Baptist Moore Castigates ‘Tribal Belonging’ of Christian Nationalism

How should Christians think about identity rooted in particular ethnicities, geographies and cultures compared with our call to universal fellowship in Christ? Surely the call to love extends beyond our own political and cultural borders, but how can this be achieved without completely forgetting the real roots we all require? Plough Quarterly, a publication of the Anabaptist Bruderhof community, recently had a series of podcasts (called Ploughcasts) on these questions of rootedness and identity.

Hosted by Plough editors Peter Momsen and Susannah Black, previous episodes of this series included guests like noted integralist Edmund Waldstein, historian Tom Holland, author Tara Isabella Burton, philosopher Dhananjay Jagannathan, and Baptist and Anglican theologians Russell Moore and John Milbank. Moore, who directs the Christianity Today Public Theology Project, was by far the most scathing in his critique of any Christian nationalisms.  

As Moore spoke, the issue for contemporary American Christianity is its decline in moral integrity. While there have always been hypocrites in the Church, Moore described the current predicament as significantly worse; instead of it being merely disappointing when Christian leaders fail to live up to their own morals, many today are now asking “what if the whole thing is just a way to gain some sort of social control?” Instead of Christianity being the authentic path to God, it becomes “just another mobilizing mechanism for something else.” This “something else” winds up as “tribal belonging that doesn’t even need to have the pretense of being churched.”

The church becoming too infatuated with Earthly power results in “essentially secularize[d] Christianity in very real ways,” said the Baptist intellectual. Secular European nationalists who utilize Christian imagery like Joan of Arc or St. George’s cross constitute a “folk religion of White people.” The act of creating an in-group held together with Christianity necessarily creates power structures to be exploited and an out-group to be demonized. Therefore, Christians must radically resist the co-opting of their religion for worldly purposes. 

In response, Momsen gave Moore his best defense of Christian nationalism: “Christian culture really is under threat. We’re losing out demographically in Europe and the U.S. There is an overweening cosmopolitan elite that’s dismantling family [and] the role of men and women, that’s indoctrinating our children in schools. The cultural cohesion of our communities is being diluted or ripped apart by uncontrolled immigration. And so, we need to rise in defense, we need to stop playing along, that there is a long tradition in Christianity of loving those who are close to you.” 

Momsen also unfavorably compared Moore’s viewpoint to that  of Kristin du Mez in Jesus and John Wayne for neglecting views going “back to Aquinas and Augustine… that we should love our countrymen in a particular way, defending that Christian version of nationalism.” Yet Moore insisted that even using terms like “we” and “our” implied a moral differentiation that is un-Christian.

To support this view, Moore pointed to the paradoxical nature of biblical invocations to “honor thy father and mother” coupled with Christ’s instructions that “If someone does not hate father and mother, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). The Baptist preacher argued the only way to appropriately love those around us is by loving Jesus first so that our secondary loves will be properly placed.

It should go without saying that any kind of ethnic or national identity cannot be the cornerstone of a Christian. Yet, this framework isn’t especially helpful in a practical sense: we can agree that we are all one family before God, but you still need to love and think the most about those most proximate to you. Moore takes issue with the formation of any moral boundaries, ingroups and outgroups, yet I cannot very well love the abstract 7.8 billion people on Earth as I would my local or national community.    

The Baptist theologian also seemed to equate all Christian nationalisms with particular European ethno-nationalisms. Yet, in the United States, the strongest argument for some kind of Christian nationalism is that Christian identity gives America a way to unite an otherwise racially and culturally diverse nation. But if the United States is thought of in terms of Christian identity, as people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass thought of it, this necessitates a public and political witness. Yet Moore seems insistent that Christians not chase those levers of power because of the risks of the church’s witness being corrupted.

IRD President Mark Tooley has begrudged the “privatization of faith often implicitly preferred by some USA Protestants, who prioritize more exclusive focus on evangelism or church purity, and who believe civic faith is intrinsically corrupt.” While it’s very on-brand for Moore, as a Baptist, to prioritize the personal experience of religion that does not mean every Christian or Protestant is in agreement.