Last week, an invitation to become Facebook friends with a former colleague of mine popped up in my account. I use Facebook to keep up with family, friends, and some former students and this colleague taught with me in the same high school social studies department. There were actually three of us in the department, I was the chairperson, but this colleague and I had the responsibility for an annual class trip to Washington, DC.
Initially, we got along well and worked well together. We had common interests in the details of the Civil War, including participating in battlefield re-enactments, had a similar approach to the classroom instruction of history and we both coached basketball. We also shared, at least on the surface, membership in the same Evangelical denomination, though we went to different churches.
Through planning for the trip to Washington, we discovered we were on opposite ends of the political spectrum, and that resulted in his turn away from a friendly demeanor back to a professional one with faint hints of contempt here and there. It took a while to figure out that it wasn't just a few cultural issues that was the driving force behind his politics, it was Christian nationalism.
He believed, because it was taught in his church, that God intended for America to be a Christian nation, not a full democracy, and that was what the founders attempted to write into the Constitution. According to him, Christians were destined to rule the country, that's why God protected the white, European settlers who came here, and let them take over the continent and exploit its untouched natural resources for the riches they produced, in order to make the world a better place. Doing so, according to their theology, will usher in the return of Jesus Christ.
After realizing that he wasn't going to consider any other view, and would go to the same prooftexts in the Bible over and over, telling me on more than one occasion that appealing to the original language and context of scripture was a scheme of Satan designed to divert people from the truth, I just dropped those ends of the conversation and focused our conversations on teaching history. Even that was a struggle, because of the way he treated anyone who didn't share his politics.
We really had an issue when it came to planning the Washington trip for the students. The National Holocaust Museum was on the itinerary, approved by the administration. He wanted to skip it and take a side trip to the Antietam and Gettysburg battlefields. Going to the Holocaust museum was a half-day, so we didn't do side trips out of the city. The whole time we were in the museum, he was a problem. He was obviously angry, making inappropriate comments to parents and students. He refused to participate in the primary museum objective, of receiving a small booklet like a passport with the name of a Jewish holocaust victim seeing the exhibits through that perspective, turning the pages to view the person's experience, and then revealing, at the end, whether the person whose name was on the booklet, survived or was murdered.
He left the school at the end of that year, and I had only seen him a couple of times, in the community, until I moved away. So I was a little bit surprised to get his friend invitation. But after a few of his posts have popped up on my newsfeed, I knew why. He's still a Christian nationalist, perhaps even more intensely than before, and he posts in an apparent effort to recruit others to his cause, or convince them of its truthfulness. He reposts conspiracy theories, photographs that seem to support phony accusations against the "deep state," clips from his pastor's sermons that are full of racist hate and vitriol, and one of his favorites seems to be photos of hundreds of illegals crossing the border.
It made it very easy to "unfriend" him.
Twisted Theology
Some of the posts were video clips from the church where he is a member. It's a small, fundamentalist Baptist congregation, about 50 people, and its pulpit is being used to proclaim extremist politics, blending them with select passages from the Bible, mostly the Old Testament, to create a heretical perspective for the purpose of political motivation. It's hard to determine, from the video clips, whether there's any real preaching and teaching of the Christian gospel, but with this sort of preview, my conclusion is that the Christian gospel is not being preached at all, it is, rather, being re-defined.
The conspiracy theories and "deep state" reports are provably false. The Bible verses they use are taken completely out of their context, which is typical of fundamentalist Christians, even before the nationalism infected their theology. Christian worship in these churches can't be discerned or recognized, they have become political rallies.
The social media posts have nothing to do with catching up with what they're doing. They're using social media as a recruiting and informing platform. Before I unfriended my former colleague, there was no social chatter or keeping up with what's going on in his life. I doubt a personal message would have received a response and the content of his posts comes from somewhere else.
The moment these churches step into extremism, they lose their Christian identity. Like the state churches which they claim preach heresy and are apostate, they, too, deny the power of God and try to use the power of government to advance their mission and purpose, which is their own empowerment and dominance, and has nothing to do at all with God or with Jesus Christ.
Jesus set the tone for his true church when he refused to accept the political rule of the world offered to him by Satan, in his time of temptation, recorded in Matthew's gospel. The moment a church seeks political power and influence, it ceases to be a church and it loses its original mission and purpose. Claiming that the United States was founded to be a nation dominated and controlled by white Christians for the purpose of ushering in the second coming of Jesus is not a Biblical doctrine, it is heresy and it is how churches are being hijacked and rendered ineffectuve as the real satan does expect.
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