While I don’t completely understand where Christian Nationalists are coming from, I do know where they came from. Some of them, anyway.
While attending public elementary school, my weekends as a fourth grader included going to church with my grandfather, the hellfire-and-brimstone preacher with whom my single mother and I lived. It was a small Baptist church, the kind where the women kept their opinions to themselves and where questioning church doctrine was unheard of. I loved both school and Sunday school and trusted my family and my teachers equally, so it’s no surprise that when the question of the origin of the universe came up on a science quiz at school-school, my innocent, wide-eyed answer was, “God made the Big Bang.” I’ll never know why, but the teacher marked it correct and gave me an A.
By junior high school, my mother had remarried a former pastor (go figure), and I was transferred to a private Christian school. The textbooks were from Pensacola Christian College and had all the supposed answers. In (pseudo) science class, we memorized “the fallacies of science,” one being that science cannot deal with spiritual things. (Why was that again?) Carbon dating? Not valid. God simply created rocks with apparent age. (Was he trying to trick us?)
Questioning church doctrine and your elders is likened to blasphemy in many Christian circles. This level of expected obedience hinders parishioners’ ability to read the bad signs and disengage. Instead, they push down their feelings and soldier on rather than admit that they really need a new church home. Some of my fellow high school alumni are still keeping up the toxic faith of our youth and are most likely Christian nationalists, based on what I see in their Facebook feeds.
So, where are they coming from? It’s a place of trust and blind obedience. Bad leadership has led them to lose track of the main question: What would Jesus do? Sometimes, I let the music do the talking for me. Everclear sums up my feelings perfectly in their hit song “Jesus Was a Democrat”:
If Jesus was a Democrat like the Bible says he was / I don’t think he’s going to want to take the blame / For all the awful things you people do and say in his name / If Jesus was alive today, he would be sad to see / That it is no different than it used to be / Someday he’s going to call you out / I am pretty goddamned sure … / He is going to be … mad
A few of my other classmates grew up to be atheists. Me? I’m agnostic at best. If I were to take up churchgoing again, I’d start somewhere like Broadway Baptist Church (305 W Broadway Av, Fort Worth, 817-336-5761), where the pastor is currently and literally preaching to the choir.
In late July, ahead of a screening of Jesus Was a Migrant, a film shown as part of the church’s Justice in July Sunday School Series, Pastor Ryon addressed his congregation in a letter that showcases the type of leadership he provides to the community at large on the Near Southside: “Powerfully, the film confronts us with Jesus’ own migrant journey and begs the question: If Jesus were at our own border, would we let him in or turn him away, as our government did to 270,000 asylum seekers in just one day in 2025? At the heart of the film is a profound moral and theological crisis facing American Christianity. We know that Jesus told us he would come to us as the desperate and searching stranger, yet it’s so often Christians ourselves who close the door and the heart.”
Pastor Ryon goes on to say that the film asks us to open our eyes and see what we are doing — to see Jesus as a migrant.
Even though Broadway Baptist’s Justice in July programming is finished, the church is continuing the fight with an informative upcoming event. At Faith, Freedom, and Democracy from 10am to noon on Sat, Aug 8, at Broadway Baptist, faith leaders, election experts, and free-speech advocates will discuss church and state, religious influence in our government, and the rise of religious nationalism, particularly Christian Nationalism’s influence in Tarrant County and across Texas.
This important educational opportunity is free to attend. Come out and learn something. Believers in nothing to every faith are welcome. I may even join you.
