When does radical religious conservatism become a dangerous bid for theocracy? It’s a question that some American commentators are pondering, in relation to ‘Christian nationalism’.

David French has argued in the New York Times that we should be wary of the term ‘Christian nationalism’, which is often attached to Trump-supporting evangelicals. There is nothing very dangerous about Christians wanting their faith to be politically expressed, he says. If you define the term broadly, ‘then you’re telling millions of ordinary churchgoing citizens that the importation of their religious values into the public square somehow places them in the same camp or on the same side as actual Christian supremacists, the illiberal authoritarians who want to remake America in their own fundamentalist image.’

The Church of England has internalised liberal political values

It’s fine to believe that there should be ‘Christian participation in politics’, not so fine to believe ‘that there should be Christian primacy in politics and law.’ And there is indeed a movement that has this theocratic agenda, which calls itself Christian Nationalism, or Dominionism.

Ross Douthat, in the same paper, agrees that the term is slippery, and that religious idealism about the nation has been basic to liberalism as well as conservatism, as in the case of Martin Luther King. So today’s liberals are wrong to depict ‘even banal forms of religious conservatism as theocratic. This requires a pretence that any kind of politics motivated by conservative evangelicalism or Catholicism is a threat to the First Amendment, that the Republic of Gilead from “The Handmaid’s Tale” is a plausible dystopia and that references to natural law and God-given rights are somehow an alien and illiberal ideology impinging on our secular tradition…Today’s religious conservatives are mostly just normal American Christians doing normal American Christian politics, not foot soldiers of incipient theocracy.

QOSHE - Is there anything wrong with ‘Christian nationalism’? - Theo Hobson
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Is there anything wrong with ‘Christian nationalism’?

6 12
05.03.2024

When does radical religious conservatism become a dangerous bid for theocracy? It’s a question that some American commentators are pondering, in relation to ‘Christian nationalism’.

David French has argued in the New York Times that we should be wary of the term ‘Christian nationalism’, which is often attached to Trump-supporting evangelicals. There is nothing very dangerous about Christians wanting their faith to be politically expressed, he says. If you define the term........

© The Spectator


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