David C. August 18, Have a comment on this story? Write to the editors. Include your full name, city and state.
Selected comments will be edited for publication in print or online. Reading sociologist Andrew L. Whitehead and I met during our freshman year of high school in the youth group of a large rural evangelical church in northern Indiana.
This is the church where we learned to love and follow Jesus. Where we learned to read the Bible. Where we found Christian community and made lifelong friendships, including with each other. And it is where we were unwittingly formed into ambassadors of white Christian nationalism.
The fusion of our faith with conservative Christian politics went virtually unquestioned. To be a Christian seemed to naturally entail advocating for conservative Christian values to guide American society.
We would play together in the youth group praise band on Wednesday nights and show up for See You at the Pole at our public schools on a Wednesday morning in September to pray for our nation to promote our values. But as conservative evangelical Christianity rose to political ascendancy during the George W. Bush administration β and as we gained some distance from our childhood church while off in college and graduate school β we began to see the fruits of this fusion of conservative Christianity with American politics.
