Christism

Why “Christian Nationalism” Is the Wrong Term, What the Right Term Is, and Why It Matters

Christopher E. Etter | M.A. Religious Studies, Sacred Heart University

Foundation paper for the terminology deployed throughout The American Antichrist and the Apotheosis of Self-Interest: A Warning from an Elder Democracy

 

I. The Problem with the Existing Term

Every act of naming is also an act of concession. When we name a phenomenon, we accept the premise embedded in the name. The term “Christian Nationalism” has become the standard designation for the political movement this book analyzes — used by scholars, journalists, policymakers, and critics across the ideological spectrum. It appears in the titles of peer-reviewed books, in congressional testimony, in editorial pages, in seminary syllabi. It is, by any measure, the established term.

It is also the wrong term. Not because the diagnosis it implies is wrong — the movement is genuinely nationalist, genuinely dangerous, and genuinely in need of a precise name. It is the wrong term because it concedes the movement’s most important claim before the analysis begins. The claim is this: that what the movement does is Christian. That the faith it professes is authentically Christian. That the tradition it invokes genuinely belongs to it. “Christian Nationalism” accepts this claim at the level of nomenclature and then attempts to qualify it — to argue that the Christianity in question has been distorted, weaponized, or corrupted by nationalism. But the qualifier does not undo the concession. By the time you reach the word “nationalism,” you have already written “Christian.”

This is not a minor semantic quibble. The naming problem is a political and theological problem of the first order. Consider what is at stake. The movement this book diagnoses has made Christian identity its primary political legitimation. It claims to act with Christ’s authority. It claims to defend Christ’s values. It claims to represent the Christian tradition in American public life. If those claims are accurate — if what the movement does is genuinely Christian, however distorted or weaponized — then the book’s central argument is weakened before it is stated. The argument is that the movement instantiates not a distortion of Christianity but its precise structural inversion. It is not a corrupted form of the faith. It is the faith’s antithesis, operating under the faith’s name. That argument requires a term that reflects it. “Christian Nationalism” does not.

The problem is not unique to this moment. It has been faced before, in a different context, with a different religion, and solved with a terminological precision that has since become standard. That solution is the model for what this paper proposes.

II. The Precedent: Islamist and the ‑ist Solution

In the years following the attacks of September 11, 2001, journalists, scholars, and policymakers confronted a terminological problem structurally identical to the one this paper addresses. The political ideology they were analyzing — the ideology that had produced al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and a network of organizations committed to the violent imposition of a specific political program in the name of Islam — could not be called “Islamic” without implicating the entire Islamic tradition and the more than one billion Muslims worldwide who rejected both the ideology and its violence. But it could not be left unnamed. Something had to distinguish the political ideology from the religion.

The solution was the ‑ist suffix. Islamist, rather than Islamic. The distinction is precise and has held: Islamic describes the religion, its adherents, its tradition, its genuine theological and cultural heritage. Islamist describes a specific political ideology that deploys Islamic language, imagery, and institutional authority as instruments of a political program — a program that most Muslim scholars, clerics, and communities worldwide explicitly reject as a distortion or betrayal of the faith. Islamism is the ideology. An Islamist is its adherent. The Islamic tradition is not Islamism.

The ‑ist suffix does specific semantic work. It marks ideology rather than identity, political program rather than religious conviction, the instrumental use of religious language rather than the sincere practice of religious faith. It creates the necessary distance between the costume and the thing wearing it. A person can be deeply Islamic — devout, observant, committed to the tradition in its fullness — and vehemently anti-Islamist. In fact, many of Islamism’s most effective critics have been exactly this: Muslims who understood that Islamism was doing to their tradition what this book argues Christism is doing to Christianity.

The analogy is not perfect. No analogy is. Islam and Christianity are distinct traditions with distinct histories, theologies, and institutional structures. The specific political programs they have been made to serve are different in important respects. But the structural relationship between the religion and the political ideology deploying its name is identical in the relevant respects: a sincere religious tradition, a political movement that has captured its language and institutional apparatus, and the need for a term that names the political movement without implicating the tradition.

The ‑ist solution works because it is already understood. English speakers who know the Islamic/Islamist distinction understand immediately, by analogy, what the Christian/Christist distinction means. The term does not require a lengthy explanation because it imports a distinction that has already been made, argued for, and accepted across decades of journalism, scholarship, and policy. It builds on existing semantic infrastructure rather than requiring the audience to learn a new terminological framework from scratch.

III. Defining Christism

Christism is the political ideology that deploys Christian language, imagery, and institutional authority as instruments of political power in the service of a program that is, on examination, the systematic inversion of what Christ actually taught. It is not Christianity. It is not a form of Christianity. It is not a distorted or weaponized version of Christianity. It is the antithesis of Christianity, wearing Christianity’s costume.

The definition has four components, each of which requires unpacking.

The first component: deployment of Christian language, imagery, and institutional authority. Christism is not atheism. It does not reject Christ’s name. On the contrary, it deploys that name with extraordinary energy and consistency. It fills its rallies with crosses, its speeches with scripture, its policy proposals with appeals to biblical mandate. The Christian institutional infrastructure — churches, denominations, seminaries, broadcasting networks, publishing houses, parachurch organizations — has been substantially captured by the Christist movement and deployed in its service. The costume is not worn casually. It is worn deliberately, comprehensively, and with considerable skill. This is what makes Christism more dangerous than simple anti-Christian secularism: it has the church’s institutional resources, the church’s vocabulary, and the church’s cultural authority. It does not attack Christianity from the outside. It occupies it from the inside.

The second component: as instruments of political power. The deployment of Christian language in Christism is not devotional. It is instrumental. Christ’s name is invoked not to produce the spiritual transformation that the Gospel describes but to legitimate political authority, mobilize electoral coalitions, delegitimize opponents, and claim divine sanction for specific policy programs. This is what the ‑ist suffix marks: the instrumentalization of the religious tradition, the conversion of faith into a tool of power. A Christian uses Christ’s name in devotion, in prayer, in moral discernment. A Christist uses Christ’s name to claim political authority and to delegitimize those who contest it.

The third component: in the service of a program. Christism is not an incoherent collection of religious gestures attached to various political positions. It is a coherent program with specific institutional architecture, documented policy goals, and consistent ideological commitments. The companion volume The American Antichrist and the Apotheosis of Self-Interest documents this program in full: the Heritage Foundation’s nine-hundred-page Mandate for Leadership, the systematic dismantlement of federal enforcement mechanisms, the suppression of voting rights, the elimination of diversity programs, the concentration of executive power, the deployment of economic policy in service of the powerful against the vulnerable. This is not random. It is a program. Christism is the ideology that provides that program with its theological sanction.

The fourth component: that is the systematic inversion of what Christ actually taught. This is the claim that distinguishes this paper’s analysis from most critiques of Christian nationalism. The argument is not that Christism has gotten some things wrong about Christianity, or that it has overemphasized some aspects of the tradition at the expense of others, or that its political conclusions are debatable within a range of legitimate Christian positions. The argument is that Christism’s program, examined systematically against the actual teaching of Jesus Christ as documented in the four Gospels and Acts, is the precise structural opposite of that teaching on every substantive point examined. The poor are abandoned rather than served. The stranger is expelled rather than welcomed. Power is concentrated rather than subordinated to service. Mercy is replaced by punishment. Truth is replaced by systematic deception. The least of these — whom Christ identifies with himself in Matthew 25 — are made the specific targets of the program’s most harmful effects. This is not a different emphasis. It is a different religion, operating under the same name.

IV. The Theological Ground

The theological case for the term Christism rests on three independent analytical frameworks that converge on the same diagnosis. Their convergence is the paper’s most important evidence: when Augustinian theology, contemporary personality psychology, and cognitive neuroscience all arrive at the same description of the same phenomenon, the probability that the description is accurate is very high.

The first framework is Augustinian privation theology. Augustine identified the primary spiritual pathology as superbia — the egoistic self-inflation that refuses creaturely limitation, that places the self at the center of all value and names that centering as virtue. In De Civitate Dei, Augustine describes the City of Man as organized around the love of self to the contempt of God, and the City of God as organized around the love of God to the contempt of self. The antithesis is structural: the two cities are not variations within a single tradition but fundamental inversions of each other’s organizing principle. Christism is Augustine’s City of Man wearing the City of God’s vocabulary. The organizing principle — the love of self, the accumulation of power, the contempt for those who threaten the self’s dominance — is the City of Man’s. The vocabulary — Christian, biblical, faithful, chosen — is the City of God’s. The inversion is not accidental. It is structural.

The First Epistle of John provides the most precise theological definition of this pattern. John does not describe the antichrist as a single eschatological figure. He describes a spirit — a recurring pattern of spiritual failure within the community of faith: “Even now many antichrists have come” (1 John 2:18). The Greek anti means not merely against but in place of. The antichrist spirit does not oppose Christ from the outside. It occupies Christ’s name from the inside, deploying his language and authority in the service of everything he opposed. John’s definition is precise: “Who is the liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, even he that denieth the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:22). The denial is not verbal. It is behavioral. The one who claims Christ’s name while practicing Christ’s opposite is the one John has in mind. Christism is the institutionalization of this pattern as a political program.

The second framework is the Dark Triad of personality psychology. Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy — the three traits that compose the Dark Triad — describe the clinical profile of leaders who capture institutions and turn them against the values those institutions exist to protect. The narcissist cannot acknowledge limits on the self. The Machiavellian treats all relationships as instrumental. The psychopath feels no empathy for those the self’s actions harm. Together these traits produce the specific pattern documented throughout the companion volume: the leader who claims divine sanction for the self’s unlimited authority, who treats the institutional apparatus as a tool for the self’s aggrandizement, and who is genuinely indifferent to the suffering produced by the self’s program. The Dark Triad is not a moral judgment. It is a clinical description. And the clinical description maps onto the Augustinian theological description with remarkable precision: the self organized around its own inflation, using every available instrument — including the church — in service of that inflation.

The third framework is Iain McGilchrist’s divided-brain research. McGilchrist’s central finding, documented across The Master and His Emissary (2009) and The Matter with Things (2021), is that the left hemisphere of the human brain attends to the world in a mode characterized by narrow-beam attention, instrumental rationality, categorical abstraction, and self-interested manipulation — while the right hemisphere attends to the world in a mode characterized by broad contextual awareness, empathic perception, relational meaning, and the direct apprehension of value. A civilization or an ideology that has suppressed the right hemisphere’s contributions to moral cognition — that elevates the abstract principle over the concrete person, the categorical rule over the contextual mercy, the instrumental use of the other over the relational recognition of the other’s full humanity — is a civilization or ideology operating in the left hemisphere’s mode alone. This is precisely the hemispheric profile of Christism: abstract principle elevated over concrete suffering, categorical exclusion deployed against the specific persons Christ identified himself with, the instrumental use of religious language in service of political power rather than the relational recognition of the neighbor’s claim. Christism is left-hemispheric religion: the Christian vocabulary without the right hemisphere’s capacity to perceive the persons that vocabulary is supposed to serve.

Three frameworks, three disciplines, three independent bodies of evidence. One diagnosis: the systematic inversion of the faith’s content under the cover of the faith’s name. This is what Christism is. This is why the term is necessary.

V. Christist Nationalism as the Correct Term

Christist Nationalism is the full term this paper proposes for the political movement that the existing literature calls Christian Nationalism. Its components are precise.

Christist is the adjectival form of Christism: of or relating to the political ideology that deploys Christian language and institutional authority in the service of a program that is the systematic inversion of what Christ actually taught. A Christist is an adherent of this ideology. Christist is to Christian as Islamist is to Islamic: the ‑ist suffix marks the political ideology rather than the religious tradition, the instrumental deployment rather than the sincere practice, the costume rather than the thing the costume is worn over.

Nationalism names the political program accurately: the assertion of a specific national, ethnic, and cultural identity as the organizing principle of political life, the elevation of the in-group’s interests over the equal dignity of all persons, and the deployment of state power in service of that in-group’s dominance. Christist Nationalism is nationalism that uses the Christist ideology as its primary legitimating framework — that claims divine sanction for the nationalist program, that deploys Christ’s name in service of the nationalist’s ends, that converts the church’s institutional resources into instruments of nationalist political power.

The term has several advantages over the existing alternatives. Over “Christian Nationalism,” it refuses the concession of authenticity. Over “Christofascism” (Dorothee Sölle’s 1970s coinage), it is more precise about the specific mechanism — the deployment of Christian language — rather than reaching for a political category (fascism) that, while related, is distinct from the religious diagnosis. Over “Dominionism,” it names the broader phenomenon rather than one specific theological wing. Over “White Christian Nationalism” (Gorski and Perry’s formulation), it addresses the theological fraud directly rather than qualifying the noun with an additional adjective. Over “Christianist Nationalism” (Andrew Sullivan’s 2006 coinage, which made the same move but used a more awkward adjectival form), it is more compressed and more pronounceable.

The term also pairs naturally with existing terminology in the literature. Christism sits alongside Islamism, Hindutva (Hindu nationalism), and similar terms that name political ideologies deploying religious language — a recognized category in comparative religion, political science, and sociology of religion. Christist Nationalism sits alongside Islamist Nationalism, Hindutva Nationalism, and similar formulations. The term is not an isolated coinage; it is an extension of an established terminological pattern into a domain where that pattern has been conspicuously absent.

VI. What the Term Protects

The most important function of the term Christist Nationalism is not what it names but what it protects by naming it correctly.

It protects the integrity of the Christian tradition. When “Christian Nationalism” is the standard term, Christianity is implicated in Christism’s program whether the tradition wants to be or not. Every headline that reads “Christian Nationalists do X” attributes X to Christianity. Every scholarly analysis of “Christian Nationalism” places the phenomenon within Christianity’s family of ideological descendants. The tradition has no recourse because the name has already decided the question. Christist Nationalism names the phenomenon as a political ideology that uses Christianity’s language — not as a form of Christianity itself. The tradition can now say, with terminological precision: this is not us. We are Christian. That is Christist.

It protects the standing of Christians who oppose the movement. There are tens of millions of American Christians — progressive evangelicals, mainline Protestants, Catholics, Black church members, Orthodox Christians — who find Christist Nationalism theologically abhorrent, politically dangerous, and spiritually fraudulent. When the movement is called “Christian Nationalism,” these Christians are placed in the uncomfortable position of opposing something that shares their own primary identity marker. They must constantly explain that their Christianity is different from the movement’s Christianity, that they are Christian but not that kind of Christian. Christist Nationalism eliminates this burden. They are Christian. The movement is Christist. The distinction is in the name.

It protects the clarity of the theological diagnosis. The book’s central argument — that Christism is not a distorted form of Christianity but its structural inversion — requires a term that reflects the diagnosis rather than contradicting it. “Christian Nationalism” contradicts the diagnosis at the level of nomenclature. “Christist Nationalism” reflects it. A term that names the phenomenon accurately makes the argument easier to make, easier to follow, and easier to retain.

It protects the political usefulness of the critique. The most common defense of the Christist movement against theological criticism is that the criticism is anti-Christian — that it targets Christianity itself rather than the movement’s specific program. This defense is extraordinarily effective when the term being used is “Christian Nationalism,” because the term seems to confirm that Christianity is what is being attacked. Christist Nationalism eliminates this defense. The term explicitly distinguishes the political ideology (Christism) from the religious tradition (Christianity). A critic of Christist Nationalism is not a critic of Christianity. The critique cannot be deflected by the accusation of anti-Christian bias because the term itself names the distinction between the ideology and the faith.

Finally — and this may be the most important protection of all — it protects the integrity of language itself. The Christist movement has been extraordinarily successful at capturing the vocabulary of the tradition it occupies. Liberty, faith, Christian, biblical, values, family — all of these words have been deployed so consistently in service of Christism’s program that they have been partially stripped of their genuine content. The word Christian is the most important word the movement has captured. Using Christist rather than Christian in the context of this political movement is a small act of resistance against that capture — a refusal to let the costume continue to be mistaken for the thing it covers. Frederick Douglass named the distinction in 1845: the Christianity of Christ, and the Christianity of this land. This paper proposes to give the second thing its own name, so that the first thing can have its name back.

* * *

The Christianity of Christ is not Christism. Christism is not Christian Nationalism. It is Christist Nationalism: the political ideology that deploys the name and institutional authority of the Christian tradition in service of a program that is, on systematic examination, the inversion of everything Christ taught. Three independent analytical frameworks — Augustinian theology, personality psychology, and cognitive neuroscience — converge on this diagnosis. The First Epistle of John named the pattern two thousand years ago. This paper proposes to give it a name adequate to the twenty-first century’s specific iteration of it.

The term is Christism. The movement is Christist Nationalism. What it is not — what it has never been and cannot be, however many crosses it displays and however many scriptures it invokes — is Christian.

C. E. E.

 

SOURCES AND NOTES

The Islamist/Islamic distinction: Standard across contemporary journalism, scholarship, and policy. Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” The Atlantic, September 1990, is commonly cited as an early influential deployment of the Islamist/Islamic distinction in American journalism. The distinction is now standard in AP Style and the Chicago Manual of Style’s guidance on religious terminology.

Andrew Sullivan’s “Christianist” coinage: Andrew Sullivan, “My Problem with Christianism,” Time, May 7, 2006. Sullivan made the explicit Islamist parallel and proposed Christianist as the adjectival form. The term was used briefly in political commentary but did not achieve wide adoption. This paper proposes Christist rather than Christianist as a more compressed and more pronounceable form of the same terminological move.

Christofascism: Dorothee Sölle, Choosing Life (Fortress Press, 1981). Sölle coined the term in the context of the German Christian movement and its relationship to National Socialism. The term has been used sporadically in subsequent scholarship but has not achieved wide adoption, partly due to its rhetorical charge and partly due to its conflation of the religious and fascist diagnoses.

Dominionism: Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (Guilford Press, 1995). The most careful scholarly treatment. Diamond distinguishes between hard and soft dominionism and traces the theological lineage through R.J. Rushdoony’s Christian Reconstructionism. The term names a specific theological program within Christism rather than the broader phenomenon.

White Christian Nationalism: Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2020). Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2022). Both works are important scholarly contributions. This paper’s terminological proposal does not contest their analyses but argues that the term they use concedes the movement’s most important claim.

Augustine: City of God (De Civitate Dei), Books XIV and XIX, on the two cities and the two loves. Standard English translation: Henry Bettenson, trans., City of God (Penguin Classics, 1984). The superbia diagnosis: Book XIV, chapters 13–15.

First Epistle of John: 1 John 2:18, 2:22, 4:3; 2 John 1:7. American Standard Version (1901), public domain. The Johannine plural and the definition of the antichrist spirit as pattern rather than eschatological individual: Bernard McGinn, Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil (HarperSanFrancisco, 1994).

Dark Triad: Paulhus, Delroy L., and Kevin M. Williams. “The Dark Triad of Personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy.” Journal of Research in Personality 36:6 (2002): 556–563. Kernberg, Otto F. Malignant Narcissism and its clinical profile in institutional leadership: Kernberg, Severe Personality Disorders: Psychotherapeutic Strategies (Yale University Press, 1984).

McGilchrist framework: Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2009; revised and expanded edition 2019). Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (Perspectiva Press, 2021). The application of the divided-brain framework to the diagnosis of Christism is the author’s own synthesis, developed in full in Appendix A of The American Antichrist and the Apotheosis of Self-Interest.

Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845). Appendix on the distinction between the Christianity of Christ and the Christianity of this land. Public domain.