as we await his return, let’s join the body of faithful believers who make decisions each and every day to do his kingdom work.
Tom Barker is a Law and Arts student at Macquarie University and is passionate about the relationship between faith and politics.
Image credit: A red hat that reads Make America Great Again by Natilyn Hicks Photography on Unsplash.