When Christian is not Christian

This is a little preachy so stop now if you don’t look to me for divine guidance. I’m not much of a theologian, despite what you might hear, but I think I can recognize a real Christian when I meet one and we talk a bit. It’s not how they dress or how they look or walk, it’s what I sense about their hearts.

Start with “love thy neighbor.” Or “judge not, that ye be not judged.” Or maybe that bit about caring for the least of us. They care about others. I think I can also spot the phonies. (Theology 101.) Christian Nationalists may mouth words of piety, but they are not Christians. I didn’t have to go to seminary for that insight.

They exhibit pagan hate and not Christian love. On their knees praying or in the choir singing, they are not what mainstream Christianity is all about. (Theology 102.) Evangelicals make up about 25 percent of our population, and I don’t think their secular hopes are democratic. Many don’t really care about the separation of church and state. In fact, they believe the church should be the state.

Christian Nationalist is a descriptive term I don’t think I had ever heard before the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. As I watched television that day, I heard the term. I thought Christian Nationalists must be zealots who would destroy democracy and even kill those who defended it, all in the name of Christ. Then I discovered that more of them, far from the Capitol, were partially civilized, people who simply held views I found destructive. But for the most part, they apparently talked to each other in church basements or, more likely, biker bars, and didn’t always take to the streets, armed and angry.

They believe we are a Christian nation and that our separation of church and state is an error, no matter what our Founding Fathers, mostly Christian, thought and put in the Constitution. Certainly, Muslims, Jews, and probably Unitarians don’t really belong here.

One student of the movement has written recently, “One perplexing part of this story was Trump himself. How is it that he would become a standard-bearer of the Christian right when his misogyny, materialism, and ‘hatred for the other,’ stood in such sharp contrast to the essence of Jesus’ teachings? And yet, Trump had the overwhelming support of white evangelical Protestants, winning a greater percentage of that demographic in 2016 than either Reagan or Bush. White, conservative Catholics were similarly supportive and gave Trump an edge in key swing states in 2020.”

Theocracy, not democracy, has been their American dream. There are conflicting views among Christians. Forty-five percent of all Americans say we should be a Christian nation. the 45 percent believe the church should work actively to remodel the state to conform to their religious beliefs.

The various sects of the right have one thing in common. They are not Christian. They are “nationalists” who are not devoted to making our nation better, but simply different and defined exclusively by them. Beware the right. They are wrong.

Norman Sherman of Coralville has worked extensively in politics, including as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s press secretary.