New York Times columnist unmasks racism of Christian Nationalism

It’s always interesting when a conservative Christian learns that Christian Nationalists can be, well, nasty people.

The latest person to figure this out is David French, a former writer for the National Review who’s now a columnist for The New York Times. In a recent gut-wrenching piece, French writes about being driven out of his church, which is affiliated with the conservative Presbyterian Church in America, after a barrage of online attacks on him and his wife.

French’s cardinal sin is that he’s not a fan of Donald Trump and has publicly said so. Some members of his church and online trolls attacked him for that, but a faction went much further and unleashed a fusillade of racist assaults on French and his wife because they had adopted a 2-year-old girl from Ethiopia in 2010.

‘Slavery? It wasn’t so bad!’

French writes about a church-affiliated school where he learned “that there were coaches and teachers who used racial slurs to describe the few Black students at the school. There were terrible incidents of peer racism, including a student telling my daughter that slavery was good for Black people because it taught them how to live in America.”

He also notes that many members of the congregation held an affinity for Douglas Wilson, a Christian Nationalist pastor who has written that “slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the war or since.”

These things seemed to surprise French. To anyone who has been tracking Christian Nationalism, they are old news. In 1988, I wrote a story about Christian Reconstructionists, the most extreme faction of Christian Nationalists who argue for an American theocracy based on the legalistic books of the Hebrew Bible. The dean of this movement, the late Rousas John Rushdoony, argued that since slavery was mentioned several times in the Bible, certain forms of it should exist in modern society. Rushdoony also asserted that slavery was good for Africans because it gave them an opportunity to live in America and become Christian.

Since then, I’ve encountered more neo-Confederate apology claptrap on far-right sites than I care to remember.

Escaping from Christian Nationalism

French, who says he remains theologically and politically conservative, writes that his family has found a multiethnic church in Nashville. I’m happy for him, but he might consider doing more. I’d suggest he talk with my friend the Rev. Rob Schenck. Once a conservative Christian pastor and anti-abortion zealot, Rob started rethinking his views a few years ago. He has since moved away from conservative politics and now spends his time warning his fellow believers about the dangers of Christian Nationalism.

Rob changed his mind in part after realizing how his views were harming others. French is angry that his family was targeted and rightly so. The next step for him is to understand that this isn’t just about his family. Many of the positions he still embraces cause others the exact same sort of pain his family experienced.

There’s a lesson here for French. Let’s hope he can grasp it.