#nemek talks about: christian nationalism

[rosennemek]

rosenrambles, 12-22-24

So begins one of the text post series I'll be doing on this blog, dedicated to random bits of personal thoughts or musings that pop into my mind. Perhaps one day myself or someone else will compile them into a piece of literature, but for now they will remain disconnected blocks of text. To kick the series off, I thought I'd begin with a topic that'll certainly return in this series:

When Christian Nationalism Ceases to be Christian

Let me preface by saying: Christianity and Christian Nationalism are fundamentally incompatible. The teachings of the Bible and the policies adopted by Christian Nationalists are impossible to reconcile; the Christian Nationalists simply delude themselves into believing they can have both. If these so-called Christian Nationalists truly believe in the textual literalism of the New Testament of the scriptures, then a piece of literature that proclaims policies of inclusion and community are inherently contradictory to the Christian Nationalists' beliefs in singularity and harm. So take this as a disclaimer that when I say "Christian Nationalism ceases to be Christian", I do not mean that Christian Nationalism was ever Christian in the first place.

No; what I mean by my header of Christian Nationalism ceasing to be Christian is that the facade can and does occasionally drop. Because of the incompatibility of true Christianity and "Christian Nationalists", their behavior will reach a point where they can no long cover their bigoted words and actions under the guise of religion. Just yesterday, my parents announced they would be forfeiting going to their usual Sunday church service to attend an alt-right convention where famous conservative thought leaders and politicians would be speaking at. My first thought was: alright, so your cult of conservatism has officially crossed the line and become more important to you than maintaining the facade of faith. You're abandoning your religious practices in favor of seeing a politician? That's a dangerous new low. The illegitimacy of their church attendance or whether or not you believe it's important anyway is irrelevant here. What matters is the fact that for so long, you have made the effort to regularly attend church services to maintain the appearance of piety. But now, you've been put into a situation where you had to chose between penance or politics, and you chose your nationalism without second thought. So now we lose the balancing act and they fall onto one side, which also displays just how far from true Christianity they are and where their hearts truly lie. This post is already far longer than I wanted the initial entry to this series to be so I won't be tackling the contentious differences between true and false Christianities, but I did want to make the point that 1.) Christian Nationalism and Christianity are textually incompatible and 2.) it is possible to catch people in their lies and observe the curtains being pulled up. Perhaps in a future entry I'll cover the aftermath of that curtain call, but for now I just wanted to get those thoughts off my chest.