Christian nationalism is our responsibility
We need to repent of complacency
regarding the rise of the Right.
Muslims know this feeling better than we do, but only because we Christians have been wilfully ignorant. For decades, every time an Islamist act of terror or resistance has made the news, Muslims have been required to denounce it, to speak out against it, to demonstrate that they are 'not that kind of Muslim'. This pressure is often racist and Islamophobic – but is always unfair. And yet, year after year, the Muslim community, knowing that it is not a monolith, has produced spokespeople who did the necessary, while knowing that they were unlikely to hold any sway over those they had been expected to denounce.
Christians don't know that feeling so much. Some pundits say that's because there is no Christian extremism or Christian terrorism. Those pundits are usually disingenuous, often naïve and almost always bigoted. Christian extremist terrorism has a long and storied history, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Oklahoma City bombing, murders of abortion doctors and any number of religiously-motivated intra-Christian sectarian killings. At no point, as a Christian, have I felt that I had to denounce those Christian extremists before I could feel fully part of my community or country.
We are privileged to have a piece in our Many Mansions section of Issue 3 where a Muslim friend of S(h)ibboleth shares his experience of being expected to be a signifier, stand-in and spokesperson for every facet of Islam, instead of just a person. It is to people like him that we as Christians owe an apology. As does any one of us who has ever said "where are the Muslims speaking out against this" or "why don't their communities denounce this sort of thing" in response to a bombing or a Taleban diktat, but have never ourselves made ourselves spokespeople opposing George W Bush or Donald Trump. If we've made random Jewish people apologise for Israel or Muslims answer for Al Qaeda, we don't just need to apologise, we need to repent.
But that's not all we must do. There is a rising tide of right-wing propaganda that is weaponising Christian imagery and appropriating Christian history for evil, and while we are not required to be perfect citizens and ambassadors any more than Muslims are, we need to recognise that our Christian media have platformed these people (some of them grifters, some of them actual christo-fascists), and our churches have assisted. In a travesty of grace (which we couldn't afford to those who didn't say the magic words or support 'family values'), we have said nothing as our leaders have welcomed into the fold anyone who claimed to have had a Christian conversion right at the point where their crimes caught up with them, never questioning whether they were using their now-sanctified platform for evil. This travesty of grace (never offered to those who didn't say the right magic words or express 'family values') devalued the true expansiveness and radical forgiveness at the heart of our faith and turned it into a question of picking a team. And the results are plain to see.
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Trump is called 'Cyrus' at best and 'godly' at the idolatrous worst, and the fascism he is ushering in is seen as only mildly distasteful, because, hey, at least he's dealing with feminism, the gays and abortion. We allowed this. Many of us welcomed it.
But this is not new. The blessing of nation and draping it in religious garb is popular in every nation where Christians are accepted. And it will be a hard pill for some of us to swallow, but patriotism, as you will read, can be just as much an idol as nationalism.
You may not agree with that, or with many of the pieces in this issue (they disagree with each other), but the articles on the theme of Christian nationalism hope to awaken in us a renewed loyalty to the Kingdom that, for the Christian, stands above any earthly principality.
It's easy to think of those principalities as governments and nations, but we should always keep in mind that, while nationalism is a real danger to us now, particularly in its 'sanctified' sheep's clothing, Babylon is anywhere wealth and power reside, and that includes corporations, billionaires and massive media companies.
This issue of S(h)ibboleth seeks to unmask and challenge some of these golden calves, while challenging some other popular idols and blind spots besides. It's not always easy reading, but I hope it dispels some of that ignorance, wilful or not.
Jonty Langley, Editorial, S(h)ibboleth, Issue 3
