“Christian Nationalism has nothing to do with Christianity. It’s man saying, ‘This is God’s Law,’ and administering it for the purposes of achieving absolute political power. And the societies that practice it are the most evil places on Earth.'”
Can’t find anything to argue with there. 
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Powerful stuff, that video.
Purely as an illustrative analogy, cast your minds back (if you are old enough) to when the Shah of Iran was overthrown and the Islamic Republic was declared under Ayatollah Khomeini almost overnight.
This is the same thing but the only reason it is taking longer in the US is that you are not starting from an all-powerful monarch being in charge, you have this wonderful thing called democracy which quite a few people like. Nobody liked the Shah.
But it is pretty much the same thing - it’s just happening in slow motion this time - i.e. religious extremists opportunistically looking for ways to achieve power and impose their will on an entire country.
The fact it is happening in slow motion, and that you still have democracy is what will help save you, if only people realise what it is that is in fact happening: i.e. do you want to live in a regime like Iran’s? Because this is how you end up living in a regime like Iran’s. Vote against these people to save the country.
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There’s a suitable flag, it just needs the letters changed.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331410194/figure/fig1/AS:742574507712513@1554054967552/Flag-of-the-German-Christians-1934.png
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Let’s get back to One Nation, Under God… since 1953.
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I prefer the 1978 revision.
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She’s already made some anti-Catholic digs, so I’m guessing, like many southern protestants, she does not believe they are real Christians.
So, the Mormons are right? Just like South Park said!
Yep. Spot on. People like her will quickly turn on their conservative Catholic allies the second they get what they want. They will be pretty high up on the list for cleansing.
Don’t bring Islam into this. This is a long-standing tradition in America. We didn’t import religious terrorism, we revolutionized it in the 19th and early 20th century, and EXPORTED it.
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I feel that we need to add a “citation needed” for the claim that societies that practice Christian Nationalism are “the most evil places on Earth”. The trailer doesn’t give us many examples, aside from some footage of Klansmen marching and a glimpse of what I assume is Patriarch Kirill planting a big old smacker on Putin’s cheek. I’ll concede that Putin’s Russia is – at the governmental level – pretty damn evil. But while the Orthodox Church under Kirill probably qualifies as Christian Nationalist, is Russia as a whole truly Christian Nationalist, or is the government just enjoying the support of a church that has learned to make the right noises?
Who else? I guess the old South African apartheid regime leaned fairly heavily on Christianity. A lot of the Latin American dictatorships espoused the twin virtues of Christianity and torturing leftist dissidents. They don’t feature on the Wikipedia page for Christian Nationalist regimes, but that page is pretty sparse when it comes to actual examples.
And then you have all the card-carrying Evil Regimes that aren’t Christian. The Nazis, everyone’s favorite poster boys for undiluted evil, were not noticeably enamored of Christianity. Recent and current Chinese governments? Pretty evil, not so Christian. Communist regimes in Europe? Evil but not Christian. There’s lots of evil floating around the Arab world, but not a lot of Christianity. The government of Myanmar goes from evil to evil without ever accepting Jesus as their Lord and Savior. North Korea? Democratic Kampuchea? And so on.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a fan of nationalism at the best of times, still less when it comes along shouting “Deus vult!” I would enjoy living in the kind of America that these people want about as much as I’d enjoy living under the Taliban, and for similar reasons. But we shouldn’t make sweeping statements about “most evil” unless we can back it up with proper documentation.
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Hungary and Russia.
Christian nationalism isn’t the same thing as Christianity. There are plenty of places where it’s a Christian majority that isn’t authoritarian.
Rule of goats applies. Whether Putin means it in his heart is irrelevant, as his support of the Church and appeal to “traditional values” (as defined by the Orthodox establishment) amounts to the exact same thing.
Did anyone say that THIS form of authoritarianism is the only kind that matters? No, just that it’s a form that we should be concerned with the rise of - as it’s a major connective tissue in the modern right wing global movement.
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Just a reminder that while Steve Schmidt may have renounced the modern Republican Party, he also helped make it what it is today. I hope he acknowledges that in the documentary. Lest anyone forget, it was his bright idea to make Sarah Palin McCain’s running mate in 2008. If Howard Schultz had run for President in 2020, Schmidt likely would have been a major part of the campaign. We might have a common enemy, but Schmidt is not an ally, just like the rest of his Lincoln Project buddies.
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Steve Schmidt claims – and the title of the post on BoingBoing repeats – that "the societies that practice [Christian Nationalism] are the most evil places on Earth”. THAT is the claim that I am questioning.
If someone wants to say that Christian Nationalism is vile and dangerous and, indeed, entirely un-Christian (at least as far as the ideals rather than the historical record of Christianity are concerned), they’ll get no disagreement from me. But if they start flinging around unsupported claims about “most evil”, then I start quibbling. And I do so not just for reasons of pedantry, but because I think hyperbole plays into the hands of the Christian Nationalists. (“See? They called us ‘most evil’!”)
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And then start working down the other groups.
“Are Mormons Christians?”
“Are Moonies Christians?”
Mind you, they don’t seem to feel threatened by those groups.
“Are Episcopalians Christians?”
When St. John’s Episcopal church in DC was teargassed, not one of Trump’s religious supporters seemed to mind at all.
Getting them to admit that they want a very specific band of Christian church to be established would be tough.
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Nah. Lots of people in the Bible had leprosy, which made their skin “white as snow.”
Growing up Mormon in the bible belt, I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been told I wasn’t a Christian. That and the Jehovah’s Witnesses I knew seemed to also get the same treatment.
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Don’t forget Seventh Day Adventists too.
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I think you’re right, though I didn’t know any growing up.
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[citation needed]
“We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity … in fact our movement is Christian.”
— Adolf Hitler, 1928
And all the people talking about “oh, but it doesn’t count, he was using Christianity, he wasn’t really a believer, he was subverting Christianity…” well, yes. That’s the point.
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I’d argue that he’s probably talking about in the current context, not across history, though. And in that context, this is where the next genocide is going to come from, no doubt about that. We’re already seeing what Putin is doing in Russia and in Ukraine. We’ll have to wait and see on the outcome from Hungary and Poland. And if they get their way here, we will see a mass slaughter of the “wrong” kind of people. They WILL kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, to secure a white Christian ethno-state and then forcibly enslave the rest for their own needs. Handmaid’s Tale is fiction, but the reality is that it’s not that far off of what is possible.
so yeah… that’s the current threat we all face right now and what they want is pretty fucking evil.
But maybe people downplay it because of WHO they target - people most “normal” Americans already see as “less American” and hence, expendable.
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Counterpoint:
In Hitler’s eyes, Christianity was a religion fit only for slaves; he detested its ethics in particular. Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest.
— “Hitler: a Study in Tyranny”, by Alan Bullock
Should a historian’s account of Hitler’s beliefs carry more weight than Hitler’s own words? Possibly, given that Hitler was notorious for saying what was most useful to him at the moment he said it. Your quote dates from 1928, when Hitler was not strong enough to confront religious believers in Germany, but needed to co-opt them. As time went by, the Nazis – including Hitler – became increasingly hostile to both the Catholic and the Protestant churches, which they saw as competitors.
As an alternative to the established denominations, the Nazis put forward a ‘Positive Christianity’ which was a kind of mash-up of paganism, Nazi obsessions about race, and a few bits of the Bible that they considered sufficiently non-Jewish. ‘Positive Christianity’ was heavily identified with, i.e. subservient to, Nazism. Hitler seems to have been ambivalent about it, but other leading Nazis were strongly in favor of it, and Hitler at least seems to have been happy to go along with it.
Was Positive Christianity still Christianity? My own answer would be, “about as much as National Socialism was socialism”.
I suppose you could make the case that the Nazis’ opportunistic relationship to Christianity, and their invention of a new and essentially political version of religion that served their needs is really the essence of Christian Nationalism. So while I might stand by my claim that they weren’t Christians in any conventional sense, maybe I should recognize that they were actually a textbook case of Christian Nationalism.
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I think you probably should. Nothing in the movement being talked about has anything to do with an ancient Jew who told people God and love were the point of life, save only his name. It has more to do with slavery and Ayn Rand even, if you want a clear example of detesting his ethics.
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“Christian Nationalism” is an oxymoron, so we are obviously not talking about real, sincere Christians following the example of Christ here.
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