-THE TAKE-

Let's get right to it y'all. I'm sure you've heard the term "Christian Nationalism" — maybe you even use the term. If so, this piece is for you!

Let's start with the framing of the term to begin with — who coined it? How is it used? Primarily through the liberal media, to paint anything "conservative," "traditional," or patriotic to America as negative.

Here's the part that gets left out every time the term gets thrown around: it's not some ancient theological category the church has been debating for centuries. As a research term, it's barely a couple decades old — sociologists started using it seriously in the 2000s, and it didn't become a household phrase until after January 6th, 2021. That's it. That's the whole shelf life of a word people now use like it's been in the dictionary since the Founding.

And once it left the academic papers and entered a headline, it stopped meaning anything specific at all. That's the actual function of the term now. It's not describing a coherent belief system somebody sat down and organized. It's a label you slap on a person the second they say something you don't want to argue with directly. You say America has Christian roots worth preserving — Christian Nationalist. You say your faith should inform how you vote — Christian Nationalist. You put a flag next to your pulpit — Christian Nationalist. The label does the arguing so nobody has to.

That's the boogeyman move. A boogeyman doesn't need a real shape. It just needs to be scary enough that you stop asking what it actually looks like, and start reacting to the shadow on the wall instead.

Take a Christian who believes marriage is between a man and a woman, believes life begins at conception, and believes the country is better off with more prayer in it than less. Ask most people using the term "Christian Nationalist" what separates that person from an actual, historically-documented Christian Nationalist movement — one built around ethnic purity, forced conversion, or replacing the Constitution with scripture — and you'll get silence, or you'll get a shrug, or you'll get the label repeated back at you louder. That gap right there is the whole scam. Two completely different things wearing the same three words, and the label gets used exactly the same way against both of them.

Take pastors who simply preach that America has a Christian heritage worth remembering. That's a historical claim, not a policy demand. You can debate the accuracy of it, sure — but "this country was shaped by Christian belief" and "this country should be legally run BY the church" are not the same sentence, even though the same three-word label gets slapped on both without distinction.

Take the flag-in-the-sanctuary example, because this is the one that should stop us in our tracks.

A church hangs an American flag next to the pulpit on the Fourth of July — same as it's done for fifty years, same gesture, same intent, nothing new about it — and suddenly that's evidence of a creeping theocracy. A verse gets quoted from a pulpit about righteousness in a nation, and that's flagged as dangerous rhetoric. A Christian says they want laws that reflect a moral order they believe come from God, and that gets filed under extremism before anybody asks which laws, or why.

Meanwhile a government building runs up a rainbow flag, a school curriculum gets rewritten around a secular framework nobody voted on directly, an entire generation gets discipled by a screen instead of a church — and where's the alarm for that? Where's the op-ed calling that a creeping authoritarian takeover? It doesn't get written, because the people writing the op-eds don't recognize secularism as an ideology at all. They think of it as neutral ground, the default setting, the absence of belief rather than a belief system of its own — and that's exactly why it's been so effective. You can't organize resistance against a threat you've been convinced isn't a threat, it's just "how things are now."

This is where I need to speak directly to the church, because I think we've been asleep at a post we were specifically called to guard. Scripture doesn't tell us to be neutral about what's shaping the nation around us — it tells us to test everything, to be discerning, to know the difference between light and the version of darkness that's learned to dress itself up as tolerance. A secular worldview isn't the absence of a religion. It's a competing one, with its own doctrines about identity, morality, and truth, and it's been given open access to raise our children, shape our laws, and define our language, largely uncontested, while half the church was busy making sure it didn't get accused of being "too political."

I want to be careful here, because I'm not calling for the church to seize political power or legislate scripture into secular law — that's a different conversation, and frankly it's the wrong one. What I am calling for is discernment. The ability to look at a flag next to a pulpit and correctly identify it as heritage, and look at a curriculum quietly stripping God out of every subject a child studies for twelve years and correctly identify that as formation. Right now we've got that backwards. We've been trained to treat the harmless thing as the threat and the actual threat as background noise, and I believe that confusion is by design, not by accident.

That's the scrutiny running only one direction. That's the whole game.

Here's my premise, and it connects to everything else I write on this platform: most people using this term haven't done the work to define it. They picked it up already loaded, already dangerous-sounding, already doing the job of shutting down a conversation before it started. That's bad analysis dressed up as a political vocabulary word. Nobody sat down and checked whether the label fit the person it got thrown at — they just threw it, because it's effective, because it ends debates instead of starting them, and because most people on the receiving end get too busy defending themselves against the label to ever ask where it came from.

I'm not asking you to abandon caution about real extremism — that exists, it's documented, and it deserves real scrutiny, not a shrug. What I'm asking is smaller than that and harder than that: define your terms before you use them as a weapon. If "Christian Nationalist" means something specific and dangerous, say what that specific danger is, point at the actual belief, and argue against that. If it just means "a Christian who takes their faith into the public square in a way I find inconvenient," then say that instead, because that's honest, and the current term isn't.

A boogeyman only works in the dark. Turn the light on it, ask it to define itself, and most of the time it doesn't have an answer — just a shape it was hoping you wouldn't look at too closely.

-THE CLOSE-

That's the minute. You paused, you looked closer — that's the whole point. If this made you think, do two things: forward it to one person who needs to slow down too, and if somebody sent you here, get on the list so you don't miss the next one. See clearly. Think deeply. Respond wisely. — WAYTAMINUTE