The Uneasy Conscience of Christian Nationalism

Too many of us assume that Christian nationalism promises a road map to a New Jerusalem or a New Rome or a New Constantinople. That’s understandable, given the triumphal and martial rhetoric of would-be theocrats. But what if the actual road map is to none of those places? 

What if the new Christian nationalism wants to take us not to the rebuilt shining city on a hill of Cotton Mather’s Massachusetts Bay Colony but just to double coupon night at the Bellagio in Las Vegas? 

Journalist Jonathan V. Last noted years ago, when staying at a Vegas resort and casino, how momentarily moved he was by the hotel’s commitment to help their guests save the earth. Last noted the card on his bathroom sink asking guests to conserve water by using each towel multiple times. On the bedside table, he saw another card asking visitors to safeguard natural resources by opting not to have bed linens changed. 

Then he looked out at the front of the hotel, where two massive fountains stood “spewing precious water into the arid, desert air.” That’s when, he wrote, “it struck me that the … concern for the environment might simply be an attempt to save on laundry costs.”

The stakes aren’t very high at one Vegas hotel, but it’s a deal that reveals an impulse in fallen human nature, in a way that’s a win for all the parties involved. The guests get to feel like they’re doing something virtuous, and the house gets to keep more of the chips. It’s a microcosm of what Martin Luther identified as the psychological game behind Johann Tetzel and others selling indulgences to medieval Christians. 

Paying the money helped ease the consciences of those fearful of purgatory while at the same time helping to raise money for building St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The indulgence hawkers could tell themselves they weren’t in the business of nonprofit fundraising or commercial real estate but in the mission of saving souls. And the indulgence buyers could reassure themselves with penance, which was, and is, much easier than repentance. 

Tossing a coin is easier than carrying a cross. Actual contrition, confession, and surrender are intangible, internal, spiritual realities that require entrusting one’s forgiveness to the promise of an invisible God. Indulgences, on the other hand, come with receipts. 

For Luther, the crisis of it all was not just that the church was corrupt but, more importantly, that the reassurance bought with this type of indulgence actually kept people from seeing what really can overcome sin and wipe away guilt—personal faith in Christ and him crucified. 

“Christians are to be taught that if the pope knew the exactions of the pardon-preachers, he would rather that St. Peter’s church should go to ashes, than that it should be built up with the skin, flesh, and bones of his sheep,” Luther asserted in the 50th of his theses. 

In our time, the indulgences are more akin to a hotel’s green initiative than to the construction of St. Peter’s. The new Christian nationalism—like the withered old state churches of Europe and the secularized old social gospels of mainline Protestantism—defines Christianity in terms of reforming external structures rather than of regenerating internal psyches. Unlike the older theological liberalisms, though, Christian nationalists seek solidarity not in the actual mitigating of human suffering but in the mostly symbolic boundary markers of taking the right amount of theatrical umbrage at culture war outrages, at having the right kind of enemies, at “owning the libs.” 

The uneasy conscience of Christian nationalism pretends that our problem is the opposite of what Jesus told us: that by calling ourselves an orchard we can bring fruit from diseased trees (Matt. 7:15–20), that by controlling what is on the outside of us we can renew what is inside (Matt. 12:33–37). 

This message is popular in all times; prosperity gospels and fertility religions always are. An extrinsic religion enables people to claim Christianity without following Christ and enables powerless, prayerless, porn-addicted culture warriors to convince themselves that they are goose-stepping to heaven. By assuaging our guilt with our political choices, we can convince ourselves that what we find in our new Bethel is Jacob’s ladder to heaven when it is really just Jeroboam’s calf of gold (1 Kings 12:25–31). 

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Philip Yancey, a longtime columnist here at CT, along with other Christians, met with the disillusioned Communists of the regime, including the propogandists at the Kremlin newspaper Pravda. The Bolshevik experiment, of course, had subordinated personal ethics, much less personal faith, to the collective cause—to the supposed “worker’s paradise” of the future, which would justify every lie told, every dissident exiled, every life extinguished along the way. 

What Yancey found most poignant was not just that Soviet communism had failed, but the particular way it failed. As he mused: 

Humans dream of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good, wrote T. S. Eliot, who saw many of his friends embrace the dream of Marxism. “But the man that is will shadow the man that pretends to be.” What we were hearing from Soviet leaders, and the KGB, and now Pravda, was that the Soviet Union ended up with the worst of both: a society far from perfect, and a people who had forgotten how to be good. 

We should not pretend that we could not see the same thing with a lifeless, politicized dystopian Christian nationalism as we saw with a hollowed-out Soviet empire. What a tragic end it would be to wind up with a society as debauched as ever and a people who have forgotten how to be saved. 

The way forward is what it’s always been. As Luther said in his Heidelberg Disputation, “The theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. The theologian of the cross calls a thing what it is.” Sometimes that means nailing a word or two to the castle door. Sometimes that might mean letting goods and kindred go. The whole of the Christian life is about repentance. That repentance must be about the renewing of our minds and the renovation of our hearts, not just the laundering of consciences that are no longer bound to the Word of God. 

Now, as always, every day is Reformation Day. 

Russell Moore is CT’s editor in chief.

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