Recently, I posted about a pair of Christian nationalist podcasters who spend little time “talking about the need for their Christian nation to feed the hungry, care for the sick, or provide refuge for the stranger.”
Instead, I wrote, “they want to use the power of government to impose their views about what it means to be a Christian upon the rest of America—even if that requires abandoning democracy as we know it.”
Then, I waited for the pushback that never came. In fact, one of those podcasters, C.Jay Engel, retweeted me!!!
John Fugelsang, author of the New York Times bestseller Separation of Church and Hate was not surprised—because he believes that is precisely what Christian nationalism represents.
As I noted in another recent post, Fugelsang uses uses the word “Jesus” a whopping 780 times in its 289 pages. Compare that to Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism uses it 20 times in its 497 pages.
Fugelsang’s book challenges such Christians to examine whether they have abandoned the teachings of Christ.
Here’s part of what he told me in the interview posted above:
“They should be allowed to worship however they want. But if they’re going to stand in our house and claim that they speak for Jesus, if they’re going to stand in our house and try to vote for candidates who want to force their version of Jesus onto our civic life, if they’re going to try to subvert our separation of church and state and vote for candidates who want to put their narrow right-wing version of Jesus in our public schools, in our government, in our culture, then we’re allowed to quote the damn Bible and see if they’ve even read this thing—because they don’t follow Jesus.
“They follow themselves. And they don’t fight for the teachings of Jesus. They don’t fight for the Lord. They don’t fight against Satan. They fight for conservative Christian power. That is what they fight for. They think that they should dominate society. And if they do, they’re allowed to use the system as much as they want. They can vote and vote for the politicians who will let them run society.
“But they don’t get to pretend they’re doing it for Jesus.”
It’s a fascinating conversation!
Please watch the interview above, then tell me what you think!
