Religious leaders gather in Boise to resist Christian nationalism | Opinion
.jpg "The Table Rock cross is shown in this 2018 file photo.")
The advance of authoritarian Christian nationalism, both in the United States and globally, presents a grave threat to religious freedom. And it is incumbent on religious groups to organize peacefully against it.
That was the message of the Second Annual Interfaith Countering Hate Summit in Boise, a three-day summit working to organize faith leaders to combat discrimination and authoritarianism, with particular emphasis on the growing prominence of Christian nationalism in Idaho and across the country.
“Democratic institutions are crumbling at astonishing speed, nowhere faster than here,” warned author and political strategist Scot Nakagawa on Wednesday, the opening day of the summit.
For nearly two decades, Freedom House, a nonprofit that has tracked democratic governance for more than 80 years, has found that nations have become less free over time. In its latest report, as Nakagawa noted, Freedom House found that today only about one in five people live in free nations, as authoritarianism grows around the globe. The organization still categorizes the United States as free but warns of dramatic democratic backsliding since 2016.
The event was wrapped in tight security. Most of it was off the record. Some in attendance asked that they not be photographed. Organizers asked those in attendance not to publicly discuss the event until it was over, for fear that it would be subject to harassment or attack — fears that were underlined when a man who shouted insults at a vigil for murdered conservative activist Charlie Kirk was beaten by a large group of people.
The fears of violence were not hypothetical — political violence and hate crimes have been steadily rising. I spoke with an out-of-state person in attendance who said their house was burned down and another whose family had been threatened, in each case because of their religious and political views.
The event gathered clergy from a variety of representatives from Protestant churches, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jews, Muslims and atheists. It included clergy from all regions of Idaho and a half-dozen other states, mostly in the Northwest.
Those in attendance reaffirmed their commitment both to principled nonviolence — the belief that violence must always be rejected on principle — and pragmatic nonviolence — the observation that nonviolent movements are more politically effective than violent ones.
“How we behave, what we do ... makes a critical difference. People abhor violence,” Nakagawa said.
The denunciation of violence was not only general, but also included specific actions, like organizing trainings in nonviolent direct action, the set of tactics employed by the civil rights movement.
Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, a Baptist minister and president and CEO of Interfaith Alliance, said the strategy to struggle against the push toward authoritarian Christian nationalism is “countering with love, countering with stories about one another.”
“We’re in a moment where there are vested interests in creating suspicion and anger and hate among communities,” he said. “That’s a tactic. The solution is to find ways to reach out to one another, to hold fast to actual American values — democracy, building a future together. What this group is doing is the antidote to that rising hate, that rising rhetoric.”
Raushenbush emphasized that Christian nationalism is a threat, above all, to religion and religious freedom.
“We are seeing the effort to insert one religious tradition into our public schools,” Raushenbush said. “Not only is it against the separation of church and state, it’s also incredible to me that conservative Christians want to outsource their religious education to the public schools.”
This includes efforts, like one earlier this year, to mandate reading of the King James Bible in Idaho public schools, he said.
“It’s a terrible thing for faith,” Raushenbush said. “What happens to the Christian kid who doesn’t agree with how it’s being unpacked? What about the LDS kid? What about the Catholic kid?
“This isn’t good for any of us. We need to combat authoritarianism because we don’t want our faith compromised by a theocratic authoritarian.”
Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman.