America's Greatest Presidents Were 'Christian Nationalists'
One of the fear tactics that Democrats are employing ahead of the 2024 presidential election is raising the bugaboo of the so-called “Christian nationalist” movement and its support for former President Donald Trump.
In December, for instance, former Bill Clinton adviser James Carville called Christian nationalists “a bigger threat than al-Qaida.”
The most high-profile push to date to demonize Christian nationalists is a documentary produced by Rob Reiner called “God & Country,” due out in February.
Based on the trailer and reviews, the film consists of a bunch of progressive or moderate Christians hand-wringing over evangelicals voting in large numbers for Trump in November.
And if Trump wins, according to the false Democratic narrative, it will mean the “end of our democracy.”
The term “Christian nationalist” is an obvious marketing technique aimed at linking the sordid history of white nationalism to Christians who vote for conservatives.
Leftists want to shame Christians out of voting for Trump or supporting politicians like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has been very forthright about his faith and how it influences his political values.
Earlier this month, Reiner misleadingly claimed on MSNBC while promoting his film that the Founding Fathers created “a clear separation of church and state” in the Constitution.
He was referring, of course, to the First Amendment, which states in part, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
This amendment at its most basic level meant that the U.S. would not have an official state religion, like Great Britain had with the Church of England.
Article VI of the Constitution also precluded religious tests from being applied to federal officeholders.
At the founding, several states required those holding office to profess faith in the Bible or Christianity. At the federal level, however, one didn’t have to be a Christian.
That is what the separation of church and state means. The Founders never intended to banish religious values from the public sphere.
The U.S. Was Founded on the Christian Worldview
Every politician is guided by faith in something. For many on the left, it is faith in government and the wisdom of politicians to know how to best spread the wealth around, rescue the planet, define genders, etc.
But the U.S. was founded on and is grounded in the Judeo-Christian worldview.
At its core is the belief that a just God, as revealed in the Bible, governs over the affairs of this world, and he has established timeless divine laws that create corresponding inalienable rights, as stated in the Declaration of Independence.
For example, as I explain in my book “We Hold These Truths,” the Ten Commandments create the right to life (“You shall not murder”) and the right to own property (“You shall not steal”).
The commandment not to covet your neighbor’s house “or anything that is your neighbor’s” is also a recognition of the right to own property and a rebuke to the central tenet of socialism: Use the force of government to spread the wealth around.
Another commandment, “You shall not bear false witness,” creates the right not to be falsely accused of a crime (which, of course, would result in the loss of one’s life, liberty or property). The right to due process of law is designed to protect the accused from false allegations.
The commandment to “honor your father and your mother” establishes the central role of family in society.
The family is also delineated in the book of Genesis and reaffirmed by Jesus Christ in the New Testament: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”
These are some of the core values of Christianity that shaped America’s laws and culture.
America’s Greatest Presidents Were Christian Nationalists
Periodically, C-SPAN polls several dozen historians asking them to rank the nation’s presidents. Included in the top 10 of that list, last created in 2021, are George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.
These men were not afraid to bring their Christian faith into the public sphere. The left would likely label them Christian nationalists today.
George Washington
Washington, who commanded the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, exhorted his troops in a July 1776 order, “The blessing and the protection of Heaven are at all times necessary but especially so in times of public distress and danger.
“The General hopes and trusts, that every officer, and man, will endeavour so to live, and act, as becomes a Christian Soldier defending the dearest Rights and Liberties of his country.”
The Americans, of course, won the war over the British in 1783 and then adopted the Constitution in 1787. Washington became president in April 1789.
In taking the oath of office, his hand resting on a Bible opened to Genesis 49 and 50, Washington swore to uphold and defend the Constitution, stating, “So help me God.”
The passages in Genesis have to do with Jacob blessing his sons before his death and Joseph reconciling with his brothers, who had sold him into slavery years before.
Washington spent a good part of his inaugural address acknowledging God’s role in aiding the U.S. in its journey to freedom.
“No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men more than those of the United States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency,” he said.
Washington also observed, “We ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained.”
According to the modern left, therefore, Washington was a Christian nationalist.
Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln must have been a Christian nationalist, as well.
In his Thanksgiving proclamation in October 1863 following the Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg and the Union’s general progress in the Civil War, Lincoln wrote, “No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.”
The language he used regarding sins and the “Most High God” is right out of the Bible.
In his second inaugural address in March 1865, Lincoln cited the Bible four times and mentioned God 14 times.
“The Almighty has his own purposes,” he said, and then quoted the words of Jesus: “Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.”
“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him?” Lincoln asked.
“Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.
“Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether,'” the 16th president said, quoting from Psalm 19.
So, by the left’s definition, Lincoln was a Christian nationalist, believing God’s justice should prevail in the affairs of this world, including in government.
Franklin Roosevelt
With Europe and Asia already in the throes of World War II and the U.S. soon to enter, Roosevelt told the American people via a radio address in May 1941, “Today the whole world is divided between human slavery and human freedom — between pagan brutality and the Christian ideal.
“We choose human freedom — which is the Christian ideal. No one of us can waver for a moment in his courage or his faith. We will not accept a Hitler-dominated world.”
“We reassert our abiding faith in the vitality of our constitutional republic as a perpetual home of freedom, of tolerance, and of devotion to the word of God,” FDR said.
In December 1941, America entered the war following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt again spoke to the nation as part of a radio broadcast titled “We Hold These Truths.”
He explained that in Nazi Germany, a citizen’s only duty was “the duty of obedience, not to his God, not to his conscience, but to Adolf Hitler; and that his only value is his value, not as a man, but as a unit of the Nazi state.”
“To Hitler the church, as we conceive it, is a monstrosity to be destroyed by every means at his command. The Nazi church is to be the ‘national church,’ a pagan church, ‘absolutely and exclusively in the service of but one doctrine, one race, one nation,’” FDR said.
Roosevelt asked the nation via radio to join him in prayer following the Allied D-Day invasion of France on June 6, 1944. It was the beginning of the offensive to retake Western Europe from the Nazis.
“Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our republic, our religion and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.”
On the night of June 6th, 1944, President Roosevelt went on national radio to address the nation for the first time about the invasion of Normandy. His speech took the form of a prayer. #DDay75 #DDay75thAnniversary pic.twitter.com/YnJXOgsyyU
— TCM (@tcm) June 6, 2019
He concluded using the words of Jesus Christ from the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done, Almighty God.”
So Roosevelt was a Christian nationalist. He wanted the will of God done on earth as in heaven.
Ronald Reagan
Finally, in more recent times, Reagan was a Christian nationalist too.
His entire address to the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983, one of the most noteworthy speeches of his presidency, is really a call for Christian engagement in the public sphere, including fighting to restore the right to life for the unborn.
“Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged. When our Founding Fathers passed the First Amendment, they sought to protect churches from government interference. They never intended to construct a wall of hostility between government and the concept of religious belief itself,” he said.
The 40th president later in his remarks contended that the main evil of the communist system is its failure to acknowledge God and the inalienable rights he grants.
“Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness — pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world,” Reagan said.
Reagan designated 1983 the “Year of the Bible,” saying in a presidential proclamation, “Of the many influences that have shaped the United States of America into a distinctive Nation and people, none may be said to be more fundamental and enduring than the Bible.”
In May 1988, Reagan signed into law legislation making the first Thursday of May the National Day of Prayer.
The same month, he traveled to the Soviet Union and addressed students at Moscow State University.
Reagan said of America, “Go into any schoolroom, and there you will see children being taught the Declaration of Independence, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights — among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — that no government can justly deny; the guarantees in their Constitution for freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.”
Here’s to Christian Nationalists
These four men believed that biblical values create a much healthier and freer society than leftist, godless, statist values do.
Trump has also spoken about the importance of Judeo-Christian values in government, and never more powerfully than in his July 4, 2020, speech at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota.
“Our Founders boldly declared that we are all endowed with the same divine rights, given [to] us by our Creator in heaven. And that which God has given us, we will allow no one, ever, to take away — ever,” he said.
He later said to great applause, “We stand tall, we stand proud, and we only kneel to Almighty God.”
If the left wants to call Trump and Christians who love their country “Christian nationalists,” so be it — they are in good company with some of America’s greatest presidents.
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