A few weeks ago, Adventists in the Southern Union were sent a “special edition” of that union’s religious liberty circular, “Waymarks.” It was written by Nicholas Miller, a professor of church history at Andrews University, and was entitled, “God’s Remnant Church and the Danger of Christian Nationalism—A Call for Unity Around Seventh-day Adventist Prophetic Identity.”
Miller begins by noting:
“Today Church membership appears to be nearly as divided as our society in our political and social views. We have never prescribed political orthodoxy for our Church members. Rather, we have invoked wise counsel from the Spirit of Prophecy to warn them from becoming deeply involved in partisan politics.”
“At the same time, our insistence on silence as to political matters for much of the 20th Century caused us to overlook the fact that our prophetic message has profound political implications. Our reluctance to address political topics as a Church has created a leadership vacuum on matters of public policy that relate to public morality.”
These two paragraphs seem to be at odds. If Adventists are as politically divided as the larger society—and we clearly are—then any political stand will be divisive and damaging to the church. So why, in the next paragraph, does Miller argue that our reluctance to address political topics has created a damaging vacuum? Should we be in politics or not?
Miller seems to want to please both sides of every controversy. That was his modus operandi on the Theology of Ordination Study Committee; he was one of the leaders of a “compromise” faction. But his “compromise” gave the women’s ordination faction everything it wanted and sabotaged those of us who insist that the SDA Church follow the Bible even against the demands of feminist culture.
Miller’s thesis is that the average Adventist in the pew is aware of the threat from the secular Left, but is overlooking the threat from the religious right:
“As students of history, and as Adventist Church religious liberty leaders, we are especially troubled by the fact that most local church members are cognizant of the dangers and problems of the secular left, but many appear blinded to the problems of Christian nationalism found on the political right.”
“The secular far left and its values are clearly antithetical to biblical Christianity. Drawing on the materialist and humanist philosophies of the French Revolution, the far left promotes a materialist outlook that denies a divine Creator, promotes an evolutionary model of humanity, devalues gender differences and sexual roles as taught in both the Bible and nature, and places a low value on unborn life. The far left seeks to spread these “values” through the media and most public and secular college and university systems. There, an environment of “wokeness,” a fixation on micro-aggressions, and an unforgiving cancel culture often intimidates and threatens those who think differently.”
All very true.
“Indeed, most of our members, along with most evangelical Christians in America, see the risks and problems associated with this extreme leftist ideology.”
Do they? I would hope so, but I doubt it. Adventists have been subjected to two generations of “religious liberty leaders” ceaselessly arguing that our worst enemies are our fellow Christians, whereas the Leftists—those now persecuting Christians they deem insufficiently enthusiastic about sodomy—are our best friends in the fight for religious freedom. I would be surprised if the long decades of that propaganda had not left their mark on the denomination.
But Miller argues that we should not be worried about the secular Left because (according to him) it plays no role in Adventist eschatology. Instead, he points to something he calls “Christian nationalism,” which he defines as “a combination of immoral civil power and national pride, combined with false Christian religious teaching.” Christian nationalism, Miller implies, is what Adventist eschatology has been predicting:
But, our prophetic message has clearly identified the final and greatest deception as coming from . . . a traditionalist, populist, authoritarian backlash — a combination of immoral civil power and national pride, combined with false Christian religious teaching. This prophetic understanding implicates the danger of the religious right grasping for political power and dominance in the name of Christianity. The hostility to biblical faith shown by some on the left does not warrant ignoring and even embracing the religious right’s pursuit of political power and Christian nationalism.
Nowhere in the inspired writings is there a mention of “Christian nationalism.” Neither the Scriptures nor Ellen White ever used that term. Nor is there a “traditionalist, populist, authoritarian backlash” spelled out in our end-time scenario, nor is there any “combination of immoral civil power and national pride.”
There is an implication of false religious teaching in our end-time scenario, but it exclusively takes the form of a national and then an international Sunday law—compelling worship on the first day of the week. Hence, any political movement that might answer to Adventist eschatology would have to be pushing a Sunday law, and Miller does not even claim that for “Christian nationalism.”
Leaving aside the dubious connection between “Christian nationalism” and Adventist eschatology, is there any evidence that anything resembling “Christian nationalism” is a viable political movement in America? In a word, NO.
To the contrary, the Left controls all significant institutions in America, including government, the media, entertainment, publishing, academia, big business, big tech, the professions, and even the military. Let us look briefly at some of these areas individually.
Most of you will have heard most of these stories, but it helps us with meaning and perspective if we organize, condense, and reiterate facts that we have heard randomly over the course of many months. Only then can we appreciate the full import of those facts.
Government. We are witnessing the merger of the permanent government with the ruling party, the Democrats. We saw it first with the IRS, which, under Lois Lerner slow-walked what should have been routine, ministerial approval of conservative political non-profit corporations (section 501c4 of the Internal Revenue Code) specifically to hamper grass-roots conservative groups and prevent them playing a role in the 2010 and 2012 elections.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, several federal agencies including the CIA and the FBI, using private contractors whom they allowed to ransack the NSA signals database, concocted the Russia Hoax as a pretext to spy on candidate Donald Trump, then on President-elect Trump’s transition, and finally on the early months of the Trump Administration. Even though the initial surveillance turned up nothing, the FBI and the Department of Justice nevertheless maneuvered to secure the appointment of a special prosecutor to harass President Trump for two more years, all over something they knew perfectly well was contrived nonsense.
Although the Russia Hoax became known in part, that the “deep state” was able—by stonewalling and resisting and/or slow-walking declassification—to keep it in large measure secret throughout the four-year term of a hostile president who was the victim of the abuse, shows the extent to which the permanent government is more powerful than elected presidents and congressmen. There has been a momentous shift in political power in Washington. In theory, our elected officials control the permanent government, but now the opposite is true; the elected representatives and chief executive are prescribed their ambit of operation by the permanent government. Elected officials come and go; the deep state is here to stay.
Since the far-Left has been re-installed under the rubric of the “Biden Administration,” the FBI and DOJ are seeking revenge on those who exposed their malfeasance during the Trump era. They have opened an investigation of Kash Patel, a top staffer for California Congressman Devin Nunes, who was the key figure in exposing the Russia Hoax. Just days ago, the FBI raided the Manhattan home of former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, seizing attorney-client privileged communications between Giuliani and his client, President Donald J. Trump. Giuliani is the third Trump attorney to have his personal papers, including attorney-client communications, seized by the FBI and DOJ.
These investigations are obviously politically motivated; Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, a liberal but not a totalitarian Leftist, has called the raid on Giuliani’s residence “thuggery.” In fact, it is worse than thuggery; the FBI has made itself the armed investigative branch of the Democratic Party, and is stomping all over established legal norms. This is a dark chapter in American history.
We could cite many more examples—the FBI’s ludicrous position that “white nationalism” is the greatest terrorist threat confronting the country, its refusal to investigate election fraud last year, its refusal to investigate Hunter Biden’s laptop, and its refusal to investigate the Biden family’s long history of influence peddling, taking millions from the Ukrainians and the Chinese (from all of which, “the big guy” got his cut). Perhaps most disgusting is the FBI’s determination to hunt down every American who was at the capitol on January 6th, regardless whether they committed a crime. But these example are more than sufficient to prove the point that the permanent government is fully aligned with, and an integral part of, the ruling Leftist party.
This merger of the machinery of the state, especially the armed law enforcement agencies of the federal government, with the ruling party is troubling. The merger of party and state is typical of “banana republic” autocratic dictatorships, as well as totalitarian tyrannies such as fascism, Nazism and communism.
Media. The media has placed itself wholly at the disposal of the ruling party. Every word, every syllable, printed or spoken by 95% of America’s media has but one purpose: to advance the narrative of the Leftist party, to the detriment of conservative Americans and their values. There are some conservative outlets—the nighttime hosts on Fox, Newsmax, OAN, daytime talk radio, and a few prominent blogs and podcasts—but the overwhelming bulk of the media is a powerful megaphone wholly at the Democratic Party’s disposal, to advance its narratives.
The media cooperated fully with the permanent government in its continuous attempts to destroy Trump while he was in office. The leaking was constant, and the media always pliantly published the anonymous leaks, to further whatever narrative the “resistance” inside the executive branch was promoting. By contrast, you will hear of very few leaks during the “Biden Administration,” both because there are very few, if any, in the executive branch who resist the Left, and because the media would immediately expose and help punish anyone who leaked contrary to that narrative.
The New York Times, the so-called “newspaper of record,” has always been on the Left—back in the 1930s, their Russia correspondent, Walter Duranty, famously glorified Soviet communism, covering up Stalin’s Ukrainian genocide-by-forced-famine. But they are becoming more radical every day. They recently purged editor Bari Weiss and science correspondent Donald G. McNeil Jr., both of whom, though very liberal, were apparently insufficiently committed to utopian totalitarianism. A mob of incensed Maoist New York Times reporters ran them off.
Sadly, however, the New York Times and the Washington Post (the Post is now owned by Jeff Bezos and hence a full-time mouthpiece for big tech and globalism) appear conservative when compared to tech-related news sources like Yahoo News, and similar outfits. There, you get the full-on Wokism of 20-something recent college graduates who never in their brief lives were exposed to a Christian, conservative, or even a non-Marxist idea. Which brings us to the subject of big tech.
Big Tech and Publishing. Almost all research—or even the satisfying of idle curiosity about trivia—is done on the Internet, using search technology over which Google now has a near monopoly, and Google is a hyper-Leftist company. What does it mean that the portal to all knowledge is now controlled by the Left? It means Google has enormous power, including power to manipulate opinion and voters. Robert Epstein, a liberal Democrat, states in a column in USA Today:
“I’ve been a research scientist for nearly 40 years, and for more than five years now, I’ve been discovering, studying and quantifying new methods of influence that the internet has made possible. Two of these methods — the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME, pronounced “seem”) and the Search Suggestion Effect (SSE) — are among the most powerful types of influence ever discovered in the behavioral sciences.”
“My randomized, controlled and peer-reviewed research on SEME shows that when one candidate is favored in search results, that can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more — up to 80 percent in some demographic groups. My new research on SSE suggests that (a) Google is manipulating opinions from the very first character people type into the Google search bar, and (b) by manipulating search suggestions (those phrases they flash at you while you’re typing your search term), Google can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into an astonishing 90/10 split.”
But big tech is far more than search. Face Book has developed a near-monopoly on social media, and they are using it to enforce Leftist ideology. Any conservative opinion is likely to be “shadow banned,” meaning restricted to a small number of the poster’s nominal “friends,” or none. Since his post has not visibly been deleted, the poster does not realize he is being censored, but he effectively is.
A near monopoly on short social media posts (150 words or less) is held by Twitter. President Trump had almost 90 million followers on Twitter, but Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey decided to silence and de-platform him. This was not good for Twitter as a business, but the tech lords have shown no hesitancy to use their monopoly power to further their ideological goals, even when it is not good for business. When you are already rich enough to ensure that your great, great, great, great grandchildren will never want, the marginal dollar is easily dispensed with in pursuit of the meaning and purpose that Leftist ideological commitment provides to a jaded, secular generation.
After Twitter de-platformed President Trump, conservatives, including Trump, began migrating to Parler, an alternative to Twitter more friendly to conservatives. Without missing a beat, big tech got together and “de-platformed” Parler; first Google and Apple refused to distribute the Parler apps for iphones and Android smartphones, then Amazon Web Services turned off Parler’s webhosting and the whole service disappeared, for months. This was probably the most dramatic illustration of big tech’s power to censor conservative public speech and control American political discussion.
YouTube, which is owned by Google, has a near-monopoly on Internet video (not including movie streaming services like NetFlix, Hulu and Amazon Prime). For years, conservatives such as Dennis Prager, whose “Prager University” posts short videos explaining conservative and free-market principles, have been the victim of bias by YouTube, which finally de-monetized Prager University. Prager sued Google, but to no effect.
Recently, YouTube leveraged its monopoly power to de-platform all videos that assert or argue that last November’s election was stolen through fraud. Throughout the last year, it has also been banishing any video that does not toe the Leftist party line on The Wuhan Flu, including any content that extols the virtue of therapeutics such as hydroxychloroquine or Ivermectin, or that downplays the severity of the epidemic, or that questions the efficacy of wearing masks or of the shutdowns, or the safety or efficacy of the vaccines.
Because many people learn visually rather than from the printed word, Google’s ability and willingness to censor political video content it dislikes is at least as important as its ability to manipulate search. There are alternatives to YouTube, such as Rumble, that allow conservative videos to be hosted, but most web-hosting sites (like this one--Square Space) are not Rumble-friendly.
Finally, there is Amazon, which is both big tech and big retail. Amazon has amassed such enormous market share in book retailing (83%) that it is nearing monopoly status. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is just as far out on the Left as the other tech lords—Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, etc.—and hence conservatives and those old-fashioned liberals who value freedom of speech, should be uneasy about Amazon’s marketing dominance.
Just a few weeks ago, Amazon de-listed a book it disagreed with. Without warning or explanation, Amazon cancelled Ryan T. Anderson’s 2018 book, “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement,” although the book was scholarly and even-handed. We are waiting for the next shoe to drop. Although a few brick-and-mortar bookstores still exist, as well as alternative online distributors such as Barnes and Noble, Amazon’s clout means that publishers will be hesitant to publish a book that Amazon might not sell. The mere threat of being banned from Amazon is probably sufficient to prevent many books from ever being published.
Moreover, the publishing industry itself is dominated by the Left. Any book with a conservative or Christian message is likely to be ghetto-ized and limited to explicitly Christian publishers and distributors or boutique conservative publishing houses like Regnery.
A couple of months ago, employees at Penguin Random House Canada nearly rioted over that company’s decision to publish a book by Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, entitled Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. Peterson’s first book, Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, was fabulously successful, but the single most prominent characteristic of today’s Leftist is that even though he might be running a for-profit business, and be answerable to owners and shareholders, he is far more interested in serving Leftist ideology than in making a profit.
Big Business. The most surprising recent social development, and the hardest for conservatives to wrap their heads around, is that Big Business is all-in for the Left. Recently, Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines were outspoken in criticizing Georgia’s new voter integrity law, and Major League Baseball moved its all-star game from Atlanta to Denver in response. Then, a few days later, executives from over 100 large companies held a video conference call to explore ways to oppose and block similar legislation being considered in other states, including Texas.
No one really believes that blacks are not capable of obtaining photo identification so that poll workers can enforce voter integrity laws; to believe that would be racist--true racism of the ugliest kind--and the few true racists left in America are mostly over 80 and are not running its hundred largest companies. No, the bulk of large business executives are Leftists (even while many of them remain registered Republicans). They oppose voter integrity laws because those laws make it more difficult for the Left to nudge their guy across the finish line, and they want their side to win.
Another problem we are seeing in big business is their willingness to hire and then cede power to Leftist diversity officers, who then subject the corporation’s employees to critical race theory training, which teaches white people to be ashamed of themselves for simply being white. In these training sessions, white employees—who must participate in order to keep their jobs—are forced, a la Maoist “struggle sessions” to admit their “white privilege,” their blood-guilt for having been born with white skin.
Why do the heads of the largest corporations lean Left when the leaders of the Leftist party, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, hate private enterprise and want to destroy it? That is a question for the head shrinkers, ultimately, but to hazard a guess, I’d say it is a class phenomenon—snobbery, and the desire to by accepted by the other snobs. Leftism has become associated with the wealthy of the world. “All the right people” lean Left and believe in Leftist doctrines like wokism, man-made global warming, etc. When you want to move in all the “right circles” with “our sort of people,” you must believe and say what they believe and say. They also believe that by giving billions to BLM, the Democrats and other Leftists, they will be protected when the time comes to strangle private enterprise. (It is a fool’s bargain, of course, but they are fools.)
Academia. America education, from Kindergarten through post-graduate studies, is controlled by the Left. A study of over 150 departments and upper-level administrations at 32 elite colleges and universities by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans by more than 10 to 1 (1,397 Democrats compared to 134 Republicans). Not a single department at any of the 32 schools remotely approached parity. The closest any school came was Northwestern University, where 80 percent of faculty were registered Democrats and 20 percent registered Republicans. At Brown University the ratio was 30 to 1. The researchers could not identify a single Republican on the faculty at Williams, Oberlin, MIT or Haverford College.
Academia is wholly and completely of the Left, and it is the source of every bad idea currently circulating in the world (leaving aside, of course, their ultimate source, Satan). The most recent monster to escape the academy and inflict itself on the larger world is the horrendous Marxist ideology of wokism—critical race theory—which has suddenly become the quasi-official public ideology of all significant American institutions. Wokism is the new racism—it teaches that the only important or significant thing about people is their skin color.
I think the time has come to find alternatives to traditional college education. It is not wise to subject young people to being indoctrinated with all the worst ideas in the history of the world: skepticism, Darwinism, Freudianism, Marxism, critical theory, critical race theory, feminism, post-modernism, transgenderism, and so on and on. These false and destructive ideas are from the pit of hell. Unless we can have colleges that teach from a thoroughly biblical worldview, college should be dispensed with—and that includes within the SDA system.
The Military. This one will be hard for folks on my side of the aisle to come to terms with. The military is gone. It has been ideologically purified by the Left. In the first five years of Obama’s presidency, nearly 200 flag and general officers were relieved of duty for weak reasons or no reason at all; they were all officers perceived as ideological enemies of the Left.
The results of this purge became clear during the Trump Administration by way of insubordination at the top of the military. Last year, during the George Floyd riots, the top military officers let it be known publicly that if Trump called in the army to put down the riots, he would not be obeyed. This was not an idle threat, as the military had already ignored Trump’s orders about reducing troop levels in places like Syria, and ignored his publicly tweeted wishes on aspects of transgenderism in the military.
The military also left Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and his twin brother Yevgeny Vindman, in the National Security Council—which is an inside-the-White House posting—after Vindman had testified against President Trump in the first impeachment attempt, after listening in on Trump’s telephone call with the Ukrainian prime minister. Leaving Vindman inside the White House after that betrayal forced Trump to have to fire him, and was another unmistakable message from the top generals and admirals that they were more than happy to be a thorn in Trump’s side.
Since the “Biden Administration” has been installed, the purge of the military has picked up again. The first thing Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin did was announce a sixty-day “pause” to root out anyone who might be a conservative, a Trump-supporter, or otherwise a “deplorable.” The pretext was the January 6th capitol building incursion, in which some retired armed services members, including the murdered Ashli Babbit, were involved. Moreover, Rep. Devin Nunes has reported that the military is now using the NSA database, warrantless spying, to drive mid-level conservative officers out of the U.S. Navy.
The current situation is that although most of the enlisted men are conservative, almost all the officers, including even the top non-commissioned officers (sergeants), lean to the Left. The officers will grow even more Leftist over time, because reports coming out of West Point and the other service academies are that these institutions are just as “woke” as any other public universities in America.
Last year, nine recent top graduates of West Point signed an open letter to the Military Academy fully endorsing Marxist Critical Race Theory and Wokism. Their letter stated:
“Though our recommended actions carry applicability in eradicating many forms of bias and discrimination at West Point, such as sexism, ableism, fatphobia, transphobia, homophobia, xenophobia, and classism, the remainder of this proposal will focus on addressing anti-Black racism as a first step on a long journey—a journey toward an anti-racist West Point.”
Rod Dreher notes, “it is amazing to me that the rising generation of the nation’s military elites have swallowed grievance culture. . . . The more you read, the more you realize that these cadets’ minds have been colonized by an ideological virus. . . . If I were a Russian or Chinese psyops officer, I could think of no better way to destroy US military cohesion than to encourage its officer corps to immerse themselves in critical theory and grievance culture.”
As I said, this is a tough one to take for folks on my side of the aisle. We had hoped the military would be passed over by the new, all-pervading Leftism, but it was not to be. The military is just as much in the power of the Left as the IRS, FBI, DOJ, CDC, State Department, etc. Those “Q-anon” followers who are thinking that the military is going to re-install President Trump could not possibly be more deluded and disconnected from reality.
We could add many more examples of leftist control relating to each of the above institutions—and we could describe Leftist control of many other institutions—but we need not be cumulative. The undeniable fact is that the Left controls all the important levers of power in America today; they command the commanding heights.
I apologize for the length of this recitation of current realities, but without it we would not be a position to evaluate Nick Miller’s claim that our nation is on the cusp of “Christian nationalism.” To be concerned about “Christian nationalism” when the government, the media, the largest corporations, and even the military are all controlled by the Left is far beyond merely being wrong; it is deeply discrediting.
What of the proverbial “backlash”?
A typical Adventist response to the fact that America’s institutions lean Left is that there will be a populist pendulum swing, or backlash, against the power centers of our society, brought about by the millions of Christians who have been marginalized and disempowered by the ruling elites. Miller writes,
“But, our prophetic message has clearly identified the final and greatest deception as coming from just such a traditionalist, populist, authoritarian backlash.”
We’ve already noted that our prophetic message does not actually say that, but the more pertinent objection is that there simply aren’t the Christians in America to create such a backlash. The numbers do not exist.
The most interesting demographic phenomenon of recent years is the sudden and drastic collapse of Christianity in the United States. In my adult lifetime, those who tell pollsters that they are Christian has fallen from 85% to 65%, and those who tell pollsters that they are a member of a church, synagogue or mosque has fallen from about 70% to 47%. Meanwhile, those who profess no religion at all has skyrocketed from 5% to about 25%. The Christian collapse we’ve witnessed in America has already happened in most of the West; only a third of Finns believe in the Christian God, and only about 37% of New Zealanders are believing Christians.
Parenthetically, I would argue that cause and effect are on display here: The collapse of Christianity and the dramatic rise of secularism are exactly why America has lurched so far to the Left in recent years, and why secular Leftist utopians now control America’s institutions.
But even these data overstate those who might be interested in “Christian nationalism.” Among religious people in America, Jews, most of “mainstream” Protestantism and more than half of the Catholics in America lean Left politically (Many prominent Roman Catholic politicians lean Left, including Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Maria Cantwell, Dick Durbin, Kirsten Gillibrand, Tim Kaine, Patrick Leahy, Bob Menendez, Patty Murray, etc.). Muslims, rapidly gaining on Jews as a share of the America’s population, are also allied with the Left (see, e.g., Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Andre Carson).
The politically conservative Christians consist of some Catholics and most evangelical Christians, about 20% of the population. It is true that, in a nation that is divided about 50/50 between Democrats and Republicans, the party that represents conservative Christians cannot afford to ignore them, because that bloc is forty percent of its potential voter pool, and we saw a Trump Administration that was very responsive to Christians’ religious liberty concerns.
At the same time, however, Republicans cannot be so beholden to conservative Christians that they lose the other pieces of their coalition, the sixty percent. And, indeed, the Trump Administration, although it discontinued the practice of flying the homosexual “rainbow flag” at U.S. embassies, also appointed a prominent homosexual, Ric Grenell, as Ambassador to Germany, and later as interim Director of National Intelligence, the highest administrative post ever held by an open homosexual. Grenell subsequently became one of Trump’s chief backers and advisors.
On May 31, 2019, Trump tweeted, "As we celebrate LGBT Pride Month [June] and recognize the outstanding contributions LGBT people have made to our great Nation, let us also stand in solidarity with the many LGBT people who live in dozens of countries worldwide that punish, imprison or even execute individuals on the basis of sexual orientation."
So, although Trump was solicitous of the views of Christians, he was also careful not to alienate his other constituencies, including conservative gays and lesbians. Trump’s administration, like he himself, was far from puritanical or even explicitly Christian.
Given the current demographic realities, the United States is less likely to “backlash” into “Christian nationalism” than we are to fly to the moon by flapping our arms. “Christian nationalism” is a phantom. It is not real. It is not something that realistically could happen in America, now or in the foreseeable future.
Most Adventists who comment on this forum do not argue that the “backlash” or pendulum swing is something possible under current political conditions; rather they argue that the backlash occurs after the Sabbath/Sunday controversy has become prominent, and after a series of devastating and clearly supernatural disasters are blamed on Sabbath-keepers, who are accused of incurring God’s wrath for having traduced the sanctity of Sunday.
Was the Trump Administration “Christian Nationalism”?
Miller regards the Trump Administration as an example of “Christian nationalism,” and those, including Adventists, who supported Trump as having given in to the temptation of “Christian nationalism”:
“Over time, the evangelical right became increasingly frustrated that their political commitments had failed to produce results.”
Translation: The religious Right lost the culture wars.
“It should come as no surprise, then, that the religious right eagerly signed on to support a deeply morally-flawed presidential candidate who promised to fulfill their political desires — for a seat at the power table for federal judges who would reverse Roe v. Wade and stop the expansion of LGBTQ rights, and for policies that would give Christianity preferential treatment in our national arena.”
Regarding the “deeply morally-flawed” candidate, one cannot but be wryly amused at how Leftists always bemoan the sexual peccadillos of right-leaning politicians, but never advert to those same issues in Left-leaning politicians, like anyone named Kennedy, Clinton, or Biden.
But what is really disturbing about this passage is Miller’s Jesuitical cleverness in blaming the victim: Christians lost the culture wars, totally and comprehensively; the forces of cultural and moral degradation, licentiousness and sexual chaos are everywhere triumphant. The only remaining question is whether Christians will be allowed, in their own churches, denominational schools, and wholly owned family businesses, to uphold Biblical standards of sexual demeanor. And, as we have seen in the “Equality Act,” the Left would very much like to drive us out of that final redoubt. (The NAD is pushing a compromise measure called “Fairness for All,” which gives the radical gay lobby everything it wants except ability to persecute Christians.) Leftists declares Christian believers’ attempts to uphold biblical values as mere “bigotry.” It is not “preferential treatment” Christians seek, but basic religious freedom.
And yet shame on Christians, Miller implies, for seeking “a seat at the power table” to protect themselves! Or for wanting to see Roe v. Wade reversed, so that at least in conservative states the holocaust of the unborn—sixty million unborn killed since 1973—can finally be ended. Are we to compromise on sexual standards in our own churches, schools, and family businesses, and consent to unlimited pre-natal slaughter to alleviate Miller’s queasiness at Christians having “a seat at the power table”?
Miller continues,
“For Adventists, there were warning signs suggesting the trade-off was fraught with prophetic danger. For example, our religious liberty ministry has always defended the rights of religious minorities, at least in part because we are conscious that the religion of the beast targets a religious minority for persecution. Yet, many persisted in supporting the targeting of a religious minority, embracing promises to exclude all Muslims from the country; to expel those already here; and to target not only alleged Arab terrorists, but also their wives and children, for assassination. These promises of gross violations of constitutional human and religious rights were accompanied with promises for the political influence of Evangelical Christianity. This duality is familiar. It is the speaking of the dragon in the former and a lamblike veneer in the latter.”
Miller is referring to President Trump’s no-fly policy regarding seven Muslim countries (out of 50 Muslim-majority countries) that the Obama State Department certified could not provide us with minimal data for vetting purposes. It was not a Muslim ban or an attempt to exclude all Muslims from the country. And there was certainly no attempt to expel any lawful Muslim resident from the country without conviction of a crime and a judicial deportation order.
As to assassinating wives and children, I have no idea what Miller is alluding to; I’ve never heard of such a plan connected with Trump. By contrast, President Obama frequently “droned” (assassinated using remotely piloted aircraft) Muslims abroad, including United States citizens—Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who were both born in the United States—without indictment, trial or verdict, which was “a gross violation of constitutional, human, and religious rights.” I do not think President Trump ever assassinated American citizens abroad with no legal process; we would have heard about it if he had.
Continues Miller:
“Many, including some Adventists, who supported these policies have embraced this spirit of Christian Nationalism — a blending of God and country, church and state, faith and patriotism, that is antithetical to the principles of our nation, but fully consistent with the warnings of our prophetic heritage. Indeed, it was the Christian nationalist policy of the recent administration that many found so appealing.”
There is nothing wrong with, or even suspect about, loving both God and one’s country, being both religious and patriotic. Moreover, it is not wrong to note that the American republic was built on Protestant Christian principles, one of which is freedom of religion (as Miller well knows); if that were wrong, then Ellen White is a false prophet, since she stated that:
"Republicanism and Protestantism became the fundamental principles of the nation. These principles are the secret of its power and prosperity." The Great Controversy, p. 441.
Americans have always understood that our continued freedom and greatness as a nation is dependent upon our continued virtuous personal self-government, which was always based upon religious faith. John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Miller continues:
“The forces of Christian nationalism received a setback at the last election, but the underlying spirit of the last term, the blending of nationalism and Christianity into a form of political idolatry, has not. It is still with us, and will re-emerge more powerfully again in the future.”
The “blending of nationalism and Christianity into a form of political idolatry” was not the spirit of the Trump Administration. That is an abuse of prophetic interpretation. As we noted above, President Trump took steps to protect Christians from persecution by the LGBTQ Left, but did nothing to roll back same-sex marriage or gay rights, or to marginalize gays, or to institute a theocracy.
Trump was primarily focused on raising working class wages by imposing tariffs on China, renegotiating trade deals such as NAFTA, and controlling illegal immigration. In Trump’s mind, “making America great again” meant halting and reversing the processes of the last several decades that are triaging America into a thin veneer of extremely wealthy global corporatists, a middle class composed mostly of professionals and government workers, and a struggling working class whose life-expectancy is declining because they are dying from opioid overdoses and suicide because there is no meaningful work for them.
Miller’s attempt to characterize the Trump Administration as “Christian nationalism” and tie that to Adventist prophetic interpretations is, again, an abuse of Bible prophecy; it is what my brother Gerry Wagoner refers to as “messchatology.”
But I do not wish to be entirely negative. There is one aspect of Miller’s article that I agree with:
White advised us to stay out of party politics, but she also urged leaders and members to engage with issues of moral weight that implicate the teaching of the Three Angels’ messages and basic human rights. . . . She counseled members to vote to support “temperance and virtue,” both for issues as well as candidates (GW, 387-388).”
This is correct. Ellen White advised us not to vote for party—you do not know what you are voting for if you just vote based an R or a D before someone’s name. But White also strongly urged us to use our vote to advance moral issues such as abolition and prohibition. In fact, prohibition was so important to her that she once said to vote on Sabbath if need be, and she urged us to make common cause with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in voting for prohibition, even though the WCTU was involved in pushing Sunday legislation.
I had intended to expand on this point, but since this article is already too long, I will have to explore it in another article.