Baptizing America
How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism
By Brian Kaylor and Beau Underwood
Chalice Press, 264 pages, $21.99
This title made me groan. Perhaps it made you groan also. But reading this book by two mainline Protestant pastors was for me a helpful and even hopeful exercise.
Like many of us in the Episcopal Church and other mainline denominations, Kaylor and Underwood are highly critical of Christian nationalism. After all, Christian nationalism demands that Christianity be privileged by the state; it implies that to be a good American, one must be a Christian. It seeks to establish a social order in which Christians control the levers of power and others are limited to subservient roles.
A proliferating literature investigates and criticizes Christian nationalism as it appears under many labels. What makes Baptizing America a distinctive contribution is the authors’ assertion that Christian nationalism is not limited to white evangelicals and Pentecostals, or to recent decades. They argue convincingly that it has been popular among mainline Christians for a long time and remains so today. Few mainline believers are utterly free from its manifestations. Many remain unaware of our complicity. Even in the Episcopal Church.
Kaylor and Underwood helped me see that Christian nationalism must appear on the same list as racism, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other such sins that scar our personal lives and the public life of the nation. Mainline churches and their members cannot simply call out Christian nationalism when others support it. Our hearts and our ranks must be starting places for sincere and informed repentance on our parts. Only then can we hope that our protests will be respected by others. We must take the log out of our own eye.
Baptizing America presents valuable history lessons about how mainline Protestants have brought church to state and state to church in ways that diminished the gospel, injured democracy, and sidelined non-Christian citizens. Many of these historical accounts are not widely known.
For example, the United States Constitution famously makes no mention of God. The Confederate States of America, established to defend a slave economy, produced a constitution that mentions God. Sparked by a letter from a Northern Baptist pastor, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase, an Episcopalian raised in his teenage years by his uncle, an Episcopal bishop, promoted the placement of a religious motto on U.S. coinage as a Union response to the Confederate constitution: thus “In God We Trust” appeared on the two-cent piece in 1864.
Not everyone approved. The New York Times criticized “the enactment of this new form of national worship” as “improper.” The editorial added, “Let us try to carry our religion—such as it is—in our hearts, and not in our pockets.”
Almost a century later, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was published in 1952. It was a predecessor of the New Revised Standard Version now widely used in Episcopal churches. Both translations were projects of the National Council of Churches.
Representatives of the council visited the White House to present President Harry Truman with the very first copy of the RSV. Truman expressed thanks for the gift, but his comments focused on the Bible as a resource for America to fight the Cold War, rather than as God’s message of peace for all the nations of the earth.
In confronting Christian nationalism, where is hope — a reasonable, just, and holy hope — to be found? In their final paragraph, Brian Kaylor and Beau Underwood point to such hope as they ask God to bless something greater than one country rather than another.
“We find Christian Nationalism abhorrent not because we lack appreciation for the privilege of living in the United States and the ideals to which this country aspires but because we are Christians who see its devastating effects on the body of Christ. If we truly believe that Jesus is the Lord of lords and God is sovereign over all the nations, then the ideology of Christian Nationalism must be false. We want to see Christians get their priorities straight. We believe that the future of both the Church and the nation depends on it. May God bless not a single country but all of creation. Amen.”