Christian nationalism did not spring up fully formed during President Donald Trump’s first term. Its roots run deep in American soil.
Unfortunately.
In the Post-Reconstruction South, the United Daughters of the Confederacy planted a Confederate memorial on many a small-town courthouse lawn. Their numbers grew like crabgrass across the South between 1890 and 1920, accompanied by Jim Crow laws to limit voting by the Black minority.
This outpouring of white supremacist posturing was bolstered by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case that legalized segregation by race across the nation.
Richard Conville
And our closest cultural forebears in Western Europe were not immune. Nazi Germany is obvious, but France? Yes. Vichy France, the roughly 40% of France that was not occupied by German forces but was nevertheless an eager collaborator with Nazi Germany.
Last week, David French’s book review essay on historian Julian Jackson’s France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944 appeared in The New York Times. French argues: “The nation that the Catholic Vichy nationalists constructed … is very much like the world that American Christian nationalists are trying to build.”
The Vichy government ditched France’s commitment to liberty, equality and fraternity (from the French Revolution, 1790) in favor of work, family and fatherland (the motto of the Vichy leader Philippe Petain). In their view, liberal democracy had failed, due to its overemphasis on the individual — over the “natural communities” (as they saw it) of family, workplace and region.
And of course many bought into (or went along with or were forced into) this vision. Evidence abounds. French points out that the Vichy government rounded up Jews and shipped them east. It decreed married women could not be employed in the public sector and only citizens born of French fathers could be civil servants, doctors, dentists, pharmacists and lawyers.
Jackson quotes a Vichy writer of the time: “Woman, wife and mother is made for man, for the home, for the child.”
It’s no wonder so many went along. Precursors of Christian nationalism can be attractive, and they may seem to be what they are not. I believe one such precursor reared its ugly head recently at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. It is “complementarianism,” a term prescribing distinct roles for men and women in the church and home. The word came into use around 1988 and has been popularized by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.
A core affirmation is captured in the 2000 version of the Baptist Faith and Message: A husband “has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect and to lead his family. A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.” Thus they “complement” one another to form a family; they fit together comfortably.
“The Gospels are full of examples of women proclaiming the gospel.”
In their convention, Southern Baptists voted 74.6% in favor of a motion to ban women from occupying any role of pastoral authority in a Southern Baptist church.
This position is a close cousin to the Catholic Vichy nationalism of 1940s France. It prioritizes the man over the woman, and it prioritizes the family over the individual. It presents real problems when a Southern Baptist woman is convinced she has been called by God to be a pastor. Her husband can veto it. If she is not married, a man in authority in her faith tradition can veto it. Well, try to veto it.
The Gospels, however, are full of examples of women proclaiming the gospel. The Apostle Paul did not have access to the Gospels that we have today (but that’s for another day). And in Paul’s day, adult women had no standing as individuals outside their relationship with a husband. Shall we go back? Really?
More broadly, if family is prioritized over the individual, there goes the cornerstone of our legal system: individuals are charged, not groups. That is, I am individually accountable for my actions before the law and not for my group membership — not for my being Palestinian or gay or female. Individuals have rights, not groups.
My worry is that wide adoption of complementarianism may prepare many to accept other parts of the Christian nationalist agenda: creating second-class citizens, replacing democracy with dictatorship, and centralizing power in the hands of men. Slippery slope and all that. Beware!
Richard Conville is professor emeritus of communication studies and service learning at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, where he is a long-time resident and member of University Baptist Church.