The False Unity of Christian Nationalism

From Chuck Wichgers, Wisconsin State Legislator at the Republican National Convention, to David Brooks at The New York Times, everyone is preaching at you that America needs unity.

Unity is not what democracy is for.

Christian Nationalists and other conservatives crave for there to be just one answer and one source of power and authority for everything and everybody, but that’s just not how people work.

We disagree about things, and in a democracy, that’s how things are supposed to be!

As Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School warns, “Sometimes we substitute calls for unity and civility with the hard work of actually transacting different ideas in a democracy.”

David Brooks writes in the New York Time that a treasured cultural consensus has been lost, and that “science and reason failed to produce a substitute moral order that could hold the nation together.” What he never explains, however, is what makes cultural consensus matter. Why do we need one moral order to hold the nation together.

Democracy is about protecting difference, not about enforcing unity. Yet, David Brooks longs for a new religious power to bring Americans back in line, writing that, “this work of cultural repair will be done by religious progressives, by a new generation of leaders who will build a modern social gospel… the work of building that culture will take decades. Until then, we, as a democracy, are on thin ice.”

Christian Nationalists are never going to agree to a progressive religion modern social gospel. Progressive secular Americans will reject it too.

We shouldn’t be afraid of diversity. A pledge of allegiance to unity is antithetical to American democracy. Unity is an oppressive problem, not a solution.