The Power Worshippers, Part 2 — What I’m Reading

In Part 1 on this topic, I praised Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers. I had an opportunity yesterday to look back at some of the notes I took while reading that book and I was struck (again) by what strong work it is. I want to use this second post to emphasize an especially important point.

Stewart’s background as a journalist shines through in important ways. First, she has really put in the work, spending years cultivating sources, digging through documents, and attending various Christian Nationalist events, getting great interviews—in short, spending a LOT of time with people and ideas that are so repugnant I can barely stomach reading about them. Stewart’s fortitude is clearly as impressive as her competence. Second, Stewart is of the “let them damn themselves with their own words” school of journalism, rarely commenting on how wrong or twisted the views she quotes and reports on are. Some of these are ridiculous on their face, but since details of theology, Biblical interpretation, history, and politics, will not be available to every reader, a little more interpretation and analysis might have been good. Still, the overall message rings through loud and clear: These Christian Nationalists are ignorant, dangerous, immoral, and ready to use any means to win, with no regard for truth, consistency, humility, or justice.

The main exception to the “damn them with their own words” pattern is in Chapter 6, where Stewart goes into detail showing and explaining why Christian Nationalist claims that the US is a Christian nation are flatly wrong.

Here, David Barton comes in for particularly scathing criticism. It is well deserved given that Barton has a long history and egregious history of making up history to sell evangelicals the Christian Nationalist myth by lying about the facts and the Founders’ intent.

To make matters even (though hilariously) worse, Barton does not even know the Bible: an NPR team investigated Barton’s 1989 book The Myth of Separation and reported: “We looked up every citation Barton said was from the Bible but not one of them checked out” (Stewart 134, quoting Barbara Bradley Haggerty, “The Most Influential Evangelist You’ve Never Heard Of,” All Things Considered, NPR, August 8, 2012. See also Rob Boston, “David Barton: Master of Myth and Misinformation,” Institute for First Amendment Studies, June 1996, http://www.publiceye.org/ifas/fw/9606/barton.html).

“At the root of all the controversies over Barton’s work,” Stewart writes, “one inevitably finds the same fundamental fabrication of American history. Christian nationalism, by its nature, must deny the extraordinary achievement of America’s founders in creating the world’s first secular republic and replace it with a kind of shabby religious-nationalist mythology” (Stewart 135).

Christian Nationalism is founded on lies and it aims to make all of us less free by binding us to extremist behavioral codes. It is no different in this respect than the Taliban, ISIS, or the Iranian government.