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[post_date] => 2021-03-11 18:16:11
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[post_content] => 'God and country' has become a toxic mix in the United States. Can they be uncoupled?
I was a graduate student in California when I realized that some white American evangelicals decouple their authoritarian views from the type of jingoistic American Christianity that rose to prominence during the early Cold War. I no longer considered myself evangelical by then, but I didn’t tell most of my family, and I still attended church occasionally, particularly when I visited my parents in Indiana. During a conversation about the “God and country” fusion I grew up with (it is now widely called Christian nationalism), my dad said, “You know, you might be surprised, but Pastor Matt* is very critical of all that God and country stuff. For him, God should absolutely come first, and it’s idolatrous to put the nation on the same level.”
I’ve been thinking about what my dad said that day in light of the response from “respectable” evangelicals to the prominent role Christian nationalists played in the January 6 insurrection, in which evangelicals carrying “Jesus 2020” banners and Christian flags participated alongside overt white supremacists displaying Confederate and Nazi symbols. Instead of asking why the vast majority of white evangelicals have so readily made common cause with white nationalists throughout the Trump years, up to and including the events of January 6, respectable evangelical commentators have now chosen to focus on Christian nationalism, full stop, as the problem that needs addressing in evangelical communities. Conveniently, this allows them to avoid looking deeper at the authoritarian theology that upholds the systemic racism, sexism, and anti-LGBTQ animus underlying evangelicalism.
Not too long before that conversation with my dad, I walked out of one of Pastor Matt’s sermons when he sneeringly equated Islam with terrorism. I was thus surprised to hear that the pastor wasn’t all-in for God and country jingoism. This was, after all, post-9/11 America, when the Bush administration encouraged evangelicals “to deepen their faith’s embrace of nationalism and American exceptionalism,” according to Anthea Butler, who is an associate professor of religious studies and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She describes the period between 9/11 and the election of Barack Obama in her new book, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, as a time in which “the seeds of that racialization [of Islam] were planted.”
From my personal perspective, it certainly was odd to see a display of brazen Islamophobia, which was simultaneously a clear expression of xenophobia, from a pastor who reportedly scoffed at patriotic sentiment. Today, it seems to me that some evangelicals are focusing on the Christian nationalism of their coreligionists precisely as a means of obscuring the bigotry that underscores it, which has deep roots in evangelical subculture and history. In fact, popular author and speaker Beth Moore set the tone here in response to the “Jericho March” that took place in Washington on December 12, 2020, tweeting, “I have never seen anything in these United States of America I found more astonishingly seductive & dangerous to the saints of God than Trumpism. This Christian nationalism is not of God. Move back from it.” In a subsequent tweet, she called Christian Trump support “idolatry.” Moore recently announced she is leaving the Southern Baptist Convention, although she apparently remains a conservative evangelical.
While we will have to wait and see how far Moore’s convictions may ultimately carry her, attempts to address the harm done by conservative Christianity are bound to fail if they only address expressions of nationalism. One can see the weakness of this approach in Bonnie Kristian’s February 25 column for Christianity Today titled, “Are Christian Schools Training Christians or Americans?”
The column responds to an article of mine for Religion Dispatches, in which I point that out that many of the Capitol invaders, including the notorious Proud Boys, were animated by ideology that was recognizably evangelical. My argument is that Christian schools, Christian homeschooling, and evangelical churches can and often do foster extremism and radicalization. Kristian admits there is some truth to the claim and argues that Christian schools should address the issue by eliminating the widespread practice of reciting three pledges every morning—to the American flag, the Christian flag, and the Bible. Because public schools also instill nationalism with daily recitations of the pledge of allegiance to the American flag, however, she sees them as no better on this front than Christian schools.
In my view, eliminating the practice of pledging in schools—public or private, sectarian or secular—would be a good thing. I don’t think that children should become pawns in their parents’ disagreements about the meaning of patriotism, or that children who feel uncomfortable reciting pledges should be made to choose between participating in the ritual or feeling alienated from their peers. But the issues with evangelical and fundamentalist schools, which are usually called Christian schools or Christian academies, run so much deeper. For starters, the isolation of children in an ideologically homogeneous conservative Christian environment is harmful.
In Christian schools, students are taught that the schools’ prescribed understanding of Christianity is the absolute truth and that it is their duty to help their community gain the political power to “make the nation obedient to God” in accordance with “the biblical worldview.” In other words, they are taught to reject pluralism and to pursue social domination, imposing their sectarian standards of morality on others, primarily by banning abortion and depriving members of the LGBTQ community of rights. Likewise, Christian schools frequently make headlines for racist incidents, which do not arise in a vacuum. Strikingly, Kristian’s article does not once mention the terms “white,” “race,” or “racism.”
Public schools have their flaws, but they are better suited than their Christian counterparts in preparing children to embrace pluralism and diversity. A healthy democratic society is one composed of people who respect the dignity and human rights of those who are different from them. Exposure to diverse ideas and views helps children develop their own personalities and strengths and values. In Christian schools, children are forced to accept “alternative facts” about science and history, and to conform to ideologies that may negate their identities, which can result in trauma and long-term psychological damage (see also: queer people in evangelical environments). On this point I would direct readers to the work of journalist Rebecca Klein, who describes the Abeka and Bob Jones textbooks commonly used in Christian schools as having “overtones of nativism, militarism and racism.” Klein notes, for example, that the textbooks represent Nelson Mandela as a “Marxist agitator” and denounce the “radical affirmative action” of post-apartheid South Africa, in addition to downplaying the harm and long-term consequences of slavery in America.
Cindy Wang Brandt, an author, parenting expert, and ex-evangelical, was educated at a Christian missionary school in Taiwan. She sees a direct connection between conservative, mostly white evangelicalism and the colonialism and systemic racism that she experienced as a Taiwanese child in a Christian school. Brandt contends that it is impossible to separate the way Christianity is taught from the culture and unconscious biases of those who are teaching it. In practice, Christian teachings and interpretations of the Bible “are delivered by human beings enveloped and shaped by their cultural influences,” she says. Brandt believes it is possible for parents to teach children their religion without indoctrinating or coercing them; in fact, she considers indoctrination to be spiritual abuse. But Christian schools are sites of indoctrination, whereas formal education, according to Brandt, should “give a child tools to investigate the world and to find their place in it with their own agency.”
Reflecting on her experience in the missionary school, Brandt writes that she was taught “to become fearful of [her] own culture.”
I was taught to reject our dearly held values of respecting our elders, with Scriptures quoting Jesus saying we should reject our mother and our father. I was evangelized with the gospel of Jesus Christ by white Americans. When they taught us things of the Christian faith, it was always this is what it means to be Christian, without any acknowledgement that perhaps some of their values have been influenced by white American culture. The result is that I grew to understand that to be white is to be godly, and vice versa. My own culture was colonized out of me as a child taught to follow Jesus Christ.
If “respectable” evangelicals want to engage in good faith with people like me, who have left the fold and who write critically about the Christian education we received, they must grapple honestly with the deeper issues of supremacism, racism, misogyny and anti-LGBTQ animus that underlie the Christian nationalism we all saw at the January 6 insurrection. Even if a large number of evangelical pastors and educators were willing to confront superficial expressions of nationalism in their communities, the deeper biases and supremacist theology that animates these communities would remain. Addressing those issues is going to take more than hand-wringing about white Christian Trump support or giving up the practice of pledging allegiance to the American flag.
* Name changed.
[post_title] => Christian symbols at the Capitol insurrection ignited a debate among American evangelicals
[post_excerpt] => Instead of asking why the vast majority of white evangelicals have so readily made common cause with white nationalists throughout the Trump years, up to and including the events of January 6, respectable evangelical commentators have now chosen to focus on Christian nationalism, full stop, as the problem that needs addressing in evangelical communities.
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Chicago FeelTank Parade of the Politically Depressed on July 25, 2006.[/caption]
A few months ago, I heard about a Feel Tank Toronto event at which the participants sang pop songs, repeating the line 
From Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's exhibition "Errata" at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona.[/caption]
Azoulay posits that the use of this violent photographic shutter stretches back to 1492, a moment of imperial Spanish colonization of the Americas, the start of the international global slave trade to make this possible and the obliteration of Judeo-Muslim culture through Inquisition decrees. This history also includes the devastation of the Caribbean’s indigenous Taíno people’s politics and culture in 1514; the ruination of the nonfeudal cocitizenship system of the Igabo people in West Africa; the 1872 Crémiuex decree that gave French citizenship to Jewish Algerians but withheld it from Muslims, a divide-and-conquer strategy with ramifications that are felt to this day; and the ongoing ravaging of Palestinian politics and culture since the early 1900s. In this connected schema of colonial destruction and erasure paired with institutionalization and documentation, the concept of history is premised on the ideas of discovery and progress. Each colonial regime “discovered” new artworks and exhibited them in new museums; they documented dispossessed people with the new label of “refugees” and imposed new cultural practices and political institutions premised on the undoing of previous indigenous norms and knowledge.
Potential history is positioned as a means of addressing these historical damages by imaginatively reactivating the memories and potentialities shut off by the imperialist photograph and its material positioning. Azoulay describes “rehearsal methods” for how we can question and begin to undo these structures. One strategy is the act of revising imperial photos through annotation, including notes, comments and modified captions that challenge the histories they describe. When these interventions are rejected by the archives that own the legal rights to the photos, Azoulay redraws the photographs herself.
Another rehearsal method is the idea of striking, found in short chapters that imagine museum workers, photographers and historians going on strike. The idea of striking until our world is repaired means saying no to the relentless new of history. It does not aim to substitute an alternative history or fill museums with new objects, but rather to reject their logic and promote its active unlearning. Azoulay underlines these and other rehearsals as modes of practicing new forms of co-citizenry and solidarity based on critical looking. “Unlearning imperialism,” she writes, “means aspiring to be there for and with others targeted by imperial violence, in such a way that nothing about the operation of the shutter can ever again appear neutral.”
“Being there” is a moment of radical solidarity in which one aspires to listen to those affected by such violence and question the flow of history that imperial institutions strive to promote as casual and natural. This includes recognizing the role of looted objects and their role in building imperial ideas, but also reclaiming them as means to enact other modes of being, such as thinking of them not as protected “art” but as part of people’s real material worlds.
Azoulay also listens to new melodies that arise from such sites of imperial documentation. She recounts the story of her own Algerian father moving to Israel as a child and trying to forget his native Arabic—because in Israel, the European elite actively condemned its use and promoted Hebrew. She first learned that her grandmother’s name was the Arabic Aïsha, the name of the Prophet Mohamed’s third wife, when she saw her father’s birth certificate after he died. Plucked from this imperial document, the name was a “treasure” in her Hebrew-speaking, Jewish-Israeli family; she sought to use it as a site of imagination by adopting it as her own—in addition to her Hebrew name, Ariella. Azoulay speaks of Aïsha as a haunting scream: Aïsha, Aïsha, Aïeeeeeeee-shaaaaaaaa.
Azoulay further demonstrates photographs and documents as dual sites of violence and resistance with images taken by the Civil War photographer Timothy O’Sullivan in 1862. One of his iconic images shows eight Black people standing stiffly near a large house persistently labeled as the “J.J. Smith Plantation.” These words make it clear that the people in the photograph are racialized property. She describes how this violence is repeated in historical archives, in which photographs of Black people taken before and after the Civil War are interchangeably captioned as depicting slaves; she proposes the imagining of a “dismissed exposure,” or ghostly negative of a forgotten image reinserted into the frame. The original image becomes blurred and surreal as it competes with sculptures from the MoMA floating in the background. Since there are no images on display in U.S. museums of Black Americans reunited with objects stolen from them, the dismissed exposure serves as an imaginative placeholder in the photographic archive. It waits for different worlds and meanings.
Potential history dwells in such creative exercises. It resists simplistic ideas of financial restitution for destroyed cultures or the mere substitution of one history for another. Instead, it advocates persistent unlearning of how the world is taught, represented and constructed; solidarity in resisting these demands; listening to those affected; and, above all, imagining. Azoulay’s book is a long (over 670 pages) and challenging read. It brings up the question of who has the resources to read it; while its ideas are currently being filtered through museum exhibitions such as the traveling , the question remains as to how this work can reach a wider and more diverse audience. If you do manage to find a copy, perhaps try following one of the more whimsical moments of the book: dip in as you please, conceiving of no beginning or end, but rather of moments that shine in “a bright, brief and sudden light” against the “dazzling” beam of imperialism.
After all of the “kings” had been “beheaded” at the intergalactic memorial carnival in Berlin, we passed around a hat, on which was written things we wanted to cherish and save. “It’s more about the spirit of hope than destruction,” laughed a person in a wooden demon mask.
[post_title] => 'Potential Histories: Unlearning Imperialism': a review of Ariella Azoulay's new book
[post_excerpt] => How the "shutter" of photography aided imperial conquest.
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