The Myth of White Christian Nationalism

The Myth of White Christian Nationalism

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by Kenneth L. Woodward

May 2024

In his first speech as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Johnson sounded like a preacher in a pulpit: "I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear that God is the one who raises up those in authority," he began. "He raised up each of you, all of us. And I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment and this time."

It was the kind of public piety and Baptist Bible-speak that folks in Johnson’s scarlet-red Louisiana district like to hear from those they send to Congress. It was also inclusive of the Jews, Muslims, and nonbelievers in the chamber. But it wasn’t interpreted that way.

A chorus line of publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, and Salon, registered alarm: House Republicans had elected a white Christian nationalist to a post just two chairs removed from the presidency. The money quote in the Times came from pollster Robert P. Jones, who labeled Johnson “the embodiment of white Christian nationalism in a tailored suit”—suggesting, not so subtly, that white Christian nationalists belong in white T-shirts and red MAGA hats.

Given a chance on Fox News to defend himself, Johnson said that his politics were to be found in the Bible and that he had never heard the term “Christian nationalist.” I believe him. To be sure, Johnson is a Trumpist and outspoken election denier. That’s not my brand of politics, nor do I think God is as hands-on in American politics as Johnson assumes he is. But according to a 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center, 54 percent of Americans have never heard of Christian nationalism either. And of the 45 percent who have heard at least a little about it, only 5 percent viewed the label favorably.

“White Christian nationalism” entered the political lexicon around 2015 as part of an effort to explain why white evangelical Protestants were drawn to Donald Trump, a thrice-married womanizer who is ignorant of the Bible and says he has no reason to ask God’s forgiveness. Since then, hunter-gatherers in the polling industry have sought to identify and quantify white Christian nationalists through surveys. Beltway journalists have ventured into the wilds of small-town America to profile—and often revile—living, breathing WCNs. And a number of academics, some of them raised in fundamentalist homes, have labored to locate white Christian nationalism within the wellsprings of the American character.

Foremost among the latter is Jones, who, in addition to being founder and former CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), writes books, based in part on his surveys and spiced with slices of autobiography, decrying the effects of white Christian supremacy. He has won the Grawemeyer Award, which in the past went to such eminent scholars as the theologian Jürgen Moltmann and carries a $100,000 prize. The Brookings Institution, a respected left-of-center think tank, has partnered with Jones in identifying the WCNs among us.

Jones’s Baptist roots go generations deep in Southern soil, back to times when there were more Baptists in some towns than there were people—times when Southern Baptists rejected “evangelical” as a Yankee word. He declared himself for Jesus at the strikingly early age of six, and as a teenager he was often at his church five days a week. He graduated from a small Baptist college in Mississippi and then studied for the ministry at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Only there, he writes, did he learn that slavery was the main issue that had led to the creation of the Southern Baptist Convention, and not until he was a PhD student at Emory University did he learn the extent to which the church had endorsed Jim Crow and abetted the brutality inflicted on southern blacks. “The scales,” he writes, “fell from my eyes.”

Indeed, Jones’s books can best be described as three variations on a line from “Amazing Grace”: “Was blind, but now I see.” In The End of White Christian America (2016), he heralded the cultural and demographic decline of white American Protestants, which was decades-old news, and provided his own journalistic gloss on why and how it happened. The book’s novelty is his invention of White Christian America as the social imaginary that illuminates 150 years of American history.

As the title suggests, White Too Long (2020) is essentially hortatory, a pulpit performance between the covers of a book. The subject is “white supremacy” as the linchpin of White Christian America, but also as the wind propelling the political ascendancy of Donald Trump. This time Jones widens his range to include glances at the tensions between black Catholics and white parishes, but the material he uses is old, derivative, and superficially sourced.

Throughout all his books, Jones champions diversity and inclusion, but only of the familiar race-and-gender kind. He entirely overlooks a side of the American story that historians have long recognized: the significance of white ethnic minorities and of the trials of assimilation that immigrants from all over Europe experienced in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. And he appears not to realize that the Catholic Church in this country was multicultural long before the most recent tide of Hispanic immigrants.

But my fundamental problem with Jones as a retailer of recent social history is that his basic narrative remains a simplistic and mostly regional story of oppressors and oppressed. I was a civil rights reporter in the mid-1960s, and Jones knows nothing of how the movement disproportionately affected low-income ethnic whites in cities like Boston, Chicago, and Omaha. It was their neighborhoods that were to be integrated, not those of suburban white liberals; it was their children who were to be bused for the sake of school integration, their homes that were subject to blockbusting by ruthless white realtors. Nowhere in Jones’s books do we hear of the urban riots that devastated the inner cities of Newark, Detroit, and Los Angeles. Nor, for that matter, do we hear of the white Southern Baptist clergy—few in number, to be sure—I met in Mississippi who risked their lives to maintain pastoral links with black Baptist congregations.

In his most recent book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future (2023), Jones enlarges the category of the oppressed to include indigenous Americans. He also enlarges the category of oppressors to include a couple of fifteenth-century popes. The connection he makes is the “Doctrine of Discovery,” a subject that, he complains, he never encountered during a decade of graduate studies. “But its absence from the historical canon of predominantly white academic institutions,” he assures us, “is testimony to its continued cultural power.” His teachers were blind, but now he sees.

Except he gets the story wrong. The so-called Doctrine of Discovery was first formulated by Chief Justice John Marshall in 1823 in a case involving the right to purchase western lands from Native American tribes. Marshall’s formulation looked back to assorted practices, never uniform or agreed upon, by which European powers had claimed sovereignty over lands they “discovered” during the two centuries of exploration. Marshall himself later rejected the doctrine when he saw it being used to justify moving Native American tribes west of the Mississippi.

Jones argues that in a series of decrees in the late fifteenth century, a few popes gave European rulers “unequivocal theological and moral justification” for exploiting lands and indigenous populations, from Christopher Columbus forward. He claims that these decrees “elevated what had been accepted practice into official church doctrine and international law.” Jones is glossing—badly—arguments advanced by some scholars of indigenous America, but none of the conclusions he draws are true.

First, the decrees he cites never were church doctrine; they were the first in a series of specific directives to the Catholic crowns of Spain and Portugal, giving those nations the right to spread the faith and use it to civilize native populations. They were supported by some Catholic theologians but vigorously challenged by others for, among other things, justifying torture and war to force conversions. In 1537 Pope Paul III replaced the old decrees with his own directives recognizing the natural rights of indigenous peoples—including their right to receive the faith freely and without coercion. Few explorers heeded the pope’s words.

Second, there was no international Law of Discovery before Chief Justice Marshall’s decision of 1823. The Protestant crowns of England certainly did not look to the papacy for moral guidance or approval. Moreover, the crowns, the explorers, and the church all had different agendas. Even among the British settlers, relationships with indigenous tribes were different in Massachusetts Bay than in the Virginia colony. Nothing about this complex history is “unequivocal.”

Jones is fueled by moral indignation, which is admirable when warranted. But his work suffers under the evangelist’s need to condemn and convert. So, with less intensity, do those social scientists, and their amen corner in the media, who insist that white Christian nationalism is a fundamental threat to American democracy. Is it?

Actually, the first question has to be, “What is it?” And the only reliable answer is, “Depends on whom you ask.”

In their 2020 book, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, sociologists Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead offer this oft-repeated definition: “a cultural framework that blurs distinctions between Christian identity and American identity, viewing the two as closely related and seeking to enhance and preserve their union.”

Simple enough. But in their Time essay on Johnson’s House election, Christian nationalism metastasizes from a theoretical concept to be tested into a litany of liberal mortal sins. Christian nationalists, the authors argued, are Americans who favor “patriarchy, heterosexual marriage, and pronatalism.” They also harbor “a desire for strong leaders who through the threat of violence, or actual violence, defend the preferred social arrangements and hierarchies.” That would be Trump. And, of course, they are nearly always white and prone to racism: For Christian Nationalists, “the ideal American is generally understood to be a natural-born Anglo Protestant.”

In The Flag and the Cross (2022) Perry and Yale sociologist Philip Gorski provide a different, almost anthropological definition. There we learn that white Christian nationalists hold “beliefs that . . . reflect a desire to restore and privilege the myths, values, identity, and authority of a particular ethnocultural tribe. These beliefs add up to a political vision that privileges the tribe. And they seek to put other tribes in their proper place.”

In an interview with New York Magazine, Gorski stressed the narrative element. White Christian nationalists, he argued, are bound together by “an underlying narrative” about themselves, one that honors a “holy trinity” of freedom, order, and violence: “which means a kind of libertarian freedom for people like us—‘us’ being, above all, straight, white, native-born Christian men—order for everybody else, which means racial and gender order above all else, and that kind of righteous violence directed against anybody who violates that order.”

One could cite other definitions, other narratives, but the point is obvious. White Christian nationalism is a social construction the meaning of which depends on who is doing the constructing. Not at all obvious is what same-sex marriage, patriarchy, and encouraging couples to have children (pronatalism) have to do with being white or Christian or nationalist. Even the term is questionable: I think what Whitehead, Perry, and Gorski are trying capture is white Christian nativism, which at least has a traceable social history.

How many Americans are white Christian nationalists?

Again, it depends on whom you ask. White Christian nationalism is not an identity you can assert; it’s an identity that’s applied to you. You can, however, audition for membership simply by assessing the following six statements, which provided the data base for Whitehead and Perry’s work.

The federal government should: “declare the United States a Christian nation,” “advocate Christian values,” “enforce strict separation of church and state,” “allow the display of religious symbols in public spaces,” and “allow prayer in public schools.” And a final statement: “The success of the United States is part of God’s plan.”

Based on responses to these statements, the authors calculated that 51.9 percent of Americans are either full or partial supporters of Christian nationalism. But if you find, as a number of social scientists have, that the statements are too ambiguous to yield precise interpretations, you may doubt—as I do—that the responses tell us anything reliable about what Christian nationalism is or how it might explain political and social behavior.

For example, believing that the government should promote Christian values like justice, honesty, truthfulness, and charity—virtues shared by people of other faiths and people of no faith—hardly makes a respondent a “nationalist” or even a Christian. Again, all sorts of people support the display of religious symbols in public parks, even in New York City. Are they incipient WCNs? And what is the meaning of “strict” separation of church and state? How can any of these questions unearth Americans who support what the authors see as an implicit theocratic threat to the country?

In February 2023, Jones’s polling firm, PRRI, together with the Brookings Institution, issued a study with this no-bones-about-it title: “A Christian Nation? Understanding the Threat of Christian Nationalism to American Democracy and Culture.” Based on responses to a set of five slightly different statements, the survey found that 10 percent “overwhelmingly either agree or completely agree” with all five, and the majority of another 19 percent “mostly” or “completely” agree—a conflation that allowed some media headlines to announce that nearly three in ten Americans support white Christian nationalism.

Three in ten was considerably less than Whitehead and Perry’s claim of 51.9 percent. But as with their survey, the point was to ferret out Christian nationalists and pin the label on them. This motive was evident from the headline Jones put on the PRRI press release: “Two Thirds of White Evangelicals, Most Republicans Sympathetic to Christian Nationalism.” Thus, when Johnson became Speaker of the House last fall, Jones could point to homegrown data in charging that the Republican Party is “the party of white Christian nationalism.”

Unlike PRRI, the Pew Research Center does not undertake advocacy polling. But in 2018, midway through the Trump presidency, Pew released a survey of American religion using a new typology that divided respondents into seven categories, from highly religious to wholly secular. One of these, “God-and-Country Believers,” came close to coinciding with the elusive cohort “Christian nationalists.” These Americans, 12 percent of the adult population, “hold many traditional religious beliefs and tilt right on social and political issues.” They are also much more likely than other Americans “to see immigrants as a threat.” But whereas PRRI reported that the more often respondents attend church, the more likely they were to be white Christian nationalists, Pew found the opposite. God and Country believers were less likely to attend church than the “Sunday Stalwarts,” the 17 percent of Americans Pew found to be the most religiously active.

The fundamental flaw in all these surveys is the presumption that religion is a leading factor in determining how Americans vote. This at a time when church attendance is plummeting amid a general hollowing-out of American Christianity! The more persuasive argument is the reverse: that our politics shape our religion. As political scientist Lilliana Mason wrote in Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (2018), politics has absorbed and recast all other identities: “A single vote can now indicate a person’s partisan preferences as well as his or her religion, race, ethnicity, gender, neighborhood, and favorite grocery store.” Not to mention which television programs the person watches, and whether he or she drives an electric or a gasoline-powered car.

We know from past presidential elections that the majority of white Catholics end up supporting the eventual winner, regardless of party. Indeed, in 2004 most of them voted against John Kerry, the first Catholic presidential nominee since John F. Kennedy in 1960. Why should we presume that white evangelical Protestants—the category thought to be most closely aligned with white Christian nationalism—are not affected by factors such as income, education, and geography when they enter the polling booth?

For example, the United States is a nation of high-school graduates: Only 37 percent of Americans over the age of twenty-five have four-year college degrees, and evangelicals are more likely than other white Christians to have no more than a high school diploma. That fact affects income. When Trump won the presidency, one-third of white evangelicals were earning less than $30,000 a year—the poverty line for a family of four—and a majority were earning less than $50,000. Trump’s MAGA message promised more jobs and better pay.

Geography matters. The majority of white Americans who identify as evangelicals live in red states, or in red districts of purple states. Most of them reliably vote Republican and did so for Bush, McCain, and Romney. In 2016 they voted for Trump, but so did a majority of white mainline Protestants. White non-Hispanic Catholics chose Trump over Hillary Clinton, 64 to 31 percent.

In sum, “white Christian nationalist” is an inherently political concept. But so is the concept on which it depends: “white evangelical Protestant.” As sociologist Robert Wuthnow has pointed out, the category “Born Again” was added to opinion polls chiefly as “a crude indication of the likelihood that someone [who so self-identifies] will vote Republican” or hold conservative views on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. Because polls offer only a few religious labels with which to identify, those picking “evangelical” may be Florida Pentecostals, Texas Baptists, California Quakers, Minnesota Lutherans, Iowa Mennonites, or Fairfax County Episcopalians—groups that share no theological or ecclesiastical connections.

What links all the books and articles and angst about white Christian nationalism is their political present-mindedness, a trait exacerbated by the prospect of another Trump presidency. Surveys give us snapshots, not storylines. The lack of historical perspective—indeed, the absence of references to acknowledged experts in American history—in the works I’ve cited is appalling.

The relationship between Christianity and American nationalism has a long history, against which any new iteration must be understood. That history is replete with efforts by Protestants to connect the American experiment in ordered liberty to some higher purpose, plan, or Planner. For the Puritans of Plymouth Rock that higher purpose was to establish God’s new Promised Land. Later it was to establish a righteous—read Protestant—empire by (in Lincoln’s tempered phrase) an “almost chosen people.” In the Cold War era, when the spread of Communism was the nation’s main concern, both liberals and conservatives advanced their political agendas by appealing to yet other forms of Christian nationalism. And so, in the biblical idiom of freedom and justice, did Martin Luther King Jr.

The political mobilization of southern fundamentalists and evangelicals in 1978 by conservative Republican strategists was a classic example of how politics shapes American religion rather than the reverse. Franklin D. Roosevelt did much the same in drawing Catholics into his New Deal coalition. But the religious landscape in the first quarter of the twenty-first century is very different.

The role of religion in public life is much diminished. Religious beliefs and behavior are more personal, therapeutic, and fluid; and belonging—as indicated by steep declines in church attendance—is fading as a manifestation of religious commitment.

Yes, those who take religion seriously—that is, those who exhibit high levels of religious belonging, behavior, and belief—tend to vote Republican. But they make up only about 17 percent of the population, according to various studies. They are far less numerous than the 28 percent who, according to political scientist David Campbell and his colleagues, identify as “Secularists”—meaning people who are not simply nonreligious, but adamant and active in opposing the presence of religion in the public square. The Secularists alone outnumber, by almost three to one, the 10 percent or so who have been labeled white Christian nationalists. And they overwhelmingly vote for Democrats.

Despite the vagueness of the term “white Christian nationalism” and the difficulty of identifying its adherents, we are certain to hear a great deal more about the threat it poses to American democracy as the election cycle churns on. In the rancid state of American politics, voters are moved more by fear and loathing of the other party than by commitment to their own. Trump’s politics thrives on these emotions. But what will we hear of the Secularists, who are more numerous, wealthier, much better educated, and more politically active than those who have been labeled WCNs? What we will hear is the sound of silence.

Kenneth L. Woodward is the former religion editor at Newsweek.

Image by Glendale United Methodist Church—Nashville, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

Yale ISPS - Understanding White Christian Nationalism

"White Christian Nationalism and the Midterm Elections"

Panel 2: Networks, Yale, 9/30/22.

by Philip Gorski | Oct 4, 2022

Understanding White Christian Nationalism

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October 4, 2022

When people hear the phrase “white Christian nationalism” in the news, they do not always get the correct meaning.

“A common misunderstanding would be that it is the same thing as being a patriotic Christian,” said Philip Gorski, chair of the Department of Sociology at Yale. “Patriotism is an adherence to the ideals of the United States, and nationalism is loyalty to your tribe and not the country.”

In a recent book with sociologist Samuel L. Perry of the University of Oklahoma, Gorski traces white Christian nationalism in the United States to the late 1600s. Adherents believe in the idea that America was founded by Christians who modeled its laws and institutions after Protestant ideals with a mission to spread the religion and those ideals in the face of threats from non-whites, non-Christians, and immigrants.

And while white Christian nationalism in the country finds its roots hundreds of years ago, the phenomenon bubbles up during periods when white Christians feel threatened by outside forces — amplified by war, heightened immigration, or periods of economic instability.

“If you think about it that way, the period we’re in now is a perfect storm,” Gorski said. “All three of those catalysts are present.”

Gorski assembled scholars and journalists for a two-day conference last week to define how white Christian nationalism relates to other ideologies in the United States and abroad, describe how it is organized, and explore lingering questions about what role it may play in the November midterm elections and how much of a threat it represents to American democracy.

“We want there to be a deeper and clearer understanding of what white Christian nationalism is,” Gorski said. “It’s a term that even five years ago you wouldn’t hear outside of a seminar room, but since the January 6^th attack on the Capitol, it’s started to circulate in national newscasts, sometimes applying to any set of ideas people don’t like. We want to be clear that it’s not all Christians, not all white people.”

Sponsored by the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the event drew a large gathering on campus and online. Click here to view videos from the conference.

Panelist Bart Bonikowski, associate professor of sociology and politics at New York University, spoke of how Christian nationalism in the United States is exclusionary and nostalgic, seeing the nation as going downhill and needing to be recaptured by people who see themselves at its rightful owners — possibly through authoritarian means. And while the phenomenon can take different forms in other countries, Bonikowski said the mechanism behind the movements can be quite similar. He said white Christian nationalists take advantage of preexisting societal cleavages to mobilize supporters, channeling their fears into resentments.

Opportunistic politicians come along and consolidate inchoate fears into an overall crisis, Bonikowski said. They argue that everything people see as going wrong with the country is part of the same problem, which can be blamed on non-Christians.

In addition to Bonikowski, panelists included Jerome Copulsky, a scholar in residence at American University; Samuel Goldman, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University; Anne Nelson, a research scholar at Columbia University’s School for International and Public Affairs; Bradley Onishi, a podcast host and adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco; author and investigative journalist Katherine Stewart; Ruth Braunstein, associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut; author, journalist, and historian Annika Brockschmidt; Anthea Butler, the Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought and chair of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania; Jeff Sharlet, investigative journalist and professor of English at Dartmouth College; Eric McDaniel, associate professor in the Department of Government and the co-director of the Politics of Race and Ethnicity Lab at the University of Texas at Austin; Sarah McCammon, national correspondent for National Public Radio; Samuel Perry, associate professor of sociology at the University of Oklahoma; Cynthia Miller-Idriss, professor in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Education at American University; Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, assistant professor of religion and anthropology at Northeastern University; and Jason Stanley, the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale.

Katherine Stewart discussed the dynamics of political actors who cultivate grievances to improve their grip on their target population, even if elected officials often take their lead from religious and extremist organizations.

“This is not a culture war,” Stewart said. “It’s a political war over the future of democracy.”

Anthea Butler said the Christian nationalist movement contradicts the principles and norms of democracy. She spoke of attending meetings in which church leaders have been directed to get their congregations to vote a certain way.

“The church is not a cruise ship,” Butler said of the stated rationale behind these efforts. “The church is a battleship. And that’s how they see it.”

Butler also spoke of racial dynamics, the appeal of authoritarianism to groups who feel they have been anointed by God to take political power, and how the internet allows people to adopt and share false beliefs.

“Feelings aren’t facts,” she said. “But feelings drive a lot of what is going on.”

Part 6 - Final Thoughts: Jay McDaniel - Learning from Process Theology and Open Theism

[Part 6]

Let the Blurring Begin

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Learning from

Process Theology and Open Theism

by Jay McDaniel​

God the Companion

"I rejoice that in many ways my childhood faith, while transformed, is not denied or watered down. I reaffirm the trajectory on which it sent my life. I believed then that God is Love. I believe that now. I found God then the great companion who understands. That is how I find God now. I looked to God then to direct my life. I look to God now to direct my life. I thought then that the supreme calling is to love God with all that I am. I think now that this is the supreme calling."

-- John Cobb, Theological Reminiscences


​God in Jesus

"What makes Jesus decisive for me is not just that he fulfilled his calling but that his calling was of decisive importance for human history. God called him to liberate the prophetic message from its remaining ethnocentrism, to deepen and enrich it, and to make it available to all. What a calling! And to what a remarkable extent Jesus' remarkable responsiveness led to the realization of God's purpose. Jesus created the possibility of a new kind of community. Paul brought such communities into being. Much of their distinctiveness faded with the passage of time, but some elements survive in many churches and occasionally such community is realized quite wonderfully even today. What Jesus called the Holy Spirit is real there."

-- John Cobb, Theological Reminiscences

Let the Blurring Begin

John Cobb is one of the most conservative Christians I know. I’m not talking about in politics or economics or social philosophy. He is critical of capitalism and American foreign policy, and he is all about helping build local communities in which people take care of themselves and the earth. Most describe him as a social radical. But in his attitudes toward God and Jesus he creatively conserves for himself and for many other Christians a confidence in biblical theism and in the decisiveness of Jesus for human history.

Whereas some might think of God as a force or energy, John thinks of God as a Subject in whose heart the universe lives and moves and has its being. Whereas some might think of Jesus as merely a teacher among teachers, John thinks of him as one who was called by God to help save the whole world. In John, being conservative and being radical are two sides of one coin. His conservatism comes from the future not just the past.

I am grateful to him for helping me want to become more conservative. I am still a conservative-in-the-making, but I'm working on it. I, too, would like to love God with the whole of my life. That seems a lot better than loving money, my country, or my ego.

*

I was sitting next to him recently at a meeting at the American Academy of Religion hearing talks about another form of conservatism for which I have great appreciation: the open theism movement. If you are unfamiliar with it, or just curious about its core teachings, I encourage you to visit the Open Theism Information website.

As you know, John Cobb is a process theologian influenced, not only by biblical traditions but also by Whitehead's philosophy. Indeed, Whitehead's philosophy has helped him be as conservative as he is.

Generally speaking many open theists draw sharp lines between open theism and process theology. The differences between open theists and process theists are important and real -- at least to theologians and philosophers. Still, they may have more to gain from becoming allies than arguing with each other. And there is a place where they really do share a common spirit: namely in their belief that God is affected by what happens in the world and responsive to its sufferings.

Is it not enough that, when so many people imagine God as a dictator in the sky, process theists and open theists emphasize God's love, God's openness? Would it not be good for the world if, at times, those of us shaped by one or the other of these traditions sing together?

*

Imagine a gospel choir. You do not need to have the same voice as someone next to you in order to harmonize, but in the very act of singing together something good emerges which is absent otherwise. When you sing with someone else your own voice is enriched by their voice, and the other way around. Process theologians call it relational power. Open theists might call it openness power.

Process theists and open theists think that God operates through openness power: through persuasion not coercion, hospitality not hatred, receptivity not divisiveness. Open theists emphasize that God chooses to operate this way, when God could have chosen otherwise; process theists emphasize that God acts in this way because God is Love.

Let them have these debates. But when it comes to the needs of the world and the human soul, and when it comes to the damage done to individual psyches and the larger world by dictator-minded theologies, such debates quickly become irrelevant except to the debaters. If God can work in the world through openness power, why can't process theologians and open theists do the same?

I am not alone in this interest. Thomas Oord proposed that, in the future, the boundaries between process theism and open theism need to be blurred, if open theism is to have a good future. If this happens, it will be good for process theology. We process theologians need open theism.

*

One of the strengths of process theology today is that it is now so multireligious. Today Whitehead’s philosophy offers a conceptual vocabulary by which Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Daoists, Confucians, and Naturalists are articulating their points of view in ways that foster respect for differences, mutual understanding, creative transformation, and, so important today, shared efforts at helping heal a broken world. A forthcoming conference in Claremont, California -- Seizing an Alternative: Toward an Ecological Civilization -- will provide a vivid illustration of this diversity and its possibilities for mutual endeavors aimed at the common good of the world.

One of the weaknesses of process theology is that, in its offering of a common vocabulary, it simultaneously fails to speak in the more particularized languages of existing, historical traditions, including conservative evangelical Christian traditions. These particularized languages contain wisdom that is more than, and often not found in, more abstract philosophical prose.

*

If there has been a problem in relations between process theism and open theism, part of the problem lies with the process side of things. Too often, articulations of process theology are overly abstract, disengaged from lived experience, unrelated to pastoral life, overly bold, and tone-deaf to metaphor and story. You can see my own critiques of Christian process theology in What is Missing in Process Theology? I think it has not been orthodox enough. Perhaps not Trinitarian enough, too. See The Space within the Trinity: All Beings Included.

*

One of my aims in developing this website has been to offer a platform for many process-oriented writers and artists who can articulate anew what is important to process thinkers in engaging ways.

And yet, as I have done this, I have truly missed having a strong voice for open theism, because I admire and am moved by so much of what it says. John Sanders explains that open theists want to affirm at least two kinds of openness in God: openness to the world and openness to the future.

We process theologians want to affirm the same, not for the sake of process theology, but for the sake of the world. We truly believe that the world can be more compassionate, more just, more creative, and more respectful of the more-than-human world, if people are open to a God who is open to the world, and join God in the work of Tikkun Olam. And we very much believe in God's dynamic omniscience,

Happily, open theists have been successful in promoting these two kinds of openness in conservative evangelical circles. Moreover, there are people in other religious traditions who, slowly but surely, are discovering and building upon the openness tradition. And open theists are exploring the implications of open theism for how we live in the world and interact other human beings: being open to our differences and honest about our uncertainties. This is only the beginning. Open Theism, whether understood as a distinct movement in its own right or as extension of the historical free-will tradition in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is in process.

*

So let us imagine the blurring. Maybe even pray for it. In God's dynamic omniscience, we know that God knows our needs even before we pray them. But we also know that, in the very act of prayer, something touches God that had not touched God before.
​

CAN PROCESS THEOLOGY AFFIRM CREATION OUT OF NOTHING AND

DIVINE SELF-LIMITATION? A NOTE FROM JOHN COBB

God the Open One

"Recently Christians in the United States and other parts of the world have begun to think about God in new ways. One of the most promising of these new ways is called Open Theism. Its critics believe that Open Theism runs contrary to biblical teachings, but its advocates believe that it is more consistent with biblical teachings than many alternatives. The issues revolve around the idea of “openness” itself.

Open theism affirms that the God of love works with creatures in order for them to share the love inherent in the trinity and to love one another. In this view God is “open” in two important senses. First, God is open to and affected by what creatures do; and second, God is open to the future in that, even for God, there is more than one possible future. God’s plan is not a blueprint but a broad intention that allows for a variety of options regarding precisely how these goals may be reached. God has “dynamic omniscience” meaning that God knows all the past and present as definite and God knows the future as possibilities. Because God has chosen to rely upon creatures for many aspects of life and humans do not always do what God wishes they would do, it follows that God takes some risks. Consequently, God adjusts divine plans and implements flexible strategies in order to try to achieve the divine purposes."

-- John Sanders

What would it look like if Christians influenced by process theology and open theism developed a common statement of belief? It might look something like this:


​God as Omnipotent Love

​When we consider that our own Milky Way is but one of a billion galaxies, each with a billion stars, we gain a sense of the inexplicable grandeur of the One in whose heart we live and move and have our being. Who cannot experience awe? Let our faith have cosmic leanings and not just terrestrial prejudices. Let us walk in wonder, knowing that God is always more than our concept of God. Let the stars be our witness.

But we trust that somehow the grandeur of God has a tenderness to it, too. Sometimes people can think of God in terms that are too big, and, for that matter, too authoritarian. Inspired by Jesus, we believe that God is big enough to be small -- big enough to pay attention to each living being, anywhere and everywhere, and say "You matter, I love you." Yes, we believe that the One by whose love the universe unfolds is infinitely tender and infinitely patient. We believe in an omnipotence of love.

We encourage fellow Christians to believe in omnipotent love, too. There's something deeply relational -- dare we say deeply Trinitarian -- about it. It's almost as if in God, long before the advent of our cosmic epoch, there was a great compassion, an infinite empathy, that made God "God." God did not choose to be loving, God was born loving, albeit in a beginningless way. God is always being born loving, again and again, out of empathy for and responsiveness to the world. Call it essential kenosis.

How to dwell in this world? We need metaphors. Some people imagine the world on the analogy of billiard balls: that is, entities that are separated from one another and collide. As Trinitarians we believe the world itself is made in the image of the Trinity: that is, profoundly relational from the get-go. No, we do not really think there are three distinct agents in the godhead, each with a will of his or her own. We can't go there. But we do think the idea of a divine trinity is a metaphor for relationality. So we find ourselves imagining that the world is relational, too: not so much a collection of objects as a communion of subjects. Collisions are real, but interconnectedness is still more real.

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Back to the question. How to live? Perhaps metaphors from the world of music can help further the idea. We can imagine the world on the analogy of aimprovisational jazz concert not yet complete. We ourselves are among the concert's creators, and God is One who calls us to create music that is conducive to the well-being of life. Our lives are our instruments, and the decisions we make are the music we make. God's hope is that we will make music that helps us become fully alive in this life and in any life to come.

So often we fall short of the music we are beckoned to make, and this falling short is painful to God and painful to us. If we want to speak of divine wrath, then let this wrath be the flip side of divine pain. Even wrath is rooted in love.

But we also play music that is delightful to God, giving God pleasure. After all, we are made in God's image and can bring about goodness and beauty in the world, too. The good news is that, whatever decisions we make, God never gives up on us. God is faithful to us, even when we are not faithful to God. This is part of what was revealed in the healing ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The healing ministry showed God's love for the marginalized and forsaken, the abandoned and despised. The death showed that there is a vulnerable side of God: a side that shares in and absorbs the suffering of all living beings, animals included. And the resurrection showed the creatively transforming side of God: the side that never gives up, always offering possibilities for new life, no matter what crosses befall the world. Jesus is our window to God.

This resurrection continues even today. It takes the form of a healing spirit at work in the world, comforting the afflicted and, of course, afflicting the comfortable, all for love's sake. It also takes the form of Jesus himself, who was resurrected from the dead, who dwells with God, and with whom we can have a personal relationship. We believe that there is a continuing journey after death for all human souls and this well includes our companion in faith, Jesus of Nazareth. Our aim is to be faithful to Jesus, not by placing him on a pedestal so high that nobody can relate to him, but by sharing in his faith. To repeat: Jesus is our window to God.

He is also our window to the world. We cannot separate our love of Jesus from our love of the world. When he taught us to pray that the will of God be done on earth as it is in heaven, he was sharing with us God's deepest hope for the melody we might play. It is that we grow as individuals in community with others and that we build communities of love, of shalom, in which all can share. Practically speaking, this means to help build communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, multicultural, humane to animals, and ecologically wise -- with no one left behind. It also means having the courage to lovingly critique ourselves, our communities, and principalities and powers that obstruct the building of these communities, doing great harm along the way. As we walk with Jesus, sharing in his journey, we must speak truth to power, including capitalist power.

We do not ask that these communities come into being all at once or even once and for all. And we know that a walk with God is more than community building. We know that a walk with God includes interior movements of the heart and soul that are solitary, isolated, private, painful, and beautiful. We know that there is a mystical dimension to life that is never fully understood by overly-extroverted Christians, including evangelicals. We know that there is a liturgical dimension as well that cannot be reduced to muscular impulses aimed at 'saving the world' or 'saving the planet.' There is a quiet side to the Christian life: a side that sits at the feet of Jesus and anoints him with oil, even if the dishes need washing.

Still, we do seek to try to approximate these communities, and we trust that, in working in these ways, we are doing God's will. We have no idea whether, in some cosmic scheme of things, we are 'right' or 'wrong.' We are pretty sure we are wrong about a lot of things; the only thing certain is that we are uncertain. But we do step forward in hope, guided by our faith that in the end, the very God of the universe -- the very Soul in whose heart we and all things live and move and have our being -- will bring us to that peace for which our hearts, and all hearts, yearn.

-- Jay McDaniel

 

Part 5 - Jay McDaniel - Open Theism and Process Theology

[Part 5]

Open Theism and Process Theology

A Reflection

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by Jay McDaniel

​click here for further erudition:

LET THE BLURRING BEGIN: LEARNING FROM OPEN THEISM AND PROCESS THEOLOGY

​Confessions of a Disappointed Supplicant

Maybe it's because a friend of mine, Farhan Shah in Norway, asked me why I chose process theology over open theism. My reasons are unique and most of them have more to do with style than content. Farhan wanted to know if process theologians can affirm creatio-ex-nihilo and divine self-limitation, as open theists do. I asked John Cobb to offer a response to his question: Can Process Theology affirm creatio-ex-nihilo and divine self-limitation? John's answer is "yes" and "yes." But it got me thinking about my own relation to open theism, and a kind of ambivalence I have about it. Here goes:

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​
I remember when, as a process theologian, I first discovered open theism. I loved the name itself and I loved the ideas. I, too, believed in a God of love, revealed but not exhausted in Jesus, whose spirit pervades the world in healing and empowering ways, and for whom the future is not-yet-decided. What impressed me all the more is that they (the open theists) arrived at their views with help from scripture. Open Theism seemed to me like process theology in biblical form. Process Theology seemed like Open Theism in philosophical form.

I recognized that open theists could find other philosophies useful; and that process theologians were interested in many ways of thinking, not just Open Theism and not just Christian. Still, I was excited and looked forward to collaboration with open theists.

What did I hope for in terms of collaboration? I knew of a book or two that promoted dialogue between the two "camps" -- most specifically, Searching for an Adequate God: A Dialogue Beween Process and Free Will Theists and Theological Crossfire: An Evangelical/Liberal Dialogue. I knew some of the authors. But the authors of the essays in the books spent a bit too much time clarifying differences and arguing for their "positions."

I had grown weary of that style of theology - the kind of theology that always wants to distinguish itself from others and say But. Here I had been influenced by feminist theologies and their critiques of the male voice and also by religious literature (the writings of Thomas Merton, for example, or of Mary Oliver) that was exploratory and poetic not dogmatic -- capable of resting in insecurities because inwardly drawn by love. I now think of this kind of literature as theopoetics.

In learning about open theism, then, I was looking for something different: something less argumentative and more flexible, I hoped to co-author some things with open theists in a more contemplative and theopoetic vein that would be available to the religiously interested reader, even if not a scholar; to explore areas of commonality and difference in a friendly and playful way, understanding the power of metaphor, and perhaps using music and film as means of communication; and, most importantly, to work together to help create communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, multi-cultural, humane to animals, good for the earth, and spiritually satisfying, with no one left behind - otherwise called beloved communities with ecology added. I thought process thinkers like me and open theists were, or could be, close cousins, working together and appreciating the kinship.

I found one open theist who was indeed sensitive to metaphor and with whom I could work, although we never co-authored anything, namely John Sanders. His ongoing work in conceptual metaphor theory is something I much admire. I knew friendship was possible!

But gradually, John aside, I came to realize that many open theists were fighting battles within evangelical circles that were much more important to them than collaboration with process theologians, and that they had to distance themselves from process theology in order to have credibility in the circles that mattered to them. And I came to understand that they were not much interested in philosophical theology in the first place, particularly if it took the form of metaphysics, thereby lacking special appeals to scripture. I sensed that every time process theology was mentioned, the guards of my open theist friends went up.

"So I gave up on open theism, or, more specifically, on the possibility of collaborative work. Gradually the open theist community became, in my mind, a fairly self-enclosed vanguard of evangelical Christians engaged in internal battles against "classical theists," especially Calvinists, and primarily interested in "arguments" and "positions." I am sure that we process theologians seemed to them to be fairly self-enclosed vanguard of liberal Christians primarily interested in converting the world to Whitehead's philosophy under the rubric "Christianity.""

Of course, things have changed on the process side. And maybe on the Open Theism side, too. Today, there are many theopoetic forms of process theology, and for that matter, process theology is not simply Christian process theology. It has become a multi-faith tradition. To my mind, the most articulate and influential process theologian of our time is Rabbi Bradley Artson, author of many books including The God of Becoming and Relationship: The Dynamic Nature of Process Theology. His is a Jewish process theology. And another is the Muslim philosopher, Farhah Shah, who is developing a Muslim Process Theology. See: Islam in Process Perspective. And then there is the work of Zhhe Wang and Meijun Fan who are developing Chinese forms of process spirituality that link with an East Asian past, And the work of Jeffrey Long developing a Hindu process theology.

Still, I am Christian, and it troubled me that sometimes open theists caricatured Christian process theology as "merely" a philosophical form of theology lacking a pastoral dimension, as if it were but a system derived from the philosopher Whitehead. I cringed and still cringe when I hear the word derive, as if process theology is primarily axiomatic. This was not the process theology I knew and loved. I loved process theology because process theologians say much the same as open theists about God, take lived human experience as a source of wisdom in its own right, and speak very strongly about other matters of importance in religious life: spirituality, beauty, our connectedness with the web of life, the need for ecological civilizations, interfaith cooperation, the listening side of love, music and the arts, the aliveness of nature. I see process theology, not as a system, but rather as an attitude, an orientation toward life, that is influenced, but by no means enslaved, to the philosophy of Whitehead. As I see things, the process way has twenty key ideas, only two of which explicitly concern God. If you take, say 15 of them seriously, you are, in my mind, a process thinker, if you want to be. (See Twenty Key Ideas in Process Theology.)

Make no mistake. I appreciate the process view of God. It seemed and [continues to] seem to me to offer a slightly clearer way than open theism of imagining how God is truly present as a guiding force and comfort in the human and more than human world, even to the point of "feeling the feeling' of all living beings with tender care. I wasn't hearing this intimacy as strongly in the open theists My intuitions were that the God of process theology was actually more personal than the God of open theism: more like the Abba of Jesus.

​I believed that I had the leading process theologian of our time, John Cobb, on my side, who likewise sees the God of process theology as Abba-like. Not that he or I want to engage open theism in battle; we recognize the good that it offers. But we want process theology as it has evolved to be adequately represented. Hence this page. And truth be told I still yearn for what Thomas Oord calls a blurring of the lines between open theism and process theology, because I think open theism has gifts process thinkers lack. But I try to keep quiet on this, except when I momentarily slip and reach out anew in small and quiet ways, as in this page and a few others on this website.

​To date, I have had no takers, but the future is open.

​-- Jay McDaniel

Meet John Cobb

John Cobb on God the Companion

"I rejoice that in many ways my childhood faith, while transformed, is not denied or watered down. I reaffirm the trajectory on which it sent my life. I believed then that God is Love. I believe that now. I found God then the great companion who understands. That is how I find God now. I looked to God then to direct my life. I look to God now to direct my life. I thought then that the supreme calling is to love God with all that I am. I think now that this is the supreme calling."

-- John Cobb, Theological Reminiscences

​​John Cobb on the Decisiveness of Jesus

"What makes Jesus decisive for me is not just that he fulfilled his calling but that his calling was of decisive importance for human history. God called him to liberate the prophetic message from its remaining ethnocentrism, to deepen and enrich it, and to make it available to all. What a calling! And to what a remarkable extent Jesus' remarkable responsiveness led to the realization of God's purpose. Jesus created the possibility of a new kind of community. Paul brought such communities into being. Much of their distinctiveness faded with the passage of time, but some elements survive in many churches and occasionally such community is realized quite wonderfully even today. What Jesus called the Holy Spirit is real there."

-- John Cobb, Theological Reminiscences

Meet Greg Boyd

from Greg Boyd's website ReKnew
Among the Frequently Asked Questions​

REKNEW: GREG BOYD'S WEBSITE

​Are you a “process” theologian?

​"I think process philosophy has some good things to teach us, but I’m not a process theologian. Among other things, process philosophy typically denies creation ex nihilo (creation from nothing), denies God’s omnipotence, denies God can respond to prayer and intervene in miraculous ways in history and denies God will once and for all overcome evil in the future. I disagree with all of these points. 

On the other hand, process philosophy holds that the future is partly comprised of possibilities, and I agree with this. But this doesn’t make me a process theologian. This is like calling Calvinists "Muslim" simply because they happen to share the Koran’s belief that God determines everything.

​Do you consider yourself an “Evangelical Christian”?

I hold to a high view of biblical inspiration and most of my theological views are in line with what would be considered “evangelical.” So in this sense, I consider myself an “evangelical.” But the word “evangelical,” as well as the word “Christian,” has become associated with many things that are radically inconsistent with the example of Jesus’ life, which we are to emulate. So I’m very hesitant to identify myself with either term until I know what my audience means by them.

Do you deny that God knows the future?

This is the most common misconception regarding Open Theism. I believe God knows everything, including the past, present and future. But I also believe the future is different from the past in that the future contains possibilities while the past is irrevocably settled. So I hold that, precisely because God’s knowledge is perfect, God knows the future exactly as it is – that is, as containing possibilities. Some things about the future are “maybes,” and God knows them as such.

​Wait a Minute, Greg

by Jay McDaniel

​​Open Theists and Process Theologians point to a God who is creative, social, loving, and embodied in our actual universe.  Both propose that the future is open, even for God, because it is not-yet-decided.  In another page on Open Horizons I have encouraged a combining, indeed a blurring, of the two types of theology.  I still think that would be good.  But if I had to choose between the two, I would choose Process Theology.

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So what are the differences?  Some open theists say that a primary difference is that process theologians arrive at their conclusions via a metaphysical system, namely that of the philosophy of Whitehead or Hartshorne, whereas open theists arrive at their conclusions from a careful reading of Christian scripture. (Sanders and Haskers)  

​As a process theologian myself, this does not ring true.  Ideas in process theology began to make sense to me, not by derivation from a system, but because they spoke to my experience: experiences of beauty, suffering, knowing people of other faiths, the experience of growth and change, and the value of the natural world.  Process theology was, and still is, an outlook on life and a way of living, not a system, and the philosophy of Whitehead was an invitation to recognize and appreciate what I know from experience.
​
Still, I recognize that open theists had the impression that process theologians were system-preoccupied.  Perhaps it was this impression that led some open theists -- Greg Boyd, for example -- to sharply emphasize the differences, indeed the incompatibilities, between process theology and open theism. Here is what Greg Boyd in his website, ReKnew:

​"I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Process thought (Trinity and Process) where I critiqued the metaphysics of Charles Hartshorne and tried to demonstrate that one can adopt a system that has all the explanatory power of Process Thought (PT) without its unorthodox implications. The unorthodox implications are these.

1. 1. In PT, God exists eternally in relation to a non-divine world. So PT denies “creation ex nihilo”
2. 2. In PT, God is bound to metaphysical principles that govern both God and the world. So God isn’t able to really interact with the world as a personal being. God must always, of necessity, respond in ways that the metaphysics of the system stipulate. This means…
3. 3. In PT God can’t intervene in unique ways, like personally answering prayer
4. 4. In PT God can’t intervene and perform miracles
5. 5. In PT God can’t become uniquely embodied, as he is in Christ.

These are pretty serious shortcomings. I hope it’s clear that PT has got little in common with Open Theism other than that we both believe the future is partly comprised of possibilities. But even here there is a major difference. In Open Theism, God chooses to create a world with an open future, while in PT God has created of necessity."

Boyd’s remarks may be true to Charles Hartshorne, but they are not true to John Cobb, so I’d like to put in a word for Cobb-influenced process theology.  I think Cobb would disagree point by point:
​

1. Cobb explicitly says that Process Theologians can affirm creatio-ex-nihilo if they wish, and notes that some have.  See Can Process Theology Affirm Creatio-ex-nihilo and Divine Self-Limitation?
2. Cobb thinks of God in deeply personal terms.  God is, for Cobb, the Abba of Jesus.  Understood in this way, God feels the feelings of all living beings, humans much included, with tenderness and care and responds by offering fresh possibilities for responding to the situations at hand, otherwise called initial aims. See God as Abba: John Cobb's Proposal.
3. Cobb thinks that when people pray, Someone is truly listening (feeling their feelings) and responding through initial aims. Cobb has written an entire book on intercessory prayer: Praying for Jennifer
4. Cobb affirms God’s miraculous work in the world.  See What is a Miracle?
5. Cobb has written an entire book – Christ in a Pluralistic Age – arguing for the unique way in which God was embodied in Christ.  See Christ in a Pluralistic Age

Boyd may not appreciate Cobb’s approach to these matters, but I am sure that he can understand why a process thinker like me would find his articulation of the differences overly sharp if not misleading.  Boyd is not describing the process theology I know.

So why would anyone choose Process Theology over Open Theism?  It is certainly not that Process Theology is “right” and Open Theism “wrong.”  Both are valuable. For me it is that process theology speaks to aspects of life that I don’t hear as clearly in the Open Theism I know, which are important to me and, I believe, important to God. Process theology offers me a vocabulary and set of concepts to appreciate:
​

1. The value all living beings have in and for themselves, in their subjectivity.
2. The value of the web of life on earth itself, within which we are small but include.
3. The value of emotions (subjective forms) as part of what makes us human.
4. The need in our time to develop ecological civilizations, consisting of communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, multi-religious, and multi-cultural, with no one left behind.
5. The value of the many world religions as containing wisdom worthy of respecting and learning from.
6. The power of music and the arts to provide “lures for feeling” for human well-being.
7. The importance of listening: feelings the feelings of others, and sharing in their subjective states.
8. The possibility of multiple dimensions of existence in which life-after-death might unfold.
9. The importance of forms of religious experience which are not theistic, and which partake of the horizontal sacred.
10. The mutual immanence and interconnectedness of all things.
11. A full-fledged appreciation of the power of decision in human (and non-human) life
12. An appreciation of the subconscious realms of human and non-human life.
13. Openness to the possibility of multiple dimensions of existence.
14. The value of metaphor and embodied experience.
15. ​The importance of beauty as a guiding ideal in human life, of which love is one form.

 
I realize as I list these that some (perhaps many) open theists speak of these matters.  But my impression is that they have been so preoccupied with matters concerning God that they have underemphasized other matters such as these.  

Thus, for me, their theology is limited, lacking a cosmological and phenomenological dimension.  This is why I prefer process theology to open theism, even as I think their similarities may ultimately be more important than their differences, and even as, I am sure, they can enrich one another.

Like I said, I would choose process theology over open theism, but I don't think it's necessary.  I think they can be combined.  But I'm sure anybody's really interested.  May it all be reconciled in the wider arms of God's loving embrace.

-- Jay McDaniel