In convos about Christian nationalism, it's important to define terms clearly.

"Christian nationalism" is a specific ideology that ties the future of the Church to the future of the State. It overlaps w/ secular nationalism but has incredibly toxic implications for gospel.

Some folks might say, "Well, I'm a Christian & I think we should prioritize America 1st over global concerns. Does that make me a Christian nationalist?"

The answer is a strong... maybe.

To know if you're ascribing to Christian nationalism of simple political nationalism, you'll need to interrogate your relationship btwn your nation & practice of your faith.

This will be extremely hard to do especially if you've been discipled in American evangelicalism in the last 40 years. Rhetorically speaking, we have conflated God & country to extent that it's hard to know where one stops & other begins.

Here's an example: In early 2000s, I had an ESL student from Bavaria. He was devout Lutheran & wanted to go to church for Easter. But when he got there, he saw an American flag on platform & was so disturbed that he left the service. He told me about it in class next day.

Popping back on briefly to share some insights on media consumption, spread of conspiracy theories, & epistemelogical divides.

.@n_d_anderson & I have spent the last few days having important conversations w/ family members who fall in the evangelical right matrix.

We didn't talk presenting issues & aimed our Qs instead for the underlying divides. @DavidAFrench identified this in a recent article as the difference btwn the danger of believing activating lies & enabling lies.

A couple things became apparent very quickly:

1) We had to be the ones to insist on conversation. People are afraid of conversation right now b/c they think it will turn into a fight & they don't want that w/ people they love. Meanwhile, the epistemological divides widen.

2) We had to clarify the underlying disconnects--and they aren't simply at a policy or issue level. Unfortunately, people have been trained to see positions or votes as representative of certain things that don't necessarily represent. But this leads to biggest takeaway...

Now that the political calculus has changed in US...

I don't accept the notion that one must critique both right & left in the same way or even give equal time to critiquing them in order to have a fair & faithful public witness. Why?

1. Critiques that aim for equal time will end up missing underlying dynamics of power & responsibility. Those w/ power are responsible in different ways than those w/out it. And those who claim the name of Christ have distinct repsonsiblities from those who don't.

2. Critiques that posit right/left as mirror images miss that while each may operate on different principles, they do so w/in the same set of social shaping forces. IOW, they might be swimming in different directions but they're in the same stream

3. Critique emerges from a specific ethos & is directed to a certain audience. Critiquing those outside your tribe is so much easier than those w/in it. B/c of this, faithfulness might sometimes mean more focused critique of your own group & less of your ideological opponent.

4. Critique of opponents requires extra work to do fairly b/c it means understanding their arguments as they understand them. It requires asking right questions, hearing answers, & being able to find true sources of disagreement, not superficial ones.

Okay folks, you all have been very kind over the last few days. I promise this account hasn't been highjacked. There's a lot going on & evangelical proximity to it is maddening.

But I promised you a thread about cancel culture, socioeconomics, & vocation.

First, let me say that I believe peer pressure & shunning happens in every social group. I believe the group can rally against the individual to force them comply w/ established norms & established powers. It is feature of human community.

So I don't disbelieve that something akin to "cancel culture" exists. But living in & ministering in working class spaces, I've never understood the emotion attached to popular iteration.

Sure, we talk about political correctness & the pressure to not say things, but the cancel culture narrative always felt imported somehow. Like, it wasn't organic to the way we moved thru the world.

So it's always puzzled me. The emotion that is. The fear. The panic of the woke mob coming for your job. Why is it framed this way? None of this made sense to me until I started mixing more w/ mid-upper class conservatives, particularly Xians.