Episode 82: Amanda Tyler on Christian Nationalism
Amanda Tyler started a movement called Christians Against Christian Nationalism. Listen to find out why this is so important today and what exactly it means to stand against Christian nationalism.
Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.
George Mason: Can you imagine a group of Christians in America that formed a group called Christians Against Christian Nationalism? Well, Amanda Tyler is behind that project and if you're interested, stay tuned to Good God.
George Mason: Welcome to Good God conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm George Mason, your host, and I'm so pleased to welcome back to the program, Amanda Tyler. She is the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee in Washington, DC, an organization of many Baptist entities and also individuals who help support the work of pursuing religious liberty for all Americans. Something that has been a really cardinal virtue of Baptists since the beginning of our time here in America. Amanda, thank you for your work and welcome back.
Amanda Tyler: Thanks so much, George. Great to be here again.
George Mason: We're so happy to have you. Well and everyone wouldn't know that you have lots of reasons to come back to Dallas among which is that this is where your husband grew up ...
Amanda Tyler: That's right.
George Mason: And in fact you just celebrated the High Holy Days with Temple Emanuel where he is a member.
Amanda Tyler: I did. With his parents, my in-laws. We got to be there and even got to take my four-year-old to a tot service to celebrate the holidays.
George Mason: So this is a wonderful way of talking about the fact that one can hold a religious conviction of one's own and hold it dearly and have real convictions about how we look at the world, but we can do so with a kind of generosity toward others who have the same kind of faith convictions that are may be somewhat different from ours. Right?
Amanda Tyler: That's right.
George Mason: You're doing it in your own marriage and in your own family and you're also doing it in your work.
Amanda Tyler: Yeah.
George Mason: So recently, you transgress the boundaries of Baptists a little more in actually moving into the wider Christian community, discovering allies who would help you create a movement called Christians Against Christian Nationalism.
Amanda Tyler: That's right.
George Mason: Christiansagainstchristiannationalism.org as a matter of fact, if you want to go there. Tell us what was happening out there that gave you fire in your heart about this.
Amanda Tyler: Yeah. So this issue of Christian nationalism, it's not new. It's been around in our country. I've learned probably for at least 200 years and we see it go up and down as far as how much evidence of Christian nationalism we see in our culture. But over the past few years, we've really seen that it's kind of stuck at high tide. That we just are seeing lots of examples of Christian nationalism, some of them quite extreme and violent, even deadly. And it felt like this was a time when we needed to stand up and say something about Christian nationalism.
Amanda Tyler: It's not the first time BJC has been involved in this topic. This idea that the United States was created as a "Christian nation" has been a myth that just won't die. And in fact, it seems to be getting even more deeply entrenched in some ways. And for decades, BJC has done some myth-busting around that idea. But this moment felt like it needed an even stronger and more organized response. And so that's how we came up with Christians Against Christian Nationalism.
George Mason: I suppose we look back on the history of European Americans coming to these shores and we know that those who fled religious persecution in England and Holland came here and they did carry with them on their journey a kind of vision of being a new Jerusalem, didn't they? They had this ... Many of them were inspired by the idea that they would be starting a new world and fulfilling somewhat this city on a hill that would be a light unto the nations. But that's a real difference between sort of an aspiration to be a Holy people in a new place and the idea that you have established a Christian nation.
George Mason: How would you distinguish those two things and help people understand that difference?
Amanda Tyler: Sure. I mean, something I've learned. I've actually been doing my own podcast, a podcast series on Christian nationalism. I've talked to a number of experts in the field and something I've learned about the history is it's much more nuanced and complicated than it's sometimes presented. So certainly know that story about the city on the hill being set up and that certainly was what inspired some immigrants to the United States, but not all. Some came for commercial reasons. And so that wasn't a universal experience for all. And then that particular experience of the Puritans coming and setting up their system from the beginning, they started excluding others, including some of our Baptist forebears.
Amanda Tyler: People like Roger Williams who were banished from the colony in the dead of winter because of their views about soul freedom, for instance.
George Mason: Well, and we should just probably pause to celebrate the fact that the very first experiment in religious liberty, the first colony set up for religious liberty in the history of the world was Roger Williams, Rhode Island.
Amanda Tyler: Right.
George Mason: Right. So a product of the very persecution by people who came to say that they were setting up a Christian nation in a sense.
Amanda Tyler: That's right.
George Mason: Yeah.
Amanda Tyler: And that experience of exclusion of establishment of a particular religious view was replicated in many other colonies during that era. And when the United States came together, when we were founded as a constitutional democracy with our founding documents, our founders, imperfect people who made a lot of mistakes at that time. One thing I think they did really well was set up a system where the government would remain neutral with regard to religion. In the constitution itself, in 1787, they have article six.
Amanda Tyler: It's the only time religion or religious is mentioned. They say there will be no religious test ...
George Mason: No religious test. Right.
Amanda Tyler: Right. So, and that was from their experience where a lot of these colonies did have religious tests.
George Mason: So this is a really important point I think for people to hear and get clear on that this is really not just one person's theory over another. There was a very distinct difference between colonial America and constitutional America.
Amanda Tyler: That's right.
George Mason: Colonial America was a transition period between the old world and the new in that they were bringing with them, yes, a desire for religious freedom, but really for their own religious freedom, not necessarily for their neighbors. And so each colony had their own religious establishment. You'd have the Congregationalists in Massachusetts and the Catholic Church in Maryland and the Anglican church in Virginia and the Quakers in Pennsylvania, etc. And yet we came to the conclusion that didn't work.
Amanda Tyler: Right.
George Mason: That that really was not what true religious liberty was. And so the first amendment to The Constitution added to article six and expanded that and we have a constitutional America that we need to acknowledge is neutral toward religion, not a Christian nation.
Amanda Tyler: Right. And that was a very deliberate choice based on the experience of exclusion and based in part on the advocacy of religious dissenters like Baptists.
George Mason: Right.
Amanda Tyler: And how that ...
George Mason: We never were a colony ...
Amanda Tyler: That's right.
George Mason: ... With established religion.
Amanda Tyler: There was no established Baptist colony. And so, but the experience of Baptists moved founders like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, along with the experience of other religious minorities, to be sure that the government, the United States Government, the federal government would remain neutral with regard to religion.
George Mason: So why do you think we have this recurring myth of a Christian nation and a desire to establish a Christian nationalism over and over again, but very much so today. We keep seeing it being heralded.
Amanda Tyler: Well, what I learned from a historian Steven Green was that in the generation right after the founders, that America was this new country and they were looking for a founding myth. And so there was an opportunity to go back and cherry pick some different quotes and anecdotes and start to make this idea of the founding of the United States as being something that was, that God had looked over, that God had faithered our undertakings, and that we were somehow part of a larger divine plan. And so it started very early and then it just got repeated and changed and repeated over time and it became so deeply entrenched.
Amanda Tyler: I think we've seen after some different world war. In the 1920s, we saw another rise of Christian nationalism. 1950s, in the cold war, we saw a lot of other examples of that. And then again, recently, I think, and I don't know exactly what to pinpoint the reason is right now, but we see a rising tide of nationalism. And so it seems natural that perhaps we would also see a recurrence and even an amplification of Christian nationalism.
George Mason: Well, let's say that there's nationalism, there's Christian nationalism and there's white Christian nationalism.
Amanda Tyler: That's right.
George Mason: Right. And these are in a kind of ascending order of danger that we're experiencing. I want to go back before we pursue that even more to Steven Green's idea that the founders ... After the founders, they were, this was your language, in pursuit of a founding myth.
Amanda Tyler: That's right.
George Mason: So it's really important, I think, that we pause there and say that that founding myth was necessary to coalesce a new nation around ideas that they wanted to advance, but necessarily it also excluded much of our history. So for instance, Native Americans as we begin. So, for instance, the enslaved persons from Africa that were part of our nation at its founding and not part of our nation in terms of who we really were. So this myth covers over a kind of a exclusionary history that if we were really telling the story of our origins, we would have to repent to begin with and say if we're going to renew America, we've got to go back to honor all those who were here with us to begin with.
George Mason: The reinforcing of that myth though is in a way continuing to cover over the social disenfranchisement of a lot of people.
Amanda Tyler: I think that's absolutely right and I think that's where we can really see how Christian nationalism has provided cover for kind of continuing white supremacy as well.
George Mason: Exactly. Exactly. Therefore, when we have these mass shootings and we seem to keep failing to realize that the vast majority of these mass shootings are inspired by white Christian nationalism in one form or another, and they are directed at otherwise excluded people from that. Whether it's the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, so the rise of antisemitism associated with white Christian nationalism, or it's against people of the African descent. And so you have or Muslims and you have the New Zealand synagogue that is, I'm sorry, mosques, the New Zealand mosques that people are murdered by someone deliberately claiming this Christian nationalism.
George Mason: And we have all of these sort of events, including immigration policy right now that are rooted in this myth of Christian nationalism.
Amanda Tyler: Yeah. I think even the recent shooting in El Paso, the tragic shooting.
George Mason: There you go.
Amanda Tyler: This idea that to be American, you look a certain way, you worship a certain way, that that is what it means to be a true American. And if you vary from that image, then somehow you are a second class citizen or even dehumanized in some way. And in the hands of extremists, that's where we can see this ideology turn violent and even deadly.
George Mason: So it goes back to a kind of feeling that the most American you can be is to be someone who looks like you and me.
Amanda Tyler: Right.
George Mason: Right.
Amanda Tyler: Right.
George Mason: And then if we're in charge, we'll be kind and tolerant of others and allow them to do certain things alongside us, which is an incredibly arrogant posture to take to begin with. But it's also not the essence of what it means to be American.
Amanda Tyler: That's right. And it's also at odds with true religious liberty, that tolerance is not what freedom is about. And that in our, again at our founding, we rejected tolerance in favor of religious freedom and that means equality that we are all equally American regardless of our religious faith or even if we claim a faith tradition at all.
George Mason: And it seems like what's happening increasingly is we're supposed to pay attention to the feeling of loss that white people are experiencing in an increasingly diverse, pluralistic America, where our neighborhoods look more diverse and all of that. But I think we should at least pause to say, yes, we're experiencing loss, but we're experiencing a loss of something that we actually never should have experienced as privilege.
Amanda Tyler: That's right. Exactly. And that's exactly how I talk about it, that what looks like a loss of religious liberty to some is really just a loss of religious privilege and back to our founders. And I point to them because the Christian nationalists often try to point to the founders as setting up something very different, but they set up a system where no one religion would be privileged. And after a couple of centuries of maybe some promoting of the Christian faith in ways that are not in line with those constitutional values, we're now in a place where we're trying to right that ship some and that causes some people some anxiety.
George Mason: It does. It does. When we come back from a break, I want us to talk more specifically about this campaign and its principles and what you hope to achieve in it. So let's hold that thought. We'll come back.
Amanda Tyler: Great.
George Mason: Okay.
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George Mason: Thanks again for your support.
George Mason: We're back with Amanda Tyler and she has started this campaign called Christians Against Christian Nationalism. In fact, we did a little video with Baptist Joint Committee and people like me got in front of the camera and said, I'm a Christian against Christian nationalism.
Amanda Tyler: A very effective video. Thank you for being part of that.
George Mason: Well, anyway, thank you for asking. But tell me what it stands for, what are the guiding principles of this and we'll start there.
Amanda Tyler: Sure. So as we've been discussing, Christian nationalism is such an insidious ideology in our culture. And so we felt like we needed to find someplace to start and we thought in order to start having conversations about this, about really understanding more about what Christian nationalism is, how it shows up in our society, and how we can start to question some of these assumptions that underlie this ideology, a good place to start would be a statement of unifying principles. Things that kind of get above the culture war noise just start conversations.
Amanda Tyler: Can we agree at least on these bedrock principles?
George Mason: Okay. So what are some of them?
Amanda Tyler: Yeah. So we have a list of seven unifying principles and the first one is people of all faiths and none have the right and responsibility to engage constructively in the public square. So right off the bat we're kind of combating that argument we sometimes hear that the separation of church and state means that we're trying to kick people out of the public square.
George Mason: Yes.
Amanda Tyler: And in fact, quite the opposite. Religion is flourishing in American and flourishes in the public square, and we want to protect it. And part of that is making sure that government doesn't advance a religion or inhibit it. And we also think that people of all faiths and then have a right to be in the public square. Too often, sometimes, especially when it comes to Christian nationalism, we sometimes hear Christian voices who are promoting, I think, Christian nationalism and its ideology. We think it's important that Christians and more authentic picture of Christian faith to show Christians who are concerned about Christian nationalism.
George Mason: And it would probably be interesting to people to know that nearly a hundred years ago on the steps of the Capitol building in Washington, DC, let me be very clear about this. The pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas articulated this very principle, all faiths or none are invited into the public square to bring their faith and that religious liberty should be accorded to all of them in that way. History is just full of ironies, isn't it?
Amanda Tyler: That's right. Now we're coming up on George W. Truett's address 1920, so you're right. We're coming up on the 100th anniversary, so this is well timed.
George Mason: Very good. What's next?
Amanda Tyler: Patriotism does not require us to minimize our religious convictions. So for one here we're trying to differentiate between patriotism and nationalism and this idea that to be a patriot does not mean to blind pledge blind allegiance to the country. It also doesn't ask us to merge our faith with our allegiance to our country in such a way that really causes us to minimize our faith in some ways because a government sponsored faith is going to water it down. It's going to find some of those truths of Christianity to be inconvenient to the status quo.
George Mason: Right. We could do this all day on that subject. What's next?
Amanda Tyler: Yeah. Conflating religious authority with political authority is idolatrous and often leads to oppression of minority and other marginalized groups as well as the spiritual impoverishment of religion.
George Mason: Yes. Which makes the further point that as a government gets involved in religion, it impoverishes religion. It doesn't necessarily ... It advanced the aims of religion. It tends to get ... Religion gets co-opted, doesn't it?
Amanda Tyler: Yeah. And I think an example here, I think part of this project is to show, it's not just, we've talked about the violent forms of Christian nationalism. But Christian nationalism also shows up in our country in much more mundane, even constitutional ways. And so we've seen these bills sweeping the country where that would mandate the posting of In God We Trust in public schools. And we saw some of these signs going up in the schools this year and it's totally out of context. So a child walks into their school first day of school this year and they just see In God We Trust on the wall.
Amanda Tyler: What does that show? How totally out of context that is how it really can mix up again, our allegiances and mix up God and Caesar in a way that Jesus preached against.
George Mason: Well, this is also a part, I think we should just be honest and say the wall builders movement and the Christian nationalist movement has a very deliberate strategy and one stage of it is this posting of In God We Trust on public school campuses so that provocatively they move the conversation that direction and certain assumptions take place. But I think a lot of people just grew up with In God We Trust and they don't realize the historical context in which that came to be a motto, not the motto, but a motto of the United States. And it was during the Cold War period.
George Mason: It was just as when we pledge allegiance One Nation Under God, the words Under God were added during the Eisenhower Administration in order to say we're not like the atheistic communist Soviets. And so we have a failure to recognize where we really come from and why all of this is there.
Amanda Tyler: Yeah, and all of these examples, yes, they are meant to lead to I think even some more harmful legislation. But I think it's worth a conversation to think about the harms that even the posting of that does or how that works to exclude perhaps some children who are nonreligious, for example ...
George Mason: Absolutely.
Amanda Tyler: Or make them feel like they don't belong. It also confuses people like me about well what is this doing in a public school and is this some kind of theological statement or is this a patriotic statement? And if it's patriotic, then what does God have to do with with the country? And are we somehow equating religious authority with political authority?
George Mason: Very good. All right. What comes next?
Amanda Tyler: And then the last one gets to the violence question.
George Mason: This is the fourth. There are seven, but we summarized them. These are the big four.
Amanda Tyler: Right. Right. Butt we must stand up to and speak out against Christian nationalism, especially when it inspires acts of violence and intimidation, including vandalism, bomb threats, arson, hate crimes, and attacks on houses of worship against religious communities at home and abroad. And so I think this statement tries to get at, yes, there's deadly violence, but there's also non deadly violence that that sends this message to people that you don't belong here in a way that is very un-American and is also against our Christian values of loving our neighbor.
George Mason: I mean, there's a certain bully mentality to this, isn't there?
Amanda Tyler: Right. I'm in a position of privilege and therefore you're going to just have to deal with this faith here in the public and in the government promoting the faith.
George Mason: So you put this out and then signatures everywhere. How many?
Amanda Tyler: 15, well 10,000 in the first 10 days. And so we just saw kind of an that we knew we had struck a cord here when this launched in late summer. And it's open to anyone who self identifies as a Christian to sign. It's also an open source public documents. So when you sign, and we're very clear about this when you go to the website, christiansagainstchristiannationalism.org, that your name, your city and state and however you want to identify religiously, whether it's a house of worship or denomination, that that's going to be publicly put on the website.
George Mason: So they can do that.
Amanda Tyler: Yes.
George Mason: People can do it. Okay go to the website. And once again it's christiansagainstchristiannationalism.org if you can type that much out ...
Amanda Tyler: That's right.
George Mason: ... To do it. But, and it's not just for clergy. It's for anyone who wants to support them.
Amanda Tyler: That's, absolutely right. And not only did we see large numbers from all 50 states, so it's now 15,000 from all 50 states have signed on. But we also see a lot of theological diversity. This is across the spectrum. I think more than six dozen different denominations have already signed, but we can just see because they've given us this information when they've signed up.
George Mason: Great.
Amanda Tyler: So this can't be dismissed as just a "left leaning" project.
George Mason: Sure.
Amanda Tyler: And that was what our goal was too because again, these are such unifying principles. We know that this reflects a great number of Christians and we hope that this number continues to grow, that we can provide a witness to our neighbors and provide an opportunity to go on record about this.
George Mason: So there's education there for someone who goes to the website and can really begin to think through the implications of these things. Practically speaking, what do you hope neighbor will do with neighbor, family member with family member around the Thanksgiving table when there's a feeling of well, we have a right to protect our nation and those sorts of things and then who is we?
Amanda Tyler: Yeah.
George Mason: These are typical kinds of conversations we have at the water cooler, at the family dinner table. What do you hope will happen as a result of this?
Amanda Tyler: Yeah. I hope that we can lead and start conversations. That instead of just rolling our eyes when we have that family member who says that or even just following along or agreeing, that we might actually start to question some of those assumptions. And we might also say, how good is this really for our faith for the government to be promoting it in this way, in this way that really distorts faith in a way that's convenient for the government but not living true to our religious values? That we can also talk about how is this really loving our neighbor to exclude those who don't believe exactly the way that we do in this country?
Amanda Tyler: That we might start person by person conversation by conversation, chipping away at again, what's become a very deeply entrenched idea. And I don't think these are easy conversations. This project is something that, like I said, we're dealing with something that's at least 200 years old, but that if people will just start to question some of these assumptions, just build awareness about where this is showing up in their world, that we might be able to make some headway here.
George Mason: Well, I think the other thing I would hope people would begin to do is to take initiative to have friendships with people of other faiths and other ethnicities so that they can hear the common aspirations we have in this country and the willingness for people who have felt excluded to see how hard they work to support our country and to be patriotic and to serve and to promote the values of America and to gain a status that should be simply theirs by virtue of their right as citizens.
Amanda Tyler: Exactly.
George Mason: And yet they are still working hard to achieve it in terms of the respect of their neighbors and it shouldn't have to be that way.
Amanda Tyler: Yeah. And I do want to point out this is Christians Against Christian Nationalism. When we first approached this project, we thought it might be an interfaith initiative, people of face against Christian nationalism. But talking with our Jewish and Muslim coalition partners, they really said, we don't feel the same level of comfort as you do in calling out Christian nationalism.
George Mason: Right.
Amanda Tyler: We think this is a great project, but this isn't really our place to call out other Christians. And that meant a lot to me. And it also showed again that we have a level of status and privilege to even be able to be so bold as to take on this campaign.
George Mason: I was in a room the other night in the mayor's office with some African American pastors as we were preparing for the verdict in the Amber Geiger Trial. And Botham Jean, as you know, was murdered by this Dallas police officer. And as I began to say some things that were resonating with these black pastors, one of them sort of stopped me and said, would you promise to say that outside this room?
Amanda Tyler: Yeah.
George Mason: Would you please? We need you to say those things and to do it publicly. And what you could hear was this very thing that you hear from other religions is those of us who have privilege, whether white or Christian or what ...
Amanda Tyler: Or both.
George Mason: ... Or both. And doubly so, if both. A lot of people are depending upon us to live up to the values that we encoded in that constitution, all of us did.
Amanda Tyler: That's right.
George Mason: And by our deference, respect and Christian humility, we can bear better witness to our own faith and build a better America.
Amanda Tyler: Yeah. And I think I've even seen my privilege in appreciating what this means to them. Like I really felt a need to do this and to stand up to Christian nationalism. But I think our efforts are even more appreciated, not only from our brothers and sisters who are from different faith traditions, but also those who don't claim a specific faith tradition. That's also a really misunderstood ...
George Mason: Increasingly growing group ...
Amanda Tyler: Absolutely.
George Mason: ... In this country. The fastest growing group in this country is non-religious.
Amanda Tyler: Right.
George Mason: Which is a new challenge altogether and maybe a conversation for another day. Amanda, thank you for being on Good God again.
Amanda Tyler: Thank you, George.
George Mason: Glad to have you.
Amanda Tyler: Yes. Thanks.
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