#1: We Were Christian Nationalists Once, and Young

I'm the middle child of fear and democracy;
I'm making my religion proud.

          Madison Cunningham, 'Sunshine Over the Counter'

I can just read it to you, if you’re too lazy to do it yourself:

Mark and I kept low and crept as noiselessly as possible across moonlit clearings and through wooded terrain. Our eyes scanned the field for flashlight beams, the telltale sign our Communist pursuers lurked nearby. Reaching a copse of pines and edging our way along it, we hoped to find our way to the church, which couldn’t be far away. There, with our fellow believers, we could rest, safe from those who relentlessly stalked us.

Suddenly, over the rise to our right, two lights appeared. We flattened ourselves against the turf. From the far side of the slope two figures ascended to the crest and swept their beams from left to right. All we could make out were their silhouettes.

Even so, I could tell these two Bolsheviks were Tom and Chad. Tom was usually the silent and unassuming type, but I had to admit, he cut an imposing figure as a solider of the proletariat. For his part, Chad always seemed jovial and easygoing. In fact, just a week before he started hunting Christians for a brutal Stalinist regime, he’d shared a Tastykake Iced Honey Bun with me at lunch time in our homeroom. That kind of generosity you don’t soon forget.

But those days were gone. Old alliances had crumbled the minute this game of ‘Commies and Christians’ began. For the next three hours of our Christian school’s 8th grade camp, somewhere in the woodlands of the American northeast, there were no friends. There were only those with the flashlights and those of us without.

‘Commies and Christians’¹: somewhat like ‘Capture the Flag’, but with a healthy American Christian spin. The ‘Commies’ team aimed to round up all the ‘Christians’ team, one by one and two by two, and deposit them in jail – which was really just a few cones arranged in a large rectangle. The Christians’ goal was to guide the entire team safely to the cone-square ‘church’, holy ground the dark forces of Marxism couldn’t penetrate. The Commies carried those flashlights. The Christians carried nothing but their guile and perseverance and the strength of the Lord.

Of course, after those three hours running through fields and forests, we’d all return to life as usual. Yet we were meant to learn this vital truth: we should never take the freedoms we enjoyed for granted. Who knew when those freedoms might be snatched away and we’d find ourselves staring down the business end of some socialist persecutor’s Eveready?

And maybe even sooner than we imagined. It was 1991 and war was brewing right here on home soil.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF WAR

What kind of war would this be? Hiding out in the hills, staving off a foreign invasion using guerrilla tactics, like Patrick Swayze and Emma Thompson in Red Dawn? Nights spent tromping through ‘the shit’ with a loyal band of brothers? Riding out the nuclear winter in concrete fall-out shelters, lined wall-to-wall with canned goods and water barrels and thrift-store books and board games, eating SpaghettiOs and slowly descending into madness playing round after round of KerPlunk?

Nothing so glamorous. This wouldn’t be a war of live rounds and ordnance and jet squadrons and tank platoons. The war that was coming would be a war of ideas – ideas about what kind of nation America should be, about who and what it should worship, about how its politics and principles and legal codes should be shaped, and who should shape them, about what American families should look like.

And if that doesn’t sound like a war with high stakes, for us, it was an epic war, a holy war, even, the newest front in a conflict stretching back to the dawn of time itself, with eternal and cosmic significance, pitting all the forces of good against all the forces of evil. This war politico Pat Buchanan would soon call a ‘war for the soul of America’ ².

We’d see this, not as a war of attack, but of defense, defending civic freedom (for us, anyway), Judeo-Christian morality and family values – and since the best defense was a strong offense, we would attack!

We would attack not with the sword but with the ‘sword of the Spirit’ and with truth. We would attack at the ballot box, casting votes like daggers into the hearts of our enemies. We would attack in the halls of Congress through lobbying and activism. We would attack through legislation. We would attack with rallies and with demonstrations. We would attack with boycotts. We would attack with bumper stickers and T-shirts and banners and slogans. We would attack with Chick-fil-A sandwiches (and of course, with waffle fries and lemonades, because, as Chick-fil-A executives would no doubt remind us, nothing sticks it to the enemies of family values like upsizing to a combo).

Over the years, an ever-expanding litany of those enemies materialized out of the fog, a nefarious collection of bad actors with increasingly sinister aims: socialists, Democrats, environmentalists, movie stars, anyone with a liberal agenda, or a feminist agenda, or a gay agenda, or a secular agenda, or just an agenda — and all backed in the spirit realm by a horde of demons.

On our side, opposing this evil, would stand a coalition of heroes, religious leaders, conservative politicians and talking heads, and ‘real American’ citizens. And God. And tens of thousands of angels. And Chuck Norris.

But even with such a mighty host, we would always picture ourselves as the underdogs, campaigning against adversaries with all of the advantages. Always striving to retake lost ground. Always the faithful resistance, pushing against the tide. Always the persecuted, the oppressed, one frontal assault or one flanking manouever away from disaster. But for the grace of God, all would be lost.

Which is why this war would need all of us to wage it. People like me. People like you, maybe, if you grew up as I did.

We were Christian nationalists once, and young.

BY ANY OTHER NAME

Of course, I didn’t call myself that. It was the 90s and I had never even heard the term ‘Christian nationalist’. I won’t attempt to supply you with an academic definition or explanation of Christian nationalism in these posts. Other, better writers have done that (in fact, maybe you should read them instead. We’re still less than 20 paragraphs in to this story, so the sunk cost is pretty low).³

No, these writings are simply one person’s story. They’re the story of someone who would have called himself an American patriot. They’re the story of a young man who believed America was exceptional, superior to any and every other nation; someone who thought maintaining that superiority was vital; someone who assumed God had, in some way, specially orchestrated the creation of the United States; someone who felt that holding America’s position at the pinnacle of the world demanded at least some acknowledgement of God, some adherence to (our version of) Christian principles; someone convinced a hard-line conservative vision was the only viable path forward for the country.

Hell, if that’s not Christian nationalism, what is?

How deeply I actually contemplated each of these tenets, well, who knows? One thing was certain, though: I was angry, and getting angrier. Angrier at those villains, those godless and underhanded liberal evildoers standing on the other side of the political aisle.

I was so angry that the thought of waging war against them was bait to a bloodthirsty soul. I wasn’t conscripted; I willingly volunteered. And even though this was a war of words, good God, it turned violent. There was a particular savagery in the words I would end up weaponizing, words that made it clear I had no qualms about the complete obliteration of those enemies, if necessity demanded it. Actually, I might have preferred it that way, in the end.

At least until I went AWOL, that is.

One thing was certain: I was angry, and getting angrier. Angrier at those villains, those godless and underhanded liberal evildoers standing on the other side of the political aisle. I was so angry that the thought of waging war against them was bait to a bloodthirsty soul…

At least until I went AWOL, that is.

Adam Lee Benner

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I didn’t foresee that outcome, though, as Mark and I hugged the dirt in that forest, silent as the grave, desperate to remain unseen. I could never have imagined that, before many years had passed, I would abandon the great conflict of our life and times. I would turn my back on Christian nationalism and walk away from my tribe.

For now, all I wanted was to live to fight another day, not to fall into enemy hands. Not into Tom’s and Chad’s hands, anyway. So after a whispered agreement, the two of us rose and dashed away into the distance.

Straight into the war, and eventually, out the other side.

Until next time…

May the One who is worthy of loyalty and service draw you
To forsake all other powers that would claim your allegiance.

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1. I can’t find this game anywhere on the interweb, which makes me think our teacher at the time had invented it. There are similar games out there on youth pastor websites.
2. Buchanan, Patrick J. “Address to the Republican National Convention.” August 17, 1992. Houston, TX. Text from Buchanan.org, http://buchanan.org/blog/1992-republican-national-convention-speech-148 [=A]
3. I’d recommend Kristin Kobes Du Mez and Andrew L. Whitehead.