White Christian Nationalism Needs to Be Defeated — By White, Jesus-Loving Christians

by | Jan 17, 2025 | Opinions & Commentary

White Christian Nationalism Needs to Be Defeated — By White, Jesus-Loving Christians

by | Jan 17, 2025 | Opinions & Commentary

White Christian nationalism isn’t just an existential threat to this nation, it’s a sickening, collective sin that flies in the face of Jesus.

Republished with permission from John Pavlovitz

I didn’t want to be doing this.

Ten years ago, I was a student pastor at a large Suburban North Carolina church. Though I’d been writing a blog for a while, it had been for an audience made up largely of parents of teenagers and youth pastors. I touched on ministry, parenting, religion, grief, the Church-at-large—but rarely on politics, and certainly not politicians by name.

Yet, as the 2016 presidential campaign season moved along, I started to notice a disconcerting shift happening, not just in my church but in those all around the country and in those who attended them. The longer Donald Trump remained in the race, the more self-professed Christians softened their criticisms of him, many beginning to justify and explain away words and deeds they’d have passionately condemned in any other instance and at any other time. The hard-and-fast rules they previously declared about morality became less-rigid. The supposedly immutable truth of right-and-wrong was now suddenly up for debate. This brought a sense of foreboding about where the Church was headed, and our nation because of it.

As Trump emerged as the Republican nominee, I realized that as someone in spiritual leadership, I had no choice but to declare the incompatibility of his predatory, exclusionary campaign of hateful dehumanization—and the openhearted, neighbor-loving, peace-bringing Jesus. I knew I needed to speak out with specificity.

And to be honest, I thought I’d be in good company.

I assumed that most Christian people would dismiss Trump out-of-hand, naming his vile behavior as the very immoral sickness Jesus spent his life and ministry warning his followers to fiercely resist.

Boy, was I wrong.

And now, nearly ten years later, America is staring at a coming Evangelical theocracy that is the end-result of tens of millions of Christians’ slow collective soul transaction: the price of supermajorities, Supreme Court seats, and human rights rollbacks. Like the devil with Jesus, Trump brought Evangelicals to a high place overlooking the land and promised he’d give them everything in exchange for their obedience and adoration. Only this time, the devil won. White Christian Nationalism is having its day in the sun and the disparate, expansive community Jesus imagined is being culled down to white Republicans.

And as I watch the rest of this weary nation preparing to push back against the impending onslaught of these power-mad, self-appointed soldiers in God’s anti-woke Army, I realized something important:

All people don’t need to confront white Christian nationalism in America.

Most of them have already done so.

The vast majority here has been confronted by it and forced to respond to it, simply by virtue of the their levels of melanin, by their place of birth, by their inclinations to love. Long ago, they were drafted into a vicious holy war, not of their own choosing but one of necessity, of survival.

Marginalized people, vulnerable communities, oppressed human beings in America have always opposed perversions of religion and craven power grabs, because those efforts have always targeted them. MAGA Republicans and Trump Evangelicals are simply the most-recent (and arguably most successful) purveyors of legislated prejudice and church-sanctioned racism.

And what is needed in this pivotal juncture in our collective national story, is a vocal and visible countermovement, birthed from from the very same place as this wide-spread heresy: It needs other white Christians to stand the hell up.

Christian nationalism isn’t a Black problem.
It isn’t a Muslin problem.
It’s not an Atheist problem,
not a Jewish problem,
or an immigrant problem.

White Christian nationalism is a white-Christians-living-in-America-who-care-about-the-teachings-of-Jesus, problem.

The entire reason we’re in this national crisis, is because white, professed followers of Jesus have built a movement that minimizes, ostracizes, and disregards the voices of minority communities. If those communities’ efforts to advocate for and protect themselves were enough, the MAGA movement and Project 2025 and a second Trump term wouldn’t even be a reality. The fact that they are, means that others need to bring their collective hearts to the fight, those whom to this point have been uninvolved..

It’s time for white, Jesus-loving Christians to oppose Christian nationalism.

This will mean partnering with the broad coalition of dissent preparing to oppose legislation and protest the promised inhumanity of the incoming Administration.

It will mean individually initiating difficult conversations: moments of micro activism at kitchen tables and coffeeshops with family, neighbors, church friends, and social circles—not allowing nationalism to go unchallenged in those small spaces.

It will mean local church communities taking a stand against attacks on immigrants, on transgender people, on the poor, on the teaching of history, on books and public school teachers and refugees—even if this brings conflict and brings an exodus from the pews.

It will mean church ministers having the courage to name and condemn the ways the Church is participating in the dehumanization of immigrants, the vilification of queer people, the diminishing of people of color, the subjugation of women, the worship of America, the weaponizing of religion—not because such things are political misdeeds, but because they are morally reprehensible and antithetical to Jesus’ teachings.

White Christian nationalism isn’t just an existential threat to this nation, it’s a sickening, collective sin that flies in the face of Jesus.

It’s time white Christians who see and know this to stand and be heard, no matter what the cost.

If not, ten years from now, we will be unrecognizable as a nation and the white American Church will have killed Jesus once-and-for-all.

 

John Pavlovitz

John Pavlovitz

John Pavlovitz is a writer, pastor, and activist from Wake Forest, North Carolina. A 25-year veteran in the trenches of local church ministry, John is committed to equality, diversity, and justice—both inside and outside faith communities. When not actively working for a more compassionate planet, John enjoys spending time with his family, exercising, cooking, and having time in nature. He is the author of A Bigger Table, Hope and Other Superpowers, Low, and Stuff That Needs to Be Said.

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