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| From the final few frames of the January 6th Committee video |
You already saw the ten-minute supercut of the January 6th, 2021, insurrection which the investigating committee broadcast during their prime-time hearings last week. Even we who couldn’t stomach it live, saw it anyway the next day, when the committee shared the video on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube—sites that are, with Amazon, basically the Internet now. The only way to have not seen it, is to consciously take steps to avoid seeing it.
Different viewers reacted to different parts of the video. I’ll focus today on one aspect: the final few frames. This snippet shows clusters of insurrectionists atop the Capitol’s parapets, waving two flags. One flag reads “Trump 2020,” the other a white flag with a red cross on a blue union: what’s become called “the Christian flag.” For many in recent days, this use of Christian imagery in a violent situation has become the public face of American Christian nationalism.
Respectfully, I want to direct viewers’ faces away from the symbols these insurrectionists hold, however, onto the insurrectionists themselves. The faces below these flags, brandished in a manner probably deliberately modeled on Iwo Jima, are mostly male, and entirely White. These insurrectionists are vocally Christian in their beliefs and imagery, and tied entirely to Donald Trump’s person; I won’t diminish that. But I contend Whiteness matters most here.
Gorski and Perry write that Christian nationalist beliefs aren’t uniquely White in America. Belief that America has historically Christian responsibilities, that American nationhood is founded on Christianity and has a prophetic mission, is held by Black and Hispanic Protestants at roughly the same rate as among White Protestants. But Black and Hispanic Christian nationalists haven’t stormed public buildings or attempted to overturn elections. Yet.
What’s more, many Christian nationalists aren’t even united by religion. Though belief in what researchers call “Evangelical Christianity” unifies these nationalists, that’s a fig leaf. Not only do many Christian nationalists not hold theological positions consistent with Evangelicalism, as many as fifteen percent aren’t even Christian. And not in the “Oh, you’re not really Christian” sense; fifteen percent of “Evangelical Christians” hold some other religion, or no religion at all.
— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) June 10, 2022
The defining trait that pushes Christian nationalists into violence to defend their beliefs, insofar as they have beliefs, is Whiteness. White Christian nationalists are more likely to believe their culture is under attack, more willing to endorse violence to defend it, and even though it’s difficult to corroborate race-based breakdowns of who actually performs violence, the footage from January 6th reveals an overwhelming sea of Whiteness.
This arguably shouldn’t surprise anybody who reads American history. Since colonial times, when racial distinctions were first codified following Bacon’s Rebellion, White Americans have had an implicit social compact allowing them to enact violence on Black and Brown bodies with impunity, a compact that doesn’t go both ways. History of America’s lynching era records that African Americans could be ritually murdered for muttering under their breath at White people.
Religion always provides justification for this violence. As James Cone writes, racialized violence serves the same role in America that crucifixion served in Rome, establishing for subject peoples that we own your lives. Such violence could never be justified without state-based religion, because taken strictly on its face, such violence is obviously unconscionable. Only a God-given social order could ever require such naked violence against resistant subjects.
Arguably, that’s why Christians felt compelled to design a flag in the Twentieth Century. We recognize, then and now, that Christianity’s role as America’s unofficial state religion, compromises our faith. Note that the flag is mostly white, the color of surrender in military operations. The Christian flag, waved on January 6th, was designed to refuse participation in state roles. The Kingdom of God is separate from human law.
But, like all symbols, people in power found ways to suborn that flag to support the already well-supported. And, citing Gorski and Perry again, America’s White power structure has performed rhetorical sleight-of-hand to conflate state power with racialized power. To challenge America’s powerful people in high places, is always to challenge American Whiteness. A racialized social order backed by an illusory state religion.
Don’t misunderstand me; as a Christian, I believe Christianity has done great good. But whenever religion gets entangled in state power, the outcome is terrible for people perceived as outsiders. Extermination of Indigenous nations and racialized slavery under the guise of “missionary” zeal is just one example. America hoards power along racial lines, and justifies itself using religion. And it’s unlikely to stop.
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