Blog Posts
Sometimes I want to be a Christian Nationalist
Photo by Josh Eckstein on Unsplash
This post originally appeared on Rev. Angela Denker’s Substack newsletter, I’m Listening.
Much has been written about the terrifying parts of Christian Nationalism: about the violent and greedy legacy of an American Church built on a never-ending quest for wealth, status, and power in middle-class white America.
That’s not what I’m writing about today.
Instead, I want to write about the myopia I find myself in - and maybe you find yourself in - as we stand amidst the wreckage of a compromised church, look back at our childhoods, and lament with embittered eyes how our once cherished memories have become tarnished.
Sometimes it would be easier to champion, uncompromisingly, a strong and central Church, one that can afford to take for granted its place at the center of American community and life.
I’m thinking now not of what became megachurches, with fancy stages and glittering lights and pyrotechnics and pastors with bestselling books. I’m thinking of what came before: white steeples with rows and rows of pews, filled with families. I’m thinking of what most Catholic parishes, and mainline and rural churches today look back at as their glory days.
While we often think of America’s past as a devoutly Christian one, instead statistics show that church attendance in the U.S. likely peaked in the 1950s. The postwar period and Baby Boom also represented the height of denominationalism, and the advent of Christian publishers and Christian radio shows.
White Christians’ memories of church in these years are often nostalgic, lacking the context that these were years still of segregated schools and Jim Crow laws in the American South, years before women could become ministers in most denominations or even before women working outside the home was considered acceptable (in white, middle-class America, that is — poor, working class women, and women of color had long been employed outside the home as a matter of necessity).
A sense that in the 1950s all was “as it was supposed to be” betrays a hint of racism among white Christians, because these years were not equally good ones for Black Americans, and for non-white Americans in general. Black American soldiers were largely denied access to the life-changing benefits of the G.I. Bill, and just a few years before the 1950s, Japanese Americans had been forcibly confined in internment camps.
Still, for those of us raised in white churches in 1980s and 90s, and for parents raising kids in white churches in the 1980s and 90s, there was by and large a sense of furthering or clinging onto the church’s central place in society that was experienced by Baby Boomer parents in the 1950s and 60s.
For this reason, many of us attended “program” churches, churches that used an “attraction” model focused on “young families.” These churches employed attractive guitar-playing young men as “youth pastors” and organized regular youth events and mission trips in order to build a sense of community among kids in the church.
There were well-established and extensive Sunday school programs, usually led by women who perhaps in another life could have been astute CEOs, organizing dozens of volunteer teachers, managing curriculum and music lessons for hundreds of children every Sunday.
There was VBS in the summer, the aforementioned mission trips and camps for older kids. There were countless “service opportunities:” visits to shelters, meals to serve and pack, yards to clean up. Once I even joined a group of junior high kids for a round of neighborhood caroling.
My church had a phenomenal youth and family ministry staff. Just excellent. While, as usual, the senior pastor got the lion’s share of the credit for the church’s astronomic growth in the 90s and early 2000s, I wondered later if more of that credit should have been extended to the youth and family staff. There were programs galore. Not just Youth Group but a variety of events for kids of all ages.
Randomly this week, as I drove from leading church alone on Sunday morning to catch my fourth grade son’s flag football game, where the other parents just stared at me when I said I’d missed the earlier game because I was at church, I thought about 456 Club, our church’s group for fourth, fifth, and sixth graders when I was that age. We went bowling and to Dairy Queen. I remember meeting with our new youth staff member, a young woman, to talk individually about what I thought might be fun plans for the year ahead. I remember how cool and unique that was. A 20-something woman was interested in spending time with me! She wanted my opinion!
There was real value in what sometimes seemed like activities that were “just for fun,” like waterpark trips in the church’s old blue bus, or scavenger hunts at the local grocery store, or playing church games like Sardines before plopping down in the dilapidated couches across the road in what we called “The Fish House,” after the symbol of the fish used by early Christians.
Church was a place where I knew adults who weren’t related to me valued my opinions. I met married couples and young adults who gave me the chance to share brief talks as part of youth group in high school, a Monday night activity called The Living Room.
It was all innovative and energetic, and it took a huge amount of coordination, planning, and financial support - as well as adequate staffing.
Me after my fifth grade First Communion at church growing up. These are happy memories: ones I’d wanted to re-create for my kids — but so much has changed.
As a stereotypically busy high school kid, I took it all for granted, showing up sparingly when I didn’t have sports practices or games; using the service projects as ways to fulfill school requirements for National Honor Society.
After all, just in my little suburb, there were tons of churches with equally rich offerings for kids and families. For a brief period in high school I left my mainline youth group and flirted with Evangelicalism, attending a different local congregation that also hosted a purity retreat as an alternative to our school’s “abstinence-based” or “abstinence-only” sex education.
This was in a blue Midwestern state (Minnesota) where megachurch Evangelical culture was slower to take hold, and mainliners and Catholics still make up the majority of Christians, even today.
And still the influence of popular Christian culture weighed heavily in my experience — sometimes in ways that seemed really positive! Just like I bet many of your churches, my church had that infamous poster, listing popular 90s musical groups and suggested “Christian” alternatives. (I remember always thinking that maybe, unfairly, Christian musicians were just people who couldn’t make it in the “real” music industry). I was cynical and untrusting and suspicious in a lot of ways, and I still attended the purity retreat and the Teens Encounter Christ retreat; and I still worried about what it might mean if my (nonexistent) boyfriend and I were “unequally yoked.” I still gossiped and slandered the SAGE group at my school as it was first getting started, laughing about it with my friends. SAGE stood for Straight and Gay Equality, and I’m embarrassed today that my gut instinct was to stand against it, probably in my head because of my Christian faith, even if my church never explicitly talked much about sexuality (JUST DON’T HAVE SEX!) was the basic message …
I remember my mom, a pastor’s kid herself, sometimes uncertain about the glossy and glitzy messages she saw us getting sometimes at our church, with a lack of theological or Biblical depth. We had a band, projector, and Dominos Pizza before Confirmation every Wednesday night, and then my mom attempted valiantly to teach our small group and go over our “memory work.” No one had ever done their verses. One kid famously preferred to never actually speak during small group, during which his eyes were always half-closed.
But we had to meet in the kitchen, because the church was so packed with teenagers every Wednesday night: three sessions of Confirmation, 4:30, 6, 7:15. A rousing success. Church Councils today would dream of it.
I remember my mom (how she had the energy to teach Confirmation after teaching school all day, I’ll never know) one day getting fed up and going to talk to one of our pastors about the fact it seemed like kids weren’t learning much in Confirmation. It wasn’t like how she’d remembered studying the Catechism and getting in-depth into the Bible.
I’m not sure exactly what the pastor said in response, but as I remember my mom telling me, it was something about how he empathized and agreed with what she was saying, but he tended to land on the side that it was better that the kids were at least here. They were here. They were at church.
As all these memories flood back to me, positive and negative, mostly I feel kind of sad when I remember church growing up, because there’s so many rich memories. I remember my dad teaching Sunday school with my friend’s dad, and yelling at the boys for tipping back their chairs. I remember being in the church plays, speaking at Baccalaureate, going on mission trips in 15-passenger vans to Philly and Richmond, Va., and sleeping on the floor in church basements; making PB&J sandwiches on an assembly line for dinner.
My kids probably won’t have these memories of church. It’s not for lack of trying. When I first became a pastor, I worked so hard to try and find a church where I could serve where my kids could have the experience I did, leading me to two calls at very large churches in Orange County, Calif., and here in the Twin Cities.
On staff, though, running a church with a $1 million+ budget is exhausting, particularly in the 2010s and 2020s. There’s this constant sense that you’re propping up a system that was never built to last. So much of your budget is going toward mortgages on massive buildings. You can’t afford health insurance for your program staff. Nobody has time to volunteer anymore, because all the parents work long hours and then move on to side hustles and ever-increasing sports and music commitments. Everybody has mounting debt and no one can afford to tithe much.
I don’t really want to be a Christian Nationalist, but what I mean by the title of this post is that sometimes I miss and even long for what churches built on money, power, and status gave to me as a kid. Everything I had came at a cost, though I didn’t really realize it then. And it was mostly all good stuff! But sustaining all those programs and all that staffing and all those volunteers (many of whom were women who didn’t work outside the home, functionally working for free for the church) came at a high cost. As society changed, the churches who did programs successfully like my own just kept moving the target forward. Like American businesses and real estate, we thought the bubble could never burst. And then it did. It is. And we’re living now in the sticky mess left behind.
My kids probably won’t get a church with tons of ready-made programs built for them, where they’ll attend Confirmation class with 200 of their middle school classmates, like I did.
They won’t have the option of four different mission trips or a National Youth extravaganza at a hotel.
They won’t take a bus to camp with dozens of their friends from church.
I don’t know if they’ll get to attend a baccalaureate service.
I’ll make sure they skip the purity retreat.
And in truth it’s probably a good thing: that my kids won’t attend a church built around their enjoyment and satisfaction. They’re probably spoiled enough as it is. But as a parent who wants their kids to know and follow Jesus, what do you do instead?
What does a non-christian-nationalist American church look like?
Luckily, we have lots of examples. It looks like a church that’s just barely getting by. A church with a few kids and a ragtag choir. A church with a part-time minister. A church with a building that’s constantly in need of repair. A church whose building isn’t primarily used for worship. A church with an organ or piano that’s out of tune.
On good days, when I’m hopeful and reminded that Jesus didn’t die and rise again to make America Christian but instead to save the world — I’m also reminded to shift my thinking.
We - us white American middle-class Christians - invested so gol-darn much into getting people “here.” Just get them to church. Attract them. It’ll work out.
It didn’t work. Look at what the word “Christian” means to most Americans today. Doesn’t have much to do with the ministry and witness and life, death, and resurrection of Jesus — it’s more about politics and social issues and, sometimes, violence.
So if it was never about getting “them” “here,” maybe I should focus on the fact that my kids will be “there” as in out in the world, with some sense of what it means to follow Jesus in the world. As often as possible, “we” will be “here” for worship: whether that’s in person on Sunday mornings, or online, or at another time during the week. And we’ll pray before meals and dinner. We’ll talk about death and life and how Jesus stands for justice.
Maybe the kids will be OK. Maybe I can let go of giving them what I had in church, and focus instead on teaching them to follow Jesus in pursuit of a better world, for everyone.
Angela Denker
Angela Denker, author of Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters who elected Donald Trump (Fortress: August 2019), is a Lutheran Pastor and veteran journalist who has written for Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post, Christian Century, and Christianity Today. She has pastored congregations in Las Vegas, Chicago, Orange County (Calif.), the Twin Cities, and rural Minnesota.
Twitter | @angela_denker
Facebook | @angeladenker1
Blog | https://angeladenker.substack.com/
Website | https://www.angeladenker.com
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.
America’s Blood Moon: Do not look away
Late last Sunday night, almost midnight, I found myself stumbling around my half-lit backyard, barefoot in pajamas, squinting up into the sky.
I’d been restless for hours, scanning mindless reality TV, trying to get my brain to turn off and stop the ugly thoughts from racing through my brain.
I live in a major city, but the neighborhood was mostly quiet that night, and nobody saw me when I walked from the backyard to the front: ratty gray threadbare sleep shorts, a white t-shirt whose neckline was encrusted with drool.
I had taken a melatonin gummy, and my body was achy and exhausted from the travails of the day and the years, and it was a miracle I didn’t walk right off my front steps and fall into the bushes, where rabbits and squirrels and probably hordes of mice were scampering around, eluding their midnight intruder.
The city lights made the sky bright, even on a clear night, and so while I saw a few stars I couldn’t find the one thing I was looking for that May evening.
I forced myself to walk further in front of my house, feet padding over the cracked and rough sidewalk and onto the smooth, asphalt-covered street. A police car rolled down the main thoroughfare, blazing through the stoplight.
I sighed in frustration.
I craned my neck upwards one more time, twisting backwards and almost losing my balance … “ah!”
A sharp intake of breath. My lungs filled with air. My mouth opened agape.
The Blood Moon.
It had been hiding in the corner of the sky, tucked in a sliver of sky between our slanted roof and the neighbor’s deep red maple tree, whose leaves had just begun to open again to the sky after our frigid spring.
I had missed the full lunar eclipse, but I marveled anyway at what I saw. A sliver of light, a crescent moon illuminated, while the rest hung, craggy and angry in the sky, a muddy red color I’d never seen before on the moon or anywhere in the sky above.
People with better cameras than me posted images on social media where the moon looked like a fiery orb, the red light caused when the earth moves between the moon and the sun, creating a total lunar eclipse, where the moon is completely submerged in the earth’s shadow, according to almanac.com. Like so much of our experience here in the world, what we appear to see (a bright reddish orange moon) is not exactly what exists in reality. The solar rays that bend around the moon to reach Earth are of all wavelengths, but Earth’s atmosphere scatters the shorter blue/green waves, leaving only the orange/red colors to reach our eyes.
I stood in awe, in the road, for a few seconds. To see the Blood Moon was to be reminded of how utterly small I am; a tiny speck in a universe grander than I could ever comprehend.
I wanted more. I walked quickly inside, locating the 1950s era binoculars we stored in our boys’ bedroom. I woke up my husband; he came outside and viewed the moon.
But it was midnight, and we had to work in the morning, and the kids would need breakfast and the Earth would keep on rotating and revolving. So relatively quickly, after a few more mindless minutes of reality TV, I pulled a sleep mask over my eyes and went to sleep.
I woke up the next morning to real reality. Backpacks to gather together for sleepy elementary-school-aged boys. A last-minute request for “home lunch.” A cavalcade of ants, marching through the left-open kitchen window above the sink, massing for battle all over our kitchen countertops.
Inside me was a sluggishness. I had looked to the heavens, but I was firmly rooted on earth. Feet strapped firmly to the ground as though they were fastened with leather buckles to a pair of sandals made from bricks. Each step felt heavy, ponderous.
As I said above, the Blood Moon isn’t really bloody at all. It’s what our eyes see when we look at it; the result of what happens to light when it comes down here to earth. Some of it dies, before it even has a chance to be mourned.
That moon, blood red in the sky, hung over America like a shroud. Our light has been dimmed for far too long.
I thought about Roberta A. Drury, age 32. Margus D. Morrison, age 52. Andrew MacNeil, age 53. Aaron Salter, age 55. Geraldine Talley, age 62. Celestine Chaney, age 65. Heyward Patterson, age 67. Katherine Massey, age 72. Pearl Young, age 77. Ruth Whitfield, age 86.
Say their names.
Pearl Young still worked as a substitute high school teacher at age 77. Ruth Whitfield was stopping by the grocery store after caring for her husband of 68 years, who lived in a long-term care facility. Andre Mackniel was going to get a birthday cake for his son.
Katherine Massey reminded me of my mom. She was an avid letter writer, a person who cared deeply about the civic life of her community, who wasn't afraid to speak out and say unpopular or controversial things, doing so with irrepressible love and spirit.
Celestine Chaney was a survivor of brain aneurysms and breast cancer, the youngest of four sisters. Margus D. Morrison was a school bus aide, the kind of too-often underpaid and thankless jobs filled by the very people who impact kids’ lives the very most.
Heyward Patterson was a dedicated church member, often driving people to the grocery store and helping them load groceries into his car. He served as a deacon and loved to sing.
Aaron Salter, a retired police officer turned store security guard, lost his life protecting others, even though when he fired at the gunman, the gunman’s bulletproof vest meant Salter died instead. Two guns, two men, one dead, one a killer of 10, who would have killed more if not for Salter’s courage.
Roberta Drury had just moved to Buffalo to care for her brother, who had been diagnosed with leukemia, and his children. Geraldine Talley was a baker, and according to the Washington Post, her friends called her “the sweetest.”
I hope you didn’t skim those last six paragraphs. If you did, go back and read them again. Say their names.
On Tuesday, the U.S. marked 1 million COVID deaths. Across the U.S., one person dies every 5 minutes from a drug overdose, according to the L.A. Times.
Life has become cheap in America. If you stopped and thought about all the kids who never got a chance; all the unfair cancer diagnoses and car accidents and gunshot deaths and heart attacks, it would knock you over. You wouldn’t be able to pay your insurance or your credit card bill because it wouldn’t matter to you anymore. You’d be sucking down life, deep into your lungs, as fast and as hard as you could because you knew it wasn’t going to last.
There’s big business in obscuring death. Add collagen powder to your coffee. Try CrossFit. Buy this $400 air purifier. Botox. Fillers. Hair plugs. Hair extensions. Filters. Moisturizers. Life insurance. Fences. Walls. Guns. Armor. Ignorance.
Maybe that’s why some White people this week seemed utterly determined to look past the 10 Black lives murdered in a Buffalo grocery store last week. Some people placed an inordinate amount of attention trying to make sure we all heard about the other shootings. The other deaths. As if more death meant these lives could mean less, if only ours could mean more.
Black Lives Matter.
Do they?
Did they matter in your church on Sunday morning? On your talk news radio show? Around your dinner table? In your kids’ school?
I am talking here to my fellow White Christians, who make up the largest religious and racial group, population-wise, in our country. Too often we have imagined if we shut and scrunch our eyes up tight enough, the Blood Moon will vanish into the night. The pain and death of racism won’t have to be real to us. We can drink in the rhetoric that makes us feel better about the jobs we didn’t get, the college we didn’t get accepted into, or the money we don’t have (in our minds) without acknowledging that that same rhetoric led an 18-year-old boy/man to jump into his vehicle and drive from rural New York over 200 miles to the Blackest ZIP code he could find and start killing people because of the color of their skin.
I protested with fellow clergy in Minneapolis after George Floyd was killed. Last year, former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck until he killed him, was convicted of murder. It mattered. It matters. But none of it brings anyone’s child, parent, nephew, friend, mother, son, daughter, aunt, sister, brother, back to life. And just because lots of other people died last Saturday does not mean we can stay silent while Black Americans are being murdered because of the color of their skin.
The Apostle Paul wrote to the Galatians that “all of you are one in Christ Jesus,” but even then it was more of a prayer than a reality. That is the job of of pastors and prophets and theologians, after all, to paint a vision of the world that God desires for us, and call us into it.
More powerfully today, I hear God’s call to repentance again to rebuke and renounce white supremacy and Christian nationalism.
Like Cain killing Abel, we are tempted to turn away, hiding our eyes behind our hands while the Blood Moon shines eerily above.
“Where is your brother Abel?”
“Where is your sister Pearl?
Where is your sister Ruth?
Where is your sister Katherine?
Where is your brother Heyward?
Where is your sister Celestine?
Where is your sister Geraldine?
Where is your brother Aaron?
Where is your brother Andre?
Where is your brother Margus?
Where is your sister Roberta?
“We do not know. Are we our brothers’ keeper? Are we our sisters’ keeper?”
I do not know what replacement theory is.
I don’t see color.
There were shootings in Milwaukee, too.
There was a shooting in California.
My friend is sick.
I am tired.
“What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!”
Angela Denker
Angela Denker, author of Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters who elected Donald Trump (Fortress: August 2019), is a Lutheran Pastor and veteran journalist who has written for Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post, Christian Century, and Christianity Today. She has pastored congregations in Las Vegas, Chicago, Orange County (Calif.), the Twin Cities, and rural Minnesota.
Twitter | @angela_denker
Facebook | @angeladenker1
Blog | http://agoodchristianwoman.blogspot.com
Website | https://www.angeladenker.com
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.