Sometimes the Bravest Thing We Have Is Hope
On learning, living, and loving in the shadow of empire.
It has been a tough few weeks. At the national level we have been inundated hourly, day after day, with a deluge of executive orders and moves by the current administration to dramatically reshape our federal government. Too much happened in just the last week to even do it justice in a couple sentences.
These moves have begun to alter the lives of millions of Americans and our neighbors around the world, and will affect millions more in the coming days, weeks, and months. Each of us will likely have to figure out for ourselves where and how we will respond.
For the last 10 years I’ve been involved in work that pulls back the curtain on Christian nationalism, providing an empirically-supported definition, showing how it functions, and how it undergirds so much of what is happening in our current political and social context. I will continue to do this work.
However, in the last month there have been moments where I question these past efforts and whether any future efforts will amount to much of anything. In one of those moments, I was reminded of the “Parting Words for the Journey”1 I wrote at the end of American Idolatry.
I had to remind myself of much of this. I’m sure I’ll have to do it again in the coming days.
While this was written to fellow Christians, I think the note of what hope is and how it operates can resonate with folks of any faith or none at all. As I wrote, hope is like planting trees—we may not enjoy the fruit or shade ourselves, but the work we do now could create a new world for those following us. May they find rest and healing shade. Onward, together.
Parting Words for the Journey
American Christianity and the Christian nationalism so deeply intertwined with it have produced unimaginable pain and suffering for so many groups. For white American Christians as a whole, Christian nationalism has produced privilege, comfort, and affluence built on the suffering of others. Is there any wonder so many are leaving the Christian church and never looking back? But as Danté Stewart writes, “I have learned that many of us have not given up on the faith, just the way our faith has been used to oppress others. We have not given up on the Bible, just the way it has been used to marginalize others. We have not given up on Jesus, we just know he ain’t a blue-eyed Republican. . . . In reality, [people leaving churches] have given up on the white supremacist brand of Christianity that cares more about power than Jesus.”
To oppose white Christian nationalism is not to give up on Christianity. Christianity can be marked by sacrifice, hope, grace, service, faith, and, of course, love. Christians can disentangle our faith from Christian nationalism and thus more closely embody the life and teachings of Jesus, the gospel, in our congregations and communities. We can tell better stories. We can provide better narratives than those we have been handed. We can take part in the good work of the gospel that Jesus inaugurated, rescuing us all from the oppression of sin in our personal worlds and in the systems and structures of society.
This collective work will not be easy. Idols are not easily destroyed. Institutions, organizations, and powerful positions depend on the continued alliance between Christianity and the power of the state. There is money to be made, and there are elections to be won. Congregations, friendships, and even families have been and will continue to be torn apart over a commitment to white Christian nationalism. It will not be easy for you. It has not been easy for me. As Kat Armas poignantly states, “It’s a surprising pain that often comes when we dig up the skeletons from the ground, when we realize the dirt we stand on is tainted and the reality we’ve been fed is curated.”
We may look around us and say, “I don’t want all this pain, oppression, and suffering.” And my point isn’t that any one person consciously or explicitly wants these things. It is that white Christian nationalism undergirds the systems producing these outcomes, and we are all implicated in this broader reality—one that forms our interactions and us, whether we like it or not.
It is only when we name it that we can begin to reckon with how our faith tradition and its theologies have been used and abused. This is uncomfortable work. People close to you will question whether you are even a Christian any longer. This has happened to me. This struggle, however, is sacred. God is present within it.
It will be an ongoing journey. We never “arrive.” Confronting white Christian nationalism will be less like an amputation—where we just cut off the unhealthy appendage. It will be more like flossing. A routine we, and the groups we inhabit, commit to every day. No one will do it perfectly, either. I appreciate the wisdom of Christina Edmondson and Chad Brennan when they write, “No one’s life is completely for or against justice,” but we can and should acknowledge where we fall short because “we do not need to be perfect in order to stand for justice.” I hope you will join me and continue this journey for years to come.
I am told hope is a spiritual discipline. When facing a chasm of the unknown, a darkness, it is so easy to let fear grip us and allow despair to take hold. It is important we face the darkness, feel the despair, and clearly declare all is not as it should be. Only then can we begin to imagine something new. Only then can we begin to hope, to commit to living as though a different future is truly possible. For hope is “a radical act of faith and courage, an embodiment of the Kingdom, and vital to our work for justice.”
We may not even enjoy this future ourselves. As with planting trees, we’re doing the work of hope, expecting that what we do today will reverberate in unknown ways, making real an alternate reality, providing a healing shade for those who come after.
Writing to her son in a time when all seemed hopeless, the Reverend Kelly Brown Douglas provides a poignant example of such a commitment to hope. During the George Floyd protests in 2020, she recounted the enormity of darkness Black women and men suffering under the evils of various forms of systemic racism faced day after day for centuries in the United States. Millions never saw the freedom for which they were hoping. Millions lived and died without stepping foot in the promised land. Despite this, so many never surrendered their commitment to realizing a more just society for everyone, Black or white.
They practiced hope and remade the world anyway. Their example instructs us. No matter the height of this mountain, the depth of this sea, we are to hold tight to hope and move forward with the expectation that we can and will remake American Christianity to look a lot more like Christ than a servant of empire.
Sometimes, the bravest thing we have is hope.
Content taken from American Idolatry by Andrew Whitehead ©2023. Used by permission of Brazos Press.
American Idolatry, pages 189-192.