"The Discipline of the White Christ"

Frederick Jackson Turner is remembered among historians for changing the field from a discipline that recited facts, often in a triumphalist fashion, to a course of study that sought to theorize how and why social change happened. In an important paper in 1893, Turner presented his famous “Frontier Thesis,” which sought to explain the development of US society across the continent in terms other than manifest destiny. That work marks an important shift in how historians sought to understand and communicate history. The discipline spent more effort theorizing the material and cultural forces that brought about the changes historians studied. 

Nevertheless, the old standards of the profession still had a certain gravity. The rest of the historians’ guild was trying to catch up to Turner, but even the man himself could lapse into the old habits of the triumphalist past, history written by hegemony. As Woodrow Wilson encouraged US involvement in World War One, Turner took up the pen in support. US support of the war was righteous, he claimed, against the naturally bellicose Germans and their allies. The enmity between the two sides had been written into the cosmos, across the ages: “The Prussian discipline is the discipline of Thor, the War God, against the discipline of the White Christ.”¹

“The Discipline of the White Christ” is the most succinct description I can think of for the abomination that happened in Washington, DC over the weekend. There, thousands gathered on the national mall for “Rededication 250.” I know scholars and journalists who have done their work carefully to try and understand and describe with analytical clarity the movement of Christian nationalism happening in the United States. I’d encourage you to read their work and think carefully about what it is happening, and why, and how it came to be. ²

But this little article is not that. Whereas Frederick Jackson Turner was attempting to defend the US entry into World War One against a people he attempted to describe as heathen, followers of false and belligerent gods, I am attempting no such defense. Turner offered the right description, but he was wrong to think it anything but a moral plague. The other thinkers cited above, some of whom are friends and colleagues, are doing smart work aimed at nuanced analytical clarity on what is happening in today’s Christofascism. This is straight polemic, for which I offer no apologies. 

This weekend, the United States government financed a religious bacchanal called “Rededicate 250.” During it, they engaged in the most perverse immorality. Persons who have spent their lives attempting to earn moral authority–supposed ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ–debased themselves in an orgy of the worst possible behaviors. They sang to White Jesus. They worshiped White Jesus. They place themselves under the discipline of White Jesus. They rejoiced in murder and avarice and lust and wrath and hubris. 

White Jesus is a false god. He is a demon. He wrecks worlds and destroys persons. In him, there is no healing. White Jesus steals children from their families and people from their land. Whiteness itself is an abomination, a principality, a theft, a culture and a system built on nothing, on fiction, on the denial of the image of God in self and neighbor. White is not real. It has no ontological basis. It is merely the denial of what is good–home, kindred, culture, particularity–in pursuit of the power to kill and destroy. 

Those gathered in Washington this weekend celebrated White Jesus. They lifted their hands in praise of empire: the killing of 160+ Iranian schoolgirls; endless war for no discernible reason; the destruction of life-saving aid across desperately poor places; the dismantling of public health; environmental degradation; rampant corruption and self-dealing; the triumph of greed. They were led by some of the most noxious humans on the planet, like fellow North Carolinian Franklin Graham, who is but one of the cavalcade of people embodying the “moral decline” he so loves to speak of. 

Jamelle Bouie said on Sunday that this gathering was “open contempt for the United States as a pluralist and secular democracy.” That’s right. Their contempt is grounded in the fiction that the founders of the country wanted some kind of marriage of church and state, the words of the founders notwithstanding. (One of the leaders of this neo-fascist movement, lately a resident of Hungary, unironically wrote a book called Live Not by Lies.) If that contempt was limited to non-personal institutions and ideas, it might be harmless, or at least easy to ignore. But hatred does not work that way. It inevitably spills over to various scapegoats and easy targets, especially when accompanied by power. The revolt against DEI is also revulsion at the idea of Black people as equals, as individuals and communities that might wield political power themselves. One might protest my assertion, but the effort to vacate the 1965 Voting Rights Act, followed by a blitz to redraw maps even while elections were actively underway testifies that the poison of hatred has swept through this whole movement. At its core, it is nothing but discipline to white jesus.

The worst feature of “Rededicate 250,” though, was its open contempt for Christians and Christianity. I’m not saying that participants are not Christian. There aren’t really any guardrails on who is and who isn’t. The only real requirement is the willingness to say “I’m Christian.” But you can hate your family and still use your last name. You can despise your inheritance and still claim it. In a descriptive sense, Rededicate 250 was a Christian event, and its participants stand inside one of historic Christianity’s streams. In a normative fashion, though, the movement behind Rededicate 250 will be remembered as one of Christianity’s most pestilential chapters,. It is in no way connected to Christ-likeness. Featured speaker Pete Hegseth, for instance, is a fountain of imperial violence. Also vodka. His presence is but one example of religion practiced to spite the Gospel, rather than to reflect it.

The visible contempt is not only to Christianity as an idea or a way of life, but also to the rest of the Christians around the world subjected to this cruel fusion of religion and amorality. American evangelicals are only 13% of the US population. They comprise a small percentage of the world’s total Christians, and yet subject other Christian communities to their hegemonic expeditions. Do they think there are no churches or Christians across the Black Belt of Alabama and Mississippi now having their voting power neutered? Do they not know of Christian communities in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Palestine, passing on the faith through unrelenting years of American-sponsored devastation? Have their mission trips not united them with the Latin American faithful into the one body of Christ that transcends borders? The discipline of the White Christ robs its adherents of the most basic impulse of human imagination–that of solidarity, the idea that you might have some connection to people who are not you. 

The entire scene is disturbing. These people have real power. But behind their proud strutting is a confession of immense impotence. The real takeaway from Rededicate 250 is how pathetic the American Evangelical proposition is. The group claims they have good news to change the world, but they need the federal government to do their evangelism work for them. They’re awfully loud, but their numbers keep shrinking. That’s what happens when you try to convince people that some of the worst ideas in the world are true–turns out they don’t wanna join you. You need an army and access to the federal pursestrings to convince people, including yourself, that your particular brand of bondage is actually freedom. You force other people to pay for your jamboree. You baptize your empire in the name of a false god.

I’m sure it will all turn out fine. Coercive religion, of course, never leads to any backlash or consequences. People don’t resent their captors or pray for their downfall or write sacred texts that far outlast their tormentors. As any Bible-believing Christian would know.

Audiobook News: I’m wrapping the final edits this week. Our Trespasses will be up on your favorite audiobook platform just in time for summer reading.

One Last Note: Ornette Coleman is not everyone’s cup of tea, but I found this concert video thrilling. It was recorded in an Italian mental institution, and the playing is truly inspired.

See you next time.