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When is the right time to compare US politics to the Nazi era?
Dear Redeeming Demcoracy Readers,
Greetings from Atlanta, where I was thrilled to share the Decatur Book Festival stage with Kristin Du Mez and moderator Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones, Assistant Professor of Theology and Africana Studies at Candler School of Theology at my alma mater Emory University. It was great to meet many RD readers as well as followers of our The Convocation Unscripted podcast. And great to have the opportunity to congratulate Kristin in person after her new book LIVE LAUGH LOVE hit the New York Times bestseller list!
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I was also pleased to see major coverage of my new book Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy by David Smith at The Guardian. The article was based on an hour-long, in-person conversation we had at the PRRI offices, where I reflected on a question that haunted me as I wrote BACKSLIDE, and which became the title of the article: “When is the right time to compare US politics to the Nazi era?”
I’m sharing selected excerpts below, please click here to read the full article.
Excerpts from the article:
The lawyer Mike Godwin famously came up with the “law” that, as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one (or 100%).
Robert P Jones thought long and hard about whether to go there in his latest book. But the more he studied US demographic numbers, considered the rise of Christian nationalism and heard Donald Trump use the language of racial purity, he found the conclusion inescapable. “This is our 1933,” he writes.
So it is that Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy begins with the rise of the Nazi party and the complicity of the German people, including German Christians and churches….
Sitting in his downtown Washington office, the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) contends that US democracy is experiencing a severe “backslide” that is directly aided and abetted by an “apostate” white Christianity, including Trump’s language on the campaign trail.
“This dehumanising language, talking about immigrants as vermin, and this racial purity language, like they’re ‘poisoning the blood of our country’. What does that mean? If they’re poisoning the blood, what’s the pure blood? We know where that story goes,” he said….
Despite the alarming trajectory detailed in Backslide, Jones resists total pessimism. The central message of his book is that “backsliding is not irreversible” and that national recovery remains possible through honest confrontation with history and sincere repentance.
Across the country, alternative Christian voices are beginning to organise against Christian nationalism. Figures such as James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian running for the US Senate in Texas, and Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton in Kansas are offering a pro-democracy theological vision.
“For a long time, mainline Protestants were taught propriety and politeness, leading to a reticence to speak out,” Jones notes. “If we don’t want the public and future face of Christianity to be only Christian nationalism, we have to present a public version of Christianity that is compatible with democracy – one that leans into care for the orphan, the widow and the immigrant.”
Ultimately, Jones argues, neither sacred texts nor historical precedents will dictate the future of US democracy. He hopes his book will make white Christians realise they face a decision similar to the one that confronted the establishment Christian church in Nazi Germany in 1933.
“It’s a wake-up call to see the bright lines that are being crossed, to be clear-eyed about how dangerous that is, and for those readers who are Christian – particularly white and Christian – to realise we have a particular responsibility to offer a different version of faith. Because it is our faith that’s been hijacked and used to legitimise this illiberal, anti-democratic, authoritarian movement that’s running rampant and taking over in the US.”
Read Full Article at The Guardian
The latest from The Convocation Unscripted .
[
New This Week: A Look Inside LIVE LAUGH LOVE by Kristin Du Mez
](https://www.redeemingdemocracy.net/p/new-this-week-a-look-inside-live)
Robert P. Jones
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Sep 17
Dear Redeeming Democracy readers,
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Read full story
](https://www.redeemingdemocracy.net/p/new-this-week-a-look-inside-live)
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