Note: I have been giving versions of my talk on democracy since 2022. Call this one version 5.0. It was presented on October 6 at the gorgeous Sacred Heart Cultural Arts Center in Augusta, Georgia. My host was the Progressive Religious Coalition of Augusta, a fine group of public-minded folks in that grand old city.
The title given for this event was: Christian Nationalism: Compromising Both Church and State. I am going to tell a story that affirms what you probably expect with a title like that but offers a broader framing, and that includes challenges for those of us who decidedly do not identify with Christian nationalism.
1. Let’s begin 70 years ago with the birth of what I want to call Modern Religious liberalism.
Let your mind go back to the mid to late 1950s or at least to the early 1960s. (It’s easier for some of us than others, I know.) America began a visible splitting that broke up what had at least seemed like a broad cultural religious and values consensus in Eisenhower era America.
–Began with Brown v Board of Education (1954) and the Supreme Court’s demand that public schools be desegregated. This was the product of long, hard labors by lawyers such as Thurgood Marshall and organizations such as the NAACP. It initiated a ferocious fight that took 15 years or so and in some ways has never really ended. It became part of the broader story of the Civil Rights Movement which took a major leap that same year with the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the leadership of young Martin Luther King, Jr. Well, you were either for or against the CRM. For white folks, there were early adopters, middle adopters, late adopters, and non-adopters. I want to identify strong advocacy and especially involvement in the CRM as being part of the very birth of modern religious left liberalism.
–In the early 1960s the Supreme Court voted to ban school-sponsored prayer and Bible reading in the public schools, out of deference to religious liberty concerns and the separation of church and state. This decision came as a shock to many conservative Christians and their communities. Those religious folks who supported those decisions and the spirit behind them can be identified as part of the religious left movement.
–In 1965 an immigration reform act was passed that opened immigration to the US radically. It ended quotas that since the 1920s had heavily favored Northern and Western Europeans and explicitly discriminated against Asians, Africans, and Southern/Eastern Europeans. Pure racism. It led to a massive rise in immigration from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. This changed the religious and ethnic makeup of the US with effects to this day. Religious liberals tend to be people who supported this immigration reform and are comfortable and even celebratory of the more ethnically and religiously diverse country that we now have.
–In the 1960s the women’s rights movement picked up fresh steam in a new wave of what is sometimes called Second Wave Feminism. Betty Friedan’s 1963 Feminine Mystique book was pivotal. NOW was founded. The civil rights act of 1964, Title 7, banned sex discrimination in employment. Women entered the workforce in larger numbers. The idea of male dominance in society and marriage was challenged and, it seemed, largely defeated. Religious liberals supported the women’s movement.
–One of the fruits of the women’s movement was the national legalization of abortion in the 1973 Roe v Wade decision. This decision was the result of careful strategizing on the part of the women’s movement and other advocates and found a favorable hearing in the Supreme Court. The three-trimester paradigm for adjudicating abortion access was debated but the general idea that women should have the right to determine whether to end their pregnancies was widely accepted and was the principle of the law now. Religious liberals tend to support the Roe decision and abortion rights.
–The sexual revolution spread during this period. Women’s empowerment was part of it, but so was a general loosening up of sexual mores, a delinking of sex and marriage, and the advent and availability of safe, effective birth control — which itself required a SCOTUS decision in 1972. Divorce rates doubled in a decade and divorce laws changed to become no-fault. Eventually LGBTQ+ people began demanding equal access to marriage and to church and society’s acceptance. This was a longer fight that appeared to culminate in 2015 Obergefell decision. In general, religious liberals were supportive of a less puritanical cultural attitude toward sex, and of the availability of birth control, and of gay rights — though the latter was a very long journey.
–The attack on poverty and economic injustice, and the demand for policies aimed at uplifting the poor, was symbolized by the Great Society program. Much of it failed, but still the 1960s saw the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. Religious liberals tended to be all in favor of these programs and all such efforts to create more economic justice.
–The Vietnam War drove a terrible wedge in US society, with opposition growing since the mid 1960s. Meanwhile fear of nuclear Armageddon was realistic, especially clear after the close call of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Religious liberals positioned themselves, generally, in opposition to the Vietnam War and for a nuclear freeze and eventual nuclear disarmament.
–Finally, scientific alarm about environmental distress began intensifying in the same period, kickstarted by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. Government policymakers began debating and passing environmental laws for clean water, land, and air. The first Earth Day was in 1970. Not long after, scientists began warning about climate change. Religious liberals positioned themselves in strong support of environmentalism.
Raise your hand if this set of commitments tracks rather closely with your own?
2. But alas, no good deed goes unpunished, so in response to these social changes a Christian Right movement was born.
Different figures in the Christian right emphasized different issues at different times. But in general, they reverse-mirrored the religious liberals. Everything I just described, they took the opposite side.
–It began with Brown v Board of Education (1954) and the Supreme Court’s demand that public schools be desegregated. The ferocious fight against school desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement was often led by Christian preachers and activists, many from the South, sometimes with straightforward anti-equality messages and sometimes with more subtlety.
–In the early 1960s the Supreme Court voted to ban school-sponsored prayer and Bible reading in the public schools, out of deference to religious liberty concerns and the separation of church and state. This decision came as a shock to many conservative Christians and their communities, and they resented them greatly. I can say from living in the small town south than even now these decisions are often ignored, and the exact boundaries of what can and can’t be done are the constant subject of cultural and legal battles. Christian Right ascendancy means as much of a rollback as possible.
–In 1965 an immigration reform act was passed that opened immigration to the US radically. While not all Christian Right folks have taken an anti-immigrant position, it is ascendant since Trump, who has helped to valorize an ethno-nationalism that was once viewed on the conservative Christian side as impolite or even, dare we say it, unchristian.
–In the 1960s the women’s rights movement picked up fresh steam. The Christian Right positioned itself in opposition to most aspects of the women’s movement, and an ascendant patriarchalism by theory and practice is with us today.
–One of the fruits of the women’s movement was the national legalization of abortion in the 1973 Roe v Wade decision. Probably the central official goal of the Christian Right was the overturning of Roe, which was finally accomplished in 2022 with justices appointed by Donald Trump the decisive factor. I would argue that the failure of earlier GOP presidents to achieve this helped sour Christian Right support for them, while Trump’s appointees doing this helped cement their support for him.
–The sexual revolution spread during this period. The Christian Right has opposed the sexual revolution, teaching that sex belongs only in heterosexual marriage. Opposition to divorce on the Christian Right has weakened, opposition to gay rights had weakened a bit but is now strengthening again. The Anti-Trans cause is the cause du jour, and it is fierce.
–The attack on poverty and economic injustice, and the demand for policies aimed at uplifting the poor, was symbolized by the Great Society program. The Christian Right generally aligned with the conservative low tax, low regulation, small government ethos of the GOP and has not generally offered strong support for social safety net spending.
–The Vietnam War drove a terrible wedge in US society, with opposition growing since the mid 1960s. Meanwhile fear of nuclear Armageddon was realistic. The Christian Right was generally pro-Vietnam War, anti-nuclear-freeze and disarmament, more hawkish and nationalistic.
–Finally, scientific alarm about environmental distress began intensifying in the same period. When the GOP decided to be anti-environmentalist, they had full Christian Right support, for various reasons, including pure partisanship, bad apocalyptic theology, and distrust of science.
3. Sixty Years Of Fighting –We Used to Think It Was Hard
For sixty years, these competing visions have been battling it out in religious communities and in the public square. I have spent my 30+ year career in the middle of many of these fights. It has been challenging. It has been exhausting. But it has until recently occurred within the recognizable boundaries of religious community and democratic deliberation. What I mean is that while it wasn’t fun to have these arguments all the time, we knew what the rules were. We knew how the game was played. You had debates in churches and denominations, you had debates in Congress, and votes were taken, and someone won and someone lost and regrouped to fight another day.
Let’s take just a moment and say that if you have made the arguments and fought the good fight for a religious-left vision, we are on the same team, though some nuances and differences that we could talk about on a different day. Feel proud of the side that I think does have the moral high ground on almost every point.
Let’s call this the era of polarization within liberalism; by that I mean within the boundaries of classic liberal moral and political theory and the longstanding institutions that instantiated those boundaries – church decision making structures and local, state, and federal government. Those institutions sometimes were frustrating, and sometimes our side lost, but most of the time they worked and most everybody agreed to play by the rules.
4. But: The Rise of Postliberalism/Illiberalism
Let’s define illiberalism as a political movement that undermines liberal democratic principles – it’s the hollowing out of an existing liberal democracy from within. People turn to illiberalism when they feel that liberal democracy isn’t protecting their identity, their security, their prosperity, or their future – and when ambitious leaders seize that mood to win power and then, if successful, to consolidate it – often at the expense of democracy itself.
Friends, this is NOW. This is where we are.
But we are so polarized, we can’t even agree who is responsible for the illiberal turn that is threatening our social cohesion, peace, and democracy itself.
I tell you the story that I have been telling. The fundamental problem is Christian Nationalism, as others call it; I prefer Authoritarian Reactionary Christianity. This is Christian Right reaction + authoritarianism and it is now in power at the federal level and in numerous states.
The US president, whose base of support rests principally on Christian Right folks, has begun executing elements of an illiberal/authoritarian playbook. He has been centralizing vast powers in the presidency, weakening checks and balances, inflaming cultural grievances and divisions, eroding individual rights and freedoms, and essentially attempting to roll back not just all the legislative gains I described above but also attempting to weaken or destroy those outposts of culture which still hold to progressive values.
As of now, Fall 2025, authoritarian consolidation is a much more significant issue than the old Left vs. Right arguments about policies and values. This is about democracy itself. And it’s about a culture of free expression.
5. But—They say It’s Left Illiberalism that is the problem!
In an October 4 column in the New York Times, conservative columnist Ross Douthat makes the best case I have seen for Left Illiberalism being at least an equivalent problem. I quote Douthat at length so we have to hear him out:
[Working on] understanding general developments in Western politics, as the norms of post-Cold War liberalism break down and “postliberal” tendencies take hold. These tendencies exist within both progressivism and populism — the impulse to police and censor speech, the increasing potency of identitarian appeals, the impatience with claims to neutrality and procedural fairness, the urge to reduce all politics to existential conflict.
But they take substantially different forms on the left versus the right — and those differences help explain why people on either side of the divide struggle so mightily to understand their opponents and see today’s dangers through their eyes.
The divide starts with a crucial asymmetry. In both the United States and Europe, the political right has plenty of popular support but considerably less influence inside the managerial systems through which elected officials actually exercise their power. By contrast, progressivism often starts with a weaker base of popular support — for decades, more Americans have identified as conservative than liberal — but its core believers enjoy an extraordinary advantage in the meritocratic institutions, private as well as public, that actually staff and shape the power structure.
Given this asymmetry, in an environment of increasing polarization where liberal norms are losing purchase, you would expect each side to embrace a postliberalism that plays to its distinctive strengths.
That’s exactly what has happened. Progressivism in the last 10 years has pursued increasingly radical measures through complex, indirect and bureaucratic means, using state power subtly to reshape private institutions and creating systems that feel repressive without necessarily having an identifiable repressor in chief — McCarthyisms without McCarthy, you might say.
He goes on to give examples:
The drama of postliberal progressivism, in contrast, is a drama of ideological influence and institutional power, in which activists and elites effect dramatic change outside the democratic process and then try to survive or sidestep backlash from the voters. It’s a drama where sudden changes seem to just happen — unprecedented waves of immigration on both continents, a radical shift in official American norms around race or sex, a new regime of euthanasia in Canada — without having a singular progressive leader who claims responsibility and provides the policy with a charismatic face.
The claim of the Right is that We Started It. We started the illiberalism by forcing our liberal values down the throats of everyone, and what the Right is doing is just pushing back, now using the power of the State. A lot of them would say that left-illiberalism began as far back as the 1960s, but that it had been accelerating during what they often call Peak Woke, from the mid-2010s forward.
6. Whoever Is To Blame – We are Now in a Mutual Finger-Pointing Death Spiral
The two sides of are polarity are in a vicious circle spiral in both culture and politics. We are mirroring each other in our mutual antipathy. We have reached juvenile levels of finger pointing and mutual blaming. Mutual incomprehension. Mutual loathing. Entirely different epistemologies and media feeds. Deepening social divisions with increasing threats and use of violence. It’s pathological – it’s mutual assured destruction.
7. What Do We Do?
1) First, we can continue to make a principled case and set a great example of religious left social and moral values. Go where the wells are deepest within your religious tradition to make the best case.
2) Act according to democratic principles enshrined in our Constitution. Freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, disestablishment of religion. Act to protect both church and state, both threatened individuals and institutions of culture, from authoritarian takeover, silencing, or destruction. Be an American, as that was once understood.
3) Check any illiberal tendencies that may be creeping in on you/your side/your team. Watch out for demonizing the other side. Try to retain relationships where possible. Respect the free expression of ideas you don’t agree with. Practice civil discourse and reason giving. Respect democratic norms like honoring the results of elections and rejecting any form of political coercion and violence. Acknowledge that we are a divided, diverse society, that the other 40% isn’t going away, that we are going to have to learn to bear with each other. Which brings to mind this text from Colossians 3:
12 So, as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience; 13 bearing with one another, and forgiving each other, whoever has a complaint against anyone; just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you. 14 Beyond all these things put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity. 15 Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body; and be thankful.
What this says to me is that the greatest need of this present moment, which is becoming an emergency, I think, is not to produce more religious liberal culture warriors but instead Christians and others who are (re) learning how to practice virtues like these. If we can be this, and find people on the other side are also trying to be this – and there are some – maybe we can avoid the abyss. Let us hope and pray that this is so.
