Christians who attend church here in the United States have all heard this said, many times, from the pulpit: “We are Christians first. Americans second.”
It is, and has been, such a commonplace statement that e. e. cummings satirized it about 100 years ago as “next to of course god america.” It’s a platitude or a cliché, repeated over and over in our churches without paying much attention to the recitation.
It’s an interesting statement in that it is both a rejection of one claim made by [white] “Christian nationalism,” and the confirmation of another of its claims. The bland sentiment expressed — “Christians first, Americans second” — is a warning against any nationalistic ideology that weakens or inverts that priority.
But at the same time, the fact that this bland sentiment is regarded as such — as a bland, unremarkable statement of something obvious and hum-drum — is proof that the Christian nationalists are not entirely wrong when they talk about America being “a Christian nation.” Christianity does not, and ought not, to enjoy legal establishment or privilege over other religions, but it clearly enjoys a measure of cultural hegemony and dominance.
Stand up in public and say “We ought to be Christians first, Americans second” and you’ll be greeted with yawns for saying something so boring and tediously obvious. But if you acknowledge the very same blandly obvious thing about any other religion, you’ll be met with an angry mob.
It would not be safe to stand up in public and say “We ought to be Muslims first, Americans second.” Or Jews, or Hindus, or Buddhists, or Latter Day Saints.*
It would not be safe to say that, even though it obviously is true, because this is what religion means. Religions make transcendent claims — claims that transcend time and space and that transcend life and death. Something as puny and temporal as political jurisdiction just isn’t anywhere near that level of significance. National borders are nothing when compared to the scale of the claims made and taught and believed in religion.
In the summer of 1990, I bought a map of the world. It includes Namibia, which became an independent nation in February of that year. The map also includes both East Germany and West Germany. This map of the world’s national, political boundaries was only accurate for about six months — until the reunification of Germany in October, 1990. Nothing so fleeting as national borders and boundaries can begin to compare to the transcendent, cosmic claims asserted by religion.
I am not talking here about whether or not those religions and religious claims are true. That’s irrelevant. They cannot all be true and it’s possible that they all may be false. But for religious believers — for all religious believers — they must and do outweigh every form of nationalism.
This is why religion is fundamentally opposed to every form of anti-immigrant nationalism. Anti-immigrant ideologies assert that the most important thing about any person is what side of a national boundary they come from. Religions all assert that something else is the most important thing, and that it is blasphemous and idolatrous and sacrilegious to falsely elevate nationality or immigration status ahead of that most important thing.
Understand that this precedes, and is separate from, whatever moral assertions or obligations or teachings any religion has about immigrants, aliens, strangers, visitors, foreigners, etc. Those moral teachings of religion are also, almost universally, opposed to anti-immigrant nationalism. Religions tend to teach that hospitality is a virtue and that inhospitality is a sin, and we’ll get into the religious morality of immigration later, but that’s not the point here.
The point here is that religion, as such, transcends national boundaries and religion, as such, stands opposed to anti-immigrant policies and ideologies. By definition and by necessity.
This simple fact horrifies some people — especially those people who regard themselves as religious while also being fervently nationalist and anti-immigrant. But it’s just blandly, obviously true. As bland and obvious and boring as the white Christian preacher droning again, for the umpteenth time, that “We are Christians first, and Americans second.”
* It wasn’t even safe for the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to say this about Christianity as a Black Christian. This suggests that what’s actually hegemonic here — privileged as normative — is not Christianity, but whiteness. What the bland platitude really is saying is “We are white first, Christian second, and American third.”
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