Episcopal leaders confront the urgent danger of Christian nationalism
The Crisis of Christian Nationalism: Report from the House of Bishops Theology Committee
In the face of rising Christian nationalism, leaders in the Episcopal Church have published the findings of a study requested by Presiding Bishop Michael B. Curry in 2022. The Crisis of Christian Nationalism: Report from the House of Bishops Theology Committee, edited by The Right Reverend Allen K. Shin and The Right Reverend Larry Benfield, addresses a threat to American democracy that has continued to grow since the insurrection on January 6, 2021.
“Christian nationalism is a sin,” says The Right Rev. Shin, Bishop Suffragan of the Diocese of New York and chair of the committee. The ideology is not Christian, though it has “appropriated a thin veneer of Christian identity.”
Building the case against Christian nationalism, the committee of eight bishops and six theologians undertook a careful examination of its origins and implications. They argue that it is “a white supremacist national ideology that uses the Christian religion as its justification. Thus, it is fundamentally an apostasy that violates the first and the second of the Ten Commandments.” They explain that the ideology “consists of assumptions about white supremacy, Anglo-Saxon nativism, patriarchy, and militarism. This ideology is a prime example of how white supremacy has morphed into and given energy to the systemic sin of Christian nationalism.”
The report created by the House of Bishops Theology Committee “offers both profound and practical responses to the Christian nationalism that today threatens our country’s soul,” writes Bishop Curry in the introduction. “It is because we love God and it is because we love our country that we want to respond in ways that are healthy, holy, and true.”
The report includes tools to help people “navigate the tension we experience when our primary identity and loyalty to the kingdom of God are in tension with our identity as members of our families, cultures, and nations.” Such tools include Sacred Ground sessions, a small group series during which participants walk through the history of race and racism in the US; Theological Dialogue on new ways to conduct one’s life; and United Religious Public Witness, an example of which is provided in a case study of how the Episcopal Diocese of Spokane responded to Christian nationalist and White supremacist activity in their area. The book also includes a study guide to spur further theological reflection on the issue, and to help Christians consider how to combat white supremacy and Christian nationalism.
The committee writes that “nothing could be more relevant and more necessary for the current Western world’s moment of crisis than the Christian message of hope.”
The Crisis of Christian Nationalism is available from all bookstores including Amazon and Bookshop or directly from Church Publishing Incorporated.
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