CERTAIN FORMS OF Christianity have long shared space with the political and nationalist Right in the United States. The history of white racist religion in the U.S. has also followed the line of a nativist ideology informed by a certain understanding of U.S. Protestant Christianity.
In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan sought to preserve Anglo-Protestant supremacy in the U.S.—especially in the face of immigrants from outside Western Europe. Later arose a particular form of racist ideology known as the “Christian Identity” movement, influential in racist organizations into the 1990s.
More recently, racialized Christian mythologies are no longer the dominant ideologies motivating white supremacists. Why has Christianity become problematic for white nationalists?
My own research reveals that Christianity is a problem for many American white nationalists because it is regarded by them as an ideology that weakens the allegedly natural instincts for racial preservation. The main objections to Christianity from contemporary white nationalists have been that 1) Christianity is of Jewish origins, and 2) that Christianity teaches, ultimately, values such as universal brotherhood of all people and the responsibility for everyone to care for one another. These are values that white nationalists have labeled “socialism” and ultimately alien to white racial nationalism.
I’m not a person of faith, but I want to offer some observations about why Christianity should be problematic to white nationalists and how it might become more so.
Christians have not always been on the side of “universal brotherhood” (or sisterhood). White nationalists are wrong when they assert that this has been the case. For example, Christians were involved in King Leopold II’s vicious campaign in the Congo in the late 19th century, even in excusing the exploitation of the people there by arguing that they were being converted. Such justifications existed, too, in the U.S. as Indigenous people were murdered and their children forced into “de-Indianization” projects, largely led by Christian organizations. And of course, on slavery, Southern Christians used selective readings of the Bible to justify brutality in the pursuit of profit.
These are facts. But only some Christian organizations have moved to address them. The Southern Baptist Convention, for example, took a contentious vote in June to condemn the “alt-right” and white supremacy. But when Dwight McKissic, senior pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, brought the original resolution, it met resistance. McKissic told The Atlantic that he felt it was “a mystery how you can so easily affirm standard beliefs about other things, but we get to white supremacy ... and all of a sudden, we’ve got a problem here.” Though a similar resolution eventually passed, the church indeed has a problem.
White nationalism, especially when unacknowledged, is a problem for Christians trying to address racial injustice in their own communities because of the normalcy of white supremacist attitudes within the church itself.
Traditions are not static things awaiting passive expression. Christian organizations and institutions, local churches, and individual believers are not restricted to simply performing whatever their traditions teach. They are also responsible for shaping those teachings, especially on issues of social import. Traditions are living things that express the collective will of their participants.
What can Christians do to make Christianity more of a problem for white nationalism? Make your tradition anathema to white supremacy. As William Barber II said recently, referencing Martin Luther King, “Silence is not an option.”
Neither is inaction. Make your gathering spaces places of refuge for targeted communities. Make your institutions reflect the multiracial and multicultural reality of the global church. Your members should, in very specific and unambiguous ways, embrace universal fraternity and concern for all people.
This Christianity would be a problem for white nationalists, not only because of who they are, but because of who you, as Christians, have become.
Damon T. Berry, author of Blood and Faith: Christianity in American White Nationalism, is assistant professor of religion at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y.
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