Christ’s Followers Are Not Culture Warriors

No doubt you’ve seen the news recently that Donald Trump is hawking the “God Bless America” Bible. How did we get to the point where the most profane President in U.S. history is endorsing a Bible?

Jemar Tisby has the best description of white Christian nationalism that I’ve read: “White Christian Nationalism is an ethnocultural ideology that uses Christian symbolism as a permission structure for the acquisition of political power and social control.” According to a recent PRRI survey: “Nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants qualify as either Christian nationalism sympathizers (35%) or adherents (29%).” I read that description and these statistics and wonder, “Really. Sixty-four percent use Christian symbolism to acquire power and control?! How did so many of my fellow white Christians here in the US get so far off the track?”

I’m neither a sociologist nor a historian, but I’m going to guess that a partial answer to this question is that many white Christians self-identify as “culture warriors.” They believe that they must fight culture and fight any people whom they believe oppose their understanding of the Christian way. From that perspective, power and control become personally, politically, and theologically desirable. Living into that identity, Christians have wreaked havoc on themselves, on the Christian faith, and on American society. (Sadly, we’ve been here before. Recall the Crusades, which was another Christian nationalist movement.)

Though Christians must take action to do what is right, they must act in the right way, in a Christ-like way. Culture warriors are, by definition, at war against the culture. Theirs is a “holy war”—a term recalling the Crusades that is used by a current presidential candidate. Today’s American culture warriors stray from morality issues when they try to dominate society by repeating falsehoods about elections, embrace conspiracies, and revise the story of the founding of America into a quest to create a Christian nation. They refuse to accept that our country is a pluralist democracy by constitutional design (see US Constitution, Article VI and the First Amendment), and instead separate people into “us” and “the enemy.” They work to shut down libraries and public and government institutions that don’t conform to their will and plan to replace tens of thousands of federal government employees with loyalists if given the opportunity. Many stockpile weapons.

Though I had heard the culture warrior metaphor before, I never gave it much thought till I read a quote by a Liberty University professor, Nick Olson, who says Christians need to replace the dominant metaphor—culture warriors—with something different. “That’s been the running theme for evangelicals: we’re always embattled, always fighting back. But what if we laid down our defense mechanisms? What if we reframed our relationship to creation, to our neighbors, to our enemies, in ways that are more closely aligned to the Sermon on the Mount? What if we were willing to lay down our power and our status to love others, even if that comes at cost to ourselves?” (Quoted in Tim Alberta’s book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.) I applaud Olson’s words, especially since Liberty University has been ground zero in the culture war and a hotbed of Christian Nationalism.

One of the problems with imagining yourself in a culture war is that embattled people convince themselves that the end justifies any means, and power becomes the chief end. Laying down power becomes unthinkable. In Losing Our Religion,Russell Moore quotes Robert P. Jones: “‘Of this generation of white evangelicals . . . their greatest temptation will be to wield what remaining political power they have as a desperate corrective for their waning cultural influence. If this happens, we may be in for another decade of close skirmishes in the culture wars, but white evangelical Protestants will mortgage their future to resurrect the past.’ The danger, he notes, is forgetting this: ‘Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, resurrection by human power rather than divine spirit always produces a monstrosity.’”

We witnessed a monstrosity when Christianity was used to justify violence on January 6, 2021. According to a 2023 PRRI/Brookings Institution survey, about 31% of white evangelical Protestants agreed, “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” Culture warriors brought their Bibles, their gallows, their “Jesus Saves” signs, and their zip ties to the US Capitol building. They beat Capitol police officers, caused the deaths of nine people, and wreaked $30 million in damages to the building. Now, as the 2024 election unfolds, we’re subject to revisionist history about the events of January 6. In that version, those jailed for their offenses that day are “government hostages” and “unbelievable patriots” who will be pardoned the first day of Trump’s next presidency.

We witness a monstrosity when culture warriors organize armed vigilante groups in the name of Christ. Militia are organizing using Tactical Civics to “take back” “this republic of sovereign States founded in the Name of Jesus Christ.” According to a Tactical Civics chapter in West Michigan, their purpose is to organize county government sanctioned militia who will engage in “law enforcement” to fight: “demonstrable, long-term organized crime by our servants from school districts to Congress, the White House, and the US Supreme Court.” Not merely satisfied with county militia, in late February 2024, Jack Posobiec opened this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference with these monstrous words: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here.” He held up a cross necklace and continued: “After we burn that swamp to the ground, we will establish the new American republic on its ashes, and our first order of business will be righteous retribution for those who betrayed America.” (Quoted from an email newsletter from Heather Cox Richardson, “Letters from an American,” Feb. 25, 2024.)

The book Society of the Snow, about a 1972 plane crash in the Andes, tells how one of the survivors wrote a note for the others shortly before his death, saying, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” The man quoted John 15:13, not only because he died as a result of a heroic action he undertook to help the others, but also because he offered his own body as nutrition in the bleak Andean landscape of snow and rock. Though few ever are called to give their lives in that way, that verse sums Christ’s call for Christians living. Other passages drive home the same point: “Do to others as you would have them do to you,” (Luke 6:31). “Love your neighbor as yourself,” (Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 22:39). Jesus even shocked his followers with this call: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” (Matthew 5:43,44). In Losing Our Religion, Russell Moore writes, “The commands to ‘gentleness’ and ‘reasonableness’ as well that a person crucify ‘quarrelsomeness’ and a ‘craving for controversy’ are on almost every page of the New Testament.”

The Christian faith has lost the cachet it once had for many reasons, not least of which comes because people who call themselves Christian choose to live opposite of the Bible’s call to love, self-sacrifice, and self-denial.

The early church provides a good model for how Christians can respond faithfully to our waning cultural influence. In a recent sermon for Lent, Rev. Len Vander Zee described the behavior of early Christians as having “A universal and overwhelming emphasis on peace, non-violence, and loving their enemies. Now remember, this was the age of persecution. But the church taught that if you’re going to be baptized into Jesus Christ . . . you’re committed to accept his cross. That means not to engage in retaliation, or violence. Instead, you must love your enemies and pray for your persecutor, and accept even death as an expected result of following their Lord who died on a cross. And this is the church that grew tremendously.”

The season of Lent invited us to turn from selfish gain and turn to serving and loving people, pursuing justice on personal and systemic levels, in the footsteps of our self-sacrificing Savior. Easter presents us with a triumphant but not triumphalist Lord, who bears the marks of his self-sacrifice throughout eternity. Christ opposed overthrowing a brutal government that his disciples hated. After Jesus’ many resurrection appearances, he gathered with his disciples who still wanted him to crush the Roman empire, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6) Well, no. Not only would Jesus not restore political power to Israel, he also would call his disciples to pour out their lives for the sake of others.

Recalling the ultimate sacrifice of Christ, the apostle Paul called Christ’s followers in Philippians 2 to “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.” Jesus called his followers to acknowledge their sins with humility and regret, repent of them, and turn to him who gave his life for others as Redeemer and Lord. Like the man who offered himself for his friends in Society of the Snow, Jesus’ flesh is real food and his blood is real drink to nourish those he loves, and to bring about the renewing of all creation (see John 6:55).

When I’m tempted to despair because some fellow Christians are ruining Christianity and may ruin democracy in the United States, Lent and Easter remind me to have hope. Though the Crusades did horrible damage to people and to the name of Christ, they came to an end. Likewise, this present madness embarked on by culture warriors in America will end too. Just as God reminded Elijah that not all Israel bowed its knee to Baal, so also not all Christians in America embrace destructive, vigilante power. Some deny themselves, take up their crosses daily, follow Christ, and lay down their lives for others.