Christian nationalists have a problem with Jesus Christ, sociologist Samuel Perry told a gathering of Oklahoma CBF Sunday night.
Perry, a professor at the University of Oklahoma and author of books and articles about Christian nationalism, was the keynote speaker for an annual awards banquet held by the Oklahoma chapter of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in Norman, Okla., on the OU campus. In addition to his training as a sociologist, Perry is a master of divinity graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary.
“When I think about how they develop their theology, of how they treat people and how they organize their own lives, the last person they want to be like is Jesus Christ,” Perry said of white Christian nationalists. “Jesus is actually a huge problem for what they’re trying to do.
Samuel Perry speaks at the OU Mueum of Natural History for a gathering of CBF Oklahoma (Photo courtesy of CBFO)
“I find that whenever they’re thinking about how they approach the world, how they think about politics, they’re not quoting Jesus. They’re quoting something about Canaanite conquests or they’re going to be maybe talking about the Ten Commandments.”
Perry is co-author of Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States and The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy.
Christian nationalists like Doug Wilson and Al Mohler are “not talking about loving your neighbor, turning the other cheek or dying for people who are not like you or dying for sinners or showing forgiveness or loving the poor or serving,” he said. “That’s not the Christianity they have in mind. That’s not the Christianity of Christian nationalists.
“In fact, Christian nationalists hate the Cross. Their whole idea of the Cross is you don’t win in this world by dying on behalf of people who hate you. You win by making them die on behalf of their own sins and errors.”
Christian nationalists, he said, do not approach interpretation of Scripture with a Christocentric lens. That’s one of three ways he suggested American Christians could be more like Jesus and less like Christian nationalists.
“Their whole idea of the Cross is you don’t win in this world by dying on behalf of people who hate you. You win by making them die on behalf of their own sins and errors.”
By seeing Scripture through the lens of Jesus, “I don’t think we would’ve so uncritically embraced the kinds of things we have as an American culture, the racism, the classism, slavery, the oppression of women, the abuse of children. I think if we had practiced this kind of epistemic, if we had exposed ourselves to different opinions, if we had pursued all of this relentlessly under the question of ‘What would Jesus have us do? How would Jesus have us be in this world?” — I think we could have avoided a lot of the incompatible elements of Christianity that we’ve incorporated into our Christianity over the years.
The way out, he said, is to teach core Christianity that emphasizes humility instead of fundamentalism, diversity instead of homogeneity, and Christocentrism rather than biblicism.
He spent the majority of his talk explaining those three points. The goal for pastors, he said, should be to “help our people pursue what is core to Christianity rather than Christianity conformed to culture.”
That begins with “rejecting fundamentalism for humility that recognizes susceptibility to biases,” he advised. “It starts with pursuing real diversity as a necessary means of accountability rather than homogeneity that insulates us.”
American culture is increasingly “sorting” people based on political views, the sociologist said. Americans “spend all our time around people who agree with us politically, religiously, culturally. And it feels comfortable for me to be in that space.”
While not asking anyone to “put yourself in harm’s way and just be yelled at all the time,” Perry said, “I want to be a part of the lives of people who don’t necessarily agree with me politically. And there’s plenty of that in Oklahoma. So there’s lots of opportunity if I’m willing to continue in those relationships.”
The result, he said, could be greater accountability on both sides. “We can disagree completely and yet we need to grow in some of our perspectives so we acknowledge we are limited in life and we need to have others to sharpen us in that kind of way.”
“If we are surrounding the throne with every tongue and tribe and nation, the idea that God loves one nation more than other nations is inconsistent and incompatible with the gospel.”
The thrust of his own academic work, Perry said, has been “to understand how American Christianity or how American culture changes Christianity.”
Culture always shapes faith, he said. The result is Christians adopting some views and practices that are incompatible with the teachings of Jesus Christ.
“Things like racism, classism and nationalism” are explicitly incompatible with Scripture, he said. “If we are surrounding the throne with every tongue and tribe and nation, the idea that God loves one nation more than other nations is inconsistent and incompatible with the gospel.”
Also forbidden in the Scriptures is showing favoritism to the rich, he said, citing the New Testament book of James.
These kinds of discrimination are explicitly forbidden in Scripture, but others are implicitly forbidden, he explained. “We don’t actually have a New Testament verse or a passage that says, ‘Thou shalt not commit slavery or own people.’ And, in fact, you can cherry pick some verses in the New Testament that seem to suggest that’s OK, that the slavery is a part of what Christians were doing at the time. And yet, as Abraham Lincoln pointed out in the 1850s, he said that it is implicitly condemned in the New Testament because it is incompatible with Jesus’ Golden Rule, this idea that we shall do unto others as we would have them do to us.
Lincoln pointed out that everyone knows slavery is wrong for them, that they would not be owned and therefore it is impossible to own other people and be consistent with Jesus’ teaching in the Golden Rule.
Yet racism and classism and nationalism and slavery have been undeniable parts of American history and culture that have shaped the church, he said.
“As intuitive as it seems that those things would be incompatible with Christian faith, those things have not only been part of our Christian faith in the United States, but there have been some eras, in fact centuries, where people have argued that those things are essential or fundamental to Christian faith.”
Research has documented the human tendency to start with one’s own political views and then assume God thinks this way as well, he said. “We use God, or Jesus becomes our little sock puppet to say certain things about what the world is, and it’s about power and it’s about what we would like to see. And God becomes a convenient way to establish authority over other people and to say, I believe this, we believe this, therefore God believes those kinds of things.”
His own academic research has shown a connection between Christian nationalist views and a lack of humility, Perry said. “We found that the people who tend to score higher on epistemic humility tend to reject ideologies like Christian nationalism, which is really a form of a political fundamentalism. It’s an idea. We are convinced that we are right, that we know how things should go and that we don’t want difference in our country. We only want people like us who believe the kinds of things we believe and vice versa. One of the leading predictors that you have low epistemic humility, that you are a fundamentalist in that regard is that you score higher on things like Christian nationalism.”
Another way research shows the effects of Christian nationalism bias is by comparing how Christians choose a Bible translation compared to how they choose medical treatment. Americans surveyed on these questions want the most up-to-date and peer reviewed medical treatments available but don’t apply the same standard to choosing a Bible translation.
On the problem of biblicism, Perry said, “When you approach the Bible as a handbook and you don’t have a central organizing hermeneutic lens or approach to the Bible, you just look at the Bible and just see the Bible and all the texts are apparently the same and whether you’re pulling it from the Old Testament, the New Testament, you’ve got to make it conform.”
The difference between biblicism and Christocentrism is like the difference in how a person might approach a jigsaw puzzle, he suggested. Biblicism is like putting together the puzzle without seeing the picture of the goal on the box.
“Somebody would say, ‘Well, I think we’re putting together an elephant.’ And somebody else would say, ‘Well, I actually think it’s a zebra.’ And somebody else would say, ‘I think it’s Spider-Man.’ And you would pursue this kind of picture you had in mind. So I can put these pieces together and you’ve got all these pieces left over that you don’t know what to do with. But once somebody gives you the picture on the back of the box and you say, ‘Oh, we’re making a picture of Jesus,’ that makes so much more sense.
“Now we know where the pieces go. And Jesus tells us in the New Testament, ‘I’m the picture on the box.’ The Old Testament is about me. The New Testament is about me. I’m the person this is supposed to be about. Jesus is our hermeneutic king.”