Alison, Liz, and Rebecca welcome guest Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee and lead organizer of BJC’s Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign. They discuss the urgent threat that Christian nationalist ideology poses to American democracy, how nonreligious and religious Americans alike can fight back, and Amanda explains the strong historical tradition of supporting state/church separation in the Baptist movement.
Show Notes
Rebecca Markert:
Welcome to We Dissent, the podcast with secular women attorneys discussing religious liberty issues in our state and federal courts and our work to keep religion and government separate. I’m Rebecca Markert with the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Liz Cavell:
And I’m Liz Cavell, also with the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Alison Gill:
And I’m Alison Gill with American Atheists.
Rebecca Markert:
In today’s episode, we are so excited to be speaking with Amanda Tyler from the Baptist Joint Committee about Christian nationalism and BJC’S new campaign “Christians Against Christian Nationalism.” Welcome.
Amanda is the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, leading the organization as it upholds the historic Baptist principle of religious liberty, defending the free exercise of religion and protecting against its establishment by government. She is the lead organizer of BJC’S “Christians Against Christian Nationalism” campaign and the co-host of BJC’S Respecting Religion podcast, a podcast I listen to pretty regularly. Amanda is also the author of the upcoming book, How to End Christian Nationalism, which will be published by Broadleaf Books in October of this year. It is available for pre-order now.
Amanda was named the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee in 2016 and she began her tenure there in January of 2017. She currently lives in Dallas with her husband and their son.
I also want to point out, as our loyal listeners know, we started We Dissent to raise the voices of women attorneys who practice constitutional law every day and also to raise the voices of women in the secular movement. Amanda is also a woman attorney having graduated from the University of Texas School of Law. She’s also our first Christian guest on the pod. Her work at the Baptist Joint Committee is often aligned with ours and given the threat that Christian nationalism poses to our democracy, we really wanted to hear from our religious partners who also agree that this threat is very real and that it is going to take all of us to fight back.
So before we get into our main topic, I again wanted to acknowledge that the Baptist Joint Committee is a valued partner and a longtime advocate for the separation of church and state. So Amanda, first question, could you please give us a little background on the Baptist Joint Committee for our listeners who may be new to this issue?
Amanda Tyler:
Absolutely, and thanks for that introduction, Rebecca, and I’m honored to be your first Christian guest on the pod, so thank you for having me.
So BJC is an 87-year-old education and advocacy organization headquartered on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC but having staff and supporters all across the country. And we come at our work, as is obvious in our name, from a Baptist perspective. Our work is focused on religious freedom and we think that is best protected in the American democracy by upholding the institutional separation of church and state. And we are the only denominationally based organization in the country that is focused on religious freedom and separation of church and state. So that is our distinctive. For most of our history. We’ve done our work in the halls of Congress and at the Supreme Court. We filed briefs in almost every church-state case since 1947. We led the coalition that passed the original Religious Freedom Restoration Act back in 1993. And as you recall, that was a really broad coalition of groups that came together for the original passage of that law. But in recent years, we have expanded our work beyond just Washington doing more educational programming and also mobilizing our supporters to take action to protect religious freedom in their own communities and contexts. And that’s what led us in part to launch our Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign back in 2019.
Alison Gill:
Amanda, if I could just follow up on that. You talked a little bit about the history of BJC, but there’s been a long history about Baptist traditions, about the separation of church and state and why it’s important, and yet that’s sort of shifted among different groups of Baptists that have sort of broken away. I’d love to hear just a little bit more about that history as well, if you wouldn’t mind.
Amanda Tyler:
Yeah, absolutely. Great question, Alison. So Baptists standing up for religious freedom and for keeping government out of religion has been a centuries long project. In fact, the co-founder of the Baptist movement is someone named Thomas Helwys, actually wrote what is believed to be the first defense of universal religious freedom in the English language. And he wrote this tract back in the early 17th century and sent an autographed copy of it to King James Ias in the King James Bible. And this was a really bold move of dissenting advocacy, which was not met kindly by the king. And so Thomas Helwys was imprisoned in Newgate prison for doing this act and eventually died in prison. And so the idea of standing up for everyone’s religious freedom from our Baptist perspective is really in the DNA of the Baptist movement.
One thing that might be new information for some listeners is, you know I talk about the Baptist movement. There’s no such thing as the Baptist Church like there is the Catholic Church, and that’s because Baptists are very non-hierarchical. There is autonomy of the local church and there is also a doctrine called Priesthood of the Believer. And so that each person has the ability to be in a relationship with God, that you don’t need anyone to be an intermediary between yourself and God. And it’s that theological basis that really also forms an idea of separation of church and state, that no person including the king in Thomas Helwys’ circumstances, including the President or any governmental body in our modern circumstances, no person should come between a believer and God. We also believe in the idea of freedom. And so when I talk to audiences, I say we stand up for Baptists in the same way that we stand up for atheists. And that’s because we believe that our yes to God means nothing if we also can’t say no to God.
That religion that is forced is inauthentic and therefore it is vital that government neither advance nor denigrate religion. So that’s kind of in a nutshell kind of a history of what Baptists care about. Of course, I could point out Roger Williams who was a Baptist himself at least for a brief part of his life, and he founded the First Baptist Church in America and he was a stalwart defender of church/state separation and in fact used that metaphor of a hedge of separation between the church and the state long before Thomas Jefferson did. Baptists during the founding period who were advocates in Virginia for the adoption first of the Virginia bill for religious freedom and then later the First Amendment. So we are modern day heirs to this long line of Baptists who have stood for the separation of church and state.
Rebecca Markert:
I’m so glad that you brought up Roger Williams because I went to Roger Williams University School of Law in Rhode Island and was really excited to have FFRF’s first symposium on whether the US is a Christian nation at Roger Williams. I thought it was really important to have it at his namesake university because of the fact that he did coin that phrase long before Thomas Jefferson and really was the first American to introduce this idea of true religious freedom in the colonies. So I’m glad that you brought that up. I was going to ask you about it.
Amanda Tyler:
Can’t forget Roger Williams.
Alison Gill:
I think this is a really helpful history to hear, but when most people think about Baptists, I think they think about Southern Baptist, they’re the largest denomination and the principles you were laying out there – individual sort of non hierarchy and freedom and support for church/state separation, those are not principles I come to the top of my mind when I hear about Southern Baptist. So I’m just curious, there’s been a pretty major deviation in doctrine over the years in different groups of Baptists. Is that fair?
Amanda Tyler:
Yeah, I think that is fair. The Southern Baptist Convention was one of the conventions that originally formed the Baptist Joint committee back in 1936. But the Southern Baptist convention is no longer one of our supporting bodies and they haven’t been one of our supporting bodies now for more than three decades. And I think that that is in part because of this change in doctrine and a move away from some of these core principles into a more hierarchical convention, but also one that is not as committed to the institutional separation of church and state as it was at other points in its history. And that sentiment, it’s a question I get a lot because most people, a lot of people when they hear Baptist, they only think about the Southern Baptist Convention and they are the largest single convention of Baptist churches, but they don’t count for even a majority of Baptists in this country.
So there are more Baptists who are not Southern Baptists than there are those who are, but it is the largest Protestant denomination still in the country. And so they take up a lot of the conversation about what it means to be a Baptist, but we have now more than a dozen different Baptist supporting bodies from all over the country from different racial and ethnic groups. So there’s an enormous diversity even among the Baptist movement. But what brings these groups together is a commitment to standing up for religious freedom for all in the institutional separation of church and state. And so they’ve made common cause in their support for BJC.
Alison Gill:
That’s super helpful. Thanks.
Rebecca Markert:
So I want to move on to the topic of Christian nationalism. Our main topic for today, the Baptist Joint committee worked very closely with the Freedom From Religion Foundation to put together a report about the January 6th insurrection. This report was entitled “Christian Nationalism and the January 6th, 2021 Insurrection,” and to date, I believe it is still the most comprehensive report of Christian nationalism from that day. I’d be interested to hear from you a little bit more about this report and what you see as the big lessons from this report.
Amanda Tyler:
Yeah, well this was a fantastic collaboration between FFRF and BJC and specifically between Andrew Seidel and myself because we had worked so closely on some other projects leading up to this and really Andrew was very committed to this idea of having a report and so we were so pleased that we could work together on it. It’s so important for us to understand how Christian nationalism influenced the insurrection, and I think the real distinctive of this report is that it reports not only on examples of Christian nationalism on January 6th itself, but in all of the lead up rallies and events in the months before January 6th and really explains and shows how Christian nationalism is a through line to help explain how all of these disparate groups came together on that fateful day. It also shows how Christian nationalism worked to intensify the attack on democracy on January 6th because it turned what was a political cause for everyone gathered there into a cause of religious fervor for many of the people gathered there, they were not there just to see that their candidate was installed as president, but also because for many of them, they believed that Trump was God’s candidate and that they were fulfilling God’s will by doing this. And as we know throughout just looking at history, any cause that is infused with religious fervor takes on another level often of violence in securing that desired outcome. And so we worked with FFRF to publish this report and to provide it to members of Congress at a very important point when the select committee for the January 6th insurrection was meeting and got instant interest from the committee in wanting to be briefed on the report, it then led to the committee seeking expert testimony from the people who contributed to the report, which I think was very helpful to that committee’s deliberations, even if that information was not included in the official report of the committee.
But all of those expert statements are part of the public record of the January 6th insurrection. And then it also led one of the members of that committee, Representative Jamie Raskin, to invite me to provide expert testimony to the subcommittee that he led as part of the House Oversight Committee in December of 2022. And from my information, it’s the first time that anyone has ever been invited to testify about Christian nationalism before a congressional committee. And so I think that just shows the importance of the report in drawing attention to Christian nationalism and the role that it played on January 6th.
Alison Gill:
Before we get too much further, I’m curious if maybe we could just define Christian nationalism. We’ve talked about it a lot, but having done all this public speaking about it, I just like to hear, what do you usually say when people say, well, what is Christian nationalism?
Amanda Tyler:
It’s so important to start there because people have different ideas of what Christian nationalism is. So the definition we’ve consistently used now for almost five years is Christian nationalism is a political ideology and a cultural framework that tries to merge American and Christian identities, or put another way, Christian nationalism suggests to be a real American, one must be a Christian, and not just any kind of Christian, but a Christian who holds certain fundamentalist religious beliefs that are in line with conservative political positions. And by merging American and Christian identities in this way, it creates second class citizen status for anyone who doesn’t fall into that narrow category of who fully belongs. Christian nationalism also often overlaps with white supremacy and racial subjugation. And so white supremacy is part of Christian nationalism in that it draws that circle of belonging very small. The circle of belonging are people who were included with full citizenship rights at the founding of the country, which are white, Christian, Protestant men who held property and everyone else is relegated to some kind of second class citizenship status. And so this ideology is directly at odds with the promise of the First Amendment of the US Constitution and the promise of the constitutional values of religious freedom – that our belonging in American society should never depend on what we believe or how we worship or how we identify religiously or if we identify as religious at all.
Alison Gill:
You raised a really great point there, especially around the racist elements of this ideology. We often hear people say white Christian nationalism and talk about it that way. How important do you think that is something we should usually try to say just to indicate that this is sort of the defining ideology? I’m just curious. Sometimes people just say Christian nationalism, sometimes people say white Christian nationalism and we hear from people a lot, why do you always include white? Why is that important?
Amanda Tyler:
Yeah, I think either works. I often tend to use Christian nationalism because they think that if we use white Christian nationalism, some people might interpret that to mean that you have to be white to embrace Christian nationalism.
Alison Gill:
Good point.
Amanda Tyler:
And the public polling shows that that’s not the case. Christian nationalism is embraced to some extent from people from all ethnic and racial groups, from all religious backgrounds, including non-religious to different degrees. But that’s the reason I often use Christian nationalism, but I also always talk about its overlap with white supremacy and how so many of those ideas are baked into the Christian nationalist ideology.
Alison Gill:
I noticed this after you testified before Chairman Raskin’s committee and other times, I’ve seen an increasing amount of pushback from people that are actively identifying themselves as Christian nationalists. In fact, I was just looking at X this morning, Twitter, and I saw an ad framing it as basically, “godless secularists are attacking Christians for being patriotic,” that sort of framing. And then you click on it, it links to an essay by William Wolfe and talking about his book and he’s a nutball and we can talk about him if you’d like. And I think it was Marjorie Taylor Greene who said, “I’m a proud Christian nationalist,” and several other members of Congress have as well. So I think there’s trying to be a movement saying, “well, you are just attacking Christians for being politically active,” and I would love it if you could break down this sort of pushback and how we should respond to it.
Amanda Tyler:
Yeah, you’re right that especially starting with Marjorie Taylor Greene, that we saw a shift in the conversation because I would say, I said, we’ve been doing our campaign since 2019, and right off the bat, literally two days after we launched our campaign, Tony Perkins was on his podcast radio show pushing back against the campaign saying that Christian nationalism was a made up term. It was just being used to try to push Christians out of the public square, that there was nothing to see here, which I actually took as a badge of honor at the time. Like, well, if there’s nothing to see, then why are you using your radio show to talk about us? So we’ve been responding to those ideas and we’ve said from the beginning, no, we’re not saying that Christians don’t have a place in the public square. We’re just saying that those people who are espousing Christian nationalism, you don’t get the only space in the public square, that there are other Christians who don’t embrace this ideology, that it’s important for us to speak, for people of all faiths, and people of no faith at all.
And so it’s important that we all have an equal right to that public square. But in 2022, we saw a real shift when Marjorie Taylor Green came out and said, “I’ll own that label. I’m a Christian nationalist and the Republican party should be the party of Christian nationalism.” And we saw or we heard deafening silence after that from the Republican party. There was no kind of sense of pushback from inside the party to that claim. And so I think since then we’ve seen people become more bold about espousing Christian nationalism in the public square. At the same time, I think taking on this false sense of victimhood for those of us who are calling out Christian nationalism. And it’s really important then I think for Christians like myself to be out there talking about Christian nationalism, explaining how Christian nationalism is a gross distortion of the teachings of Jesus, how it’s idolatrous to merge and confuse political and religious leadership, that it’s important for Christians to push back against this false idea that to not be a Christian nationalist is to be, in their words, a godless atheist or a globalist in some way.
That’s what they will say in response. And it’s important for us to say, one, that atheists have equal citizenship to people of other faiths in our country, and two, that to be against Christian nationalism is not to be against Christianity. In fact, it is because of my Christian values that I feel called to speak out against Christian nationalism, because I see it as an urgent threat to religious freedom to American democracy and to the Christian faith itself. And so I think it takes all of us, a broad and diverse coalition of people who are speaking about the various threats to Christian nationalism, and we’re going to take hits from the other side because we are gaining ground, because we are being effective in our advocacy. And so I’ve heard it all, I’ve heard, well, “you’re not a real Christian if you’re calling out Christian nationalism.” I just know that these are baseless attacks and you just get inspired by them and move on in spite of them.
Liz Cavell:
As we’re lingering on what the definition of Christian nationalism is and what we mean by it. So our organizations fight primarily to protect secularism, right? We’re fighting to keep government action from taking on a religious purpose and enforcing that on everybody. I think of the idea of Christian dominionism as something that’s kind of distinct but overlapping with Christian nationalism, and it’s sort of the piece that takes the Christian nationalism ideology and wields the levers of government to sort of affect the political ideology. And I’m just wondering how you think of Christian dominionism as part of the Christian nationalism ideology.
Amanda Tyler:
Yeah, I think of dominionism, or sometimes heard it referred to as the Seven Mountains Mandate, and then there’s overlap too with this New Apostolic Reformation, all these different groups, as an example of extreme Christian nationalism, right? This is the end game for some people who have totally embraced Christian nationalism is for Christians to take over every aspect of society and that they see it as God’s will that they do this, that this is the fulfillment of God’s will for their life. And we alarmingly see people who ascribe to some of these extreme Christian nationalism ideologies as being in places of significant power, including, I think most notably, recently the chief of the Alabama Supreme Court who wrote this incredibly troubling concurring opinion in the IVF case in Alabama recently. And we have seen other candidates who ascribe to these particular religious ideologies being elected to other high offices.
And we should take note, because this is very alarming and undemocratic for any one religious movement to try to take over law and policy. So I do see it as an extreme example of Christian nationalism that we should be worried about, but my definition of Christian nationalism is much broader than just that most extreme movement. And I think it’s important that we have a broad definition of Christian nationalism because this ideology is so prevalent in American society because we haven’t fully rejected it, that it continues to pop up at different points in our history. And right now, I think we are just at a particularly high tide of Christian nationalism because of some of these recent political developments.
Alison Gill:
That’s interesting that you say that, because I think it’s true as well, but I’ve seen recent studies by people like Ryan Burge and I think groups like Pew and PRRI that have shown that the overall level of Christian nationalism is decreasing or general Christian nationalist beliefs among the population at the same time. I would counter that, well, maybe that’s true, but the Christian nationalists are more so than ever now in power, open and visible about it. I’m curious what you think about that. How are they able to cling to power when the people that believe in this ideology are decreasing?
Amanda Tyler:
Yeah, I’ve read some of those same studies and the PRRI in particular, they use a survey question that really gets at the issue of dominionism as far as this mandate to take over government, for Christians to take over government. And so by adding that question to the survey, they really are finding the most extreme of the Christian nationalism movement and labeling that in their words as “adherence to Christian nationalism.” So you’ll see in the overall population, that number is I think around 10%. And whereas earlier surveys by people like Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry had that at closer to 20%. So you think, “oh, that’s good movement,” but it’s really because they’re defining the most extreme or the adherence to Christian nationalism by this most extreme example of dominionism. At the same time, those people are in power, and so this small minority is exerting undue influence because of their positions of power.
And then we see once they gain power, they are trying to hold onto power at any cost. And so we see that in a variety of voter suppression bills, for example, across the country and in an opposition to any attempt to try to protect the vote for people. So they’re kind of tearing down the structures of democratic society while they’re holding onto power in order to stay in power indefinitely. And I think that that’s also what we saw at work in the insurrection itself and in some of the other continuing threats to democracy that are emerging with the prospect of another term of a Trump presidency.
Rebecca Markert:
Let’s talk about the Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign. What was the catalyst for starting this campaign and what is its mission?
Amanda Tyler:
Well, as I mentioned, we started the campaign in 2019, and I would say the single catalyst, I mean I think if I were to identify one was the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in October of 2018, which remains the deadliest attack on Jews in American history. But it wasn’t just that one single event, because there were other attacks at houses of worship, including Mother Emmanuel AME in Charleston in 2015, at the Unite the Right Rally, which also targeted synagogues in 2017. And so we at BJC were increasingly alarmed at how Christian nationalism was turning physically violent and deadly and doing so at houses of worship. We saw this as an attack on religious freedom. And so we brought together, as we often do our interfaith allies around a table to talk about, well, what could we do? We think we really need to name what this is as Christian nationalism, and we need to have a platform for people to take a public stand against it.
And we initially thought we would do so from different faith traditions, and it was our interfaith allies who told us, number one, we don’t think we can call out Christian nationalism as a distortion of Christianity with the same kind of authenticity that you as Christians can do. We just don’t feel comfortable. We don’t understand enough about the differences to call that out. And two, we simply do not feel safe in this environment in calling out Christian nationalism in the kind of bold way that we think needs to be done. And so basically, Christians take care of your own house. We think that you need to do this. And we fully agreed. And so that was the origin of the Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign. It started as this unifying statement of principles that we thought and hoped and that eventually did reach out to a variety of expressions of Christianity.
And so we have signers from dozens of different Christian denominations. It’s an open source list of now more than 37,000 Christians who are located in every congressional district across the country who have signed on to the statement of principles. Since then, we’ve developed a number of resources to be used by anyone, not just Christians, but that anyone can use to learn more about Christian nationalism. We’ve done webinars, podcast series, discussion guides, Bible study curriculum that can be used in Christian communities. All of these resources are free and available for download at Christiansagainstchristiannationalism.org. And then the latest aspect of our work is we are working with community organizing, faith-based community organizing, to stand up some local organizing projects for Christians Against Christian Nationalism. So we are piloting a project right now in north Texas where we have a community organizer that’s organizing with congregations on the ground, and we are working with volunteer organizers in other areas of the country who are interested in working not just with Christian communities, but with people from other faiths and with the secular community and working together to both understand how Christian nationalism is impacting their local community and then to help fashion some responses and interventions to push back against Christian nationalism.
Liz Cavell:
So Amanda, we mentioned earlier you’re actually based in Texas now, and in one of our previous recent episodes we talked about the push for school chaplains in public schools and what our organizations are doing to fight back against that. And specifically, most recently a law was passed in Texas that allows for chaplains to be brought into public schools. We know that you too locally have been fighting back against that. So can you just tell us a little bit more about that effort?
Amanda Tyler:
Yeah, so this, I’m so glad you devoted time on the podcast to talking about this really troubling trend that Texas started unfortunately in passing a first of its kind law to encourage school boards to adopt a school chaplain program. And as the law was written, it didn’t require hiring of school chaplains, but simply required that school boards vote within a six month period. And so that six month period in Texas ran from September 1st, 2023 and ended March 1st, 2024, so just a few weeks ago as we record today. And so we at BJC working with other groups including your groups, and also a number of other faith-based groups, we thought, “who better to explain why hiring unlicensed, untrained school chaplains without any limitation on what they could do, including no limit against proselytizing? Who better to explain why this is such an awful idea than chaplains themselves?” And so we organized a sign-on letter that was open to people who are licensed professional chaplains to explain one, what is chaplaincy and why it is such a bad fit for the public school system.
And so we had a few hundred chaplains from across the state of Texas who signed this letter. And then we sent the letter to every school board in Texas, which by the way is like over 1,200 school boards received this letter. And then we also sent it to the media. And so within a week of this letter being released, we had 30 different stories all across the state of Texas reporting on the fact that chaplains did not want school chaplains.
Well, in the state of Texas, most people, this is the first time they’d ever even heard of this law. And so I think that was a really important way to shape the conversation around opposition to the chaplain law. And we saw that this strategy worked. So the 25 largest school districts in Texas all opted not to expand into a school chaplain program. Many other smaller school districts from all different areas of Texas, from urban, rural, suburban also rejected expansion into a school chaplain program.
And this just sends a really important message to the people of Texas, but really to people all over the country that these interest groups can push through these laws, but the people on the ground have something to say about it and that these are deeply unpopular and people know that they don’t want to inject this kind of religious instruction or religious counseling into the public school system. And that opposition is not just from people who aren’t of the majority religion, which in Texas and most places is Christianity, but also from Christians and from people who are religious. And so we hope that this example can really help advocacy in other states. I think to date, there are now more than a dozen states who have introduced similar legislation. And so we hope that those legislatures will just reject it off the bat. They’ll see how unpopular this law has been in Texas.
Alison Gill:
I really want to credit BJC’s work in this area because I really do think you helped change the narrative. The chaplain letter was, like you said, it got so much media attention and it was so critical for most people had not heard of this for really setting the stage of that this was coming from a fringe group and not just generally speaking a good idea, because people know chaplains are in the military and that’s what people think about and not in schools and what the differences are between schools in the military.
I am curious if you or any of the folks you’re organizing on the ground in Texas got a chance to speak at any school boards and what that experience was like. Was there a lot of pushback? How did the conversations go at the local level?
Amanda Tyler:
Yeah, so I personally did not testify, but people in our coalition did. So when we heard that there were votes coming up, we got the word out, we had materials, talking points that would help people who might be for the first time going to their school board to testify about an issue. And we found that their testimony was very well received. You hear about these other fights that are happening at school boards, but we did not see a groundswell of support for the school chaplain program. We simply didn’t see it. There may have been some people on the school boards themselves who were elected often by some of these groups that are heavily involved in Christian nationalism who might’ve been voting for the policies, but what we didn’t see were lines of people lining up in favor of school chaplain programs. And so we did have people testify and some of the testimony is publicly available on YouTube, for instance, and it was really effective, but we also had people who were contacting their school board members by email or private meeting before they even got to the meeting. And that advocacy is also really important. We heard school board members referencing the chaplain letter or referencing other advocacy they heard from people on the ground as the reason why they were going to opt to not expand into the school chaplain area. And so that showed us that this advocacy was indeed effective.
Rebecca Markert:
This is such a great postscript to our episode on chaplains to hear how it ended up in the state of Texas. But knowing that there are dozens of states now that are currently considering school chaplain bills introduced in their legislatures, are you doing anything in those states after the success in Texas? Is there any sort of advocacy to stop those bills in their tracks?
Amanda Tyler:
Well, there is. So we have started a national chaplain letter, so a letter that any chaplain can sign onto and then can be repurposed for advocacy in a particular state. We also are reworking some of the materials that we had in Texas for the particular bills that have been filed in different places and are making those available to advocates on the ground. We’re working with our mobilized advocates in the places that we have in some of those states to use that. And again, all of this information is available bjconline.org so we can get information out to listeners who might be in a state that’s considering one of these school chaplain laws now.
Rebecca Markert:
Do you have any state that you think is the worst bill that is currently being considered?
Amanda Tyler:
Well, I haven’t compared all of them. I think the worst bill might be the Texas bill, because I think what we are seeing, for instance, a few weeks ago I was in Florida, which has one of these bills, and I spoke to a group of advocates there. And so I did look at their bill and they did try to fix some of the most egregious parts of the Texas bill. Again, they didn’t do enough, but for instance, the Texas bill didn’t even have a requirement of parental consent before a student would meet with one of these school chaplains. So the Florida bill added that bandaid to the bill. Again, not enough to fix it. My impression is maybe Texas is kind of like the most extreme and they’re trying to fix around the edges now in some of these other states,
Alison Gill:
I would say that Florida isn’t as bad because it’s also just volunteers. They’re not employees. I don’t know if DeSantis has signed it yet, but it did pass that it is headed to DeSantis.
The other one I’m worried about, which is still in play, is Louisiana because it doesn’t have the required voting. Every school board has to vote on it like Texas. But it has sort of an exception saying that school chaplains, regardless of what they say or do, unless it’s malicious, cannot be held liable for any interactions with a young person. Teachers don’t get that. It’s incredible. It’s made for improper proselytization, if that makes sense. It’s meant to engender it. It’s pretty ridiculous. And that’s still in play, unfortunately.
Amanda Tyler:
Yeah, yeah. No, and yeah, thank you for that reminder about the volunteer versus paid, but it also just as a matter, and you all went over all these bad outcomes, but also just as a matter of student safety, to have people who don’t even have any kind of licensing or training on how to work with children is incredibly troubling in this context.
Alison Gill:
You talked a little bit about the history of BJC and just thinking about this, I really like how it sort of proves the lie by revisionists like David Barton and others that church/state separation is a fallacy. It was never part of our history and that the Establishment Clause was meant to protect churches from the government, not vice versa, because you have such a long history showing where these strains of thought that culminated in separation came from, that they were there at the founding. You have maintained a history of this, and I just appreciate that, and I wonder if that’s why your organization is always under attack when you try to fight back against this because you show that this is all just false.
Amanda Tyler:
Yeah, I mean, we’ve been myth busting David Barton now for 40 years, right? And what’s particularly galling is how much of his pseudo history is being peddled in Baptist churches. Because if you know your Baptist history, then you know about John Leland who was a Baptist pastor working in Virginia at the same time as James Madison, and what a stalwart defender of church/state separation he was because of the church and because he knew about all of the dangers that an involved government posed to any church, whether the government is trying to prop up and help your church or not. One of my favorite Leland quotes is, “The fondness of magistrates to help Christianity has done it more harm than all of the persecutions combined.” I might’ve missed a few words there, I did that one by memory, but this idea that the government does the church no favors by trying to help it along and that the church flourishes when it is free from government control. And so those principles were there at the founding and were being spoken by Baptists to those who were literally writing the Constitution. And so knowing that history, I think is really an important way to push back against the false history that’s being pushed by Barton and so many others who would try to rewrite history and rewrite the Constitution to say something that it does not.
Alison Gill:
And that’s really been a major project of Christian nationalists, frankly. I mean, we’ve talked about Project Blitz in the past, which was this effort to sort of push Christian nationalism bills, and a lot of it was focused on schools and young people in all these different ways. Now we have school chaplains, but a few years ago we had putting In God We Trust on the wall of every classroom. We have Bible class bills, these documents we see all the time these bills about, you have to have the first few words of the Declaration of Independence because they talk about a creator, and it’s the only document, the founding document that does, even though it’s not binding in the United States, it’s things like that to go out of their way just to find these snippets to sort of cobble together this Christian nationalist sort of history and reify that I’ve seen some recent bills that say, basically you have to incorporate material from Hillsdale College into school social studies and history classes. So it’s just like over and over again, it’s really been a major project just to misinform young people.
Amanda Tyler:
Yeah, absolutely. And it is a strategic project because they know that if you don’t indoctrinate people into Christian nationalism instead, if you teach them American civics and history, that they are less likely to embrace it, that there’s a demographic problem with Christian nationalism. And so there is a concerted effort to push Christian nationalism in the public schools, and that’s been a major project of Christians against Christian nationalism, and that’s why we worked on the chaplains bill, but also on pushing back against the Project Blitz bills, the recent effort in Texas to require the posting of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom, a bill that failed only because the legislature ran out of time to adopt that bad idea, but one that continues to pop up in other places. So this rewriting of history and teaching that rewritten history in public schools is something certainly to watch out for when it comes to Christian nationalism.
Liz Cavell:
I too love that Christians Against Christian Nationalism exists because it’s this important proof point and this living rejoinder to the argument that state/church separation and religious neutrality in government is hostile towards religion. That argument has taken hold even in our courts up to the Supreme Court, and that it’s really only the project of atheists and non-religious Americans. And I just love to hear you speak or how you answer those types of arguments, especially the one that is secularism or religious neutrality is hostile, because I think the argument of our history and tradition doesn’t support the idea that our founders intended for government to be religiously neutral, kind of opens the door to the follow-up argument, which is that religious neutrality is actually hostile towards religion. That’s a really frustrating argument, and we hear it a lot, and now we’re even hearing our courts embrace it. And how do you answer that from the perspective of Christians?
Amanda Tyler:
Yeah. Well, it’s a complicated question because I think on one level, yes, we definitely stand for the principle that government should play no role when it comes to religion. When I talk about the institutional separation of church and state, the most basic way I try to say it is the church shouldn’t try to do the job at the state, and the state shouldn’t try to do the job at the church, that they have different roles, and that the government’s role is just to stay neutral and not take sides when it comes to religion. Any one particular religion or even in favor of religion over irreligion. That’s how I talk about government neutrality. And those are the principles that I think are reflected in the Constitution. Those are constitutional principles. But as we know, there is a divide between principles and reality. And this is where I think Christian nationalism comes in.
I think the reality is that undercutting these promises of religious freedom and government neutrality when it comes to religion has been a persistent Christian nationalism over American history, a Christian preferentialism, particularly for most of our history for Protestantism, and that we see that reflected in a number of different ways in American life. And so there is a tension there between what the promise is and what the reality is. And then coming alongside that, we see a real shift in religious identity of Americans, particularly over the last, I don’t know, 50 years, where you see more and more people who are not identifying as religious or claiming a particular religious identity. And so Christians in particular are feeling a loss of privilege in American society. And so what looked like neutrality before, it was neutrality before, but was still evidenced in some kind of privilege. As it comes to look more like equality they interpret that as oppression, and they turn that into the sense of victimhood. And unfortunately, we see this, as you’ve pointed out, reflected in Supreme Court opinions. So I think about the line of cases around government funding of religion, particularly in religious schools. What was long – I mean, talk about a bedrock constitutional provision, talk about something that Baptists stood up for. It was this idea that no government money should go to support religion at all, and that was viewed as a protection of religious freedom. And now this Supreme Court has turned that into, in their words, religious discrimination, that to not fund religion is to actually discriminate against it. And that is an incredibly troubling trend that we’ve seen at the US Supreme Court and one that we continue to speak out against. So I don’t have a neat easy answer except to say I think that all of these factors are kind of at work in what we see as this reaction to neutrality as somehow being hostile. And I think it’s therefore the job of Christians like BJC to stand up and explain why, no, that’s not the case. Why in fact, it’s very important that we not have government funding of religion and that throughout our history has allowed religions to flourish on their own without government control or strings attached.
Rebecca Markert:
My last question then for you is, you said at FFRF’s convention last October, you were given the Champion of the First Amendment award, and you mentioned during that acceptance speech that you thought Christian nationalism was the single biggest threat that we have today. And so hearing that and knowing our listeners, everybody wants to be activists and wants to try to help fight back against these forces that we’re seeing and just try to figure out a way to save our constitutional principles and our democracy. So what do you think is the best thing that an ordinary American could do to help fight in this movement?
Amanda Tyler:
Well, I think earlier we talked about how Christian nationalism is being normalized in a lot of circles, and I think the best way to counteract that is to normalize speaking out against Christian nationalism. So we have to do exactly what we’re doing today, we have to talk about the ideology to help understand it better and then speak out against it. And I say this knowing that there can be enormous political and personal cost to doing that. And I think we do this work best when we do it together. And so this is where I would really encourage people to get involved in their local community in finding other people who are concerned about Christian nationalism and working together to push back against it. It’s why we’re investing more and more of our resources and community organizing. I would point to the Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign as a place to find other people who are concerned about Christian nationalism.
Our list is organized by state, and then you can go there and you can find people who live in your community. We don’t have their contact information there, but you can try to reach out or reach out to us at christiansagainstchristiannationalism.org and see if we have some local organizing already happening, but find others. And then just find others in your community, in your circles, in your family, in your friend group, if you’re involved in a school, in a PTA, sports teams, and if you’re in any kind of congregation or other kind of gathering or association of people, and just start talking about it, right? I just think that for so long, Christian nationalism has flourished, because we haven’t talked about it directly, but talk about it and then find ways to have some kind of intervention in your community. I can’t tell you what that intervention is because I don’t know how Christian nationalism is most impacting your community, but once you start working together on the ground, I trust that those groups of people will fashion interventions that will help, and it will, just a word of hope after some of the dark moments of this podcast. We are the majority. The majority of Americans do not want Christians taking over the government. The majority of Americans are not in favor of this thorough merging of Christian and American identities and are not in favor of a thorough merger of church and state. And so I think we need to band together and work together across lines of difference in order to push back against Christian nationalism.
Rebecca Markert:
That is a great way to end the show. Thank you so much for your time and for your partnership as we fight against Christian nationalism. We are so pleased that you could come and talk to us today about your work and hope that we can continue this as we move forward. So thank you so much, Amanda. We really appreciate it.
Amanda Tyler:
Oh, thank you for the partnership and a great conversation today.
Rebecca Markert:
So that is it for today’s episode. I am Rebecca Markert.
Amanda Tyler:
I’m Alison Gill.
Liz Cavell:
And I’m Liz Cavell. If you haven’t already, please follow us on our socials Facebook, Instagram, and X. Please also remember to let us know how you’re liking the show by leaving a review. You can also find we-dissent.org. Thanks for listening.
