Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates a brother or sister is still in the darkness. 1 John 2:9 (NIV)
One of the things one sees in the world, indeed at any time in human history, are ample demonstrations of hatred and love. I’m of the belief that acts of hatred far outweigh acts of love by a vast margin, which is why we tend to take notice and show appreciation for what we think of as acts of love, however we define it.
Herein lies the state of things in what was created a perfect world by a God Who gave us the definition of love. Mankind has perverted this definition to the point that even acts of violence and hatred can now be included in this definition, with some degree of comfort from certain quarters that call themselves Christian.
Worldwide, acts of violence in the name of religion is nothing new. In recent times, especially since 9/11, we have seen conspicuous crimes around the world that have taken the lives of countless thousands of people in the name of Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, and other faiths but in a country like the United States, which has represented itself for the last 400-plus years as having been founded upon Christian ideals, these have recently become a new and, to many, concerning aspect of the faith.
One really must have a grasp of American history back to its earliest European-influenced days in the 16th and 17th centuries to get an idea of just how Christian our foundation really is. What most of us have grown up with is an idealized myth that has been passed down from generation to generation and was not believed by the founding fathers that we have placed on pedestals since our grade school days.
The Constitution is a priceless gem of wisdom designed to accommodate a developing nation for the ages, and the framers knew it. As a result, they built in ways to adapt to changing times and attitudes without, for better or worse, the man-made judgment of religions to interfere with the laws that had been developed. Sometimes, acts of violence come with the territory because that is the nature of mankind.
After I graduated from college, I became a naval officer for a few years and swore to uphold that same Constitution. I still take it seriously. In the early to mid-1980s, it was a heady time for members of all the military branches to be in action, especially if we were going to be building up “Reagan’s Navy”—a fleet of 600 ships—to defeat the Soviet Union which was our greatest threat at the time.
Proxy wars were all the rage and we would take on the Soviets every chance we had. Since I was on an aircraft carrier, we were often shadowed by a Soviet ship or an airplane. Religion had nothing to do with the Constitution we were out defending back then, any more than it does now. The Cold War, as it was known as then, used religion as a convenient front for comparison against the atheist communists that we were up against. Other than that, it bore little meaning in the day to day lives of sailors at sea.
The point here is that as in any kind of warfare, it requires a kind if hatred. That hatred which takes upon itself a prejudiced hostility or animosity, usually mutually felt by the object of the hatred, which then results in an extreme response.
In my experience, the Cold War was a calculated, disciplined, if constantly threatening state of affairs conducted by superpowers who were capable of destroying everything. We made gestures that we were able to do this for decades and threatened to do so—Mutually Assured Destruction, we called it—but we held off until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. History isn’t taught this way in K-12 schools anymore. Hatred and religion were part and parcel of how we saw the fight back then. Godless communists were going to win, if we didn’t force them out of existence, because our cause was inherently good. God was on our side.
America as a nation was founded because God wanted it that way, and many in the 21st Century American church will tell you that from the first European settlers to this very day, it has been our destined, God-given purpose to lead the world to Him, through us. The people that believe this belong to a group of Christian evangelicals referred to by different names but most frequently by the name Christian Nationalist. Some use the pejorative White Christian Nationalist because the loudest, and most frequent, speakers for this cause happen to be Caucasian. Many attended the January 6, 2021 insurrection at our nation’s capital.
To be clear, even with a built in protection against religious prejudices in the U.S. Constitution, religious bigotry was the first thing to come ashore with the Europeans when they set foot on our shores in Plymouth. It is why they came. The smallpox was incidental. Christian nationalism has always been part of our history, along with its ugliest attitudes and behaviors, going back to the first colonials in New England. Their philosophy spread along with the other viruses they brought.
So here we are 400 years later and this philosophy has re-emerged at the forefront of our political discourse. Merging politics and a fringe, even cultic, religion based on the worst aspects of American behaviors and prejudices, Christian Nationalism seeks once again to dominate politics in Washington and elsewhere by seeking new enemies of the state.
Who are the 21st century Enemies of the State to the Christian Nationalist? Are you? Perhaps I am for writing an opinion piece about them.
Dr. Paul Miller, a Georgetown University professor of global politics and security stated for Christianity Today that, “in past generations, to the extent that the United States had a quasi-established official religion of Protestantism, it did not respect true religious freedom. Worse, the United States and many individual states used Christianity as a prop to support slavery and segregation.”
Ironically, when one looks up hatred online these days, you are most likely to see it allude to racial hatred more than anything else. In America it is not terribly surprising.
After 9/11, we directed this towards people of the Islamic faith for a while, and fought a long war in he Middle East as a result. This did not change, in any significant way, how we treated other marginalized people, no matter how long the issues that marginalized them remained unaddressed. We keep returning to them, time and again.
Wokeness is a new thing to hate, especially now. Marginalization is something to be mainstreamed against the last vestiges of Christianity, just like atheism tried to be mainstreamed against it a generation ago. They are all still around, at war in a chaotic world.
No religious scripture gives a definitive definition of hatred. The only clear definition of love I am satisfied with comes from The Holy Bible, and I think the whole world would do well to govern itself by its tenets:
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 (NIV)
Knowing, as I do, that God is love and He sent His Son Jesus to die as a sacrifice for all of our sins, even our worst, one must wonder: would He be welcomed or recognized in a 21st Century church run by Christian Nationalists?
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