Chapter 2: Naming What We See

Before we can talk about a thing, we have to name it. Names matter. They tell us what we are looking at, and they tell us what we are not looking at. A doctor who cannot name a disease cannot treat it. A mechanic who cannot name the part cannot fix the car. And a country that cannot name the thing shaping its politics, its pulpits, and its neighbors cannot begin to have an honest conversation about any of it.

So this chapter is about a name. It is about what I mean, and what I do not mean, when I use the phrase "Conservative American Christianity."

I want to be careful here, because the name can sting. Some readers will hear it and feel accused. Others will hear it and feel relieved that someone is finally saying it out loud. Both reactions are worth taking seriously. My job in this chapter is to slow down long enough to describe, in plain language, what I am pointing at, so that when I use the phrase later in the book, you and I are looking at the same thing.

I am an onlooker. I am not writing this as an insider trying to reform a tribe I belong to, and I am not writing it as an enemy trying to burn a tribe down. I am writing as a person who has spent years watching, listening, reading, and comparing. I have sat in the pews. I have watched the broadcasts. I have read the books that sit on the shelves of the faithful, and I have read the Book they say those other books are based on. What I am going to describe is what I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. You can check it against your own experience as we go.

What the name does not mean

Let me start with what the name does not mean, because if we do not clear this away, the rest of the book will get tangled in a fight it does not need to have.

"Conservative American Christianity" does not mean every Christian in America who leans politically conservative. It does not mean every person who votes a certain way, or every person who holds traditional views on marriage, or every person who prefers hymns to guitars, or every person who reads the Bible literally, or every person who homeschools their kids, or every person who owns a firearm, or every person who thinks abortion is a moral tragedy. There are millions of Americans who fit some or all of those descriptions and who bear very little resemblance to what I am about to describe. Many of them are quietly living out a faith that looks a lot like what you find in the Gospels. This book is not about them, and it is not against them.

"Conservative American Christianity" also does not mean any single denomination. It is not a synonym for Baptist, or Pentecostal, or Southern Presbyterian, or nondenominational, or Catholic. You can find the pattern I am describing inside all of those traditions, and you can find people inside all of those traditions who reject the pattern completely. The thing I am naming cuts across denominational lines. It uses their buildings. It borrows their vocabulary. But it is not identical to any of them.

And "Conservative American Christianity" is not the same as historic Christian orthodoxy. The creeds of the ancient church, the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed, say nothing about tax policy, nothing about border walls, nothing about the Second Amendment, nothing about which political party God prefers. A person can hold every word of those creeds and still stand at a great distance from the movement I am describing. In fact, a lot of the Christians I most admire do exactly that.

So when I use the phrase, please do not hear it as a swing at every conservative believer in America. Hear it as a name for a specific, identifiable, describable movement that has taken up a lot of room in the American religious landscape and has, in the process, become confused, in the public mind, with Christianity itself.

What the name does mean

Here is what I mean.

Conservative American Christianity is a movement, mostly Protestant but not entirely, that fuses a particular set of political commitments with the language, symbols, and authority of the Christian faith, in such a way that the political commitments become inseparable from, and often indistinguishable from, the faith itself.

That is a long sentence. Let me break it into pieces.

It is a movement. It is not a denomination, not a single church, not a single leader. It is a network of pulpits, broadcasters, publishers, colleges, political action committees, conference speakers, podcast hosts, and social media personalities that share a common vocabulary and a common set of assumptions. Some of the people in that network know each other well. Others have never met. But they draw on the same sources, quote the same verses, name the same enemies, and celebrate the same victories.

It fuses political commitments with the language of faith. The political commitments are recognizable. They include a strong preference for one American political party, a defense of unrestricted gun ownership, a hard line against immigration, a suspicion of public education, a hostility toward what is called "wokeness" or "critical race theory," a defense of American military power, an embrace of low taxes and light regulation on business, a rejection of most environmental policy, a certainty that the country was founded as, and must remain, a "Christian nation," and, in recent years, a willingness to defend, excuse, or celebrate leaders whose personal conduct would once have been considered disqualifying in any Christian community.

None of those commitments, on their own, is what makes the movement what it is. Christians have argued about politics for two thousand years, and reasonable believers can disagree about tax rates and immigration quotas and gun laws. What makes this movement distinct is the fusion. The political commitments are not held as opinions that a Christian might, in good conscience, weigh against other opinions. They are held as expressions of the faith itself. To question them is not to hold a different political view. It is to be, in the eyes of the movement, a bad Christian, or no Christian at all.

That is the fusion. And once you see it, you see it everywhere. You see it in the flag on the sanctuary stage next to the cross, treated as if the two symbols meant the same thing. You see it in the sermon that moves, without a seam, from a Bible passage into a monologue about the border, as if the Bible passage required that particular political conclusion. You see it in the voter guide handed out in the church lobby that tells the faithful, in the name of Jesus, exactly how to vote on every ballot measure. You see it in the pastor who says, from the pulpit, that a Christian cannot vote for a certain candidate, and means it as a theological statement, not a political preference.

The fusion is the thing. Without it, you have Christians who happen to be conservative. With it, you have Conservative American Christianity.

Four markers I keep noticing

When I try to describe the movement to someone who has not spent much time around it, I find myself reaching for four markers. They are not the only markers, and I do not want to pretend that every congregation carries all four in equal measure. But when I see three or four of them together, I know what I am looking at.

The first marker is the flag. Not just the presence of an American flag in the building, which is a common practice in many traditions and does not, by itself, mean much. I mean the flag as a devotional object. The flag draped near the cross. The flag saluted during worship. The Fourth of July service that borders on a religious observance in its own right. The song about America sung with more feeling than the songs about Jesus. The prayer that thanks God for the United States in language that would have made an Israelite prophet wince, because it treats a nation-state as if it were the people of God.

The second marker is the enemy. Every movement has an enemy, and you can learn a great deal about a movement by asking who its enemy is. In the Gospels, Jesus names the enemy plainly, and the enemy is not the Roman soldier or the tax collector or the prostitute or the foreigner. The enemy, when Jesus names one, is usually the religious insider who has confused his own power with the will of God. In this movement, the enemy is almost always someone else. It is the immigrant. It is the "liberal." It is the professor. It is the trans teenager. It is the neighbor with the wrong yard sign. The enemy is external, and the enemy is always growing, and the enemy is always about to win unless the faithful rise up and stop them. The tone is defensive, but it is defensive in a way that requires constant offense.

The third marker is the strongman. This one is harder to talk about, because it is newer, and because it cuts close to the bone. But it is real, and any honest description has to include it. There is, inside this movement, a growing comfort with, and even celebration of, a certain kind of political leader. A leader who is loud. A leader who is crude. A leader who insults his opponents. A leader who lies without embarrassment. A leader who boasts about his wealth, his women, his intelligence, his victories. A leader who, by any straightforward reading of the New Testament, would fit almost none of the criteria the apostle Paul lists for the leaders of a church. And yet this leader is defended, from the pulpit and in the pews, as God's chosen instrument. That defense, offered by people who quote the Sermon on the Mount on Sunday morning, is one of the strangest things I have watched in the last decade, and it is one of the things this book has to reckon with.

The fourth marker is selective Scripture. This is the marker that ties the whole book together, and I will spend most of the coming chapters on it, so I will only introduce it here. Conservative American Christianity does not throw the Bible out. It quotes the Bible constantly. But it quotes it selectively, and the selection is not random. Certain passages come up again and again. Certain other passages, sometimes on the very next page, almost never do. Passages about sexual morality are cited in sermons every week. Passages about the treatment of the poor and the foreigner, which outnumber them many times over, come up rarely, if at all. Passages about the authority of government are lifted up when the movement's preferred party is in power and forgotten the moment it is not. Passages about wealth, which fill the pages of the Old Testament prophets and the Gospels, are quietly reinterpreted so that they no longer apply to the wealthy. The Bible is present. But it is a curated Bible, and the curation is doing a lot of the work.

If you see the flag treated as a holy object, and the enemy located outside the tribe, and the strongman defended in Jesus' name, and the Bible edited by omission, you are looking at what I am calling Conservative American Christianity. If you see none of those things, you may be looking at something else, and the criticisms in this book may not be about you.

Why "American" is in the name

You will notice that the middle word in the phrase is "American." I want to say a word about why.

There is such a thing as conservative Christianity outside the United States, and it does not look like this. There are conservative Anglicans in Kenya, conservative Catholics in Poland, conservative Pentecostals in Brazil, conservative Orthodox in Serbia. They have their own histories, their own struggles, and their own blind spots. But the specific fusion I am describing, the fusion of Christian faith with American nationalism, American gun culture, American racial history, American consumerism, and American political parties, is a made-in-America product. It has been exported, in recent years, to other countries with real effects, and those effects are worth another book. But its origin, its shape, and its center of gravity are American.

That is why I put the word there. I am not saying that Christianity is American, or that America is Christian. I am saying the opposite. I am saying that a particular version of Christianity has grown up inside American soil, watered by American history, shaped by American assumptions, and that this version has become so dominant, so loud, so visible, that many Americans, inside and outside the church, now assume it is what the word "Christian" means. It is not. And one of the goals of this book is to pry the two words apart, so that "Christian" can go back to meaning what it meant for the first nineteen centuries of the church, before it got tangled up with a flag.

The people inside the movement

I want to say something now that I will say again, and probably many times, before this book is over. The people inside this movement are not the villains of this story.

I have sat across the table from them. I have shared meals with them. I have watched them love their kids, tend their gardens, care for their aging parents, bring casseroles to grieving neighbors, and volunteer for causes they believe in. I have listened to them pray for the sick with real tenderness. I have heard them speak, with genuine gratitude, about what Jesus has done in their lives. Whatever else this book says, it does not say that they are bad people. It says that they have been handed a story about God, about country, and about the enemy, and that the story does not match the Book they claim to be reading. That is a different accusation, and it is aimed at the story, not at them.

The people I am writing about include, in many cases, members of my own family. They include people who have been kind to me, who have prayed for me, who have shown up when things were hard. I owe them the honesty of this book. I do not owe them, and they do not want, a flattering silence.

Because here is the thing an onlooker sees, and it is what pushed me to write in the first place. The story has costs. The costs fall on real people. The immigrant family separated at the border. The gay teenager thrown out of the youth group. The poor neighbor blamed for his own poverty. The Black congregation across town whose history the majority church has never wanted to hear. The woman whose questions were dismissed as unfaithfulness. The pastor who tried to say something honest from the pulpit and was voted out by the elders. These are not abstractions. These are the people who pay when a movement confuses its politics with its faith. Naming the movement is the beginning of asking those people's forgiveness.

What this book will do with the name

For the rest of the book, when I use the phrase "Conservative American Christianity," I mean the movement I have described here. I will not put quotation marks around it every time. I will not stop to define it again. I am asking you, in return, to hold the name loosely enough to hear the argument, and firmly enough to notice when the argument applies to something you have seen.

Sometimes I will use a shorter phrase. I might say "the movement," or "American political religion," or "the version of Christianity that gets loud on cable news." When I do, I mean the same thing.

I will not, if I can help it, use the phrase as a slur. I will try to describe, not to sneer. If I fail at that in places, I will trust you to forgive me and keep reading. The goal is not to score points. The goal is to see clearly.

And the reason clarity matters is this. If we can name the movement accurately, we can also name what it is not. It is not the same as the Bible. It is not the same as the historic church. It is not the same as most Christians around the world. It is not the same as most Christians in American history. It is one particular story, told in one particular time and place, using one particular set of tools. And a story that has a beginning can also have an end.

A note before we go on

I owe you one more thing before we move to the next chapter, which is about how I will read the Bible in this book.

I am not writing as a neutral onlooker. There is no such thing. I have a point of view. I think the movement I have just described has done, and is doing, real harm to real people, and I think the Bible, when read honestly, does not support it. That is my thesis. I will try to argue it fairly. I will quote Scripture in context. I will represent the movement's own arguments as strongly as I can before I answer them. I will not pretend that everyone in the movement is stupid, or evil, or acting in bad faith. Most of them are not. Most of them are doing what they were taught, by people they trusted, in institutions they loved.

But I am not going to pretend that I do not see what I see. That is not honesty. That is a different kind of dishonesty. And this book, whatever else it is, is trying to be honest.

So the name is on the table. Conservative American Christianity. In the next chapter, we will talk about how to read the Bible in a way that lets the Bible push back on all of us, including on me, as we go looking for what it actually says.