Littlejohn on Christian Nationalism

Especially since January 6 of last year, the epithet "Christian Nationalist" has increasingly been deployed to rule out of bounds a host of conservative voices. Not only among academics, left-leaning political activists, and pundits, but increasingly, centrist and even right-of-center Evangelicals are running away from the label.

Brad Littlejohn's excellent long-form post here does not so much try to rehabilitate contemporary Christian Nationalism as to situate it in relation to the front end of the long arc of American history. To warrant his historical approach, Littlejohn observes that

It should not surprise us that today’s “Christian nationalists” make … appeals to history. We are a story-telling species, looking to the past to understand our present and shape our future. And this makes it rather difficult to simply dismiss the flag-waving zealots at the Capitol building as a herd of insecure, misogynistic extremists ... To the extent that their vision of the present is rooted in some perception of the past, the first question we must ask is, “is this perception accurate?” 

Answering that question takes Littlejohn to the Founding era and intermittently beyond. But it’s important to observe that he does not let the answer devolve into the question of the orthodoxy of the better-known Founders: “after all, the beliefs of a few individuals, however prominent, cannot determine for us the Christianity of the American nation.” Ditto for an isolated preoccupation with the founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, because they tell us “comparatively little about the assumptions of 1780s Americans.” In other words, asking questions about the nature and varieties of Christian Nationalism requires an examination of the demos of the nation that was (and perhaps is) America.

Littlejohn expects sustained attention from his readers as he discusses important topics like “What is a nation?” and “What is religion?” These are exercises in sociology, and he handles them deftly. What becomes clear is that

If language is one of the key measures for a nation’s public religious identity, it is hard to miss the evidence for a Christian America in the later eighteenth century. Although supposedly something of a religious low-point sandwiched between two periods of vibrant religious revival (the First and Second Great Awakenings), most American very much still lived in the long shadow of Christianity during the decades that spanned the struggle for American independence and the formation of the constitutional order. Throughout the literature of this period, the language of the Christian Scriptures and the Protestant Reformation is pervasive, and the sermon—whether heard or later read—remained by far the most influential means of persuasion.

I won’t bore my readers with a summary of Littlejohn’s canvass of writings and sermons from late eighteenth century America except to point out that the forms of expressions drawn from the King James Bible as mediated through long-standing Protestant political thought dominated the political imaginary of the demos of America. That Americans of this era were fervent nationalists and expressed themselves in a distinctively Christian patois simply cannot be gainsaid.

Littlejohn does not, I hasten to point out, assert that all of the arguments of this first generation of Christian Nationalists were on that account valid. Answering that question would take us away from history and sociology and to theology. Nor does Littlejohn claim that contemporary Christian Nationalists are correct in their prescriptions:

To say this, of course, is by no means to resolve contemporary debates over “Christian nationalism”: whether America remains in any meaningful sense a Christian nation, or whether it ought to strive to be one again. ... And yet the conclusions of this essay certainly ought to challenge those who, eager to minimize the role of Christianity in the present, would try to sweep the history under the rug, conveniently forgetting the Christian nationalism of the past. At the very least, it should induce a bit more humility on the part of contemporary sociologists and pundits eager to analyze what they clearly regard as the pathologies of today’s “Christian nationalists.” (Emphasis added.)

And that, I submit, is a worthy goal that Littlejohn has achieved.