Brian Kaylor > Quotes

“The second divergence is fear. By making people feel like they are constantly under threat from the racial, immigrant, or non-Christian “other,” Christian Nationalism provokes people to act in ways that are decidedly unlike Jesus.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“What happens when “ordinary Americans” no longer share “common beliefs” or understand the “commitments of the Western religious and philosophical tradition”?”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“The year 2018 was when the Christian Nationalistic effort known as “Project Blitz” launched, even receiving an approving tweet the next year from President Donald Trump.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“From legislating prayer in public schools to storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, inspiration has been derived in the present from the work of mainline Protestants in the past.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“why do so many churches place the U.S. flag in a place where the presence of the Lord who rules all the nations is thought to be near?”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“Christian Nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy. Christian Nationalism demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“As Jemar Tisby, author of The Color of Compromise, added in the same report on Christian Nationalism and January 6, “The White Christian Nationalist version of patriotism is racist, xenophobic, patriarchal, and exclusionary.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“Christian Nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy. ... It often overlaps with and provides cover for White supremacy and racial subjugation.”
― Brian Kaylor, The Bible According to Christian Nationalists: Exploiting Scripture for Political Power

“We must exorcise the demons of racism and American nationalism. We must step outside of the power structures to recover a prophetic voice. We must look anew at the Scriptures, not as a cudgel to wield against our supposed enemies but as a guide for daily living and a template for how we treat others.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“While Dorhauer sought defeat and banishment in contrast to Curry’s suggestion of engagement and persuasion, both mainline leaders see Christian Nationalism as a problem of “the other.” Those holding these beliefs are outsiders who can be reached only by crossing boundaries. They may disagree over what that boundary crossing should look like but both depict this dynamic in us-versus-them language.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.”
― Brian Kaylor, The Bible According to Christian Nationalists: Exploiting Scripture for Political Power

“They recognized that appearing with faith leaders in religious places alongside sacred symbols made their actions and administration look moral, perhaps even holy, to those watching and listening. But why do Christian leaders in the U.S.—especially mainline Protestants—cooperate? Why are they so willing to let themselves be used in this way?”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“Christian Nationalism is bad branding that soils the entire American Church. While mainline Protestants helped lay the foundation for the larger edifice, the worst offenses now emanate from other corners, but they still sully everyone’s reputation.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“For those who grew up in White churches in the U.S.—mainline, evangelical, Pentecostal, or Catholic—Christian Nationalism was often in the air. We breathed it in, seeing it as inherently part of what it means to be Christian.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“Civil religion depends on downplaying differences in ways that empty religious affirmations of their meaning.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“Failing to challenge the twisting of the Bible to justify and evangelize for Christian Nationalism has empowered bad faith uses of the text.”
― Brian Kaylor, The Bible According to Christian Nationalists: Exploiting Scripture for Political Power

“Because the myth that America is a Christian nation has led many to associate America with Christ, many now hear the good news of Jesus only as American news, capitalistic news, imperialistic news, exploitive news, antigay news, or Republican news.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“Despite its social justice activism that seeks to alter the status quo, the congregation offers a unique form of legitimacy to the powers that be. It’s difficult to simultaneously be Christ’s Church and the Church of the Presidents. It’s hard to serve in the king’s court and also speak as the prophet.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“Ambassadors believe the United States has a special relationship with God, and thus, the federal government should formally declare the United States a Christian nation and advocate for Christian values,” Whitehead and Perry explained. “Ambassadors support returning formal prayers to public schools and allowing the display”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“Christian Nationalism in the Capitol didn’t end on January 6. And mainline Protestants created this daily display of the ideology.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“In trying to privilege certain identities and statuses over others, Christian Nationalism seeks to create a society where all participants are not afforded equal rights by their government and equal respect from other citizens.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“To read the Bible from the margins is to grasp God in the midst of struggle and oppression. ... Reading the Bible from the margins is as crucial for the salvation of the dominant culture as it is for the liberation of the disenfranchised.24”
― Brian Kaylor, The Bible According to Christian Nationalists: Exploiting Scripture for Political Power

“When the government sponsors the prayer vigil as a way to commemorate a Christian Nationalist attack on the U.S. Capitol, it is especially insulting to our foundational principle of religious freedom. Instead, the government should use the occasion to remind people that it is the secular nature of our government that fortifies our democracy and frees us to come together as equals.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“the man long credited with writing the Pledge in 1892 left it out.3 And ‘God’ would stay out of it for another 62 years—until mainline Protestants pledged to change our nation’s oath.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“A danger of creating symbols is losing control over their use. They can send different and even conflicting messages than what their creators originally intended—like we saw on January 6, 2021.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“Christian Nationalism is not a politically enthusiastic version of Christianity, nor is it a religiously informed patriotism. Christian Nationalism is a prosperity gospel for nation-states, a liberation theology for White people.”
― Brian Kaylor, The Bible According to Christian Nationalists: Exploiting Scripture for Political Power

“The years just after World War II ushered in a golden age for Christian Nationalism in the United States. After the creation of the National Day of Prayer in 1952, the launch of the National Prayer Breakfast in 1953, and the addition of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, the revival spread to feature “In God We Trust.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“To assert that I am on God’s side and you are not, that I know God’s will and you do not, and that I will use the power of government to advance my understanding of God’s kingdom is certain to produce hostility.4”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“Barely four months had passed since Docherty’s sermon. After six decades without “God,” the Pledge got quickly baptized as the nation was being reborn with Christian Nationalistic flare.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“Christian Nationalistic prayers didn’t just come into the Capitol during the insurrection; mainline clergy first spent two centuries regularly baptizing America’s leaders as instruments of God.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism