Richard’s Reviews > American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church > Status Update

Pithy and high-handed demands to read scripture deserve to be turned on their head in the interest of making the point that scripture, in its entirety, isn't univocal.

"Take a moment to read the first 10 verses of Matthew 5. Empire is not at the center of God's story."

Take a moment to read the Book of Joshua. Killing a lot of people in your way sure seems to be.

What does one call it when data is alluded to, implying that "some" of a group behave/believe a certain way, and then, a page later, the conclusion is that said group has no love whatsoever in their hearts?

I'm choosing to call it sleight of fact.

Perhaps it's the TRPG player who lived through the Satanic Panic in me, but I find myself constantly questioning the correlation/causation arguments Whitehead is making, and whether racist-misogynist fear mongering would have latched into whatever was hegemonic in the culture to justify its pose.

Here we get to the heart of the problem with Whitehead's take on violence: he cherry picks his instances to build up his narrative of violence as a CN idol, and fuses it with a dismissal of violence having any value morally. This is made obvious in his take on the Civil War: yes, the South believed violence was justified to protect slavery. The North believed it was justified to end it. Are both wrong?

I'm going to finish this book, mostly so I can think for myself on actual actions to take over the vague academic platitudes provided here.

Whitehead tries to slide his own false binary choice in here. I cannot help every person in need, so clearly the government must, as if there is not an intermediate step in collective action that doesn't require the coercive power of government.

"To pursue justice, Christians will have to seek power; however, this employment of power should benefit all people..."

False, the employment of just power can inconvenience the authoritarian and fascist. Stop pretending Nazis don't need to be punched.

"Accommodators...who make up a third of the population..."

"Ambassadors represent about 16 percent of the population..."

"Together, these two groups represent just under half of Americans who support Christian Nationalism to some degree..."

33+16=49. So, if I've followed this, 98% of Americans support Christian Nationalism...or math is hard and this argument is badly written.

I worry that Whitehead is mistaking his audience here. Does he imagine that the people picking up a book about White Christian Nationalism believe it's not a problem, and so page count must be expended on an argument that it is?