Some might say the greatest threat to American democracy today is increasing polarization. Others might point to the rising national debt or Islamic terrorism. Still, there are bipartisan concerns about the recent electoral victories of the Democratic Socialists of America, who openly champion abolishing the Senate and Supreme Court, getting rid of prisons, and defunding the defense department. It may be more difficult than it seems to pin down the single greatest threat to the American political order.
According to Congressman Jared Huffman, who represents California’s Second Congressional District, America faces a singularly ominous challenge: Christian nationalism. His view, according to his book, No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy from Christian Nationalism, is that Christian nationalism is “a fascist specter with disturbing parallels to Europe of the late 1920s and 1930s” (186). He repeatedly describes it as “the most dangerous political movement in the country” (96). His tone is ominous.
Huffman, a self-described secular humanist, often points to his upbringing in a fringe offshoot of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as giving him insight into the thinking of all conservative evangelicals and Roman Catholics. Readers looking for a reliable guide to America’s religious and political landscape will come away disappointed by Huffman’s reliance on caricatures and philosophical inconsistencies.
Broad Brushes
The book’s foreword, written by Huffman’s fellow Congressional Freethought Caucus member Jamie Raskin, a Maryland representative, promises to “never to vilify, ridicule, or embarrass religious people, religious beliefs, or religious communities” (xiv).
Readers looking for a reliable guide to America’s religious and political landscape will come away disappointed by Huffman’s reliance on caricatures and philosophical inconsistencies.
Huffman fails to meet this standard. In the opening chapter, he celebrates his public mockery of an evangelical congressman’s belief in Scripture’s authority.
Later on, he ridicules House Speaker Mike Johnson’s declaration that he bases his worldview off the Bible. There’s certainly room for debate about the Speaker’s leadership or policy preferences, but Huffman ignores the fact that worldview language has been common among evangelicals for decades. As he accuses Johnson of trying to usher in “medieval Christian tyranny,” he ignores that Johnson spent years as a litigator fighting for religious liberty for all (120).
The most frustrating aspect of the author’s approach is the broad-brush way he assigns the term “Christian nationalism.” According to Huffman, Christian nationalism includes everyone from Mike Pompeo to Dr. Phil, who admit their religious beliefs influence their political choices. It includes chaplains who conduct bipartisan Bible studies in state capitols and the millions of devout evangelicals who pray, worship Christ, and vote according to their values.
These mischaracterizations happen at many levels. For example, Huffman declares that “the Christian School movement” and the “parental rights movement” are based on Christian reconstructionism (60. 149). No doubt some Christian reconstructionists are involved with these movements, but Huffman’s accusations amount to mere Bulverism.
Logical Flaws
In many cases, Huffman’s accusations are easily falsifiable. For instance, he describes Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, as a “full throttle Christian nationalist” who saw ecumenism as “a Trojan horse for doctrinal compromise” (20).
Yet Falwell cofounded the Moral Majority with Catholic activist Paul Weyrich and Jewish leader Howard Phillips. Falwell often bragged about the breadth of his political coalition. The idea that he was a theocratic reconstructionist intent on replacing the Constitution with a sectarian theocracy is ahistorical.
In one bizarre statement, Huffman declares that “Ronald Reagan galloped into Washington with a posse of fundamentalists” (19). Reagan won 44 states in 1980 and 49 states in 1984. If his majority coalition was a “posse of fundamentalists,” it was an exceedingly large one that included roughly 25 percent of Democrats and a majority of the overall population.
Huffman’s thesis is plagued by inconsistencies. He pleads for pluralism yet defends pro-Palestinian demonstrators who harassed Jewish students at Ivy League colleges. Huffman often laments that evangelical churches are overtly political on Sunday, with little evidence offered. Yet he lauds progressive churches who use their pulpits to underscore progressive political talking points.
Huffman asserts that science and reason alone offer a better alternative to religious principles for political advocacy and policy making. Yet he assumes the appropriateness of abortion and transgenderism, both of which ignore genuine scientific inquiry in favor of ideology. He fails to recognize the first principles of his humanism that shape the way he sees the world.
He calls for robust debate within the public square and yet laments that conservative Christians have the audacity to bring their deeply held beliefs to the table. Huffman’s not looking for a naked public square, just one that excludes ideas that conflict with his philosophical commitments.
Liberty Undermined
Perhaps most significantly, No Prophets violates its own terms of engagement by interweaving religion and politics. Huffman is a congressman arguing for a less religious and more secular America. His argument is that reason alone can provide the moral architecture for democracy, yet this a fundamentally religious argument. This is why his book isn’t persuasive.
Moreover, when we look carefully at the fabric of Western culture, it’s impossible to miss the way basic ideas like the existence of human rights are borrowed from Christian assumptions about the human person.
Huffman’s not looking for a naked public square, just one that excludes ideas that conflict with his philosophical commitments.
By any reasonable definition, I’m not a Christian nationalist. As a Baptist, I believe a state church isn’t only a bad idea; it’s an unbiblical idea. It isn’t the role of the government to compel belief, nor has God tasked bureaucrats with separating sheep and goats. Yet I can see that even the least religious Founders understood the necessity of a thick Christianity that serves as a guardrail to liberty.
A chorus of cranks and crackpots misapply Jesus’s teachings in the public square on the political right and the left. However, the answer isn’t to filter Christianity out of public debate. Instead, we need consistent, faithful gospel preaching that helps Christians resist the dangerous ideologies of the age, and we need sober, thoughtful public theology that helps Christians properly steward their citizenship in the 21st century.
The 20th century showed us that societies bereft of Christianity’s influence aren’t havens of freedom. When Christianity recedes, what fills that moral vacuum is often worse, leading to injustice, poverty, and despair. I disagree profoundly with Congressman Huffman’s case for secularism; however, I’m grateful for a country that allows him to make it. Ironically, the moral architecture for that freedom has roots in the very Christian influence he seems to despise.
No Prophets claims to argue against Christian nationalism, but it’s really an attempt to exclude nonprogressive reasoning from the public square.
The Gospel Coalition