I suspect that anyone reading this is well-aware of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech; a speech he delivered to a rigidly segregated America in August of 1963.
The soul-inspiring and mind-stirring cadence of King’s marvelously articulated dream of a nation living up to its founding promise for all its citizens has woven its way into our collective memory. However, the five principles that King voiced as the basis for how that dream could become a reality are not as widely remembered. Unknown, forgotten, or perhaps by too many even resented, these principles are now separated from the dream for which they provided foundation.
Speaking to justifiably aggrieved black people, King proclaimed that his dream of a time when all people would live together as brothers and sisters depended on recognizing the fierce urgency of now in confronting racial hatred. In the face of unrestricted violence against black people, King called for meeting white racist physical force with the disciplined and powerful soul force of nonviolence. He proclaimed that the battlements of injustice needed to be stormed by a bi-racial army, that unearned suffering was redemptive, and that there was no excuse for accepting a history and condition of racial inequality by wallowing in a sense of despair.
What a difference 61 years makes.
Now we have the more than sobering and fearsome reality of a growing number of vicious, privileged, white nationalists claiming that they are aggrieved. Many are even identifying themselves as Evangelical Christians. They have a dream. They are on a mission which they believe is God inspired. They seek to take back America and make it great again. Their dream is a fearsome, disguised nightmare of cruel self-righteousness.
Evangelical Christian Nationalists who find a welcoming home within a grievance-listing Republican Far Right are praying for a restored white supremacist America. These Evangelical Christian Nationalists are waging their American jihad culture wars in communities across this country. They are not a congregation. They are a most fearsome mob. Believing they are agents of God’s will, these disciples are far from advocates for disciplined soul force. Evangelical Christians of this stripe believe their dreamed for outcome may justify violence.
Their goal and dream for this nation is not inclusion but the exclusion and demonization of all who do not share the Evangelical Christian Nationalist dream. If this were not horrific enough, their desire includes a theocratic America where all those defined by them as demons would also be justly prosecuted as criminals.
Evangelical Christian Nationalists who articulate and endorse the MAGA “dream” have little patience for King’s dream for America. Rather, they believe that their perceived, unearned suffering at the hands of progressives and alleged child-trafficking, Democratic cannibals must be overcome by storming the battlements of WOKE. Their army is not inclusive. Instead, theirs is an army of self-righteous disciples in the thrall of – and blindly loyal to – a grievously immoral, narcissistic man believed to be sent by God to nurture and validate their grievances.
Evangelical Christian Nationalists seeking the realization of a theocratic state in America are dangerous. This is in part the case because too many of us who affirm the Jesus of the Gospels, or those of us who identify ourselves as spiritual but not religious, or those of us who as engaged citizens embrace no faith tradition at all, are not taking the growing influence and power of Evangelical Christian Nationalism and its advocates seriously enough. We are largely indifferent to or unaware of their strength through organizations such as Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, and their growing influence on state governments as well as on national policy.
We continue to ignore the reality of this recurring and ever more pervasive Evangelical Christian Nationalist nightmare at great cost to the life, liberty, and true dream of America. We must wake up before the true promise of this nation with a government aspiring to be in Lincoln’s words, “of the people and for the people” is put to sleep…permanently.