David French wrote in The New York Times yesterday:
Arguments for a ‘Christian nationalism’ are increasingly prominent, with factions ranging from Catholic integralists to reformed Protestants to prophetic Pentecostals all seeking a new American social compact, one that explicitly puts Christians in charge.
French’s arguments are excellent, and I endorse them 100%. But I confess that while I find the prospect horrifying, I am nowhere near as alarmed by the movement as some observers are.
The main reason is simply the obvious one: the truly, sincerely zealous simply are incapable of running things competently.
First, they substitute heart for mind. That goes about as far in running a country as it does in designing an internal combustion engine.
Second, their bottom-line conviction is “I’m God’s man/woman for this hour, so God’s obligated to pull my irons out of the fire.” Truly religious people lean into religious solutions to problems. At the height of a national crisis, you’d have the president disappearing to a remote wilderness location to fast and pray.
Third, zealous people are incapable–by temperament and ideology–of compromising, and for that reason, they’ll never be able to cooperate long enough to run a nation. The leadership would devolve into in-fighting.
Fourth, while there are many smart and competent Christians in many fields, taken in toto, American Christianity today is pretty much a clown show–a clown show with a tender and sincere heart–but a clown show nonetheless. (“Clown show” is too broad a brush, of course, but if you’ve been paying attention to religion’s public face for the past decade or so, you know what I mean.) Almost everything they do is bad–music, movies, visual art, fiction, and very much, politics. They’re even awful at theology; they barely know the Bible; most of them don’t know what their own church believes! They don’t know enough and they don’t think hard enough to be able to perform competently in aggregate. Even if you found some religious Solon to take the reins, this is a democracy, and the people would be flocking to some version of Paula White or whoever. Again, there’s just not enough there that’s solid for the enterprise to actually hang together long enough to get anything done.
That doesn’t mean large numbers of voters animated by Christian Nationalist ideals won’t line up behind a very dangerous demagogue now and then, with consequences for the republic that range from unfortunate to dire. But that the Christian Nationalist program–whatever it is–could get instantiated across the nation? I just can’t see it. Richly elaborated religious programs just aren’t what America does, or really has ever done. The closest we ever got was with the New England Puritans, and that experiment fell apart from within.
If Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert can’t stay on the same page, how long would you give Sohrab Ahmari and Greg Locke?