FAITHFULLY RESISTING THE DEEP STORY OF WHITE CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM
“The convictions are false. They want to destroy him [Donald Trump] because he is chosen by God to lead the nation.”
—Anonymous
Since 2016, I have heard Christians call Donald Trump a prophetically anointed leader, the vessel to bring forth God’s vision for a Christianized America. When Trump first ran for the presidency, I was seventeen. All I knew about Christianity—for better and for worse—was my charismatic tradition. I grew up believing in God’s power and personal providence. My relationship with God was intimate, spirit-driven, and filled with spiritual fire and devotion. At the same time, I was enmeshed in a narrative of spirituality where politics and providence go hand in hand.
In November, 2024, I spent many nights wide awake after my night classes for my PhD program in Rhetoric, reading Debie Thomas’s A Faith of Many Rooms on my tiny, blue-light rendered phone screen.[1] Amid Donald Trump’s re-election, pressing questions about what it means to follow Jesus kept me awake at night. Instead of sleeping, I remained awake, researching, reading theology, and even turning to the works of the Reformers. With all my PhD homework, didn’t I have better things to do?
At the time, confronting what Reverend Jim Wallis calls “the false white gospel,” defined as the belief held by far-right conservatives that “America is God’s chosen nation and must be defended as such,” was the most pressing issue in my life.[2] As I navigated new relationships with people who were truly different from the conservative circles I grew up in, I confronted the certainty of my faith and embraced, thrashing and grieving and arguing with God, the doubt that emerged within me.
Leaving the echo-chamber of my conservative, religious-right upbringing and confronting the false white gospel has been one of the most frightening and sanctifying experiences of my life. Like Debie[3], a creative writer, seminary student, and episcopalian lay minister, I am learning to embrace the doubting disciple Thomas within me as I search for a richer faith— a faith that rejects the false story underlying white Christian nationalist belief.
“The story of Thomas in scripture reassures me that the journey of faith can be slow and winding,” writes Debie. “Thomas dared to confess uncertainty in the midst of those who were certain. He recognized his Lord in wounds, scars, hurts, and raw places— not in cleanness, neatness, perfection, or glory.”[4] Belief-centered Christianity, like the kind expressed in white evangelical circles, divorces the assent to theological creeds and a sense of spiritual certainty from the “enfleshed and storied lives of believers.”[5] Faith without story does not make room for messiness, instead preserving certainty and rightness above all else. Amid certainty without room for listening and empathy, the seeds of prideful religion grow. Jesus listened to the stories of his disciples, he gave his ear, time, and space to the Samaritan woman at the well, who lived on the outskirts of Jewish society as a cultural “other.”[6] Jesus embodied compassion while holding others accountable for the ways their actions hurt and oppressed the people at the margins of society.
As a rhetorician, I am deeply aware of the ways in which histories are immersed in story, bound together by perspective and context and woven within their particular moment. As histories are made, there is danger in the stories that take precedence over the voices that fall through the cracks, not making the cut. For Americans today, a false and heretical story of Christianity threatens to take center stage as the single story[7] of the Christian faith.
White Christian nationalism is a deep story, a term sociologists use to describe a type of cultural storytelling rooted in myth. “Deep stories have been told and retold so many times and across so many generations that they feel natural and true: even and perhaps when they are at odds with history,” explain sociologists Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry.[8] The myth at the heart of white Christian nationalism twists the Christian story from a religion that welcomes tax collectors and society’s culturally outcasted into God’s loving family, instead perpetuating white racial superiority and exclusion.
The deep story of white Christian nationalism is older than America. It’s woven into the historical fabric of the nation, based in dominion theology, colonialism, and the slave-trade. Dominion theology distorts God’s scriptural command in Genesis 1:28 to steward and care for the natural world into a political ideology favoring a Christianized society, and it is this sort of theological backing that gives the white Christian nationalist story its deep roots.[9] The deep story claims America’s Christian origins and divine providence, and there are classic literary tropes that follow the narrative arc: the white, masculine defenders of the nation and the “othered” villains who threaten to pollute America.[10] There are also many retellings of the white Christian nationalist story, with secular manifestations in defense of “Judeo-Christian civilization” and “Western culture.”[11]
The idea that America is a Christian nation is a key part of the deeply rooted story of white Christian nationalism, and the diverse religious backgrounds of the founding fathers challenge the myth. The founding fathers drew on secular as well as religious theories for their vision of America, including civic republicanism and classical liberalism. They were atheists, Catholics, unitarians, deists, Baptists, and congregationalists.[12]
America’s historical roots in violence complicate the story of America as a Christian nation, because the nation’s roots convey a lack of Christian mercy, love, and justice. The nation’s true historical roots comprise quests for ethnocentric “blood conquest and blood purity,” where the “civilized” white colonists conquered the “uncivilized” Natives. Alongside the brutal history of American slavery and black subjugation, “an enduring culture of White violence” remains today and is expressed in white Christian nationalist ideology.[13]
For professing Christians, redeeming the violent history of Christianity from its roots in colonialism and the slave trade to today’s present threat of white Christian nationalism, if such radical redemption is even possible, requires action and humility in the here and now. The path forward requires Christians to seek differences across partisan policy lines, across denominations and religious traditions, across class, economic standing, and ethnic and racial backgrounds.
“The realm of God is by nature wide, abundant, and capacious,” writes Debie. “Where God dwells–and where we dwell with God–there is expansiveness. Where God reigns, there is generosity, variety, and plenitude.”[14]
From within the fabrics of American Christianity, rejecting white Christian nationalism involves not only an examination of our own hearts as proclaimed Christ-followers, but also deep, inward reflection on who God is. Is God a white man who tramples refugees seeking safety across American borders, refusing them access to His great nation? Or is God a God of welcome, a God who professes his intimate love for all peoples, tribes, and tongues through his spacious invitation?
Resisting white Christian nationalism demands Christian repentance for the ways that the story of white Christian nationalism twists the ethnic and racial identity of our Lord and Savior. Jesus was Middle Eastern, not European. The savior who bled and was crucified by the Romans was certainly not a white man, and Christians must repent for the fascist rhetoric that perpetuates a harmful ethnoculture of white racial dominion in all spheres of American civic life.[15] Such rhetoric directly contrasts the spacious, all-encompassing hospitality of God.
The way forward involves deep listening, a willingness to embrace discomfort and difference, and a recognition that the imago dei of the other demands radical kindness. As Jesus said in Matthew 25, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”[16]
Revisioning faith as story invites Christians to listen and learn in ways that will fundamentally change our being and our capacity to love like Jesus. “No matter how passionately I disagree with your opinions, creeds, doctrines, or beliefs, I cannot disagree with your story,” Debie implores. “Once I have learned to hear and speak your story in the words that matter most to you, then I have stakes I never had before. I can no longer flourish at your expense.”[17]
As believers, we have to pay attention to others and create radically inclusive spaces with the same regard as God—with deep, loving kindness—recognizing the inherent dignity in the people around us who are also expressions of the imago dei, bearers of God’s image.
As a scholar of writing and rhetoric, I plead with the Church to employ a specific kind of listening theorized within my field. Rhetorical listening, defined as “a stance of openness that a person may choose to assume in relation to any person, text, or culture” is “a code for cross cultural conduct” and communication.[18] Rhetorical listening operates from a basis of shared understanding, holds its adherents accountable, identifies the commonalities and differences across speaker and listener, and analyzes the storied cultural logics of the claims that are made.[19] Rhetorical listening is listening outside the echo-chamber, engaging with difference, and working through dialogue— experiences that are deeply challenging and uncomfortable, yet serve as vital tactics for fighting the oppressive and faulty logics at the heart of white Christian nationalist ideologies.
Living out the Christian faith as a story means “acquainting ourselves with a God who is much more welcoming, dynamic, and spirited than the God of abstract dogma. A storied God is a curious God, a listening God, an artistic God, a risk-taking God,” and our expression of welcome as Christ-followers ought to follow the expansiveness of God’s heart.[20]
Leaving the echo-chamber and listening to the stories of others means walking out a risky faith, leaving the safety and systemic sin of white Christian nationalism, and engaging wholeheartedly with a risk-taking God—a God who listens.
[1] Debie Thomas, A Faith of Many Rooms: Inhabiting a More Spacious Christianity (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2024).
[2] Jim Wallis, “The False White Gospel,” in The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy (New York: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2024), 13-46; Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, W.W. Norton & Company, 2021), 4.
[3] To avoid confusing the contemporary writer and episcopalian minister Debie Thomas with the Apostle Thomas, I will refer to the contemporary Thomas as Debie throughout this work.
[4] Debie Thomas, “A St. Thomas Pilgrimage: Doubt,” in A Faith of Many Rooms: Inhabiting a More Spacious Christianity (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2024), 25.
[5] Debie Thomas, “Beyond Belief: Story,” in A Faith of Many Rooms: Inhabiting a More Spacious Christianity (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2024), 65.
[6] John 4, verses 1-42, New Revised Standard Version.
[7] Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” October 7th, 2009, Youtube, 19:16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg.
[8] Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, “Introduction: Eruption,” in The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 4.
[9] Ian McFarland, “Dominion Theology,” in Ian A. McFarland, David A. S. Fergusson, Karen Kilby, and Iain R. Torrance, eds. The Cambridge Dictionary of Christian Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 147-148.
[10] Gorski, Philip S., and Samuel L. Perry. “Introduction: Eruption.” In The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 4.
[11] Gorski and Perry, “Introduction: Eruption,” 5.
[12] Gorski and Perry, “Introduction: Eruption,” 10.
[13] Philip Gorski, “Religious Nationalism and Right-Wing Populism: Trumpism and Beyond,” in Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism, edited by Atalia Omer and Joshua Lupo. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2023), 26.
[14] Debie Thomas, “Introduction: Belonging” In A Faith of Many Rooms: Inhabiting a More Spacious Christianity. (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2024), 10.
[15] Wallis, “The False White Gospel,” 23.
[16] Matthew 25, verse 40. New Revised Standard Version.
[17] Debie Thomas, “She Blows Where She Wills: Spirit,” n A Faith of Many Rooms: Inhabiting a More Spacious Christianity (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2024), 79.
[18] Krista Ratcliffe, “Defining Rhetorical Listening,” in Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness (Southern Illinois University Press/Carbondale, 2005), 17-19.
[19] Ratcliffe, “Defining Rhetorical Listening,”26.
[20] Thomas, “Beyond Belief: Story,” 6.
