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Dear Friend,
Today is the anniversary of the insurrection at the Capitol. Thousands of people marched there last January 6th to protest, as is their right. The Capitol Police had granted permits. Many of them also fought with police, broke into the building, defaced it, looked for and threatened members of Congress, and forced the delay of the Constitutional transfer of power from one presidency to the next. We saw the crystallization of a growing threat to democracy that day, the rise of white Christian nationalism.
The attack on the Capitol demonstrated this threat for the whole world to see. The crosses, the flags, the signs, the prayers outside the building and on the Senate floor were all the result of growing influence of this pernicious ideology. The testimony of numerous people arrested that day confirms that white Christian nationalism motivated many of the rioters. According to Samuel Perry, co-author of Taking America Back for God, “The Capitol insurrection was as Christian nationalist as it gets.”
White Christian nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting America’s secular constitutional democracy. Christian nationalism demands that Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian. It is the antithesis of the secular and pluralistic government envisioned by the Founding Fathers and embodied in the First Amendment.
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