White Christian Radicalization Is A Violent Threat

The pulpit of Robert Jones’ childhood church, a Southern Baptist congregation in Mississippi, was flanked by two flags ― an American flag and what’s referred to as the “Christian flag,” with a blue canton and a pink cross on a white area. During Vacation Bible School, a summer time children’ program, Jones remembers that he and different kids have been taught to recite three pledges of allegiance ― to the American flag, the Christian flag and the Bible.

Last week, an insurrectionist carried this Christian flag onto the Senate flooring as rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol to interrupt a joint session of Congress and try and overturn the outcomes of the 2020 presidential election. As Jones watched the siege unfold on social media, he was disturbed to see this flag among the many symbols the rioters have been utilizing ― however he wasn’t stunned.

There’s a potent mixture of nationalism, Christianity and white supremacy at work within the U.S., and it’s not new. Jones, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, says it has been a part of Christianity in America from the very begin.

Jones and different U.S. Christians are actually piecing collectively what it signifies that their religion was so openly invoked throughout a lethal rebel ― and what duty Christians have to deal with white supremacy and nationalism of their ranks.

“We are indeed at a moment of reckoning for white Christianity, which has been complicit in legitimizing and baptizing white supremacy throughout the entire American story,” Jones instructed HuffPost. “We white Christians need to speak out, not just for the sake of repairing the damage we have done to our Black and brown brothers and sisters, but for the sake of ourselves and our faith.”

Christian nationalism is a motion that seeks to affirm and codify America’s id as an explicitly Christian nation, by leveraging the faith’s affect within the public sphere. Many Christian nationalists imagine the federal authorities ought to advocate for Christian values, enable prayer in public faculties, and permit non secular symbols to be displayed in public areas, based on Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, and others working with him.

White conservatives don’t have a monopoly on Christianity, an extremely various religion practiced worldwide. But in America, Christian nationalism has lengthy been wrapped up in defending whiteness. Many white evangelicals have grown anxious in recent times about America’s rising racial variety, and imagine they’re dropping floor on culture-war points.

Symbols of white Christian nationalism have been current earlier than and through the Jan. 6 rebel. People carried crosses and Christian-themed flags. One signal declared “Jesus Saves.” An American flag bore the phrases “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my President.” Religious rituals and imagery have been included into occasions main as much as the riot, together with communal prayers and “Jericho marches.”

The presence of those symbols highlights how Christian imagery has been co-opted by Christian nationalists, based on Whitehead.

“These powerful symbols serve to legitimate their goals and desires in the transcendent,” he instructed HuffPost. “And by doing that, they can claim that the Christian God is on their side.”

Throughout American historical past, white supremacists have tried to make use of the Bible to justify their agenda of cruelty and oppression, Jemar Tisby, the president of the Witness, a Black Christian collective, instructed HuffPost. The insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol final week are additionally making an attempt to “twist Scripture to fit their destructive ideology,” he stated.

“White Christians have been such a big part of the problem of creating white supremacy and Christian Nationalism that they must also be part of the solution,” Tisby stated.

Some Christian leaders have condemned the best way their religion was misused on Jan. 6. Russell Moore, a outstanding voice throughout the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination, stated he was “trembling with rage” as he watched rioters show Christian symbols on the Capitol. He insisted that “violent insurrection and the Gospel of Jesus Christ cannot coexist.”

Over 250 school and workers at Illinois’ evangelical Wheaton College have signed an announcement condemning the “blasphemous abuses of Christian symbols” on the Capitol riot. They acknowledged that many Christian leaders “wittingly propagated lies, or were unduly silent” as a substitute of talking fact to President Donald Trump’s supporters, a lot of whom nonetheless imagine his repeated false claims that he rightfully received the 2020 election.

“We repent of our own failures to speak and to act in accordance with justice, and we lament the failures of the Church to teach clearly and to exercise adequate church discipline in these areas,” the assertion from Wheaton reads. “Moreover, we grieve over the inadequate level of discipleship that has made room for this type of behavior among those who self-identify as Christian.”

But this perspective of repentance has but to manifest among the many evangelical leaders who’ve been closest to Trump over the previous 4 years. These leaders ― individuals just like the evangelist Franklin Graham and Texas pastor Robert Jeffress ― have condemned the rebel and referred to as for therapeutic. But many haven’t held Trump accountable for inciting it, or acknowledged the position of white Christian nationalists within the violence, or apologized for failing to decisively acknowledge President-elect Joe Biden’s victory sooner.

In the weeks main as much as Congress’ certification of Biden’s win, the president’s shut evangelical allies have been both actively selling Trump’s debunked claims of election fraud or tacitly giving credence to that narrative with their silence. In some American evangelical circles, self-declared prophets with substantial social media followings held on to their prophecies that Trump would win, even lengthy after the president’s election fraud lawsuits started to fail within the courts.

Election fraud narratives inside evangelical circles are partly pushed by a poisonous view of masculinity, based on Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historical past professor at Calvin University and the writer of a ebook on the topic. By insisting that God made males to be warriors, conservative evangelicals have fueled a culture-war mentality that erodes belief and promotes an “us versus them” militancy, Du Mez instructed HuffPost. 

“Whether that fight is against communists, feminists, secular humanists, liberals, Democrats or radical Islam, the fate of the faith and the nation are always perceived to be hanging in the balance, and so the ends will always justify the means,” she stated. 

White conservative Christians’ willingness to entertain conspiracy theories may very well be a product of their shut ties to the Republican Party and their loyalty to Trump, based on Elizabeth Neumann, who served as an assistant secretary of counterterrorism on the Department of Homeland Security below Trump till final April.

Neumann warned final yr that the Trump administration wasn’t doing sufficient to counter violent extremism coming from the political proper, though right-wing home terrorism is extra of a risk than left-wing violence.

Trump’s hard-line stances have made conservative Republicans “extremely vulnerable” to the grooming strategies of right-wing extremist teams, Neumann stated. The outgoing president has sown “seeds of grievances” round white supremacist speaking factors, equivalent to the concept that immigrants are stealing American jobs, or that one of the simplest ways to deal with terrorism is to maintain Muslims overseas. This has helped create a “common values system” between common Republicans and white supremacists, Neumann stated.

Some of the rioters ultimately week’s rebel have been members of established far-right hate teams, just like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, or vocal supporters of apocalyptic conspiracy theories equivalent to QAnon. Neumann believes there have been different individuals on the protest who didn’t have official ties to those teams, however who shared their conservative values and have been led to imagine misinformation concerning the election.

White supremacists know they should appeal to a large share of white Americans in an effort to obtain their objective of a white nation, Neumann stated. So they use subtle recruitment ways to groom and recruit weak teams ― primarily white adolescents ― on-line. 

“It seems like you’re good friends because you have such a common worldview,” she stated. “You would never know that that person is actually a neo-Nazi, or is actually a Boogaloo boy intent on overthrowing the U.S. government.”

This is how white conservative Christians can unwittingly be pulled into extremist circles, she recommended.

“The concern I have is not that by being a Christian, you would naturally think that white supremacy is a godly thing or that it’s part of the Bible, as much as it is some of the other political viewpoints that you have gotten into by being a Trump adherent,” she stated. “You’ve created this toxic soup of conspiracy that makes people very vulnerable and susceptible to recruitment to other radicalized causes.”

Moore, the Southern Baptist chief, has been talking up concerning the proliferation of conspiracy theories in evangelical circles. In a webinar for church leaders on Friday, he used biblical language to sentence conspiracy theories about QAnon, the COVID-19 pandemic and the political leanings of the insurrectionists.

Conspiracy theories use apocalyptic rhetoric to create a way of desperation, Moore stated, and individuals who don’t really feel as if their lives have a function change into hooked on the frenzy that these theories supply. Christians have a duty to talk fact about these conspiracy theories, he stated ― and to separate the violent actions of the rioters from the message of Jesus.

Moore stated he’s heard individuals declare that the issue with Christianity is that it’s change into a “weak, ‘turn the other cheek’ sort of religion.” He identified that these sorts of statements explicitly contradict Jesus’ directions in his well-known instructing, the Sermon on the Mount.

“If the Sermon on the Mount is the problem with American Christianity in your view, then [you’re suggesting] Jesus Christ is the problem with American Christianity, which means what you’re holding on to is something else,” he stated.

“There are people who don’t yet know who Christ is, who all they know about Jesus is seeing ‘Jesus saves’ in the hands of violent insurrectionists who are disobeying the clear commands of Scripture and the explicit words out of the mouth of Jesus himself,” he added. “That is blasphemy.”

Moore stated Christians ought to attain out in the event that they see family members being drawn into justifying violence ― and if pastors discover that members of their congregations have change into weak to that sort of ideology, they need to name it out as un-biblical.

Neumann, who’s a Christian herself, stated church leaders can join individuals who have fallen into the “QAnon rabbit hole” with assets to assist them de-radicalize. Beyond that, she stated, pastors must be keen to say there was no proof of large voter fraud within the 2020 election, and to remind their congregations to put their hopes in Christ, as a substitute of on a particular political consequence.

This second requires repentance and accountability from white American Christian communities ― together with among the many outstanding evangelical leaders who’ve “idolized” Trump over the previous 4 years, Neumann stated.

“It’s important to acknowledge what a challenging moment we have as a nation, but also the fact that there was an element of the Christian community that participated in what got us to this point,” she stated. “We need to pause and take a moment and reflect, and if we have sinned, repent of it.”

She stated her largest worry is that individuals will rush to declare that this “sickness” inside American Christianity has been cured.

“We’ve got to start acknowledging there’s a problem before we can get to starting to heal from it,” she stated. “It took decades to get us to this point. It’s not going to be fixed with a Band-Aid and a platitude. We have to go deeper and understand why the church was able to be deceived, why an individual was able to be deceived, why a movement of conservatives was able to be deceived.”