Blog

Theorizing Modernities article

Religion, Humanitarianism, and Decolonization


United States Agency for International Development (USAID) distributes food in Madagascar. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Reading Lynch’s compelling and wide-ranging study of the role of Christian actors at different historical periods and how they manage the ethical precarity that faces them in dealing with the social, political, and economic problems they encounter, introduced me to areas of scholarship and geo-political contexts not directly engaged with in my own research to-date. The strongest impact on my thinking, however, was with respect to the careful unpacking of the ways in which Christian actors have been involved in both driving and resisting colonial processes. Connecting with these histories is both timely and potentially transformative given the radical impact of Black Lives Matter (BLM) in 2020, which has extended far beyond “Black Lives” in catapulting critical race theory and intersectionality into the mainstream. It has never been more crucial for academics to engage with the ethical precarity arising from the unequal and colonial underpinnings of our disciplines as well as the activities of the communities of practice about which many of us in the social and political sciences write.

In my primary field of the study of religion, there has been a tradition of scholarly critique over the past few decades of colonialist and Protestant Christian influenced understandings of what a “religion” should look like, the damage that has been done through the normalization of the separation of the religious from the secular, and the problems that arise from viewing religions through the lens of the “world religions paradigm.” My secondary field of study, that of “humanitarianism”—defined by Lynch as including “both emergency relief and longer, development efforts” (190)—has for several decades sought to influence policy and practice within the international aid sector to move away from Global North-led solutions to local humanitarian/development “problems,” and instead to work from the “bottom up” through equal partnerships that value local knowledge and expertise. However, it is only more recently that serious attention is being paid to the institutional racism in the aid sector. Given that these attempts to decolonize scholarship and practice within the field of religion and of humanitarianism are not new, how can we learn from this decolonial moment? And how does Lynch’s book offer some ways forward in pursuit of this aim?

Christian Humanitarians—The ‘Little Platoons’ of Neoliberalism?

Like Lynch does in chapter 6, “Wresting with Violence and Injustice Abroad and at Home,” my research combines the study of religion with humanitarianism/development. However, I do so from a sociology of religion perspective, rather than from Lynch’s theologically inflected international relations approach. As Lynch points out, contemporary Christian humanitarianism has its roots in the colonial missionary enterprise, providing a “strong foundation . . . for ongoing denominational relief and development efforts” (189). Nonetheless, this Christian genealogy became obscured with the rise of the contemporary global aid business, which took off immediately following the Second World War, and saw the establishment of key aid instruments, including the World Bank and the IMF, as well as the UN. Religion had no place in this official picture, which assumed that religion (at least in its public manifestation) would eventually lose its hold over people’s lives as they reaped the benefits of “modernization.” Lynch picks up this story at a crucial intersection, in the post-Cold War period in the 1990s. This era saw the spread of “neoliberal economic ideology and policies on a global scale” (188). It saw the rise of the non-governmental organization (NGO) and its religious counterpart the so-called faith-based organization (FBO). NGOs and FBOs attracted rising levels of donor funding throughout the 1990s, with the faith element particularly taking off towards the end of the decade and into the 2000s. This coincided with the global “war on terror,” which turned the attention of Global North governments towards religion (or more properly Islam) as a public force that needed to be better understood and managed.

It has never been more crucial for academics to engage with the ethical precarity arising from the unequal and colonial underpinnings of our disciplines as well as the activities of the communities of practice about which many of us in the social and political sciences write.

For faith actors who had been pushing for greater inclusion in humanitarianism/development, as well as for scholars in the incipient field of religion and humanitarian/development studies, this “turn to religion” has been interpreted differently. For some, this was evidence of the emergence of the “desecularization of development” or of a “post-secular development praxis” where faith actors were now being invited to the table to design development policy and deliver development programs (Tomalin 2019). Others have been more critical and see this as a cynical attempt to co-opt religions to meet neoliberal development goals. On this account, faith is nothing more than a vehicle for generating social and other kinds of “capital” for instrumentalist ends. Like Lynch, I am interested in the extent to which FBOs, including Christian humanitarians, are little more than what Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell have called the “little platoons” of neoliberalism (390), or, as in Lynch’s words, “quasi-agents of the state, their focus on metrics of accountability to funders over aid recipients” (199). As with the earlier decolonial shift towards “bottom up” development in the 1980s, where equal partnerships with local communities in the Global South were emphasized, the “turn to religion” can be seen as not going beyond “trendy terminology” (202). Here its radical and decolonial potential is diluted and pacified.

Looking Again at the “Turn to Religion” by Humanitarianism: Shifting Register to Manage Ethical Precarity

Despite this colonialist deployment of religion in the name of humanitarianism/development, Lynch notes that it is also the case that Christian humanitarians are “participating yet sometimes reformulating . . . a ‘transnational apparatus of governmentality’’’ (199). This suggests that (some) faith actors occupy a more fluid and multi-vocal space within the aid nexus rather than simply performing the role of the little platoons of neoliberalism.  Building on this, I argue that if we take an “actor-oriented approach” and look at the religion-development connection from the point of view of these faith-based humanitarians themselves, we can see how they strategically shift in register between secular modes of communication with neoliberal global development actors to religious modes with local faith actors and their religious support base, while acting as, in David Mosse and David Lewis’s description, “brokers operating at the ‘interfaces’ of different world-views and knowledge systems” (10). I suggest that (some) faith-based humanitarians manage the ethical precarity that comes with involvement in the formal aid business with parallel activities where they instead resist their instrumentalization to serve secular neoliberal goals by cultivating strong networks with other faith actors, including at the local level in the Global South. Their positionality within the aid nexus as brokers and translators, comfortable with both secular and religious registers, places them in a unique position to connect with local faith actors in the Global South, who are mostly precluded from directly participating in the formal aid business due to their expression of religiosity and development outside a neoliberal framing.

Decolonizing Religion and Humanitarianism Scholarship and Practice

Lynch notes how Christian humanitarianism cannot be reduced to the (neoliberal) Global North version, and instead that “relationships between Christians in the Global North and Global South” add to its intricacies and complexities (220). Many Global South Christian actors are involved in humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding activities, yet they may not label them as such or be recognized by the global aid system as doing this work. Studies have shown that they are often overlooked as humanitarian partners due to a secularist bias and the perception that they will not adhere to the Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Disaster Relief. Moreover, we know much less about this informal humanitarian work of local faith actors than we do about that of the neoliberal, faith-based humanitarian, where academic research has followed a donor trend of focussing on that contribution (see Spies and Schrode 2020). In order to push forward the decolonizing of religion and humanitarianism scholarship and practice, I am in agreement with Lynch’s assertion that we need to look to the Global South for “insights that are critical for understanding the ethical precarity of Christianity and secular humanitarianism” (192). Indeed, as she points out, Global South theologians offer “other strategies” to “cope with such tensions” arising from the ethical precarity of engaging in neoliberal humanitarian work (225) since they engage in an “autocritique of Christianity’s symbiotic role in colonialisms, racisms, and paternalisms of various kinds, including the neocolonialism and paternalism at the heart of humanitarianism” (225). This critique involves drawing attention to the ways in which neoliberal, faith-based humanitarianism reinscribes boundaries between religious traditions, as well as between the religious and the secular, and promotes a model of engagement that reinforces the views of select religious leaders and organizations. Instead, there is a need to broaden approaches to the religion-development nexus and to develop a new conceptual perspective that moves beyond prioritizing the agenda of secular global development institutions and instead critically examines their rhetoric and practices. In looking to Global South theologians and faith communities to highlight the neoliberal and colonial framework that dominates scholarship, policy, and practice around religion and humanitarianism, Lynch’s approach offers some solutions to this. These solutions support the need for the development of a research agenda which recognizes that in order to achieve widespread commitment in the aid community to the localization of humanitarian action, engagement with faith actors is critical. Unfortunately, they continue to remain overlooked and marginalized.

Leave a Comment on Religion, Humanitarianism, and Decolonization Array
Emma Tomalin
Emma Tomalin is Professor of Religion and Public Life at the University of Leeds. She has published widely on the topic of religion and development, including the following books - Religions and Development (2013) and The Handbook of Religions and Global Development (2015). She co-edits the Routledge Research in Religion and Development book series, which now has 19 volumes. She is the co-chair of the Joint Learning Initiative on Faith and Local Community (JLI) learning hub on Anti-Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery.  
Theorizing Modernities article

The Sexual Politics of Ethno-Religious Nationalism


Rainbow colors on the White House celebrate the Supreme Court’s June 26, 2015 5-4 decision allowing same-sex marriages in every state of the Union. White House photo. Photo Credit: GPA Photo Archive. Via Flickr.

The 2013 Supreme Court Decision, United States vs. Windsor, declared unconstitutional the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996—an earlier law that had defined marriage as a union between one man and one woman in federal law, thereby granting states the right to deny the marriage of same-sex couples. Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) further required the federal government, and all states, to recognize and respect same-sex marriage equality, and confer all the rights and protections attendant to such recognition.

On the night that the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Obergefell, then President Barack Obama illuminated the White House in rainbow colored lights—the colors symbolizing Gay Pride since the inception of the Gay Rights movement. For many evangelical Christian Americans, this action taken by the first African-American U.S. President was nothing less than a culture war broadside against evangelical Christian identity. For them, it marked the rapid dissolution of Christian culture in the United States. As evangelical historian John Fea recounts, “When LGBT activists claimed that Obama was on ‘the right side of history’ in his support of gay marriage, the message to evangelicals was clear: they were on the wrong side” (27–28).

Fea suggests that White evangelicals embraced Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election as part of a backlash to a societal shift toward marriage equality that occurred “too quickly for many Americans.” And yet, this backlash narrative neglects the deep history and subterranean—yet episodically resurgent—dynamics that made evangelicals’ path to Trumpism predictable, if not inevitable. For, when viewed through the lenses of ethno-religious nationalism, it becomes evident that White evangelicals have been at such a juncture of obstinate opposition before in their sexual politics concerning the “sanctity of marriage.”

The “sincerely held belief” among White evangelicals in 2016 is that same-sex marriage (and all homosexual relations) contradicts the true meaning of “marriage.” This true meaning is premised on a putatively ontological, or natural, difference between men and women. Further, those who hold this belief appeal to a “civilizational normativity,”  which is frequently based on the alleged dictates of natural law. Here, the claim is that marriage is a union between a man and a woman that has served as a societal bedrock of Western civilization for millennia. Such claims resurrect and reanimate the same logics, patterns of refusal, and sexual politics of earlier evangelical opposition to inter-racial sex and marriage. Both cases spurred, and were further fueled by, upsurges in evangelical Christian ethno-religious nationalism. This points to the animating and reanimating impulse, pattern, and logic that has surged and resurged for more than a half-century in White, Christian America. I have termed this phenomenon “zombie nationalism.”   

Long before abortion was recruited as a wedge controversy, the “moral abomination”  of “inter-racial mixing,” “inter-racial marriage,” and “inter-racial procreation” led White evangelical Christians to engineer protective legal and political formations to defend against the putative onslaught against their religion and culture. Inter-racial sexual relations were rejected by conservative Christians as a taboo of “miscegenation” because they transgressed ontological racial differences. Countless documented lynchings were related to inter-racial intimacy, sexual relations, or “flirting” (alleged or real).

Long before abortion was recruited as a wedge controversy, the ‘moral abomination’  of ‘inter-racial mixing,’ ‘inter-racial marriage,’ and ‘inter-racial procreation’ led White evangelical Christians to engineer protective legal and political formations to defend against the putative onslaught against their religion and culture.

Many evangelicals argue that the parallel is not valid. Most claim to have long since renounced explicit racism. They argue that “race mixing” and “miscegenation”—while clearly taboo and sincerely believed to be moral abominations long ago—are fundamentally different concerns because the arguments against gay marriage stand upon the more (allegedly) stable grounds of the “biological complementarity” of specific sexual reproductive organs. Transgressing this conception of sexual complementarity, as they claim same-sex coupling does, violates “natural” (putatively ontological) forms of differentiation in ways that the “miscegenation” and “amalgamism” of inter-racial sex and relationships never did.

This objection, however, is based on revision of justifications treated as self-evident, and theologically justified, at the time. The claims that inter-racial sex, marriage, and procreation were biological, moral, and spiritual abominations, and thus ought to be legally prohibited, were justified by White evangelical Christians in similar ways to how they currently justify their opposition to same-sex marriage. They deemed the differences in personhood and status that existed between Whites and Blacks to be just as ontological and grounded in natural law. Protestants devised “Bible-based” theological justifications for separate races. Similarly, appeals to the logic of putative “ontological differences” between races, and claims that sexual separation of the races was a “civilizational norm,” served as bases for excluding certain people from legal marriage. For example, in prohibiting marriage between any “person of African descent,” and “any person not of African descent,” the terms of Oklahoma’s 1908 anti-miscegenation law made the ontological and civilizational nature of such statutes clear. Like the alleged abomination of same sex marriage (or any same-sex sexual relations) is for most White evangelicals and White Catholics today, inter-racial sex and marriage was claimed to be a violation of God’s law, as well as a betrayal of the essential natures of White and Black manhood and womanhood. The fact that instances of miscegenation could result in procreation spurred expansive legal innovation—laws which would cover the distinct class of cases in which inter-racial sex resulted in so-called “mixed-race” offspring.[1]

The claims that inter-racial sex, marriage, and procreation were biological, moral, and spiritual abominations, and thus ought to be legally prohibited, were justified by White evangelical Christians in similar ways to how they currently justify their opposition to same-sex marriage.

This logic of ontology, civilizational foundations, and natural law leads most White, evangelical Christians, to be unable to recognize the legalization of same-sex marriage as the acknowledgement of a long occluded, marginalized, and persecuted group which has finally achieved recognition and equality before the law. They cannot see it as an instance of the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. Any such claim is transvalued into the secular state’s, and secular culture’s, legal vindication of a putative “sexual orthodoxy” that appeared roughly two minutes ago on the clock of history, and is now being imposed upon them. Of course, by this logic, civil rights for African Americans and suffrage and rights for women fall roughly 2.5 and 3 minutes prior on the clock of civilizational history, respectively.

They protest that they are the victims of an anti-religious, militantly secular state and nihilistic culture that, in effect, marginalizes them by requiring that they legally recognize, and provide services in businesses (or in government, universities, or other organizations that serve the public and/or have tax-exempt status). Such recognition of same-sex marriage gets portrayed as a compelled endorsement of sin, transgression of natural law, and, as such, an infringement on a persons’ religious freedom to believe and treat same-sex marriage as an abomination in God’s eyes. So it was also in the eyes of Christians who were forced to recognize, first, laws overturning Jim Crow segregation, and gradually, inter-racial marriage, inter-racial sex and procreation, adoption, and child-rearing (Griffith, Moral Combat, 118–19).

Again, this illuminates sexual politics as a spirit that breathes life into zombie nationalism. What appears to be an isolated episode in sexual politics (i.e. rear-guard defense against newly legalized same-sex marriage) is, when placed in historical context, one surgent moment in a long contest over the identity and character of U.S. society. The “oppression” of White evangelicals occurs in the secular state’s putative infringement upon allegedly sincerely held commitments to a religious worldview. This is the secular state’s supposed violation of one’s basic right to religious freedom. This position construes religious freedom both as a so-called “first freedom,” as inscribed in the First Amendment of the U.S. Bill of Rights, but simultaneously, also a civilizational value that is intrinsic to the supposedly Judeo-Christian ethos of the U.S. founding. Accordingly, the fight for the “soul” (identity and character) of American society is infused by Christian nationalism.

What appears to be an isolated episode in sexual politics (i.e. rear-guard defense against newly legalized same-sex marriage) is, when placed in historical context, one surgent moment in a long contest over the identity and character of U.S. society.

This reactionary response reflects an attempt by evangelicals to contest the effects of modernization in U.S. society by using modern moral and legal terms. They deploy these tactics to preserve beliefs they consider to be non-negotiable, but which have become recognized as dehumanizing and damaging to others (for example, protecting their right to practice and promote “conversion therapy”). This creativity with modern legal and moral norms and concepts also leads to innovation and creativity with the religious dimensions of national identity, and the societal and legal implications that flow therefrom. This creativity is not the innovation of working within the normative constraints of a living tradition. It is the kind of creativity that Nietzsche described as emerging from the nihilism that underpins ressentiment. It exemplifies the resourcefulness and self-vindication of the transvaluation of values (see my discussion in Part 2).

The patterns of ethno-religious nationalism inscribed in White Christian resistance to interracial sex and marriage, and later, resistance to same-sex sex and marriage, evince markedly similar logic and dynamics of ressentiment. A key insight this connection illuminates is that, to identify and unlearn these patterns of ethno-religious nationalism—to escape the cycles of zombie nationalism—White evangelicals (along with White Americans more generally) will have to learn (and, then, unlearn) what it is to be, and to have been all along, White, cis-hetero-normative, and patriarchal in a context that bears the stamp of the distinctive racial history, recurring history of sexual politics, and hegemony of White, evangelical Christianity, as does the United States.

[1]  See Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South, 1, and Fay Botham, Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, and American Law, 145, 156. See also, Marie Griffith, Moral Combat: How Sex Divides American Christians and Fractured American Politics, 86–90; and Byron C. Martin, Racism in the United States: A History of the Anti-Miscegenation Legislation and Litigation.

 

Leave a Comment on The Sexual Politics of Ethno-Religious Nationalism Array
Jason Springs
Jason A. Springs is professor of religion, ethics, and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame. Springs is particularly interested in ethical, philosophical, and religious dimensions of restorative justice, attending specifically to its potential to intervene in racialized and class dimensions of the U.S. prison-industrial complex. He works on questions of structural and cultural violence, conceptions of religious toleration and the challenges posed by religious pluralism for transforming conflict, Islamophobia in Europe and North America, and democratic theories and practices. These concerns are oriented by his broader research interests in American Pragmatist thought. Springs’s most recent book, Resurrection in Back of the Yards: Restorative Justice and Lived Religion on Chicago’s South and West Sides (2024), examines the effectiveness of restorative justice initiatives in responding to structural forms of racism and injustice (e.g., the New Jim Crow). He is the author of Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society: From Enemy to Adversary (2018), Toward a Generous Orthodoxy: Prospects for Hans Frei’s Postliberal Theology (2010), and coauthor (with Atalia Omer) of Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook (2013). His articles appear in Journal of Religious Ethics, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, The Journal of Religion, Modern Theology, and Contemporary Pragmatism, among others. 
Theorizing Modernities article

Decolonizing the Practices of Religion in International Relations


Map from Cholula, in the present-day state of Puebla, Mexico. Dating from between 1578 and 1586, the Relaciones Geográficas are responses to a questionnaire initiated by the Spanish crown in 1577, requesting information about Spanish-held territories in the Americas.  The Relaciones contain important historical, cultural, and geographical information about New Spain during the 16th century. Many of the questionnaires are accompanied by maps and pictures. These both convey information about such topics as the colonial economy and the spread of European religion in New Spain. This map dates from 1581 and has glosses in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, and in Spanish. University of Texas Libraries. Public Domain.

As a student of religion and modernity, one important upshot I derive from Wrestling with God: Ethical Precarity in Christianity and International Relations is that contemporary humanitarianism, still dominated by Christian organizations, continues with, but also diverges in important ways from, the long legacy of Euro- and Christian-centric colonial extraction and epistemic (and material!) violence. Lynch’s nuanced account of intra-Christian ethical debates regarding conversion, displacement, elimination, and now humanitarianism and “soft power,” is important because, first, it problematizes an overly simplistic critique of modernity and Christianity’s complicity with empire and, second, it demands an intersectional approach to religion and politics. These are the two issues I highlight here. The first is very much present in Lynch’s text and relates to the shocking reverberation of colonial discourse in contemporary technocratic humanitarianism and other facets of religion and international relations. The second point is likewise present, though only implicitly so, in the book’s accounts of prophetic and liberationist Christian actors as well as in non-White theologians’ effort to imagine decolonial and polydoxic horizons. Their inclusion in the book offers an encouraging avenue for future research trajectories that seek to decolonize “religion” and the practices of religion in international, global, and local relations.

Lynch examines the symbiosis between “western Christianity” and secularism through her analysis of internal ethical contestations. The upshot is a more capacious, historically attuned, and theologically pluralistic account of Christianity and secularity as discursive traditions. This is important if only to challenge overly simplistic, unhelpful, and reductive accounts of Christianity’s role as midwife in the consolidation of western colonialism and neocolonialism. Such accounts now constitute a foil for decolonial epistemologies and emancipatory (reactionary) narratives that end up flirting with reifying the “west” and Christianity as mechanisms of empire.  Walter Mignolo, for example, writes: “The decolonial—in contradistinction to Christianity, liberalism, Marxism, and neoliberalism—is not another option for global design . . . but it is an option to delink from all global designs promoting local resurgences and reemergences confronting and rejecting, unmasking their fundamentalism and pretense of ‘chosen’ people to arrogate themselves the right to run the world” (147).

While today the language of mission framing humanitarianism is no longer explicitly one of violent conversion, power dynamics are entrenched nonetheless in multiple registers of proselytizing, through both “secular” and “religious” forms. In particular, I found the concept of “donor proselytism” (which Lynch develops together with Tanya Schwarz in an earlier work) effective in illuminating the way neoliberalism shapes humanitarianism in its secular and religious registers. Lynch’s work brilliantly demolishes the pretenses and proclaimed benevolence of contemporary Christian or “faith-inspired” humanitarianisms for their persistent complicity and symbiotic relations with neoliberal developmentalism and anti-Muslim orientalist securitizing discourse. Indeed, they cannot be analyzed as one nefarious constant, moving like a “one eyed giant” through the centuries, but instead should be understood as historical epochs and universalizing cosmologies/ideologies that rhyme with one another. Conquest in one and neoliberal structural adjustment in another are undeniable, as are the internal efforts to make such violence more ethically palatable. To such a degree we do identify casuistry, it is carried out by Christian actors who, on a case-by-case basis, apply theoretical and moral frames to concrete realities within the confines of unrelenting power differentials. I refer to this kind of variation as the “priestly” variety of humanitarian practitioner. This person was initially an actual priest, but now more often is a person who can be identified with a class of practitioners best described by what I refer to as a “religiocrat.” These are the actors (though she does not use my labeling) who populate the humanitarian spaces Lynch examines.

Lynch’s work brilliantly demolishes the pretenses and proclaimed benevolence of contemporary Christian or “faith-inspired” humanitarianisms for their persistent complicity and symbiotic relations with neoliberal developmentalism and anti-Muslim orientalist securitizing discourse. 

Lynch’s book, which she describes as “a genealogy of wrestling” (235), or intra-Christian casuistry (turned eventually into variations on enduring civilizational discourses within the contemporary framing of humanitarianism) therefore clearly shows the troubling continuities between the landmark debate between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda at Valladolid, Spain (1550–1551) and contemporary ethical grappling with tensions between the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) and the Code of Conduct for Humanitarian Assistance. If the popular casuistry of missionaries in the one context of sixteenth century Spain “soften[s] the edges of colonialism” (236), as Lynch writes, the contemporary relinking of “religious freedoms” with military and strategic articulations that occurs with the IRFA and subsequent articulations of contemporary policies rhymes with this legacy in troubling ways. It is interesting to locate variations within the “priestly” discourse of empire, but the overall outcome is hegemonic, paternalistic, and leads the actors involved to seek out justifications for violence in its multiple forms.

The cooptation of contemporary Christian humanitarianism into neoliberal developmentalist discourse results in the depoliticization of communities who are taught to link their “dignity” to being economically self-sustaining. Indeed, there is nothing new about such paternalism. Neoliberal technology and its patterns of “donor proselytism” simply constitute a reconfiguration of earlier varieties of a civilizational discourse. Regardless of this foil for decolonial demystification, Lynch wants us to know about internal debates and that our analysis of Christianity, imperialism, and neo-imperialism, i.e. the story of modernity, is in effect not a “one-eyed giant” simply reconfiguring its oppressive script through different currencies, be they conversion, democracy, or development/humanitarianism. The debates that Lynch conveys, tracing casuistry and “wrestling with God,” are important, but they also reveal the endurance of the modernist construction of religion as an instrument of colonial control and taxonomy as noted by scholars such as David Chidester, Charles Long, and Tomoko Masuzawa. Indeed, the neoliberalization of “faith-inspired” or “faith-based” humanitarianism consolidated a new class of “priestly” operatives facilitating devolutionary technologies and otherwise entrenching systemic structural forms of violence. Lynch does not end there. She illuminates prophetic registers in the discourse of those working in the humanitarian field as well. These are not only associated with religious and spiritual exemplars but also with a prism that highlights systemic and structural violence by focusing on epistemologies from the margins. Such epistemologies must be embodied in the experiences of marginality, and hence they also must immediately constitute an intersectional analytic intervention.

This is precisely where Lynch’s discussion of Christian liberation theologians exposes an important disjuncture between the ironic depoliticizing effects of religious humanitarianism (and cooptation of the so-called “religious actors” into peacebuilding and development policy designs and practices) and religion’s apparent new-found visibility in the “postsecular” moment. What Lynch does is show through a careful study of primary sources that this postsecular discovery of religion does not constitute a departure from the symbiosis of Christianity and secular modernity, but rather represents its perpetuation through other idioms and technologies. Hence, it is important to do what Lynch does and highlight epistemologies of those on the Christian margins. Such epistemologies by default are deeply political and intersectional and thus resist depoliticization. Lynch examines the case of the Harlem Renaissance in Chapter 4, for example. This example forces us to think of “religion” and “race” together through an analysis of coloniality. Such an analysis brings to the fore the long and enduring patterns of gendered racialization and exploitative economic configurations. This intersectional mode already takes me to the second point I wanted to underscore.

What Lynch does is show through a careful study of primary sources that this postsecular discovery of religion does not constitute a departure from the symbiosis of Christianity and secular modernity, but rather represents its perpetuation through other idioms and technologies.

The religion and development/peacebuilding/humanitarianism industry which Lynch challenges powerfully deploys religion in its modernist abstract form as a set of principles, ritual practices, networks, institutions, and leaders/actors that supposedly have the keys to unlocking elusive “local” communities and mobilizing them as forms of “capital” (in the neoliberal devolutionary spirit). Disentangling “religion” from race and racialization by focusing on utilitarian engagement with religion as a positive force to alleviate suffering reinforces modernist epistemic moves that retain colonial difference. The deployment of religion as a tool of humanitarianism/development/peacebuilding, therefore, is decidedly non-intersectional, by design. Lynch is alluding to this point when she writes in her conclusion about the cynical use of the concept of “human dignity” as a way to erase socioeconomic and systemic violence, or structural sin. She writes: “The concept of dignity connects liberationist and humanitarian ethics, but its meaning has changed. Instead of the poor and marginalized taking the lead in structural transformation according to liberationist ethics, humanitarianism depends upon the paternalism of actors employing largely western epistemologies and modes of action to help others who suffer” (239). Dignity is only one of the “nice” concepts deployed within a neoliberal and technocratic landscape of the global engagement with religion. Such an engagement contributes to the ironic depoliticization of religion through its very politicization (a “soft power”) in the discourse of empire. This is indeed a familiar history that Lynch’s account exposes while gesturing toward the possibility of its transformation through what Mignolo calls “epistemic disobedience.” Indeed, I think that the concept of wrestling is more fitting to the prophetic mode of disruption and resistance than to the missionary and/or contemporary humanitarian priestly adjudication of competing ethical grammars. Still, I wonder if Lynch’s historical and ethical work can help us think about how to reimagine human rights and the concept of dignity through decolonial theological and political prisms. This would amount to a worthy undertaking.

Leave a Comment on Decolonizing the Practices of Religion in International Relations Array
Atalia Omer
 Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Politics (2008) from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research focuses on Israel/Palestine; religion, violence, and peacebuilding; as well as theories and methods in the study of religion. Omer was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, resulting in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Among other publications, Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago Press, 2019). She is also a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015). 
Theorizing Modernities article

Christian Ethics and the Purposes of Modernity


Detail of marble base of a funerary kouros with relief scenes, found in Athens 510-500 BC. National Archeological Museum of Athens. Photo Credit: Darren Puttock, March 2012.

 

I can only imagine how exhausted Cecelia Lynch must be after Wrestling with God. It is breathtaking in its ambition and at times its audacity. She is constantly circling the subject matter, at times tossing it to the ground, only to find that the subject has thighs of steel and is able to jump to its feet and put Lynch on her heels. I am impressed by her resilience, but also impressed that she never has a moment’s rest, and that is partly because she wrestling from “outside the ring” with others who are “inside the ring.” In other words, who is doing the wrestling is (intentionally) ambiguous. There are the theologians, Christian ethicists, papal authorities, missionaries, Christian-inspired socialists and Marxists, as well as ecumenical intellectuals and activists. All of them are wrestling with God as they also wrestle with secularism and other intellectual currents that challenge their existing worldviews. But standing over this wrestling match is Cecelia Lynch, who herself is wrestling with the very same issues as she watches their contortions, hand-jabs, and leg spins. We learn not only through Lynch’s assured interpretations, but also her own reflexivity. I have considerable admiration for both the book and its author.

Yet a book should be judged not only by how well the author does in answering her own questions, but also by the questions it leaves on the table and subsequently generates. Lynch should be credited for acknowledging that many of the questions cannot be answered precisely because they are subject to heated contestation by this uninterrupted wrestling match, a point I will follow up on below. In that spirit, I want to raise two questions not only for Lynch but for all those who follow in her footsteps.

What Is Christian about Christian Ethics?

I have to start with a fairly remedial question: What is the Christian in Christian ethics? This might seem like a simple question, but as Lynch knows quite well, it is far from simple and is the retaining wall that provides the boundaries for claims to be made about Christian ethics in theory and practice. Christianity is a social and not a natural kind, and all social kinds are heterogenous. Wrestling with God embraces the presumption that Christianity is a social kind and attempts to capture how Christians are wrestling with ethics from differing branches of the faith. We don’t have to worry too much about subgroups within these different branches because presumably they all are part of Christianity, but occasionally there are some branches and some subgroups within these branches that cross the line from Christianity into something else (such as secular humanism). All this is a long-winded way of saying that all social kinds are subject to considerable contestation. Wrestling is the name of the game. Lynch’s neo-Weberian analysis takes much, but not all, of this into account. This leads me to the second question.

Everybody Wrestle?

Only Christians are allowed to enter this match, which presupposes that there are criteria for membership, and these criteria must include beliefs and practices. In other words, there is a screening process. But what questions are included in this screening process? And who referees, deciding which questions are welcome, which answers are heretical, and even who is sanctioned to wrestle? My sense is that Lynch’s analysis begins after all this is settled, but it would be worth saying more about the terms of the settlement. After all, Eastern Christianity does not seem to have made an appearance at the match, and its absence is worth some explanation, especially if it signifies something about its quite different approach to the “other” and the “common good.” In any event, as I read Lynch’s book, I kept wondering what is the core of Christianity and what are the outer boundaries, that is, how far can a Christian venture away from the core without risking being disqualified from participation? Lynch seems to suggest that secular humanism represents the outer limits of the acceptable and constantly risks being transgressive.

As I read Lynch’s book, I kept wondering what is the core of Christianity and what are the outer boundaries, that is, how far can a Christian venture away from the core without risking being disqualified from participation?

A further complication is that Christianity wrestles over different core issues at different times. Lynch is not interested in all features of Christianity but rather its ethics, or rather the ethical purposes of a modernity shaped by Christianity. In other words, Lynch is not addressing pre-modern ethics but rather the Christian attempt to bridge two divides: first, between Christians and less powerful or non-Christian others, and second, between violent and non-violent legitimations of intervention with the goal of bringing peace and social justice. This is a terrific way of approaching the matter because they have not only been at the core of contemporary Christian ethics but also the ethics of many other religious communities as they also confront the challenge of modernity and humanism; in this regard, it provides the basis for important transcultural and transhistorical comparisons.

Orientalist statue of Fr. Eusebio Kino in his native village of Segno, Italy. Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons, 2016.

Nonetheless, I do have some questions, including some that Lynch partially, but does not fully, address. Who are the “others” that have been the most common source of concern for western Christians? My sense is that most of them are non-westerners, mainly those who Christians encountered through exploration, colonialism, imperialism, and missionary work. But this leaves aside the “others” that were nearer and arguably more of a perceived threat to Christians, namely Muslims and Jews. Lynch suggests that western Christians have wrestled with many differentiated others, and it would be worth pursuing how the debate over one other did or did not shape the debate over other others. This would be helpful because Christians have typically ranked others in terms of their proximity to a highly Christian-inflected conception of standards of civilization. Standards of civilization, though, are also subject to change in emphasis and debate. Consider, for instance, Christianity’s entanglement with race; for some Christians, conversion was (almost) enough to warrant admission to civilization, while for others skin color would always hold them back.

Christianity and Modernity

Relatedly, one of the interesting conundrums is how Christian ethics relates to the ethical purposes of modernity. In her introduction to the argument, Lynch proceeds as if they are ontologically distinct. But she later has a long discussion of the complicated relationship between the two, particularly concerning how Christian ethics shaped the very purposes of modernity. And there is also a recognition of how secular humanism has shaped Christian ethics. If both of these are true, is there not a substantial overlap between the two? And does this not mean that it becomes difficult to understand where one ends and the other begins? One way to break this circularity is to consider who, besides Christians, contributed to secular humanism and the separation of the Church and state. Who in Christian societies would have an interest in doing so? There is a case to be made that one “other,” namely European Jews, made important contributions on this matter, and were motivated to do so because of their own theological debates as they increasingly integrated with Christian societies and saw secularism as integral to their physical and ontological survival. In other words, notions of secularism and humanism emerge not only because of internal Christian debates and Christianity’s encounter with non-western peoples, but also because of the active role played by other non-Christian communities in the west.

The Thin Line between Precarity and Collapse

The question of Christianity’s core—and the nonnegotiable elements and boundaries between self and other—also possibly figure into Lynch’s conclusion regarding the permissibility of interventions, coercive and otherwise, to defend and spread Christianity. Said otherwise, how far can Christians go in meeting the other before they lose their faith? Lynch wants her fellow Christians to embrace ethical precarity. As she writes, the radical egalitarianism that she seeks must be based on a “deeply reflexive acknowledgment of ethical precarity.” But at what point does precarity collapse on itself? At what point does radical egalitarianism challenge the Christian self and beliefs? Lynch has a rich discussion of Christian humanitarianism, and one of its interesting developments is the interpretation and place of missionary work and conversion. My research on World Vision International (WVI) suggests that there were various factors that caused the evangelical organization to moderate its tendency to give a bowl of rice alongside a heap of the gospel. Part of this was not just a recognition and respect for the other, but also the sheer fact that WVI grew and became more inclusive of non-western forms of evangelism—and there was not necessarily agreement on which beliefs would become the basis for conversion. But many evangelical Christian humanitarian agencies believe that some people are going to heaven and others to hell depending on whether they have been saved. This is not just a prediction but also a reflection of a belief in the fundamental distinction between self and others. This is not just about saving lives but also saving souls. And if someone believes that I, a Jew, has a damaged soul, then I am going to question their ability to be truly engaged in radical egalitarianism. So, how far can Christians go in their radical engagement before they cease to be Christian in the eyes of other Christians?

Silver Linings?

Lastly, I want to raise the role of theodicy in Lynch’s argument about wrestling. Lynch rightly argues that the problem of theodicy is the reconciliation of the existence of evil in the world alongside the existence of an omnipresent, loving, God. How could a God that cares about his children allow evil to exist? Different religions can be defined by how they answer this problem. Different Christian sects also have a range of views. Theodicy is not necessarily an everyday problem, but rather emerges during times of personal and societal crisis: Why do the good die young? Why would God permit a pandemic? Why would a loving God permit the Holocaust? As Lynch notes, those who experience the problem of theodicy are in need of meaning; if they cannot find meaning, then the suffering is meaningless, and this can be almost too much to bear.

Notions of secularism and humanism emerge not only because of internal Christian debates and Christianity’s encounter with non-western peoples, but also because of the active role played by other non-Christian communities in the west.

The problem of theodicy that arises from soul-shaking experiences, therefore, can create a crisis of faith that requires an answer that restores faith; and this crisis will itself produce an unsettled period during which lay and clergy produce a variety of responses that draw on tradition, but also produce novel interpretations of it. These debates do not happen in abstract but rather in concrete historical contexts that shape which answers are appropriate and practical and which are not. It would have been helpful to her argument and the subsequent chapters, however, if Lynch had even a loose framework for understanding when such change is and is not likely to occur. And it is not always a response to theodicy that drives this change. Consider her discussions of Christian humanitarianism. There were lots of debates among faith-based organizations about how to respond to the post-Cold War challenges and how to do so in ways that were largely consistent with existing practices. But debates did not seem to be triggered or guided by the problem of theodicy. Sometimes the sacred mattered, but faith-based organizations were also moved by profane concerns, such as market shares. In any event, I think that there is more to be said on the subject and I hope that in subsequent work Lynch more clearly connects the specific theodic challenge to the nature of doctrinal and practical change.

Leave a Comment on Christian Ethics and the Purposes of Modernity Array
Michael Barnett
Michael Barnett is University Professor of International Affairs and Political Science at the George Washington University. His research interests span the Middle East, humanitarianism, global governance, global ethics, and the United Nations. His most recent books include The Star and the Stripes: A History of the Foreign Policies of the American Jews; Paternalism Beyond Borders; and, most recently, the edited collection Humanitarianism and Human Rights: Worlds of Differences.
Theorizing Modernities article

Race, Ressentiment, and Nihilism in White Evangelical Christian Nationalism


American Progress (1872). John Gast. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Why focus on Whiteness in the surging and resurging evangelical Christian political activism that occurs as zombie nationalism? How does race relate to the recurrent waves of religious nationalism currently driving Trump-era populism among White evangelicals? Race is inextricably interwoven with Christian nationalism in the U.S. And racialized privilege—and various dynamics of racial animus—is an essential driver of the recurring waves of White evangelical Christian ethno-religious nationalism, or what I have termed “zombie nationalism.”

Christian nationalism is a cultural frame that has been profoundly influential in recent U.S. politics, culture, and society more broadly. Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry suggest that being “White,” or a “White evangelical”—even the nature and character of one’s “religiousness,” per se— is not at the heart of the deeper, motivating interests of what presents itself as the phenomenon of Christian nationalism. On the one hand, they argue, Christian nationalism frequently underwrites and fuels political support and organizing for specific issues associated with, for example, pro- “law and order” policies, anti-gun control policies, anti-“big government” policies, anti-abortion legislation, and anti-same-sex marriage policies, among others. Yet, these conventional explanations also suggest that what mainly motivates and fuels this activism is the desire for conservative policies and laws. On this account, “Christian nationalism” is the means by which conservative Americans of whatever race, ethnicity, or socio-economic class desire to “institutionalize conservative Christian cultural preferences in America’s policies and self-identity” (153). This account, however, risks reducing Christian nationalism to a multipurpose tool by which conservative-minded Americans pursue power and political and cultural influence. Race is not entirely irrelevant here, of course. Not, for example, when being White and approving of Christian nationalism happen to intersect. At bottom, however, Christian nationalism is motivated more by the pursuit of political influence and cultural protectionism—to “defend against shifts in the culture toward equality for groups that have historically lacked the access to levers of power—women, sexual, racial, ethnic, and religious minorities” (152–54).

Of course, pundits are quick to charge that scholars, academics, and social commentators of all sorts are eager to uncover and impute charges of racism to conservative and religious members of U.S. society where (they claim) racism does not really exist. Such objections deploy highly specific concepts of “race” and “racism.” “Racism” easily becomes a sanitized term that obscures more than it illuminates, especially in so far as it is limited to intentional beliefs and explicit attitudes associated with discrimination and bigotry. This, however, obscures the ways that cultural practices, conceptions, and implicit and un-recognized biases camouflage participation in structural forms of racism, reinforce them, or make them feel and appear “not wrong.”

‘Racism’ easily becomes a sanitized term that obscures more than it illuminates, especially in so far as it is limited to intentional beliefs and explicit attitudes associated with discrimination and bigotry.

By treating race as secondary, dependent, and/or incidental in significance, such accounts detach the power and long-time ethno-religiousness that has shaped Christian nationalism throughout U.S. history. In effect, through this lens it is impossible to see the specific changes that White evangelical and Catholic Christians resist in their embrace of Trumpism. Similarly, it downplays the structural and cultural character of “race” and “racism.” Interestingly, this dynamic coheres with White American Christians’ broad refusal to acknowledge racism as a structural and cultural phenomenon in the first place (rather, to conceive it solely as a matter of personal attitude and explicit belief, from which most White people quickly excuse themselves [178]).

Whitehead and Perry, for example, identify “racism” with explicit, identifiable attitudes, in abstraction from structural and cultural forms of racism (18-19). And yet, as a group, White U.S. Christians who think the U.S. is a “Christian nation,” and are self-avowedly “not racist” (indeed, who report “warm attitudes” toward Black Americans), simultaneously broadly fail, or refuse, to acknowledge the impact and persistence of structural and cultural forms of racism throughout U.S. society (Chapter 5).

Contra what Whitehead and Perry claim, Christian nationalism in the U.S. is, at its root and in its constituent features, an intrinsically White supremacist phenomenon. When viewed as a socio-contextually embedded, historically extended, discursive formation and set of practices that inhabit institutions, Christian nationalism is only minimally a set of personal beliefs and preferences (the hackneyed “tip of the iceberg”). It is, rather, a set of disposition- and behavior-shaping embedded mythical (would-be historical) narratives, embodied rituals, and (putatively) legitimating conceptions of collective self-identity that were Euro-centric and White supremacist at their core, and continue to be laced with racialized dimensions in the present.

To consider but one example, the conception of U.S. peoplehood as a “New Israel” espoused by New England Puritans, as well as founders like Thomas Jefferson, among others—chosen and charged by God to seek religious freedom and establish “a [shining] city upon a hill”—underwrote conceptions (and formal articulations) of “Manifest Destiny.” Manifest Destiny—the belief that the providential guidance of the Christian God (or some sense of divine providence) guided European colonial-settlers into the “new world” and sanctioned and blessed their conquest of it—was (and is) an intrinsically White supremacist conception (intentionally conceived as such or not).  It underwrote settler-colonial removal and the extermination of indigenous populations in the “new world.” It fueled the expansion of the slave trade in so far as it expanded the demand for forced labor, and it opened new territories and states which invigorated the quest to add slave states. It invited and legitimated conquest and annexation of neighboring countries such as Mexico.

The Manifest Destiny interwoven with the “New Israel” self-conception is at the heart of “American exceptionalism” and the “chosen and/or special status in the eyes of God” motif. In various forms—including its “shining city on a hill” trope—it remains a constituent feature of the history and character of U.S. Christian nationalism, interweaving with numerous elements of nationalism of the last sixty years, and into the present—including, as of 2012, the formal platform of the Republican Party. Recognized for its structural and cultural features, it is an intrinsically White supremacist-inflected, and racialized, discursive formation, regardless of the skin color of the person espousing such views. Fully recognizing this illuminates how and why contemporary versions of U.S. Christian nationalism spur the behaviors and voting patterns that it does.

The withering away and loss of phenomena like racialized advantage, and protection of what Max Weber identifies as a central driver of ethno-nationalism, i.e., “cultural prestige” and significance, currently mobilizes White evangelical Christians in mass patterns of behavior and voting trends. These behaviors and trends reveal a degree of uniformity (and amplification of previous logics and behaviors) not seen heretofore. At the same time, these also reflect patterns and logics of in-group protection, survival, and political reassertion that do have antecedents in the history of this group. Ethnicity, religion, and nationalism interact synergistically and symbiotically with all the religious and ethnic/racialized features that constitute U.S. nationalism (Christian myths, symbols, origin stories, and exceptionalist claims for the nation’s special favor, duties, and world-historical significance in relation to the Judeo-Christian God). Re-described philosophically, the animating process—and the innovative forms of protectionism to which it gives rise—bears a striking resemblance to the nihilistic “transvaluation of values” that occurs by way of spiritual defensiveness and retaliation which Friedrich Nietzsche describes in The Genealogy of Morals.     

White Evangelical Ressentiment as Ethno-Religious Nationalism

US President Calvin Coolidge signs the Immigration Act of 1924 on the White House South Lawn along with appropriation bills for the Veterans Bureau. John J. Pershing is on the right. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Diversification by non-European immigrant people groups has been occurring at an increasingly rapid pace in the U.S. over the past sixty years. This has happened especially in the wake of Asian and Latin-American immigration since the passage of the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Hart-Celler reversed hardline nativist immigration restrictions established in the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. Historian John Higham describes the distinctively White supremacist orientation of the xenophobia and nativism that underwrote Johnson-Reed. “Nativists during this period argued that the so-called new immigration from southern and eastern Europe was racially inferior to the ‘old immigration’ from northern and western Europe. It was therefore polluting the nation’s bloodstream” (50).

Numerous studies indicate that increasingly rapid societal diversification—accompanied by experience and/or fear that one’s majority status is diminishing, and that such reorientation is a necessary part of the increasing justness of a society— triggers identity defensiveness. Consistent with these studies, White people in the U.S. now widely report that they perceive discrimination against White people to be as significant a problem as discrimination against Blacks and other minorities.  Such surveys correlate with the upsurge of White entitlement, White fragility, and increasingly reactionary and virulent forms of White supremacy in recent decades, and especially in the 2016 and 2020 elections. These are circumstances ripe for exploitation by appeals to putatively endangered White identities, and grievance politics, which characterize much of the conflict and divisiveness in contemporary U.S. society.

White evangelical Christian perceptions of discrimination track closely with the reported grievance trends of White Americans generally. Eighty percent of White evangelicals report perceiving “in-group embattlement.” They allege that “discrimination against Christians is as big a problem as discrimination against other groups in America.”  As Janelle Wong notes, a majority of White evangelical Christians claim that “American culture and way of life” has worsened since the 1950s (53). This may account for White evangelicals’ wide-spread attunement to the invitation to “make America great again.” White evangelical Christians demonstrate marked uniformity in their political affiliations. They are vastly Republican.

Wong’s work indicates a difference in minority and immigrant evangelicals in virtue of what they lack. Namely, they do not harbor a similar sense of “grievance” and perception that they have “lost” a culture and society that once was (putatively) rightfully theirs (cultural protectionism) (Wong, 21-24). In sum, evangelicals who are members of minority groups frequently hold self-identified conservative views on numerous issues without doing so in a way (or for reasons) that are predictably uniform in the way they are among White evangelicals, and in a way that does not bear the same degree of grievance toward a perceived lost (or putatively diminishing) status. The temptation is for White evangelical politics to become—in so far as they are not already—inspirited and driven by a perception of their own endangerment, and a spirit of victimhood turned inward upon itself, and then outward, exemplifying what Nietzsche called ressentiment.

As Nietzsche had it, ressentiment is a process by which a group takes its own perceived endangerment, alleged victimhood, and/or suffering, and projects its angst outward as a means by which to assert itself. It wields its alleged victimization as a covert means of conjuring and asserting power—even dominance—in the form of retribution against what it perceives (and claims) to be the source of its precarity. Ressentiment is self-deceiving in that the source of the group’s power—its amplification of its own alleged victimization and putative embattled status—produces an inability to accurately perceive the true cause of its perception of self-suffering. Ressentiment trans-values (revalues) values in order to locate meaningfulness in the group’s perception of its marginalization and suffering. It then repurposes that putative suffering and alleged endangerment as a weapon. The trans-valuation of values becomes a form of spiritualized self-protection and reprisal.[1]

The temptation is for White evangelical politics to become—in so far as they are not already—inspirited and driven by a perception of their own endangerment, and a spirit of victimhood turned inward upon itself, and then outward, exemplifying what Nietzsche called ressentiment.

In its general contours, ressentiment becomes a source of power because it is creative. It invents by transposing the meaning of values, and the orientation of actions that ensue therefrom, in virtue of the group’s conviction that its members are the people who are truly victimized and endangered. In this way, even “the highest values devalue themselves,” despite the stated intentions of those who might promulgate those values as absolute or nonnegotiable.[2]  This transvaluation—and thereby, group self-invention and reassertion— reveals how the treasured beliefs and alleged inviolable truths of the group are, in fact, symptomatic of a Western mythos (a dynamic Nietzsche described as indicative of nihilism).[3] In the present case, the mythos in question manifests in the outworking and reworking of a particular form of ethno-religious nationalism—zombie nationalism. This process of transvaluation and self-invention fits Nietzsche’s description of nihilism (even if tacitly so and/or unintended by the group in question).

Held up to the recent history of White evangelical Christians, ressentiment describes an animating dynamic for the ways that ethno-religious nationalist logics exemplify recurrent patterns of self-preservation through transformation, re-animation, and resurgence that constitute the zombie nationalism at the heart of White evangelical, culture war Christianity. As I demonstrate in the third and final installment of this blog series, the recurring effects of this pattern of ressentiment is nowhere more dramatized than in White evangelical and White Catholic Christians’ present-day, and previous, discourses and organizing regarding sexual politics.

[1] Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 162–63. Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought, 27-30. As Nietzsche has it, it is possible for ressentiment to “consummate and exhaust itself in an immediate reaction,” and thus not become “poisonous.”  This is indicative, he says, of a “noble’s” response to the experience of ressentiment (36–39).

[2] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 9.

[3] For a helpful exposition of Nietzsche’s nihilism along these lines, see Tsarina Doyle, Nietzsche’s Metaphysics of the Will to Power, pp. 2–4.

Leave a Comment on Race, Ressentiment, and Nihilism in White Evangelical Christian Nationalism Array
Jason Springs
Jason A. Springs is professor of religion, ethics, and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame. Springs is particularly interested in ethical, philosophical, and religious dimensions of restorative justice, attending specifically to its potential to intervene in racialized and class dimensions of the U.S. prison-industrial complex. He works on questions of structural and cultural violence, conceptions of religious toleration and the challenges posed by religious pluralism for transforming conflict, Islamophobia in Europe and North America, and democratic theories and practices. These concerns are oriented by his broader research interests in American Pragmatist thought. Springs’s most recent book, Resurrection in Back of the Yards: Restorative Justice and Lived Religion on Chicago’s South and West Sides (2024), examines the effectiveness of restorative justice initiatives in responding to structural forms of racism and injustice (e.g., the New Jim Crow). He is the author of Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society: From Enemy to Adversary (2018), Toward a Generous Orthodoxy: Prospects for Hans Frei’s Postliberal Theology (2010), and coauthor (with Atalia Omer) of Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook (2013). His articles appear in Journal of Religious Ethics, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, The Journal of Religion, Modern Theology, and Contemporary Pragmatism, among others. 
Theorizing Modernities article

Ethical Precarity and Staying with the Trouble


Dew on web. Author photo.

Historian of science and ecofeminist Donna Haraway’s focus in her latest book, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, is to understand and represent dynamic interdependence in the radical present. She challenges readers to abandon (1) the fiction of autonomous entities, and (2) the distracting obsession with imagined futures. In their stead, she urges all to embrace the reality of profound interdependence with human and other “earth critters” (what cellular biologist and radical evolutionary theorist Lynn Margulis called “the intimacy of strangers”) and to stay with, rather than attempt to ameliorate, the “trouble” in the ever-changing present.

Echoes of Haraway permeated my consciousness as I read Cecelia Lynch’s evocative volume Wrestling with God. Lynch’s development of what she calls “ethical precarity” aligns beautifully with Haraway’s notion of “staying with the trouble,” and both provide a refreshing and generative challenge to expressions of moral absolutism that are prominent in normative western “religious” and “secular” discourses. In fact, as Lynch ably argues, the persistent representation of each of these epistemic arenas (secular and religious) as bounded and discrete forms the foundation for moral absolutisms to flourish in explicit and implicit ways. Both are commonly evoked as totalizing worldviews (often defended as such over and against the other) that are commonly defined by moral and epistemic absolute truths. Lynch elegantly challenges this secular-religious binary and joins other scholars in asserting the symbiotic relationship of the religious to the secular while eschewing interpretations that conflate them. Her robust genealogy of Christian ethical thought at selected critical moments in history provides a strong illustration of the twin fallacies of the religious-secular binary and the ethical credibility of both religiously and secularly inspired universal moral truths. Through her meticulously argued narrative, Lynch lays bare what turns out to be the de facto reality of ethical precarity, namely that all moral agents always function in a radical and complex “present” that is situated in time and place and constructed by a dynamic confluence of forces. By the end of her eloquent exposition, one can’t help but wonder how any of us could have ever thought otherwise. Ethical precarity is a “precondition for a radically egalitarian (and thus ethical) international politics that can diminish the salience of justifications for inequality and violence” in service of the “common good” (19).

While Lynch dismantles the religion-secular binary and challenges the credibility of moral absolutism, Haraway’s focus is to decenter humans and to radically expand who and what is included when the “common good” is invoked and promoted. Haraway asserts that it is essential for us to be intentional about “making kin” that includes “godkin” with other humans and “oddkin” comprised of “multispecies connections” as a way to acknowledge our true state of radical interdependence. “Neither One nor Other, that is who we all are and always have been” (Haraway, 98). Like Lynch, Haraway exposes fundamental truths of our existence. The fiction of autonomous selves is as unmoored from reality as is the fiction of bounded abstract concepts and their attendant universalisms, including moral absolutes.

Our ethical precarity as humans is especially pronounced when we decenter ourselves and acknowledge our place in the ecologies of existence itself. The complexities of our interdependencies are legion and dynamic and impossible to fully comprehend. This decentering can be terrifying, but in Haraway’s hands we are invited into its generative wonder. Staying with the trouble in the radical present requires creating “stories [and theories and worldings] that are just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections” (Haraway, 101). She offers epistemic tools for the construction of stories, theories, and worldings that she calls “SF” that are comprised of science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, and science fact, “so far” (Haraway, 2).

Together, Haraway and Lynch invite us into the generative power of confronting and embracing the interdependent dynamism of our existence as biological and social beings. By exposing how claims of biological and social autonomy as well as bounded epistemic abstractions are fallacious, both authors thrust readers into confrontation with our physical and moral precarity without reverting to another binary of relativistic limbo. Instead, they assert that the complexity of our existence can itself inspire the radical moral and ethical imagination required to tackle our most urgent contemporary challenges.

As the climate crisis looms and the consequences of multiple forms of inequity are exposed and exacerbated by the global pandemic, we are in what Arundhati Roy calls a “portal” moment where we have the opportunity to confront the reality of our interdependence and stay with the trouble of the always radical present. Acknowledging ethical precarity in the service of multispecies flourishing seems the only responsible option. And doing so with humility, curiosity, and imagination will guide us well.

1 Comment on Ethical Precarity and Staying with the Trouble Array
Diane L. Moore
Diane L. Moore is the faculty director of Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School, a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions, and a faculty affiliate of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and the Middle East Initiative. She focuses her research on enhancing the public understanding of religion through education from the lens of critical theory.
Theorizing Modernities article

Introduction to Symposium on Wrestling with God


In Wrestling with God: Ethical Precarity in Christianity and International Relations, Cecelia Lynch provides a genealogical account of Christianity’s role in shaping the field of international relations. Throughout the book, Lynch creatively puts a geographically diverse set of thinkers from different moments in history into conversation with one another. She does this so that we might not only understand the past better, but also think with it more constructively in the present. By looking at how Christian theologians confronted the political and social contingencies of their day, Lynch shows how the logic of Christian missionizing and humanitarian activity arose during the colonial era of conquest and continues into the present, albeit now more often in the work of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and FBOs (faith-based organizations). Drawing on Judith Bultler, Lynch contends that we should see these actors in history, and ourselves, as precarious creatures—that is, as persons vulnerable to violence and injustice—perched within traditions not of our own making, but to which we can draw on to further the common good (66). This is what Lynch aims to do in her examination of the Christian tradition in this context.

In her examination, Lynch prioritizes practice over doctrine, i.e. what people do rather than what they profess to believe. In doing so, what comes to the forefront is the process of ethical reasoning rather than its doctrinal precedence or results. Ethical reasoning, on this account, is a form of casuistry, where “religious actors constantly interpret and reinterpret teachings in order to meet their needs for living and acting in specific places and times” (57). In other words, it is a bottom-up process, one where the practical realities of the world shape how we respond to challenges and eventually shape what we call doctrine. It is decidedly not a top-down process, one where we apply previously established principles to new matters without considering the restraint of contingencies. It is these contingencies which make our actions, and our sense of self, precarious.

Lynch treats each of the subjects with whom she engages throughout the book as ethically precarious, practically reasoning actors. It would be impossible to provide a complete overview of the thinkers and arguments that Lynch weaves together throughout this book. Indeed, in each historical era, she makes clear that there is no single interpretive line amongst Christian thinkers, and gives ample attention to a variety of influential philosophers, theologians, and political thinkers. She begins in the colonial era, focusing on the arguments made by theologians like Bartolomé de las Casas and Eusebio Kino concerning the treatment of indigenous peoples in the newly “discovered” Americas. She shows how the terms of these debates concerning, for example whether it was necessary to convert, kill, or peaceably live alongside indigenous peoples were shaped by the contingencies of exploration and the restraints of doctrine. But in responding to these contingencies, she explains, doctrine itself was changed. Her story continues in her discussion of debates about war amongst Protestant and Catholic theologians in the modern world. Lynch dives deep into the 1932 debate between H. Richard Niebuhr and his brother, Reinhold, on the ethics of intervention in the Sino-Japanese conflict. She does so, however, while situating it within its wider theological and political context. She demonstrates, for example, that H. Richard Niebuhr’s account of non-violence was not the only possible interpretation at the time. She shows how a Catholic thinker like Dorothy Day interpreted the Christian tradition in an even more radically pacifist way than H. Richard Niebuhr as an active mode of non-violent resistance. Before ending the book by exploring the current constellation of neoliberal NGOs and FBOs, Lynch explores how liberation theology took up the same Christian teachings as their elder brethren, and yet saw in them a message more concerned with standing with the poor and marginalized. What one is left with after reading this book is a genealogy of Christianity’s role in international relations that balances a wide-ranging scope with historical depth. This approach makes it possible for the actors that appear in each of her chapters to speak to one another and to readers.

In the responses to the book collected in this symposium, the contributors engage with the theoretical as well as ethical questions that Lynch’s book raises. Diane L. Moore puts Lynch’s account of precarity into conversation with Donna Harraway’s notion of “staying with the trouble” to further reveal what an expansive notion of the common good might entail. Michael Barnett wrestles with the boundaries of how we classify Christianity. Atalia Omer extends Lynch’s discussion of technocratic humanitarianism in our present moment and thinks with her about what it means to center those at the margins of religious traditions so that we can imagine new horizons of ethical possibility. Relatedly, Emma Tomalin reflects on the importance of prioritizing local faith actors in overcoming current neoliberal approaches to humanitarian aid.

In thinking both critically and constructively with Christian thinkers from both the past and present, Lynch’s book shows how we might employ critical genealogical methods without succumbing to a cynical and/or fatalistic view of the world. This creative engagement is key to navigating the challenges of modernity and grappling with contested notions of the secular and the sacred. In significant ways, this forum builds upon themes of our previous symposium on Giuliana Chamedes’s A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe, which also gathered scholars together to think both historically and constructively about religion’s role in shaping geopolitical realities in modernity.

Leave a Comment on Introduction to Symposium on Wrestling with God Array
Joshua S. Lupo
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism  (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Global Currents article

Eichmann Is Still in Jerusalem


 

“In the summer of 2014, the police put up a checkpoint at the entrance to the [Bab al-Majles al-Islami] neighborhood. Ever since, all residents have been suffering from severe movement restrictions that interfere with their lives and harm their livelihoods.” Yoav Gross/B’Tselem February 2016, CC 4.0 International.
On May 21, 2021 Hamas and the Israeli government agreed to a delicate ceasefire following Israel’s most recent assault on Gaza, leaving the narrow Strip, which has been under continuous siege for 15 years, to deal with the aftermath of death and destruction. Shortly after the ceasefire went into effect, U.S. officials reverted to framing the situation in Gaza as a “humanitarian” crisis rather than as a site of “nationalist” or anti-colonial struggle. However, this ghettoization of Gaza and its extrapolation from broader Palestinian struggles reinforces a fragmentary colonial logic. This exposes the manifold ways in which European colonial logics and legacies of blood purity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide still underpin the anatomy of Israeli Jewish systematic Palestinian displacement and fragmentation as well as the ever consolidation of the annexationist Jewish supremacist apartheid regime.

Now, in the wake of the assault on Gaza and unrest in Israel, Israel’s Minister of Internal Security and the Police Commissioner Major General have carried out massive arrests as a part of “Operation Law and Order.” The Operation targets Palestinian-Israelis who resisted violence instigated by Jewish vigilante mobs inside the 1948 lines and who expressed solidarity with other Palestinian communities, thereby resisting their own sequestering from the anticolonial Palestinian struggle. The importation of vigilante settler violence from the West Bank, carried out with impunity on Palestinian citizens of Israel in the so-called “mixed cities” (binational cities that are only “mixed” because of the Nakba or the Catastrophe of 1948), exposed that the citizenship status of Palestinian-Israelis is not worth the paper it is written on. This is hardly a surprise considering that, in 2018, the Jewish Nation-State Law legally enshrined what was already the norm. It did so by resolving the internal contradictions between Israel’s identity as both “Jewish” and “democratic” in favor of ethnocracy and as such the Israeli regime no longer seeks to conceal its disregard of democratic norms and international law. This ethnocratic mode denotes convergences between territorial maximalist settler theology and ultranationalist racist ideologies such as the Kahanism of the Religious Zionist Party. The latter has gained six mandates in the recent election cycle, due to Benjamin Netanyahu’s maneuvering but is just one explicit expression of a broader normalization of Jewish supremacist outlooks. In collusion with the state and underwritten by settlers’ organizations, Kahanists are inciting and provoking violence in binational cities and in occupied East Jerusalem. Kahanism is fixated on connecting ideas of Jewish blood purity to ethnoreligious land hegemony, and it seeks to enact those ideas by implementing policies that Judaize space within Israel. This blood- and land-centric Judaism is rooted in the experience of Jewish modernity in Europe.

In this instance, it is worth recalling the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the public trial of Adolf Eichmann, the executioner of the “Final Solution” against the Jews during World War II. Herself a stateless refugee during the war, she had two insights that can aid in analyzing this moment. First, Eichmann was not an evil mastermind, but rather an obedient bureaucrat totally immersed in an antisemitic ideology concerned with de-Judaizing Europe. To this degree, his evil actions were banal. Second, the Nazi machinery intent on dividing people marked for elimination according to an arbitrary scale of valuation enabled the ghettoization and eventual liquidation process implemented in the Nazi death factories. Not only that, the Nazi regime employed Jews in their own execution, whether through populating lists for the next shipments out of the ghettos or loading bodies into the ovens. In the end, while the Nazis stratified Jews into different categories, it did not really matter what your status was; all Jews were affected by the logic of genocide.

The dispossession of the Palestinian residents from Sheikh Jarrah and the violation of al-Aqsa by Israeli police that triggered the escalation into rocket exchanges between Hamas and Israel exposed how the eliminative specter of Eichmann, in an inverse, is haunting Jerusalem and Palestinian lives. A bureaucratic permit regime that permeates the entire space constitutes a fragmentation mechanism not unlike the Nazi’s taxonomy of different Jews. It is indeed an “ongoing Nakba” or a Nakba by other means, which occasionally explodes into massive aerial assaults and other military operations. The Nakba, a project of ethnic cleansing, was an event in time that involved the massive dispossession and displacement of Palestinians. Yet the Nakba is also ongoing through multiple mechanisms, including the bureaucracy of dispossession and of fragmentation. Indeed, Israeli government employees, police, and construction workers routinely carry out legal orders to destroy Palestinian homes inside and outside the 1948 borders and to dispossess Palestinian citizens of Israel to make room for Jews. And using an arbitrary scale of valuation, Israel has assigned different statuses and identification cards to Palestinians. In the end, fragmentation policies enable the trajectory of Judaification of the land through the construction and maintenance of “reservations” or Bantustans for Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority, itself a series of mostly non-contiguous Palestinian islands interrupted by checkpoints and other military barriers, is deeply discredited as a “subcontractor” of the occupation, exemplifying Arendt’s analysis of fragmentation and cooptation of the victims themselves in their erasure.

The truth is that it does not really matter what identity card status Palestinians hold. The recent escalation exposed the links between Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem, Gaza, and Israel “proper” and clarified how all Palestinians are subject to the same logic of apartheid. That Israel is an apartheid state was recently determined by the evidence-based reports of the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem as well as by Human Rights Watch. They show that the Israeli state is worthy of this label because Jewish supremacy underpins the entire geopolitical space from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea and informs the ever-aggressive Judaizing policies that have expanded from the West Bank to the hearts of “mixed cities.” Some analysts call this the Hebronization of Israel, referring especially to al-Shuhada Street in the Palestinian city of Hebron, in which it is now only permissible for Jews to live. Over decades, Israeli government policies fragmented Palestinians, dividing them into an intricate pyramid of categories of identification. The current moment revealed with clarity the anatomy of this colonial logic. Disrupting this logic, we saw on May 18th a general strike across all of Mandatory Palestine, the first since 1936.

What the grassroots organizing in Sheikh Jarrah continues to evoke, in the aftermath of the 2021 assault on Gaza, is how a dispossession from this neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem constitutes a collective Palestinian experience of an ongoing Nakba, regardless of the illusions of autonomy created by the Oslo Accords and the discourse of a (Jewish) democracy within the 1948 lines. The Nakba is ongoing and is manifest in the expansion of the Judaization policies underwritten by settler organizations. The residents of Sheikh Jarrah showed the world the banality of evil operating in every day instances of bureaucratic decision-making, framed by all-encompassing Jewish supremacist ideology. “Operation Law and Order” offers an official show of force that intends to terrorize Palestinian-Israelis back into their apparent domesticity, back into their ghetto, fragmented from other Palestinian experiences in the West Bank and Gaza. It is as if Eichmann’s own tactics and exclusionary and eliminative ideology are alive and well, only now being used against Palestinians. The purist logics of European Christian modernity live on in the land- and blood-centric Jewish supremacist regime which, along with its Palestinian victims, has also imprisoned Judaism and Jews in a militaristic ghetto.

Leave a Comment on Eichmann Is Still in Jerusalem Array
Atalia Omer
 Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Politics (2008) from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research focuses on Israel/Palestine; religion, violence, and peacebuilding; as well as theories and methods in the study of religion. Omer was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, resulting in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Among other publications, Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago Press, 2019). She is also a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015). 
Theorizing Modernities article

QAnon, Conspiracy, and White Evangelical Apocalypse


Zombies as portrayed in the movie Night of the Living Dead (1968). Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” 1919

Rather than an aberration, the fascination with conspiracies at the heart of Trump-era White evangelical Christian nationalism is symptomatic of a distinctively modern manifestation of evangelicalism’s obsession with end-time prophecies. These form a surging and resurging current throughout late twentieth and twenty-first century evangelicalism. Confronted by an ever more rapidly changing socio-political context, and now inextricably intertwined with Republican Party politics, end-time apocalypticism and messianism have come to infuse evangelical approaches to contemporary politics and culture. Caught in the siren-song of Trump and QAnon conspiracy ideology, this fixation has leapt from the folk theology pages of popular Christian fiction and populism-inflected evangelical church pews, into voting booths, political rallies and activism, and onto the lawn of the U.S. Capitol at the January 6th, 2021 insurrection. Together, apocalypticism and messianism form a recurring dynamic, pattern, and logic that drives the latest resurrection of White evangelical nationalism—a dynamic, pattern, and logic I describe as “zombie nationalism.”

The Zombification of White Christian Nationalism

Studies of the American religious landscape produced in the second decade of the twenty first century claim that White, Christian America is rapidly ageing and diminishing in population, its institutions receding, its influence waning. If demography is destiny, the argument runs, the relevant demographic trends indicate that White Christian America is dying.

Amid these projected realities, Robert Jones warns of the emergence of a white evangelical Christian “Frankenstein’s monster” (231)—an entity stitched together from the remnant fragments of formerly hegemonic, gradually declining, cultural and institutional bodies. Though long decaying, they become reanimated and propelled by the surging currents and organizing shocks of mobilizing for political power and specific culture war causes. Frankenstein’s monster stands in as a metaphor for the kind of aggressive, concentrated culture war resurrection that White evangelicalism opted for in its political resurgence under Trump and in successive waves of Trumpism (which has outlasted the Trump presidency itself).

And yet, in contrast to Jones’s analogy of a White evangelical “Frankenstein’s monster,” the ethno-religious nationalism that animates contemporary U.S. White evangelicalism is fashioned much more in the image of the zombies of George Romero’s film, Dawn of the Dead (1978), the follow up to the his first zombie film, Night of the Living Dead (1968). Like George Romero’s zombies (and in diametric contrast to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), the latest mutation of this ethno-religious nationalism demonstrates little capacity for the kind of self-discovery, hyper-self-reflexivity, critical-reflectiveness, and desire for nurturing relationships that Harold Bloom describes as the tragic vulnerability of Victor Frankenstein’s creation.

In the Romero original, the zombies emerge slowly. They traverse the terrain with seemingly infinitesimal motions. Their power inheres in the ways they pursue their objectives in mindless, lock-step conformity, and with undeterrable resolve. So it is for the social and ideological patterns that inspirit the latest resurrection of White, evangelical Christian political resurgence. These patterns are reflected in dynamics of reanimation born of motivating commitments and beliefs that are not amenable to contrary evidence. Such recurring dynamics are fueled, moreover, by U.S. White evangelical Christians conceptualizing themselves as an increasingly marginalized remnant in a society that (putatively) originally did, and (allegedly) should still, reflect their central identity and values. It entails the self-perception of being perennially marginalized—and progressively more endangered— victims of an aggressively anti-Christian “secular” society. For White evangelicals, these grievances infuse (and further propagate themselves through) pop-culture genres in evangelical Christian culture that amplify accounts of spiritual warfare, end time apocalypticism, and messianism. As Edward G. Simmons, David C. Ludden, and J. Colin Harris show, these forms of “pop-theology” (or folk theology) prime White evangelicals for forms of cognitive dissonance. Such dissonance is fertile soil for conspiracy fascination that graduates into—sometimes subtle, sometimes flagrant—radicalization. Many Trump-era evangelicals embrace “end-time” and messianism-inflected conspiracy theories that permeate Trump-driven Republican politics and policy-making. From this ensues a proclivity to position their political and cultural opponents on the far side of a Manichean divide and to imbue contemporary politics with cosmic urgency.

During the Trump presidency, for example, White, evangelical Christians were absorbed in ever-expanding numbers into QAnon conspiracy ideology. Some evangelical scholars sounded the alarm about this trend. They declared the active evangelical embrace of—or impassive acquiescence to— QAnon as a departure from true evangelicalism, into an altogether different, heretical religious movement. And yet, this response by evangelical elites makes denial of White evangelicalism’s relation to QAnon all too convenient and un-self-critical. Much like the basic principle of addiction recovery, denying that one even has a problem is a primary indicator that the problem is not only present, but has become, in fact, quite fundamental.

Clearly, not all evangelicals became QAnon followers—though startlingly large numbers have. Evangelical and non-evangelical analysts alike document that captivation with QAnon conspiracies has spread through the ranks of White evangelicalism like wildfire. Careful inspection through the lens of ethno-religious nationalism illuminates that many White evangelicals are primed to embrace QAnon ideology for reasons intrinsic to 20th and 21st century White evangelical culture. Indeed, ethno-religious nationalism—and the distinctive logic and dynamics of zombie nationalism— forms the connective tissue creating a symbiosis between much White evangelicalism and QAnon conspiracy ideology.

QAnon and White Evangelical Nationalism

QAnon theories, and the internet “drops” wherein “Q” would leak putative secret information about government officials and the media, emerged in the second year of Trump’s presidency. They quickly evolved into an increasingly mainstream religio-political movement promoted by Trump (via Twitter). “Q” portrays Trump as a messianic figure who is a bulwark for U.S. White evangelicals and other putatively “patriotic” populations against assaults upon American Christian culture. “Q” is a clandestine (that is, “anonymous,” hence, “QAnon”) internet presence whose viral posts and YouTube videos—frequently sprinkled with quotations from Christian scripture (e.g. 2 Chronicles 7:14) and soliciting prayer from his/her followers—purport to expose the insidious inner workings of the so-called “deep state,” and the intrinsic deceptiveness of “mainstream media.”[1] “Q” purports to reveal how Trump’s alleged struggles against these are infused with apocalyptic significance and spiritual warfare, cohere with end time biblical prophecy, and require the retrieval and defense of America’s “true” identity as a Christian nation.

QAnon flag at Virginia 2nd Amendment Rally in January 2020. Photo Credit: Anthony Crider. Via Flickr.

At its most acute, the QAnon conspiracy ideology asserts that the Democratic party is controlled by a cabal of global elite (“globalist”) and “deep state” anti-Christian and anti-Trump actors (specifically naming the Rothchilds, George Soros, Bill and Hilary Clinton, Bill Gates, and “Hollywood” figures, among others). This cabal allegedly engages in pedophilia, child sex-trafficking, ritual cannibalism of children, and worships Satan. Further, this ideology amplifies the “big lie” or Trump’s baseless claims that he won the 2020 presidential election “in a landslide,” and that the election was stolen from him and his followers. Though seemingly so extreme as to be dismissed out of hand, in fact, White evangelicals in the U.S. embrace these claims at rates far higher than their non-evangelical, Republican counterparts.

Examined in terms of their religio-cultural structures, these conspiracy-fueled patterns of scapegoating and demonization of opponents are neither novel, nor especially unusual. They reanimate distinct features of widely circulated antisemitic conspiracy theories, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—an early 20th century Russian Czarist fabricated account of a Jewish economic and political elite allegedly controlling global politics and economics. QAnon crosses various “Protocols” tropes with the recurrent “blood libel” accusations that inspired numerous Christian pogroms against European Jews, namely, claiming that Jews kidnapped Christian children and used their blood in ritual observance. QAnon demonizes and scapegoats its targets in similar ways, and similarly inspires violence. The antisemitic contours of QAnon ideology make it especially attractive to self-avowed White supremacists and White nationalists (for example, the Proud Boys). These antisemitic contours are “plausibly deniable” for many White evangelicals in virtue of the self-averred, seemingly philosemitic, pro-Zionist policies of the Trump administration. QAnon’s ethno-nationalist elements, intermingling with its religious dimensions, create an intoxicating elixir for White evangelicals who may think of themselves as sharing nothing in common with avowed White nationalists or card-carrying White supremacists. Yet, QAnon brings the elective affinities between these groups into clear and distinct focus. Those affinities form the warp and woof of the ethno-religious nationalism that is the (sometimes camouflaged, often denied) connective tissue between them.

Trump-era White evangelicals have widely adopted various messianic interpretations of Donald Trump. Many of these feed directly into QAnon claims that Trump is an “end time” defender of U.S. Christian culture. This is the same culture previously captivated and emboldened by Franke Peretti’s best-selling spiritual warfare Christian fiction, which generated warnings from some evangelical elites against a looming obsession with “spiritual warfare.” The U.S. White evangelical culture-industrial complex amplifies these claims and dynamics exponentially. QAnon is, in effect, one part Frank Peretti spiritual warfare, one part Left Behind series apocalypticism, and one part Elders of Zion antisemitic conspiracy theory, packaged together in a tantalizing, self-involving variation on Celebrity Apprentice reality television and social media.

Apocalypse Again

End-time, apocalyptic, messianic drivers of White, evangelical Christian nationalism are not new. They form a recurrent dynamic in contemporary White U.S. evangelicalism. The best-selling, end-time prophecy publishing industry emerged in the 1970s and 80s. It was launched by Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), which the New York Times identified as the best-selling non-fiction book of the 1970s. This, along with other phenomena of Christian rapture culture (for example, the A Thief in the Night film series of 1972–83), influenced the upsurge of evangelical political engagement in the 1980s. Evangelical apocalypticism surged forward again with the release of the bestselling Left Behind book and film series, and ensuing multimedia franchise, throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. All of these are prior examples of the various apocalyptical entanglements that re-emerge in evangelical Christian enmeshment in QAnon conspiracy ideology.

These examples are not merely benign instances of “Christian fiction,” niche Christian nonfiction, or “Christian entertainment.” They have recurring real world implications. For example, 1970s and 80s end-time prophecy and apocaplypticism shaped White, evangelical attitudes toward U.S. national politics in the Cold War. It informed evangelicals’ views regarding the prospects of nuclear war—which many viewed as the form that biblically prophesied apocalypse might take. Hal Lindsey claimed it was the Anti-Christ that would “delude the world with promises of peace” (144). As Matthew Sutton shows (see chap. 11), throughout the 1980s Ronald Reagan catered to his White evangelical base by occasionally entertaining their apocalypticism at various points throughout his presidency. Selling upwards around 80 million copies altogether, the Left Behind series of the 90s and early aughts shaped evangelical views about the State of Israel’s end-time significance in the present, and fueled Christian Zionism. Indeed, the dispensational theology modeled in the Left Behind series spurred Trump to move the U.S Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018.

QAnon conspiracy ideology symbiotically feeds upon populist White evangelical impulses toward apocalypticism and messianism. It captures them through their fusion with Republican political ideology. It retrieves and synergistically reanimates—even as it mutates— earlier religious nationalist patterns. These occur, for example, in re-emergent concepts of the White Christian nation (peoplehood) as a victimized-yet-faithful and long-suffering remnant, that conception’s inter-wovenness with embattled, originally Christian identity and culture (a myth of origin), and the exceptional role of the U.S. as a “chosen nation” (or “new Israel”) in God’s providential plan within world history (exceptionalism). The cyclical resurgence of these dynamics exemplifies “zombie nationalism.”

Hence, the capture of White evangelicals by the siren-song of Trump-amplified ethno-religious nationalism through QAnon conspiracy ideology is no momentary deviation from true evangelicalism. It is the culmination of more than a half-century of evangelicalism’s surging and resurging fixation upon end-times apocalypticism, and its concurrent progressive enmeshment in, and symbiosis with, Republican Party ideology. It is intrinsic—not extraneous or incidental—to White evangelical religion.

Rather than the demise prognosticated by social scientists, the case of “the end of White Christian America” is an example by which to examine how forms of religious authority and identity navigate conflicts precipitated by rapid change and relativized significance in a diversifying context, and how they vie for retrenchment through radicalization in the shifting contexts of modernity. Any hope for evangelical resistance to these trends, much less constructive transformation, will entail grappling with the very changes that appear to them to be the sources of their precarity. This entails working in registers that have emerged in U.S. society more broadly—registers of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality. Responding intelligently and intentionally requires that White Christians, in a spirit of teachability, come to terms with past—and recurring—patterns of racism, ethnocentrism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy, in which they are implicated. I examine how race energizes the ethno-religious nationalist impulses of zombie nationalism in Part 2 of this series.

[1] A 2018 poll conducted by the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center Research Institute found that 46% of self-identified evangelicals and 52% of those whose beliefs tag them as evangelical “strongly believes the mainstream media produces fake news”—a central tenet of QAnon. Indeed, the more active respondents were in their church, the more mistrusting of news media they were. This is one trend, along with their widespread embrace of Donald Trump, that has rendered White evangelicals especially susceptible to the central claims of QAnon theories. See Stetzer “Evangelicals need to address the QAnoners in our midst,” USA Today, Sept 4, 2020.

1 Comment on QAnon, Conspiracy, and White Evangelical Apocalypse Array
Jason Springs
Jason A. Springs is professor of religion, ethics, and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame. Springs is particularly interested in ethical, philosophical, and religious dimensions of restorative justice, attending specifically to its potential to intervene in racialized and class dimensions of the U.S. prison-industrial complex. He works on questions of structural and cultural violence, conceptions of religious toleration and the challenges posed by religious pluralism for transforming conflict, Islamophobia in Europe and North America, and democratic theories and practices. These concerns are oriented by his broader research interests in American Pragmatist thought. Springs’s most recent book, Resurrection in Back of the Yards: Restorative Justice and Lived Religion on Chicago’s South and West Sides (2024), examines the effectiveness of restorative justice initiatives in responding to structural forms of racism and injustice (e.g., the New Jim Crow). He is the author of Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society: From Enemy to Adversary (2018), Toward a Generous Orthodoxy: Prospects for Hans Frei’s Postliberal Theology (2010), and coauthor (with Atalia Omer) of Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook (2013). His articles appear in Journal of Religious Ethics, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, The Journal of Religion, Modern Theology, and Contemporary Pragmatism, among others. 
Theorizing Modernities article

Introduction to Zombie Nationalism


 

President Donald J. Trump walks from the White House Monday evening, June 1, 2020, to St. John’s Episcopal Church, known as the church of Presidents’s, that was damaged by fire during demonstrations in nearby LaFayette Square Sunday evening. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead). Public Domain.

Reports of the death of White Christian America have been greatly exaggerated. White Christian political mobilization helped deliver Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency in 2016.  White Christians self-identifying as “evangelical”—26% of voters in the 2016 election—voted for Trump in greater numbers than for any single candidate in the previous four presidential elections—a rate of 81%. White Catholics followed closely, voting for Trump at a rate of 60%.  Rather than a momentary choice of a putative “lesser of two evils,” White evangelicals steadily increased their support for Trump and his policies throughout his presidency. They supported his constricting immigration and walled border policies (including separating refugee children from their asylum seeking parents), his prohibition of immigrants from various Muslim-majority countries (upheld by the Supreme Court in June 2018), and his deploying federal troops to violently quell peaceful protests in the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020. By the end of Trump’s presidency, the more frequently a White evangelical attended church, the stronger his or her support for the Trump agenda was likely to be. White evangelical Christian support surged to nearly the same proportion for Trump’s attempted re-election in 2020 (75%).

This upsurge of laser-focused, White, evangelical voting in the 2016 and 2020 elections has sparked an emerging industry of books that point to White Christian nationalism as the driver of this phenomenon.[1] And yet, the intermingling of religion and nationalism does not merely pertain to the backlash politics and voting patterns across two elections. The Trump-infused ethno-religious nationalism of White evangelicals is but the most recent upsurge of a political and cultural current that is traceable back at least sixty years, and indeed, much further. At the same time, exclusive—or even primary—focus upon whiteness and Christianity in these developments leaves multiple drivers of the ethno-religious nationalism of White evangelicals obscured from view. Attending to the sexual politics that fuel evangelical ethno-religious nationalism is equally indispensable. By sexual politics, I refer to the ways that gender norms, operations of power related to sexual identities, and policing of sexuality all function to legitimate and perpetuate ideologies, and are used to advance political agendas. Indeed, focusing on sexual politics uniquely illuminates the elective affinities between ethnicity, religion, and nationalism in this case. As a matter of historical emergence and development, sexual politics pervade the socio-political processes by which White evangelical ethno-religious nationalism has asserted and reasserted itself across recent decades—an animating and reanimating impulse, pattern, and logic that has surged and resurged for more than a half-century in White, Christian America. I describe this persistently recurring dynamic, pattern, and logic as zombie nationalism.

Part 1 in this blog series examines the ways that contemporary White evangelicals are religiously and culturally primed to embrace ethno-religious nationalism on the one hand, and its intermingling with Trump-driven conspiracy ideology (occurring most acutely in the apocalyptic and messianic features of the QAnon conspiracy movement), on the other. It diagnoses the nature and character of the apocalyptical and messianic fixations that inflect the nationalist proclivities of White evangelicals, and which render them distinctly susceptible to the siren-song of Trumpism and QAnon. I demonstrate how these ethno-religious and nationalist patterns, dynamics, and logic are intrinsic to modern U.S. evangelical Christianity, rather than peripheral or extrinsic. Part 2 of the series explicitly assesses the ways that race is inextricably interwoven into the ethno-religious nationalism of contemporary White evangelicals in its entirety, and is a distinct driver of its recent resurrection. Finally, Part 3 takes up the role of sexual politics as a recurring motivator of White evangelical ethno-religious nationalism since the 1960s.

Together, the three pieces that follow conduct a complex exposition and dissection of zombie nationalism. They historically contextualize and explicate its religious and cultural genealogy, its motivating commitments and distinctive temptations, and finally, the recurring patterns of sexual politics that have inspirited the resurrection of the White evangelical ethnoreligious nationalism of the Trump era.

[1] Robert Jones, The End of White Christian America; Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity; Philip Gorski, “Why Evangelicals Voted for Trump”; Gorski, American Babylon: Christianity and Democracy Before and After Trump; Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States; Andrew Seidel, The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American; Sarah Posner, Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump; Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers; Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America; Kristin Kobes du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.

 

Leave a Comment on Introduction to Zombie Nationalism Array
Jason Springs
Jason A. Springs is professor of religion, ethics, and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame. Springs is particularly interested in ethical, philosophical, and religious dimensions of restorative justice, attending specifically to its potential to intervene in racialized and class dimensions of the U.S. prison-industrial complex. He works on questions of structural and cultural violence, conceptions of religious toleration and the challenges posed by religious pluralism for transforming conflict, Islamophobia in Europe and North America, and democratic theories and practices. These concerns are oriented by his broader research interests in American Pragmatist thought. Springs’s most recent book, Resurrection in Back of the Yards: Restorative Justice and Lived Religion on Chicago’s South and West Sides (2024), examines the effectiveness of restorative justice initiatives in responding to structural forms of racism and injustice (e.g., the New Jim Crow). He is the author of Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society: From Enemy to Adversary (2018), Toward a Generous Orthodoxy: Prospects for Hans Frei’s Postliberal Theology (2010), and coauthor (with Atalia Omer) of Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook (2013). His articles appear in Journal of Religious Ethics, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, The Journal of Religion, Modern Theology, and Contemporary Pragmatism, among others.