Last week Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez received over 250,000 Twitter likes for this little gem.

Using the now-common “Tell me without telling me meme,” Ocasio-Cortez scored a social media victory over her nemesis, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. I, um, LOLed.

Social media memes won’t save democracy, and they won’t redeem the church.

But AOC, as she’s called, made a powerful point about how we use the Bible in the United States. Marjorie Taylor Greene poses as a champion of evangelical Christianity, and she advanced a theological point: God would not create a harmful disease. The point is misguided on at least two grounds. For one thing Covid-19 is just one of many awful diseases in the world, very few of which humans created in laboratories. For another the Bible quite clearly attributes some plagues to God, most notably in the Exodus story. The Congresswoman’s theological claim ran far ahead of her Bible knowledge.

There’s a warning for all of us here: there’s danger in using the Bible without listening to it. We’re all prone to do it, progressives and traditionalists alike. We use “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged” as an excuse to avoid moral discernment (Matthew 7:1). We call ourselves ‘Matthew 25 Christians’ — “I was hungry, and you fed me” — and we don’t much care if Jesus was talking about something other than acts of mercy. We cite passages about vulnerable aliens and strangers as if the Bible did not include passages like Ezra’s demand that the men of Judah divorce their non-Israelite wives. We’re not at our best when we reduce the Bible to a tool.

“Fundamentalists use the Bible like a drunk uses a lamppost — for support, but rarely for illumination.”

Unfortunately, this quote does not derive from the twentieth century preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, as I was told. Instead, it originally applied to statistics: first we make up our minds, then we pick the data we like. I wish Fosdick had said it, though, because it truly does capture a powerful threat to American spiritual and social health: Christian nationalism. 

Christian nationalism is the idea that God holds the United States in special regard. The nation was founded upon a Christian foundation, so the story goes, even a biblical one. That is why is has prospered so. Christian nationalism also holds that Americans have special virtues. So long as America does God’s will, God will bless our nation. Therefore, Christians should see to it that they elect officials who will enact a Christian, specifically a biblical, agenda. Christian people, institutions, and values should be privileged in American society.

Christian nationalism often expresses itself by blurring Christian and patriotic symbols. Church sanctuaries should have American flags, congregations should honor patriotic holidays, society should celebrate Christmas but not necessarily Jewish or Muslim holidays, and public schools should include prayer and Bible study. When Judge Roy Moore installed a display of the Ten Commandments in the Alabama Supreme Court, he demonstrated Christian nationalism.

There are lots of things to say about Christian nationalism, but recent research shows that the movement is not particularly about the gospel. There’s not much talk about Jesus and his teaching, but there’s lots of chatter about prayer in schools, the status of religious symbols and holidays, and other displays of civic piety. Preachers might appeal to Romans 13 (submit to the authorities), to the Bible’s military imagery, to the modern state of Israel, and to the “clobber passages” commonly deployed against sexual minorities.

Public crosses, yes; carrying one’s cross, not so much. That’s because Christian nationalism is about social privilege for certain kinds of White Christians, about a particular ordering of society, rather than loving one’s neighbor.

In Christian nationalism “Christianity” stands-in for other values. The sociologists Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry have pored over survey data to reveal important ways that Christian nationalism operates independently of Christian practice. Conventional measures of Christian religiosity often pull against folks’ adherence to Christian nationalism. According to Whitehead and Perry:

As Americans show greater agreement with Christian nationalism, they are more likely to view Muslim refugees as terrorist threats, agree that citizens should be made to show respect for America’s traditions, and oppose stricter gun laws. But as Americans become more religious in terms of attendance, prayer, and Scripture reading, they move in the opposite direction on these [and other] issues.

According to this research Christian nationalism is “more of an ethnic Christian-ism” than a theologically conservative Christianity. It tends to correlate with racist and antisemitic attitudes, valuing nativism and whiteness above inclusivity. It is also authoritarian valuing the interests of “folks like us” over representative democracy. The Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection is totally consistent with Christian nationalism: if “our” candidate doesn’t win, it’s time to adopt other, non-democratic, means. Those include recourse to violence.

In the context of Christian nationalism, it makes total sense for a politician to use the Bible without reading it.

In Christian nationalism the Bible is a source of authority rather than one of inspiration or instruction. In that world it’s a good thing to put your hand on a Bible when you’re sworn into office, but it’s a bad thing to read passages that might be inconvenient for the agenda. 

During last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, D.C., former President Donald Trump marched over to a local Episcopal church, took a Bible that was not his own, and held it upside down for the cameras. That scene dramatized the Bible’s role in Christian nationalism — not an inspiration, certainly not a guide, but a symbol of identity and belonging. 

I visit lots of churches, sometimes to talk about controversial issues like human sexuality and immigration. Over the years one thing has become clear to me: congregations generally rush to debate the Bible’s significance for our concerns before they’ve ever had serious conversations about how the Bible forms our moral imaginations. That makes me sad. In our churches we need to devote serious energy to the process of modelling deliberate, healthy biblical interpretation.

In that way we might avoid the impression that we’re using the Bible without having read it.