Three articles debating whether white nationalism is Christian? Murali Balaji's articles support the contention while John W. Morehead's article negates it.
Source: The way of improvement
Behind New Zealand Terror Attack Is a Problem Bigger Than Islamophobia
Mar 18, 2019, 3:21pm Murali Balaji
Even as advocates point to growing Islamophobia as the cause of the attack, the larger issue seems to be white Christian nationalism.
As a white terrorist from Australia emptied clips of his M16 into the Al Noor and Linwood mosques in New Zealand, killing 49 innocent worshippers, his manifesto revealed the depths and scope to which Christian nationalism has entrenched itself into white majority countries.
Even as advocates point to growing Islamophobia as the cause of the attack, the larger issue seems to be a reactionary—and almost theological—white Christian nationalism that has taken hold over the past decade. And it can’t just be whitewashed away with the “economic displacement” trope.
Indeed, white Christian terrorists like Anders Breivik in Norway, Dylann Roof in South Carolina, and now Brenton Tarrant, are self-styled (and self-described) soldiers in a fight against greater threats: secularism and pluralism.
While white Christian nationalism has its roots in the United States during Reconstruction, it grew in the 1960s as the evangelical movement attracted new congregants fearful of racial and gender equality activism. Over time, these congregants conflated their racial resentment with religiosity, and viewed the idea of a secular country—and a pluralistic one—as tantamount to their extinction.
This Christian nationalism found its way to other parts of the globe, and weren’t necessarily tied to evangelical movements. The resentment-bred, reactionary politics of the National Front in France and far-right movements across Europe were tied to insecurities about what it meant to be a citizen of a particular country. Breivik weaponized that sentiment in 2011 with his terror attack, and Roof cited similar sentiments after slaughtering congregants of an African American Church in 2015.
We are distracted by incidents of mass murder and terror, and assume white Christian nationalism is a series of one-offs, rather than an increasingly pandemic problem across white majority nations in demographic transition. It’s growing in our own backyards, too, and not just because of Trumpism and social media.
To blame Trump, Facebook posts, and rambling manifestos for carnage overlooks our failure to confront the grievances fueling white Christian nationalism. Assuming secular values and pluralism will win out in the end does nothing to prevent the ideological violence of Christian nationalism from spreading. Just as Wahhabism spread as a grievance-based movement against ostensibly secular Pan-Arab dictatorships in the 1960s before morphing into a powerful global threat, white Christian nationalism is a tinderbox.
We have to have the tools to snuff the fire before it lights.
White Christian Nationalism May Not Be Religious, But It Is Christian
Mar 21, 2019, 4:26pm Murali Balaji
White Christian nationalism’s foot soldiers don’t necessarily connect their racial resentment with their devotion to the Bible, yet they're often trying to retake what they presume to be lost: white and Christian dominance.
After my recent post on the terror attack in New Zealand, several Christians reached out to Religion Dispatches and directly to me asking why I conflated white terrorism with Christian nationalism.
They eloquently noted that the shooter (whose name I shall not use) did not use Christian theology, but espoused anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant views that seemed disconnected from religion. But in making that argument, they might be missing a larger point: white Christian nationalism isn’t religious (or even grounded in religious scripture), but its adherents nearly always frame their grievances in terms of endangered white Christian societies.
Following Charlottesville, I wrote that white nationalism does have theological roots, with evangelicals like Bob Jones standing firmly in the way of civil rights. In modern iterations, white nationalism and Christian fundamentalism have converged with folks like Tony Perkins, Steve King (who is at it again), and David Duke.
But for the most part, white Christian nationalism’s foot soldiers don’t necessarily connect their racial resentment with their devotion to the Bible. Many aren’t religious, and in fact that’s generally beside the point. Instead, their resentment towards Others (generally non-white and non-Christian populations) is built up over time, largely through online portals that function as echo chambers for the blend of history, conspiracy theory, and racism that produces and sustains white Christian nationalism.
And we should note that it’s really a resentment movement that wears religion like a hood ornament or team colors. In such a definition, these nationalists are trying to retake what they presume to be lost: white and Christian dominance.
In a larger context, none of the nationalist and exclusivist movements—Jewish nationalism in Israel; Islamism in parts of Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia; Hindu nationalism in parts of India; Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand—that have grown in recent years are grounded in theology. They’re all connected by a shared sense of grievance and an imagined community based on assumed shared ideals.
The New Zealand terrorist might not have been religious per se, but he was 100 percent devoted to the divine providence of white (Christian) nationhood.
Misdiagnosing Nationalism as ‘Christian’ Exacerbates the Challenges of Islamophobia: A Response to Murali Balaji
Mar 29, 2019, 12:59pm John W. Morehead
Christian nationalism and White nationalism have some common concerns, but they shouldn’t be conflated in their differing narratives and responses to Muslims and other immigrants.
In the wake of the terrorist attacks on two Muslim mosques in New Zealand by Brenton Tarrant, many are looking to address the motivations and influences underlying the violence. In two RD posts, one from March 18 and another from March 22, Murali Balaji argues that the attacks were rooted in white Christian nationalism. But is Balaji defining Christian nationalism correctly, and is it the best way to characterize Tarrant’s ideological narrative? I will argue below that the answer is “no” to both questions.
To the question of defining Christian nationalism, there is a helpful body of academic research in political science and the social sciences relevant to this. The lead researchers in one study argue that “the conservative strain [of American civil religion] views America as holding a unique covenant with God, which requires it to be protected from outsiders and those who would do it harm. We refer to these ideas more generally as Christian nationalism.” Contrary to Balaji’s assertions in his second essay, Christian nationalism is religious, and it incorporates theological elements. This results in perceptions of “divinely anointed” Christian ingroup members vs. “theologically condemned” outgroup members like Muslims. This fusion of religious and national identities is noteworthy among white American evangelicals, where being Christian is very important to being truly American. This was the Christian nationalism that was a significant factor for white evangelicals who voted for Trump in 2016.
By contrast there are other forms of nationalism. The type associated with white supremacy, sometimes called white nationalism, is concerned with ethnocentrism and the superiority of the white race. Both white nationalism and Christian nationalism have shared concerns about “cultural displacement,” and involve prejudice toward immigrant populations, sometimes seen as “invaders,” manifested in anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim attitudes. But these two forms of nationalism, even with some shared fears, are not the same thing. So Balaji does not define Christian nationalism correctly and conflates it with other forms of nationalism.
To the second question, what type of nationalism did Tarrant espouse? Before his attacks, Tarrant posted a 74-page document on the internet. According to J.M. Berger, an expert in online extremism, Tarrant’s manifesto is “clearly a statement of ideology,” described as white nationalist, and the author “is a white supremacist, and anti-immigration and anti-Muslim.” There is no indication in Berger’s analysis that Tarrant included statements that would characterize his ideology as a form of Christian nationalism.
If Christian nationalism is not the proper way to understand Tarrant’s nationalism, but instead a form of white supremacist nationalism is more accurate, where did the major anti-immigrant influences come from? According to Sasha Polakow-Suransky and Sarah Wildman at Foreign Policy, Tarrant draws upon the work of Renaud Camus, a French anti-immigration writer. They note that while Tarrant was in France at a mall watching immigrant “invaders,” the idea came to him to use violence against nonwhites. Polakow-Suransky and Wildman quote from Tarrant’s manifesto illustrating the emotional impact this had on the soon-to-be mass murderer: “I found my emotions swinging between fuming rage and suffocating despair at the indignity of France, the pessimism of the french [sic] people, the loss of culture and identity and the farce of the political solutions offered.”
It would seem that Balaji has identified the wrong type of nationalism in connection with the New Zealand terrorism. White nationalism provided the ideological narrative, not Christian nationalism.
In the interests of full disclosure, I identify as a Christian. But my disagreement and critique of Balaji’s thesis should not be interpreted as a failure to accept criticism of those in my religious tradition. For the last four years I have been pursuing a grant from the Louisville Institute that has brought social psychology into conversation with American evangelical theologies of opposition to religious others, particularly Muslims. Among the contributing factors, our research indicates that Christian nationalism is a significant predictor of negative attitudes toward Muslims. I accept this, and advocate strategies to counter this narrative so as to foster more positive forms of multifaith interaction.
Christians have behaved badly, and pursued violence toward others, in the name of their religion. That’s beyond dispute. But whether Christian nationalism was the ideological narrative underlying New Zealand’s attacks, that’s another question. And it’s one that I think Balaji misidentified. If we misdiagnose the challenges we face we will create inappropriate strategies to counter them, and possibly foster even more tensions between Christians and Muslims.
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Murali Balaji responds:
Following my first and second pieces in Religion Dispatches, several evangelical leaders have offered thoughtful critiques of my position that the New Zealand terrorist (whom I will not name) is a white Christian nationalist.
John Morehead writes in his response that I mislabeled anti-immigrant white nationalism as “Christian nationalism,” asserting that “White nationalism provided the ideological narrative, not Christian nationalism.”
I respectfully disagree.
For starters, I emphasized that a white Christian nationalist doesn’t necessarily have to be “religious” in the traditional sense. I would argue that Donald Trump and Mike Pence are both white Christian nationalists, though the former hardly has any attachment to the actual theology of Christianity.
In this regard, white Christian nationalists draw upon and reference a pure white Christian ideal—one that arguably never existed anywhere. If we reference Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities, the white Christian ideal becomes an affinity that helps to build a collective identity.
The terrorist’s manifesto also makes reference to Pope Urban II and the First Crusade, implying that he fancied himself part of a holy war against Muslims and other invaders. While Morehead’s argument seeks to clearly distinguish between white nationalism and Christian nationalism, the terrorist’s own words seem to undercut this attempt.
“We are coming for Constantinople and we will destroy every mosque and minaret in the city,” the terrorist wrote in his manifesto. That’s not subtle in its call for Christian supremacy and destruction of Islam.
I sympathize with Morehead’s position, but the terrorist seems to make both implicit and explicit references to a dream that many white Christian nationalists share: a return to white Christian dominance over its non-white, non-Christian others.
