As a transgender person who grew up evangelical and is now an atheist, I feel the consequences of the “myth of Christian innocence” that profoundly shapes American society in ways that many Americans do not. Fully two-thirds of LGBTQ Americans are nonreligious (compared to about one-third of the general population), for what seem like obvious reasons—and yet it’s not the LGBTQ Christians who leave the religion, but rather those who reclaim it as something inclusive, who get all the media attention.
There’s a peculiar sting to the form of erasure that comes from being told, again and again, that the Christianity that taught you repression and self-hatred are the path to “righteousness,” and that traumatized you for rejecting it, isn’t “real” Christianity at all. And that, if you would only give “real” Christianity a chance, you’d find out that it’s good for you, actually!
It adds insult to injury when elite media gatekeepers decide, again and again, to throw all queer Americans under the bus by holding up “polite” and “respectable” anti-LGBTQ evangelicals like David French and Russell Moore as “good” examples for their Christian nationalist coreligionists—people who might just persuade the Christian nationalists to start behaving like “good” Christians. You know, the Christians who oppose LGBTQ inclusion and abortion rights but that we should all be okay with politically because, while they only sincerely hold some of the same anti-pluralist theological beliefs that fueled January 6, they would never themselves participate in an open insurrection. Open insurrection is just so gauche. And besides, the evangelical kids will be making American evangelicalism “normal” any day now, which is why we keep repeating that trope every few years. This time for sure!
The latest example of a legacy media outlet platforming one such “respectable” evangelical for clearing the lowest of low moral bars comes in the pages of The Atlantic. This ostensibly centrist magazine has given Moore, a former Southern Baptist Convention bigwig and the current editor-in-chief of the major evangelical magazine Christianity Today, space to rebuke his (mostly White) evangelical coreligionists for spreading the false and harmful narrative that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating people’s pets. Citing the bomb threats that shut down local schools after former president Donald Trump emphasized the talking point in his September 10 debate with Kamala Harris, Moore writes:
When we are willing to see children terrorized rather than stop telling lies about their families, we should step back, forget about our dogs and cats for a moment, and ask who abducted our consciences. That’s especially true for those of us who, like me, claim to be followers of Jesus of Nazareth, who told us that on the Day of Judgment, ‘people will give account for every careless word they speak’ (Mt 12:36).
In fairness, I appreciate Moore’s moral clarity on this subject, and, while the man has glaring ethical blind spots, this stance is consistent with his record. Moore has never wavered from his advocacy of the misogynistic belief in divinely ordained male leadership and female submission that was once called “biblical patriarchy” but that now goes by the more genteel-sounding name of “complementarianism.” Even so, I believe Moore genuinely tries to be a good person within the confines of this very toxic Christian theology that makes the task of being decent far more difficult than it needs to be.
That being said, Moore’s rhetoric is, intentionally or not, self-serving. No one “abducted” evangelicals’ consciences. In fact, Moore, French, and others like them certainly helped to create the current iteration of angry evangelicalism that threatens democracy and human rights in the United States. I cannot “see into their hearts” to know whether any spark of self-awareness resides there, but if it does, these “good” Christian men have certainly not publicly owned up to even the slightest accountability for their complicity. Doing so would require them to take an uncomfortable look at their own theology.
What is it that makes the leadership of an elite publication like The Atlantic see value in something like Moore’s new piece? Do its editors still, nearly eight years after the 2016 election, believe that America’s right-wing, mostly White evangelicals and similar authoritarian Christians are merely “misguided” souls who can be brought back to the light if they only find the right mouthpiece to use the right script and quote the right Bible verses? Does Moore himself still believe that the vast majority of his coreligionists, who for years now have been denouncing him as “liberal” and “woke,” are persuadable? I believe they really are that naïve—though it’s possible and even likely that bottom line considerations (and the inevitable modicum of cynicism that comes with them) are also in the mix.
Still, if highly educated people like the editors of legacy media outlets naively and tenaciously cling to obviously false hopes about American evangelicals—and even place a higher priority on those hopes than on supporting women’s and LGBTQ equality, which most Americans are for—what drives their tenacity and naivete? The short answer is Christian privilege, which flows from the hegemonic nature of Christianity in the United States.
That very Christian hegemony not only affects the aforementioned bottom line considerations of major news outlets, but also limits the imaginations of those who fail to look at it critically. And if the politics of America’s White evangelicals and other authoritarian Christians over the last few election cycles aren’t enough to get The New York Times or The Atlantic to question the conflation of “Christian” with “good,” or to grasp that authoritarian Christians cannot be reached at scale by selectively quoting the Bible at them, I don’t know what will. I do, however, have a modest proposal that might help push our discourse about Christianity and power in a more honest direction were enough of us to get on board.
I once cheered the introduction of the term “Christian nationalism” into the mainstream American political lexicon because it at last brought some scrutiny of evangelical authoritarianism into the elite public sphere. When the term first appeared, I would have been more likely to agree with my RD colleague Daniel Schultz, who recently argued that journalists should take care to refer to “Christian nationalists” rather than “Christians” when the former term applies.
I now disagree; I think using “Christians” (without any modifier) to describe toxic, authoritarian Christians is actually a positive step, because, even as it reinforces the message that “real” Christians can in fact be bad people, it doesn’t paint all Christians with a broad brush. “Christian” ought to be seen as a fairly neutral descriptor, one as applicable to Christian nationalists as to Christian liberation theologians.
What leads me to this conclusion? Over time I’ve noticed that the widespread adoption of the “Christian nationalist” framing has done nothing to arrest the American press’s tendencies to whitewash Christianity. If anything, it’s only provided American liberals and pundits with another useful tool to distance “real” Christianity from ugly realities like bigotry and political violence—to refuse to see that bigotry, strict social hierarchy, and an ends justify the means drive for domination are all quite compatible with Christianity.
Of course, liberationist Christianity also exists, but there’s no singular, “pure” form of Christianity in empirical existence. There are only Christianities, some of them empowering and inclusive, most of them to varying degrees authoritarian and harmful to the wellbeing of all people, Christian and otherwise. Many versions even contain elements of both of those broad tendencies because humans are complicated, and religion, as a quintessentially human phenomenon, reflects that. As complex cultural systems, religions like Christianity are ultimately defined by what their adherents do in the world with their texts and their traditions.
As I argued in a recent virtual talk, the key problem with the “Christian nationalism” framing as it functions within American political discourse is that it’s ultimately too narrow to encompass all of the harmful tendencies within American Christianity. Clearly there’s a problem when “respectable” evangelicals like French and Moore, who are opponents of abortion rights and LGBTQ inclusion, can obtain “get out of criticism free” cards simply because they are outspoken opponents of Christian nationalism. Clearly we need better language to address anti-democratic Christian beliefs.
So how does one responsibly cover Christian nationalists these days? To begin with, we must find language that doesn’t allow for the easy whitewashing of “respectable” Christians who hold authoritarian theological beliefs. In order to do this, journalists and commentators need not eschew the rhetoric of Christian nationalism altogether—it does, after all, accurately capture a particular social reality.
But care must be taken not to distance Christianity from Christian nationalism—even implicitly—so it isn’t enough to use only the terms “Christian nationalism” and “Christian nationalists.” A whole host of other terms can be used to describe the problematic beliefs and tendencies I’ve stressed in this piece, particularly the harmful patriarchal and anti-LGBTQ Christian beliefs that don’t strictly fall under the “Christian nationalism” umbrella.
In addition to taking every opportunity to point out the reality of hegemonic Christianity and the real-word effects of Christian privilege in American society, responsible religion journalists and pundits should start applying phrases like “authoritarian Christianity,” “patriarchal Christianity,” and “anti-pluralist Christianity” when the terminology of Christian nationalism doesn’t address relevant concerns like LGBTQ and women’s rights, to say nothing of the rights of nonbelievers and religious minorities to be free from oppressive Christianity. Schultz is absolutely right that the language we use matters. In my view, that’s a reason to start using language that’s less protective of Christianity and more protective of vulnerable people and populations.
