You don't fight Christian nationalism with less faith

Convince, not dominate: an answer to Stine Jensen

In her column of September 25 Stine Jensen warns against the encroaching Christian nationalism in the United States. She does this using Jared Huffman, the only member of the House of Representatives who openly states not to believe in God. At its core, she is right: Christian nationalism is a real danger. As a European, it is difficult to understand how deeply religion is embedded in daily life there. When I walked around there decades ago, the question of which church you attended sometimes determined your status more than what you earned or where you came from. Which churchit was, hardly mattered, as long as you went.

Church attendance was often a social identity, not an examination of conscience. Huffman calls this 'christian privilege': being a Christian as an advantage in society. It is faith as an identity marker, not necessarily an invitation to reflection. Jensen quotes philosopher Julian Baggini, who noted that a homosexual president in America is more likely than an atheist one. That says enough.

Jensen also sees the distinction that matters. She quotes religious scholar Kelsey Hanson Woodruff, who warns that the Christian right narrows the definition of being a Christian to appropriate the faith for one radical political flank. And she honestly catches herself having anti-religious reflexes. I appreciate that.

Where it clashes

Yet her text subtly shifts. In parentheses, she describes Christian nationalism as 'the blending of Christianity and politics.' It's just an interjection, but a telling one. With such a description, any Christian who acts politically from their faith comes dangerously close to being labeled a nationalist, from Martin Luther King to the Christian Democrats who helped rebuild Europe after the war.

Jensen writes about America, and there her complaint about the 'far too great influence' of religion in the public sphere is well understood. But her criticism does not remain on the other side of the ocean. She is annoyed that political Christianity is 'bon ton' again, and she responds to a debate that is mainly conducted here: that about being secular and emptiness. There, her criticism shifts from a radical political ideology to religious presence as such, and there I can no longer follow her.

Her passage about Barack Obama is also telling. He calls himself a Christian, but Jensen suspects he is 'also a humanist in the closet' because a history of humanism is on his reading lists. It's meant as a wink, but it betrays a reflex: a Christian who reads and thinks must secretly be something else. As if faith and curiosity don't fit in the same head.

That is a pity, because Jensen knows the mechanism herself. She is rightly annoyed by the simplistic connection between being secular and emptiness, as if someone who does not believe cannot find meaning. Believers are told the opposite caricature: that whoever believes leaves their mind at the church door. Whoever rejects one caricature should not use the other.

The line runs between convincing and dominating

The real line does not run between belief and disbelief, nor between religion and politics. It runs between convincing and dominating. Religious convictions may influence public debate. What's more: it would be strange to ask believers to leave their deepest moral convictions at home as soon as they enter a polling booth, parliament, or opinion piece. Politics is about views on humanity, society, responsibility, justice, and a good life. Of course, worldviews play a role in this.

What is not allowed is for religious authority to identify with state power. A church may not dictate what the state must do because it claims to speak on behalf of God. A religious majority may not impose its particular religious truths on citizens who do not share those convictions. But that is very different from attributing too much influence to religion as soon as believers loudly engage in public debate.

That distinction seems simple, but it is not. Christian nationalists will also say that they are only defending their convictions. That is why touchstones are needed.

Three touchstones

Anyone who exercises political influence based on their faith must respect at least three boundaries. The first is that proposals must ultimately be defensible with arguments that people outside of one's own faith can also weigh. 'God wills it so' can be a decisive personal argument for a believer, but it is not a sufficient reason to impose a law on all citizens.

The second boundary is that whoever seeks influence must also accept counter-power: a free press, independent judges, parliamentary opposition, and elections that one can lose. Whoever tolerates democracy only as long as their own conviction wins, defends not democracy but power.

The third boundary is that even those who live or think fundamentally differently remain full citizens. Religious conviction gives no one the right to deny those who think differently their civil equality. A society in which only people with the 'right' religious conviction fully count is no longer a pluralistic democracy.

Whoever respects these boundaries may speak fully from their faith. Whoever abandons them no longer tries to persuade, but to dominate.

Habermas and the religious voice

I borrow the first test partly from Jürgen Habermas, who called himself religiously ‘unmusical’. Habermas believes that believers in the public sphere may freely speak from their own religious language. To demand that they first strip down their faith before they can politically participate would be an unfair burden. But as soon as arguments become the basis for binding political decisions, they must be translatable into reasons that citizens without that faith can also judge. Moreover, that translation is not only theresponsibility of believers. Secular citizens must also be willing to listen to moral insights arising from religious traditions.

The latter is sometimes forgotten. Habermas saw in our egalitarian universalism, with freedom, conscience morality, and human rights, partly the legacy of Jewish ethics of justice and Christian ethics of love. Greek philosophy, Roman law, renaissance, humanism, and Enlightenment were equally determining sources. Western democracy does not have one father or mother. But to pretend that religion is just baggage from the past and has contributed nothing essential to our moral language is historically difficult to sustain.

Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde formulated a related thought: the free state lives on conditions it cannot guarantee itself. Democratic institutions can protect freedom, but they cannot force citizens to use that freedom responsibly. Trust, conscience, solidarity, and civic spirit must come from somewhere. Religion is one of these sources, alongside culture, upbringing, philosophy, and other forms of social cohesion. The interesting question then is not how much religion the public debate tolerates,but which religious contributions strengthen our democracy and which threaten it.

Science doesn't decide everything

Take the debate about extending the abortion term. I am not taking a stand here on the term itself. My point is different: science can say a lot about pain stimuli, development, and viability, but no lab decides what moral meaning we give to those facts. Science can describe facts, investigate consequences, and calculate risks, but ultimately a normative question remains: what do we consider right, just, or humane?

For that, we are dependent on moral reflection. Philosophical traditions have been doing this for centuries, as have religious traditions. An argument must be judged on its content and reasonableness, not on whether the speaker goes to church on Sunday.

That does not make religious traditions infallible. They have seriously failed, with slavery, witch hunts, anti-Semitism, and racial segregation. But the correction also came from within. William Wilberforce fought the slave trade from his faith. Martin Luther King fought racial segregation with an explicit Christian moral vocabulary. And science has its own dark files. Eugenics was once defended with scientific authority as a means to 'improve' the population. Today we rightly consider thatdeeply unethical. Yet no one decided that science should therefore disappear from public debate. Mistakes from the past are a reason to critically examine institutions, not an argument to silence an entire source of moral reflection.

Also for my own church

These touchstones also apply to myself. My own church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, declares itself neutral towards parties and candidates, but explicitly encourages its members to vote, participate in public life and even take up political positions. That is not without tension.

In 2008, members in California campaigned at the request of their church leaders for Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment that restricted marriage to one man and one woman. Many readers will say that this precisely violates my third touchstone. I understand that criticism and do not want to brush it away. Nevertheless, I stand by the principle that a church may speak out on legislation regulating moral issues, and that it may advise its members on this. Trade unions, employers' organizations, and humanist associations also do this, regarding euthanasia, education, orlabor law. What a marriage is, is such a moral issue, about which citizens of good will differ in opinion on what equality precisely demands.

The crucial point is not that a church expresses an opinion, but what happens afterward. A church may advise, but not demand obedience in the voting booth. And it must accept the outcome of the democratic and judicial process, even if it goes against its views. Proposition 8 was invalidated by a federal judge in 2010, and that ruling was upheld in 2013 after a Supreme Court decision. The church accepted that. In 2015, in Utah, it supported a law protecting gays and lesbians against discriminationin the workplace and housing market, coupled with the protection of religious freedom. In 2022, it supported the Respect for Marriage Act, which federally enshrines civil marriage for same-sex couples. Its doctrine on marriage has not changed. However, it recognizes that in a pluralistic democracy, not every personal moral conviction needs to become law, and that those with differing views remain full citizens.

Jensen writes that criticism from Christians who oppose Christian nationalism is sorely needed. I agree with that. Nine days before her column, such a voice sounded. In a speech at the National Cathedral in Washington, church president Dallin H. Oaks emphasized reconciliation, pluralism, and constitutional limitations. Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, read that speech as a church distancing itself from the culture war and rejecting Christian nationalism. Oaks himself warned that believers shouldadditionally be careful not to strive for total dominance for all their own viewpoints.

That is exactly the boundary I mean. Words are not deeds, and I continue to hold my own church to the same touchstones as any other religious community: are arguments offered or imposed? Is counter-power respected? Is there still room for citizens who believe differently, think differently, and live differently? But it does show that religious communities themselves can learn where the line is, and that makes it too easy to see religion in the public domain primarily as a threat.

Europe also has its reflexes

Even with us, anyone who openly states that their political or social commitment is partly fueled by their faith sometimes encounters more distrust, in my experience, than someone who consciously distances themselves from religion. That is an impression, not proof, and our situation is not the same as Huffman's. But the mirror image is recognizable. In America, the atheist sometimes has to prove that he is morally reliable. In Europe, the believer sometimes has to prove that he is intellectually independent. Both reflexes are pathetic.

I am a Christian. I am also an entrepreneur, father, reader, citizen, and bishop. My faith influences how I think about human dignity, responsibility, forgiveness, freedom, and community. It would be strange if something I consider true and important had no influence on how I view society. But I do not expect my fellow citizens to share my theology before we can engage in politics together. I do expect my arguments to have the same chance as those of someone who derives their convictions from Kant, Marx,Mill, humanism, liberalism, or explicitly from nowhere.

Thinking aloud

Religion can legitimize power, history has abundantly proven that. But religion can also limit power. Anyone who believes that every human being possesses a dignity that is not granted by the state, market, or majority, has a language with which they can precisely oppose power. Religion is therefore not automatically a democratic virtue, but a secular attitude to life is not either. The question remains what people do with their conviction.

Christian nationalism becomes dangerous when faith no longer invites self-examination but is used as legitimation for political power, when one religious identity is presented as a condition for good citizenship, and when political opponents are no longer seen as people with whom you disagree, but as enemies of God or the people. Christians must speak out against this, not despite their faith, but partly from their faith.

Believers who oppose that mixing of religion and domination, therefore belong to the solution, not to the problem. Whoever views religious involvement as such with suspicion makes it more difficult for precisely those believers who can offer resistance from within. The best antidote to bad religious engagement is not less religion in public debate, but better religious engagement: a faith that allows itself to be questioned, that distrusts power, that protects the dignity of the opponent, that does not politicalparty with the Kingdom of God, and that convinces by testimony and argument, not by coercion.

Believers and humanists are, moreover, less far apart than Jensen's text sometimes suggests. The values she attributes to humanism, curiosity, knowledge, freedom, and human dignity, I subscribe to all of them. And I do that as a believer. The source differs, the values much less so. On that point, we are allies.

I have great respect for those who call themselves humanists. I only ask that a Christian who reads and thinks is not immediately seen as a closet humanist. Jensen, who, by her own account, balks at the word 'duty', ends with what she almost calls a duty to vociferous humanism. I would add a duty to think aloud next to it, for believers and non-believers together. Not to erase our differences, but to prevent anyone from claiming the public domain for themselves.