1 Year of Against Christian Xenophobia

With a bonus translation of the Magnificat

Roughly a year ago, I opened up a Google Doc and began ranting. In and of itself, this would have been a thoroughly unremarkable event, on par with Marvel releasing a movie about superheroes, or Ben Shapiro saying something stupid. What distinguished this particular rant, however, was its ostensible object:

Yes, it’s been one year and spare change since Marsha Blackburn of Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville, TN offered her two-sentence contribution to Sinological studies, surely leading Jonathan Spence to reconsider his life’s choices. My initially dumbfounded reaction to Blackburn’s tweet, coupled with researching her ties to CPC and former Redeemer Presbyterian NYC pastor Scott Sauls, eventually produced the open letter’s overview of what Christian nationalism looks like across American Christianity today. Sure, it can look like a carnival barker literally holding a tent meeting. More often than not, though, it looks like a network of formal and informal alliances between God-and-country demagogues and churches that present themselves, via carefully curated Instagram accounts and committee-written panegyrics for racial justice, as the kind of place where one would never hear the term “China virus,” no sir, not in a millennium.

(By the way, this Dec. 3, Marsha celebrated 1 year of Chinese historiography with the below gem, indicating that perhaps Dec. 3 is her sacred day to be extra racist. The Feast of St. Marsha, if you will.)

Over the past year, I’ve declined to ignore, rationalize, or excuse the arrangement between Christofascists and their enablers. It turns out at least 750+ people agree with me. For my efforts to draw attention to this consensus, I’ve been accused of communism, communist sympathizing, cancel culture, outrage porn, violating the Ninth Commandment, violating Matthew 18:15, misrepresenting Very Good People, and garden variety cowardice. It’s been an instructive glimpse at the extent to which pastoral enablers indoctrinate the rank-and-file to excuse inaction a thousand and one different ways.

I don’t regret any of this activism, even as it’s become painfully clear that my initial hunch—that the churches named in the letter would find every reason to justify prioritizing convention over combatting fascism—was correct. I’ll be holding an update on Saturday 12.18 at 1:30 PM EST, where I’ll unveil a timeline of my efforts to engage these churches, as well as their responses. Registration is limited to the first 100 respondents, so I urge you to sign up if you’re interested! I’ll post video after the event, too.

For now, what I’ll say is this: to the degree that these churches and their congregants continue to look the other way and treat immensely powerful politicians like any other warm body in the pews, they are grossly underrating the urgency of the moment. There is a very good chance that we are witnessing the ascendancy of a permanent white minority rule in the United States. Come 2024, it’s not unlikely that either Trump or one of his more polished successors—i.e., any number of the holy warriors named in the letter—will once again commandeer the powers of the federal government towards full-throated, unqualified white nationalism. This isn’t to excuse Biden’s dismaying tendency to placate such forces—merely to note the distinction between having them ride shotgun and handing them the keys to the car.

In the face of such a prospect, how are we to understand clerical assertions that confronting Tucker Carlson would amount to “cancel culture,” or an affront to the egalitarian spirit of the Eucharist, or a violation of canon law? Aren’t such responses painfully out-of-touch, encapsulating the reason why the church is and always has been a haven for the “well-resourced” kakistocrats who have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to immiserate the underclass as long as churches have existed?

If you agree, I invite you to join the webinar on 12.18, where I’ll provide more details on the past year and initiate conversation on what the next year might look like. In closing, here is my take on the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), Mary’s song of praise, in keeping with the season of Advent.

And Mary exclaimed, “My very being hails the LORD—

In my soul, I gloat in God the Deliverer.

For he is eyewitness to his bondsmaid’s humiliation.

Look—for ages to come, the world’s children will hear of my bliss, my favor, my triumph.

With his might he has blown my mind away,

The one whose name is set apart.

His solidarity with the wretched of the earth,

The only ones who truly respect him,

Lasts forever.

He reaches out to dominate the dominators,

Scattering like sand the ruling class, those deluded by power.

He crushes dynasties, evicting CEOS, plucking presidents from Rose Gardens.

He inaugurates the warehouse workers, the casual labor,

The adjuncts, the farmhands without papers—

The disposables of the age.

He gives treasure to the dispossessed.

He seizes the assets of plutocrats, leaving them with nothing.

He arms the “one who wrestles with God,” his second-in-command.

He honors his treaties, just as he promised to our ancestors,

To Abraham and his descendants,

For all time.