In my last post, I talked about the worst book I read on Christian Nationalism (CN). For this one, I want to draw attention to the best book I’ve read on CN: The Religion of American Greatness by Paul D. Miller. He’s a conservative Christian, but an opponent of CN. If you’re a secular liberal such as myself, it may appear as these distinctions mean little on the surface, but they’re quite important.
Miller is a Christian Republican (not the political party, though he is a Never Trump Republican). His book is great because he does a good job of elaborating upon his philosophy (theology?) and explaining how the Christian right and CN have historically drifted from the Christian Republican vision. He also falsifies Nationalism and CN on practical and theological grounds.
In this blog post, I’m going to run through what I think are the main points of Miller’s book. Full disclosure: this is basically a book report. Pretty much everything below is a summary or evaluation of Miller’s work, these are not my ideas and I don’t want anyone to assume they are.1 I wanted to write this post to digest my thoughts on the book and use it as a reference point for future posts.
This post contains two main parts, with the first part running through different political philosophies: Christian Republicanism, the American Christian Right, Nationalism, and Christian Nationalism. The second part is Miller’s commentary on the flaws of Nationalism.
Christian Republicanism
Miller doesn’t dive too deep into the specifics of his personal Christian Republicanism, teasing that he’ll eventually write an entire book on the subject. What’s important is that he affirms that Christians should be patriotic and grateful for the countries where they live, citing scripture and Augustine’s City of God.
Having said this, he does not affirm that Anglo-Protestant Christianity is the only source of civic virtue. Citing how Christians have viewed “virtuous pagans” such as Socrates and the Romans, as well as Italian Catholics who practiced republicanism during the Renaissance, he concludes: “Just as God’s common grace brings the rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous alike, so too has he throughout history allowed and enabled non-Christian and non-Protestant people to discover and practice virtues—including the virtues of political liberty.”
In this way, Christian Republicanism isn’t a theology so much as it is a political philosophy informed by Christian theology. Miller affirms five Principles of Christian Republicanism:
Promotion of Free Culture, Punishment of Moral Evil. This means that the government should punish evil, praise good, and promote civic virtue. Christians should be culturally, but not morally, neutral. He affirms that we must repress immoral cultural practices because they are immoral, not because they are culturally alien. Giving a culture government sponsorship may codify a cultural practice, not the virtue the practice embodies. Instead, the government should permit and encourage cultural openness and change. This will allow society to “better discover natural law and guard against the confusion of natural law with a particular culture.”
The state should not be neutral toward its own theory of justice, though there are risks in promoting civic virtue. The liberal society that Miller supports has a legitimate interest in perpetuating itself, and thus a responsibility to teach about the virtues of democracy and individual rights. There are some norms that are good, necessary, and make democracy work better. The danger lies in these norms becoming confused with a culturally specific form. What’s more, government isn’t best suited to train citizens in virtue. Christian Republicans such as Miller are “most comfortable with locally defined and locally driven efforts to encourage civic virtue, which would ensure no single cultural embodiment of virtue is established nationwide.”
Even though governments should not promote “official versions of history,” open societies should not be neutral toward their own history. The Christian Republican rejects a government-sponsored official interpretation of its history, but affirms it’s important for citizens to tell a country’s history. Per Miller: “There is a fine line between appreciating our history as the seed from which we sprang and entombing it like a dead relic we venerate.”
The state cannot be neutral between mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive, non-divisible beliefs that have unavoidable implications in public policy. For example, with human sexuality the government cannot be neutral “between the belief that human sexuality is fixed, objective, and set by nature, on the one hand, and the belief that sexuality is malleable and socially constructed, the expression of which is a fundamental human right which should not be hindered, on the other.” There are some things that the government has to take a stance on because it has public policy implications.
If the state should discriminate, it should discriminate in favor of the poor, the historically oppressed, and the disenfranchised, not in favor of a preferred cultural group. To Miller, this principle is more complicated than “give people money,” “free the oppressed” and “enfranchised the disenfranchised.” To be properly non-neutral in favor of these groups, the government should minimize unintended consequences and not set up bad incentives.
The American Christian Right
Looking back at the history of the American Christian Right, Miller demarcates some key differences between historical Christian Republicanism and the Christian Right, as championed by Jerry Falwell.
The Christian Right claimed to be Christian Republicans, but had some key differences. Falwell blended Christianity with a version of Civic Republicanism, which emphasizes various ideas, including:
Freedom from foreign rule and internal tyranny
The right of citizens to participate in their own government
A mixed constitution and checks and balances to prevent concentration of power
The priority of the common good over private interests
The Rule of Law
The Importance of Civic Virtue to stave off corruption
These ideas seem quintessentially American because they are: The American founders drew on classical Greece and Rome, renaissance Italy, and early modern Britain to argue for the superiority of republicanism and the importance of citizens’ virtue in sustaining republican freedom. Traditional Republican thinkers thought virtue was about striving for excellence, the common good, and exposing citizens to formative, shaping experiences and institutions that taught and reinforced the value of the virtues of their society.
Falwell understood virtue differently, in a sectarian, theological way. For him, virtue is holiness or obedience to the Bible. Because the God of the Bible is the exclusive source of morality, God rewards those obedient to Him with his blessing. Disobedience and lack of virtue will bring God’s judgment in the form of national decay and calamity. In this way, where Republicanism emphasizes individual civic virtue to sustain political liberty, the Christian right asserts that Christian values are necessary preconditions of individual virtue. You can’t have political liberty without Christianity.
Miller cautions that this theory is intolerant because the citizens of a pluralistic nation will not honor Christian values voluntarily, so Christians would feel the need to acquire power to force them. For Miller, this is one of the reasons why the Christian Right has always had elements of Christian Nationalism within it: the movement has tended to prioritize giving Christians power.
Nationalism and Christian Nationalism
To understand what this has to do with Christian Nationalism, we have to understand how Miller defines Nationalism and Christian Nationalism (please note: I’m cutting/pasting/reformatting his definition). Namely, Nationalists believe that:
“Humanity is divisible into mutually distinct and internally coherent cultural units called “nations.” Each nation deserves its own state. Political and cultural boundaries should, ideally, align perfectly. Governments have rightful jurisdiction over the cultural life of their nations. They have a responsibility to preserve and defend their national identity and cultural inheritance because:
Nationalist identity is intrinsically valuable and its preservation is part of the reason governments exist;
Humans need a cohesive national community for fulfillment, flourishing, and meaning; and
Every country requires a strong, cohesive, predominant culture to survive. Without a predominant culture to define the nation, it is likely to fragment or dissolve.)”2
Christian Nationalists, what’s more, believe:
“…that the American nation was, is, and should remain a “Christian nation”—that America’s identity as a Christian nation is not merely a historical fact but a moral imperative, an ideological goal, and a policy program for the future, which also means that defining the nation’s religious and cultural identity is rightfully part of the government’s responsibility.”
In this way Christian Nationalists are not like ethnic nationalists or theocrats. They express support for democratic institutions and do not advocate granting theocratic power to the clergy. They do not believe citizenship should be exclusive to a race or church membership. Rather, they believe that the formal disestablishment is only sustainable so long as the U.S remains culturally homogeneous and Christian.
Without cultural consensus, CNs believe disestablishment would lead to social fragmentation and that the constitution would no longer be supported. Both Christian Nationalists and the Christian Right believe that Christianity is necessary to sustain citizens' virtue directly, and the constitutional order indirectly.
Practical Objections
Christian Republicanism objects to Christian Nationalist and Christian Right beliefs for both practical and factual reasons.
On practical grounds, Miller objects to the Nationalist emphasis on culture, as such emphasis assaults personal liberty and undermines the unity nationalism seeks to create.
The problem is that culture itself is fluid, and it’s hard to draw boundaries on it, while political boundaries (like borders, policies, and laws) are hard and somewhat permanent. What’s more, cultures change, and can do so radically over the course of just a few years: just think of the Americans of the 1790s being less religious than the same people 20 years later during the Second Great Awakening. Because of culture’s fluid, fast-changing, and unpredictable nature, Miller dismisses nationalist beliefs about borders and cultural boundaries to be “simply impossible on its face.”
On a basic level, Nationalism tries to resolve central debates about politics (identity, religion, ethnicity, culture, language, etc.) by fiat. This policy is so contestable that instead of resolving debate, Nationalism creates new conflicts. Nationalism is thus “usually authoritarian in spirit and violent in practice, founded on the raw assertion of power.” It does this by practicing an internal imperialism, an “effort by the largest or most powerful group to establish itself as the dominant group whose identity defines the nation.”
Though the nationalist may frame this positively using metaphors of nation as family, with the nationalist faction paternalistically overseeing everyone else, this only hurts their case. After all, families are dictatorships with children as subjects, not citizens! Nationalists in this way define who is and isn’t part of the nation, and therefore who doesn’t count as a full citizen, justifying horrible policies like Indian removal, slavery, and segregation.3
In this way, Nationalism becomes an enemy of free government to mandate cultural identity. It’s usually prominent in countries prone to conflict, both internal and external. And it undermines its own goals, provoking a backlash whenever it’s tried.
Christian Nationalists Are Wrong About Ideas
Because the Nationalist cares so much about culture, he misses something important about what makes societies successful: ideas. Miller points out that ideas for CN are unimportant and that, for them, culture does all the work: “once we get the culture right, ideas inexorably follow—and by extension, they believe ideas cannot survive without their supporting culture.”
This is obviously wrong. Anyone who has ever learned from a book written from a different culture or historical context falsifies this theory.4 Miller presents his case over many pages in a way that both Christian Nationalists, and non-Christians can agree. On one hand, he may agree with the Christian Nationalist when saying:
“It is probably true that the uniquely modern form of representative, small-r republican, liberal democracy was highly likely to be invented first in the Anglo-Protestant cultural context given its predisposition in favor of individualism, limited authority, the rights of conscience, and more.”
And that
“There are obvious, clear, and strong historical and cultural links between Christianity and the ideas and institutions of classical liberalism and civic republicanism”
But he synthesizes this view with non-Christian scholarship pointing out the “basic idea” that electoral democracy was invented by pagan Greeks and that:
“Non-Western democracy exists: it is demonstrably possible to have a democracy in a place that did not experience Western history or have a Christian culture or produce Enlightenment philosophers, which proves that Western culture and political liberty are separable. Japan, India, and South Korea are the most obvious examples of thriving, prosperous, and stable non-Western democracies and have been for decades.”
A Christian can thus affirm the historical reality that Anglo-Protestants “invented” modern democracy and individual rights, but that Anglo-Protestantism is not the necessary or sufficient condition for these liberal values to flourish.
In the same way that Muslims may have invented Algebra, that doesn’t mean that Algebra is “Islamic Math,” so too is it true that liberalism isn’t Christian politics. A Christian can do Algebra, and a Muslim can sustain liberal democracy. Ideas are important, per Miller:
“Advocates of classical liberalism treat ideas with more seriousness. We believe ideas can, in principle, be independent of culture and heritage; that ideas can break free of the cultural and historical circumstances in which they were first articulated; that ideas can be reappropriated and reinterpreted in other cultural and historical circumstances in ways that still preserve the unity and consistency of those ideas.”
Or more succinctly: “The ideas of liberalism, capitalism, and democracy simply work, and so other societies must copy them or get left behind.”
Disagreeing With The Facts, Not The Values.
From the Christian Republican perspective, the Christian Nationalist ideology is falsified. The CN says they will create national unity, but instead create more division. The CN says that culture is more important than ideas, and yet ignores the transferability of ideas onto different cultures. The CN says that democracy is a Christian invention, when it isn’t. The CN says property rights and voting rights can only be sustained by a Christian culture, when in reality these liberal rights are supported in non-Christian cultures.
In today’s divided world, you’re not going to convince Christian Nationalists with secularist arguments, because they come from a place of different values. If you’re a politically-engaged Christian, you should probably adopt a flavor of Miller’s Christian Republicanism, not Nationalism, because there are just so many ways you can falsify Nationalism. Unlike traditional secular-Christian disagreements, you don’t need to do a metaphysical audit of reality to see the falsehoods of Nationalism.
Having said all of this, I’m not reassured about the future of Christian Nationalism in America. That will be the topic of my next post.
Please go out and buy Miller’s book! It’s great.
You can find this on page 59 of the book in the Kindle Edition
Worth mentioning here that he includes abortion here, but I personally think that’s a little silly.
Miller cites anyone in the west learning something from Aristotle, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and others to illustrate this point.