(RNS) — The Rev. Gerald L.Okay. Smith liked Jesus a lot he constructed a seven-story statue on the highest of an Ozark mountain to honor his savior.

Smith liked America, too, however despised a lot of his fellow People. Particularly those that had been Black, Jewish or immigrants.

An ordained Disciples of Christ pastor, grasp showman, expert fundraiser, prolific author and “minister of hate,” Smith spent many years warning white Christians that they had been at risk of shedding their nation to devious forces conspiring in opposition to them.

To fight these forces, Smith based a political social gathering, ran for U.S. Senate and churned out tens of 1000’s of copies of The Cross and the Flag, a month-to-month journal devoted to the reason for Christian nationalism.

For Smith, that work was outlined not by Jesus or the Structure. His foremost concern was preserving Christian energy and what he known as “conventional Americanism.”

“The primary precept for which we stand is: Protect America as a Christian Nation being acutely aware of the actual fact that there’s a extremely organized marketing campaign to substitute Jewish custom for Christian custom,” he wrote in “This Is Christian Nationalism,” which outlined the ten pillars of his motion.

Among the many different pillars of Christian nationalism: outlawing communism, destroying the “bureaucratic fascism” of revenue tax and the Supreme Court docket, and preserving racial segregation without end.

Smith aimed to take the latent prejudices and anxieties of American society and fan them into flames, wrote the late Glen Jeansonne, a longtime College of Wisconsin-Milwaukee historical past professor and Smith’s biographer. For Smith, the worry of communism was an excuse to embrace prejudice and pursue energy.

“His life illustrates that the profession of an individual of outstanding skills may be tragic whether it is guided by a lust of energy and fueled by a bigotry that appeals to latent hatred,” wrote Jeansonne in his 1988 biography, subtitled “Minister of Hate.”

Whereas Smith’s title is generally forgotten, his concepts — and the methods he used to advertise them — nonetheless hang-out America immediately.

“America has an extended historical past, sadly, of this type of Christian nationalism,” stated Lerone Martin, affiliate professor of faith at Stanford College and director of its Martin Luther King, Jr. Analysis and Training Institute.

Debate over ­Christian nationalism, which sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry describe as “a cultural framework that blurs distinctions between Christian id and American id,” has been fueled by the rise of Donald Trump and the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.

A current survey by the Public Faith Analysis Institute and the Brookings Establishment discovered that about 1 in 10 People favors an excessive type of Christian nationalism, whereas a 2021 Pew Analysis examine discovered an analogous variety of “religion and flag” conservatives, whose religion in God and America are intertwined.

But Christian nationalism is outlined by greater than faith and patriotism, stated Whitehead, co-author of “Taking America Again for God” and affiliate professor of sociology at Indiana College-Purdue College Indianapolis. It’s additionally outlined by hate.

For hard-core Christian nationalists, new and outdated, the enemies checklist has typically included Jews, Black People, immigrants and progressives, typically labeled as Marxists.

“One of many key parallels is an us-versus-them mentality the place now we have to circle the wagons as a result of we’re being attacked,” stated Whitehead. “And the one solution to survive is to battle again to take management and achieve energy.”

This tracks with PRRI’s ballot, which discovered that People who imagine that “Jewish folks have an excessive amount of energy” usually tend to assist Christian nationalist concepts than different People. Adherents of Christian nationalism, PRRI stated, additionally imagine that white People face as a lot discrimination as Black People and that America is being invaded by immigrants.

Proponents of Christian nationalism have lengthy promoted their racist beliefs by means of Christian concepts, stated Charles R. Gallagher, a Jesuit priest and professor of historical past at Boston School. This enables them to achieve a bigger viewers that shares their beliefs however not essentially their enemies.

“They’re very shrewd in how they use the unique ideas of Christianity to swimsuit their political or nationalistic objectives,” stated Gallagher, creator of “Nazis of Copley Sq.: The Forgotten Historical past of the Christian Entrance.”

Gallagher traces Christian nationalists again to the early 1900s, when conservative Christians witnessed firsthand Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution. Amongst them was William Dudley Pelley, a journalist and novelist, who’d gone to Russia as a volunteer for the YMCA and ended up masking the civil struggle for The Related Press. He noticed atrocities dedicated in opposition to Orthodox Christians by the Pink Military.

“He skilled what he noticed as a communist annihilation of Christian orthodoxy,” stated Gallagher.

Additionally in Russia on the time was George Deatherage, a younger engineer from Ohio, who’d gone to India to work for a metal firm. As a part of his job, he traveled to Russia and met with Russian exiles, the place he additionally discovered concerning the persecution of Christians.

Deatherage and Pelley returned to the US with a worry of communism and what turned an intense hatred of Jews, the latter fueled by a baseless conspiracy principle often called “Judeo-Bolshevism,” which blamed Jews for creating communism to threaten Christianity on the behest of a cabal of Jewish leaders bent on world domination.

Pelley, who additionally spent a number of years as a Hollywood screenwriter, would go on to discovered the Silver Shirts, a pro-Nazi fascist group. Deatherage resurrected the KKK-related Knights of the White Camellia and began the American Nationalist Confederation, a Christian group whose e-newsletter featured a Nazi hooked cross on a banner of purple, white and blue.

Each Pelley and Deatherage promoted what Gallagher known as “ecumenical anti-communism,” which sought to unite Protestants and Catholics in a grand, international battle in opposition to Judeo-Bolshevism.

Smith and the Rev. Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest and star of the early days of radio, introduced these concepts to a mass viewers. Coughlin did it by means of his radio present, beamed throughout the nation by main networks and native stations; Smith by churning out his journal, pamphlets, books and unsolicited mail appeals in a endless stream.

“Few writers with so little literary ability have made such an indelible mark on so many individuals,” his biographer would write. “His phrases had been like hoards of lemmings, plunging over a cliff into the ocean. If he wrote sufficient, Smith thought, he may refill the ocean.”

Even at a time when Catholics and Protestants typically mistrusted one another, Coughlin and Smith discovered frequent floor of their hatred of communism, their antisemitism and their shared perception in each the cross and the flag.

The 2 males ultimately helped launched a third-party problem to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936, promising to avoid wasting the nation from each the communists and Roosevelt’s big-money backers. At a conference organized by Coughlin’s Nationwide Union for Social Justice, Smith stood with a Bible in hand and gave a three-hour speech, promising to defend the Structure, the Bible, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

Like some trendy Christian nationalists, Smith was each true believer and grifter, keen to advertise his beliefs and construct up his private energy, stated Seth Cotlar, professor of historical past at Willamette College. Smith and different Christian nationalists additionally promoted “participatory anti-democracy,” stated Cotlar, quoting a phrase coined by Princeton scholar Joseph Fronczak.

They had been expert, he stated, at “getting folks actually fired up and mobilized within the title of preventing in opposition to democracy.”

Portray secular democracy because the enemy of Christianity, stated Cotlar, Christian nationalists like Smith argued that the one patriotic solution to save America from godless secularists was to vote for leaders who would ignore the principles of democracy. “It sounds actually counterintuitive,” stated Cotlar. “However it works in the event you understand that the American democratic custom is a practice that hates you. It provides folks an actual sense of goal and mission.”

Whitehead stated political energy has grow to be an idol for contemporary Christian nationalists as properly, one which can be utilized to justify anti-democratic motion. Religion can then gas that motion.

“If a gaggle authentic their objectives within the will of transcendent God, then what may stand of their method? The reply is nothing, not even democracy,” stated Whitehead, whose new e book, due out this fall, is titled “American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church.”

Whereas Smith failed to realize political energy and light from reminiscence, his concepts didn’t. Cotlar stated he sees echoes of Smith within the present cultural debates over “wokeness” and the “deep state.”

Martin, creator of “The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover,” stated he additionally noticed echoes of historic Christian nationalism within the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, one thing he believes the congressional investigation into the assault missed. “The Jan. 6 report … appears to wish to lay virtually all of the blame on the president and not likely take significantly the virus within the physique politics that’s Christian nationalism,” he stated.

He stated the committee investigating the assault dismissed the Proud Boys and different right-wing teams as fringe teams, not specializing in how a lot they symbolize concepts of Christian nationalism that stay in mainstream tradition.

When Smith died in 1976, the Arkansas Gazette summed up his life this manner, in accordance with his biographer: “To have the ability to the touch males’s hearts with glory or bigotry and to decide on the latter is a saddening factor.”

He had cut up a lot of his later years between California, the place he ran a nonprofit known as the Christian Nationalist Campaign, and Eureka Springs, Arkansas, the place he constructed a sequence of Christian vacationer points of interest, together with a Ardour Play, a Holy Land Tour and a 65-foot-tall Jesus known as “Christ of the Ozarks” on prime of a mountain. The statue, fabricated from concrete, was designed by the identical sculptor who constructed a large brontosaurus for Wall Drug, the famed South Dakota vacationer attraction.

These monuments now appear quaint, of one other age. However his legacy as a Christian nationalist appears extra vibrant than ever.

This story was reported with assist from the Stiefel Freethought Basis.

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