My Latest: 'Christian values'?

Is there such thing as an authentic Christian resistance to white Christian nationalism?

Thunder on the Left: What would it mean to take the political message of the Gospels to the streets? - The Nation

[In] a recent national survey published by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) … [respondents] were asked whether they agreed with each of five statements, such as “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society” (6 percent agreed “completely,” 14 percent “mostly”). Another was “U.S. laws should be based on Christian values” (13 percent agreed completely, 27 percent mostly)—a notion that various iconic figures in the history of the American left, from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King Jr., might well have agreed with. Which raises the question: Whose “Christian values”?

“That’s a very, very legitimate question,” Cornel West told me when I asked him about the survey. A professor of philosophy and Christian practice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City—and now a 2024 presidential candidate for the Green Party—West is perhaps the leading Christian thinker on the American left.

“Christianity is a way of life,” West said. “It’s not just a commitment to a dogma or doctrine, not just a certain attachment to values in the abstract. It cuts so much deeper than that. …”

“So you say, ‘Oh, I can see you got Christian values,’” West said. “No, I’m following this cat—who I believe was the son of God.

“The Klan wants Christian values,” West continued. “Martin Luther King does, too. So they’re both Christian nationalists? What are we really talking about?”

Dear friends,

Yes, I’m back so soon. My new feature for The Nation, reported and written in the spring, appears in the new print issue of the magazine and is available to subscribers now. It will be available to everyone next Monday, July 31, along with excerpts from my full interview with Cornel West.

The piece asks what an authentic Christian resistance to white Christian nationalism might look like. I posed this question to more than a dozen Christian thinkers, clergy, and activists—including West, Traci Blackmon, Obery M. Hendricks, Liz Theoharis, David Bentley Hart, David Gushee, Jim Wallis, Robert Ché Espinoza, and more—and asked them whether a genuinely prophetic, liberationist Christianity in this country can offer an alternative to both right-wing and mainstream liberal Christianity in America.

I’ll be back next week.

Peace,

Wen