Amanda Tyler is the head of the Baptist Joint Commission, which became so liberal that the Southern Baptists established the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Unsurprisingly, its head has made defending idolatry her mission and opposing uniquely Christian interests. So Amanda Tyler has written How To End Christian Nationalism, a book with the worst cover I’ve ever seen.
If you are expecting the inside of the book to be well-researched, then you’ve come to the wrong place. This book does not address Christian Nationalist literature such as The Case For Christian Nationalism by Stephen Wolfe. It does not really address the arguments of the opposing side at all, minus a few quotes from notorious politicians and Mike Flynn. The lack of research is astonishing. But the liberal mind is also jarring to the reader. For example, Amanda Tyler believes what the TV said about January 6, hook, line, and sinker.
The Introduction in this book is packed with every woke self-hating talking point one can imagine. She makes it a point to signal her virtue about being White and check her privilege. Additionally, Tyler has no concept of history, so she relies on an extensive metaphor equating religious freedom to The Lorax. Ironically, this metaphor works better the opposite, as the exploitation of religious liberty by pagans and atheists has eroded the usefulness of the concept, creating a wasteland. But this goes to show the liberal mindset that thinks in terms of real life and relies on fictional narratives.
We will not end Christian nationalism if Christians do not actively work to dismantle it: to rid it from ourselves, our congregations, and our larger communities. For Christians who are committed to this cause, basing our activism in our faith provides the motivation and the sustenance to persevere in this hard work. And make no mistake: this will not be an easy road. Christian nationalism is deeply entrenched in US society. Because generations have let Christian nationalism fester, the ideology has grown deep roots, creating an underground system that makes it that much harder to extricate. Nor can this outcome-ending Christian nationalism-be accomplished in my lifetime or yours. We must accept that a problem that has gone unaddressed for centuries will take several generations to resolve. This book offers a starting place for each person willing to contribute to this multigenerational project. It does not, however, make false promises about how smoothly or quickly this work will go. (3)
The first chapter of How To End Christian Nationalism is about debunking a mythical founding of America as a Christian nation. Amanda Tyler argues that Christian Nationalism relies on a distorted myth of America’s founding. But in her own retelling of history, she refers to pre-Columbian civilizations as “highly developed” (28). Her viciously anti-colonial bias undermines her credibility in asserting a positive interpretation of America’s founding, as she views the Founding Fathers as progeny of land-stealing slavers. Therefore, her strategy in historic education is laughable.
However, one of her interviewees had an ironically correct view of America’s founding and its relationship to the First Amendment.
“The First Amendment was not conceived of in a context like today, where you literally have people of different religions living together and having to figure out how we set rules and have a system in place that allows us to coexist and not force each other to follow each other’s religions or punish each other for not following each other’s religions,” Aziz told me. “These are completely different contexts.”
Aziz’s perspective is important to consider because it com- plicates a triumphant narrative of religious freedom. Though they talked in grandiose terms about religious freedom, the framers did not have our current reality in mind when they drafted these principles. By confining citizenship to white persons when the overwhelming majority of the existing population was white Protestant, they were effectively limiting the potential religious diversity that they would allow to have access to the promise of religious freedom.
Aziz explained that ensuring religious freedom has always required advocacy by those who were trying to realize the rights promised in the Constitution. “Testing religious liberty norms comes from the early 1900s onward, in large part in the courts and to some extent in politics,” she told me. “The reality is that religious liberty isn’t expanded to other groups out of the kindness of the hearts of those who are in control,” she said. (114)
This much is correct and the truest thing written in the book. The First Amendment was written to limit Congress’s role in determining America’s religious future. America was, in effect, a pan-Protestant nation with tolerance for Papism at its founding. The First Amendment and religious liberty, by extension, functioned because immigration was reduced to keep pagans out. The limitation of “potential religious diversity” was by design, and the only way a society could function. The Founding Fathers did not want nor envision the secular multiculturalism we see today.
Of course, everything that Tyler is right about with regard to history, she’s bitter about.
Theology Lacking
Amanda Tyler does not offer much in the way of a theological argument for why the government’s preference for Christianity to other religions is sinful. She is anti-Constantine, but she peddles the myth of Christianity thriving best either under persecution or neutrality. The former is a popular misconception, while the latter is a liberal myth. History shows that the church exploded in the 4th century when governments, in Armenia, Rome, Georgia, etc. preferred Christianity over their pagan traditions. She cites the prevalence of Baptists as her American example, but this is not because of a marketplace of ideas. Presbyterianism and Anglicanism (denominations with state establishment at America’s founding) were simply inadequate at planting churches on the frontier, whereas Baptists and Methodists raced westward.
But, in general, Amanda Tyler’s arguments are empty platitudes of believing everyone is a “child of God.”
But God didn’t do that. God created humans as free beings: free to say yes and free to say no and free to say nothing at all.
With freedom, though, comes responsibility and account- ability. The humans in the creation story also suffered the consequences of the decisions they made with their freedom. Despite all our imperfections and mistakes, we are all children of God. Recognizing the divine image in each person is the first step to loving our neighbor.
If I had to sum up Christianity in one word, that word would be love. When a lawyer questions Jesus about the greatest commandment, Jesus first quotes the Torah: Deuteronomy’s instruction to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind.” And then Jesus adds a twist, another way to see that commandment in our earthly context: “You must love your neighbor as you love yourself.” On these two commandments, Jesus says, the Law and the Prophets depend” (Matt. 22:37-40). (58)
Tyler’s argument for secular neutrality is based on a theological argument for free will. To make matters worse, she implies that “love your neighbor as yourself” was a novel teaching, whereas Christ quoted Leviticus 19, a chapter sandwiched between two unambiguous condemnations of homosexuality.
Lack of Practical Wisdom
For a book with “how to” in the title, one would expect a lot more practical instruction. The chapters are steps, and while there may be a semblance of a strategy, at the tactical level, Tyler leaves much to be desired. The book prioritizes the public school system as a strategic bastion to hold amidst efforts to place the 10 Commandments in classrooms or have football coaches lead prayers. The former of which is one of the defeats the anti-Christian Nationalists suffered since the book was completed for editing. Additionally, Trump killing the Johnson Amendment is also a symbolic defeat for Amanda Tyler.
But the only real wisdom for the everyday person is to not be argumentative and to build relationships. Perhaps for a crazy liberal boomer audience, this is compelling wisdom. But as someone doing opposition research, this approach is laughable, and I can tell Amanda Tyler has never spoken to a Christian Nationalist successfully, or else there would be some kind of personal anecdote to humanize her pearls of wisdom.
Rank Partisanship
It’s worth mentioning that the book’s final step laments House Speaker Mike Johnson for alluding to Romans 13:1 in a speech to Congress accusing him of suggesting that the House of Representatives was a “religious body.” (191). There are zero Republican politicians favorably mentioned in this one.
Conclusion
Amanda Tyler is a Rachel Maddow wine aunt, and her writing is as historically and theologically vacuous as you would think. There are zero attempts to understand the opposing viewpoint or address their theological arguments. Her conception of church history is that the early church got it right, but then Constantine came along and ruined everything, until Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his 99 theses. Thus, she cannot appeal to Christian tradition to support her position, nor does she attempt to mishandle biblical texts such as Romans 13 to argue why the civil magistrate should permit idolatry. As a Christian Nationalist, I am not the slightest bit threatened by her writing or her strategies because this book exists within and for an echo chamber written for an audience that relies on local TV news. This book is not convincing for actual believers; the cover is a Freudian slip about her hatred of Christianity, but it might serve its purpose in getting its author on a speaking circuit.
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