Approaching Christian Nationalism with Queer Theologies

Mark Douglas

In The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy, Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry offer seven value statements that they use to measure an individual’s adherence to Christian nationalism in order to define the term:

1. Founding documents like the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution are divinely inspired.
2. The success of the United States is part of God’s plan.
3. The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation.
4. The federal government should advocate Christian values.
5. The federal government should enforce a strict separation of church and state.
6. The federal government should allow the display of religious symbols in public spaces.
7. The federal government should allow prayer in public school.¹ 

These value statements may get at individual adherence to Christian nationalist views, but they don’t really define Christian nationalism.² Indeed, defining “Christian nationalism” is part of the problem. If Christian nationalism links religious identity to national identity, how—if at all—is it distinct from the kind of generic churchy patriotism that puts American flags in PC(USA) sanctuaries and patriotic tunes in Glory to God? If Christian nationalism centers on a particular (false) narrative about the United States’ origins as a “Christian nation,” then how does this particular origin narrative carry so much more political clout than other origin narratives? If Christian nationalists think that Christian values should be at the center of American public life, why do the values they espouse look so little like those described by the writers of the New Testament? If Christian nationalism is understood primarily as a political force, why does it feel more like a kind of diffused (if consecrated) reactivity? The problems with defining Christian nationalism so pile atop one another that some scholars have simply turned to other language; prominent Christian ethicist David Gushee, for instance, favors “authoritarian reactionary Christianity.”³   

In a moment, I want to suggest that the difficulty in defining Christian nationalism is part of what has made it hard for the wider ecumenical church to confront—but also that this difficulty, examined, may be a way to work towards its dismantling.  And that one theological approach that may prove interestingly promising in such dismantling will involve marshalling the wisdom of queer theology. Prior to that, though, I want to make three points that highlight this problem with definitions.  

First, when we talk about Christian nationalism—and, for that matter, White Christian nationalism—we are not talking about a single, monolithic thing, nor something that everyone feels equally deeply about, nor something that doesn’t change over time. Indeed, I think I can pick out at least three strands of Christian nationalism in the US today—a Roman Catholic strain visible in Catholic integralism and the so-called Trad Cath movement; a Reformed strain tracing from R. J. Rushdoony and visible in Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism; and a Pentecostal strain visible in the New Apostolic Reformation and Seven Mountains Movement. While these three strands may overlap in some of their goals, they are definitely not the same. Indeed, I suspect that short of their shared commitment to those overlapping goals, if you were to put representatives of the three in a room, throw in a knife, and lock the door, only one would walk out.

Second, while Christian nationalism seems to be finding a home in the wider Christian church, it isn’t wholly clear to me that Christian nationalism is either growing out of the leadership of the wider church nor broadly funded by that wider church. Public Religion Research Institute’s (PRRI) 2023 survey of Christian nationalism notes that “[w]hite evangelical Protestants are more supportive of Christian nationalism than any other group surveyed,” with nearly two-thirds of them qualifying as either Christian nationalist sympathizers or adherents, whereas a little over a third of white mainline Protestants and Catholics could be identified as such.⁴ To read through mainline denomination websites, the concern for—and, often, rejection of—Christian nationalism is sustained. To talk to pastors in mainline and some evangelical congregations, though, is to encounter concern that it is now more difficult to preach on political topics than it used to be because statements that come across as opposing Christian nationalist views are expressions of political partisanship rather than theological integrity or denominational fidelity.  And in a society in which more people are willing to choose—or leave—a church based on their political positions, such pastors feel trapped between competing obligations.⁵ 

And, third, while there are good historical, philosophical, sociological, and even theological reasons for us to add the adjective “White” to the phrase “Christian nationalism,”⁶ such an addition may be worth resisting. Among the reasons to hold off on adding that adjective is that Christian nationalism is, itself, multicultural. As the PRRI survey notes,

A majority of “other Protestants of color,” a group consisting primarily of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) and mixed-race Protestants, also qualify as either sympathizers (32%) or adherents (20%). Approximately four in ten Hispanic Protestants (23% sympathizers and 20% adherents), Black Protestants (24% sympathizers and 14% adherents), and Latter-day Saints (33% sympathizers and 5% adherents) also lean toward supporting Christian nationalism.⁷

With those points in mind, especially as they reveal the slipperiness that comes in defining and dealing with Christian nationalism, let me suggest a strategy that doesn’t so much try to pin Christian nationalism down as reveal why its slipperiness is what needs attention. Toward that end, let me suggest that the church and its scholars turn to emerging insights from queer theology, particularly as those insights relate to the uses of parody and camp. Parody and camp shine light on slippery surfaces and, in so doing, undermine arguments about their stability, durability, and utility.  

Because this strategy may feel strange—especially as I suspect there are very few Christian nationalists in the US who would look at queer theologians with any sympathy or understanding—I want to begin by suggesting three features of at least most expressions of queer theology that sit behind and shape its use of parody and camp. These are the centering of desire, the troubling of identity, and the subverting of conventional narratives.

Begin with the centering of desire. Much of what passes for engagement with Christian nationalism sounds like an argument in which one marshals the resources of history, reason, and theology and then aims them at an interlocutor in hopes of displaying the rational superiority of non-nationalist forms of faith and politics. Such an approach asks, “Why do you think that?” and transitions, fairly quickly, to “Here’s why you shouldn’t think that.” The slipperiness of Christian nationalism, though, makes reason-based projects like this difficult because the terrain is unstable; moreover, the offensive defensiveness of Christian nationalists drives their retrenchment during such arguments. The effect of such efforts regularly tends to play better to the choir than with one’s interlocutors—an effect which, while often unintentional, ends up displaying the kind of performativity that is part of the problem.

If one begins with desire, though, the starting questions sound more like, “What do you want and why do you want that?” Responses to those questions have the potential to surface forces that drive Christian nationalist sensibilities, which forces tend to be more stable than the reasons that Christian nationalists give for holding their positions. Such an approach may reveal overlapping drivers for behavior between Christian nationalists and their interlocutors. Indeed, this approach may even, hopefully, help to distinguish those who believe the narratives of Christian nationalism from those who are simply using those narratives for other political ends.

While queer scholars are not the only ones to renew attention to the interconnectedness of theology, politics, and desire, they have been among the scholars most deeply attentive to desire.  This is certainly in part because they have frequently had to give a defense of their desires and the legitimacy of their desires as a precondition for entering public or scholarly debate. It is also, though, because, they have recognized the power of desire in shaping moral and political projects. One thinks here of Audre Lorde’s classic “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”⁸ but also of a range of more recent publications, including several of the essays in Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies⁹ or Linn Tonstad’s Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics.¹⁰ Centering desire—particularly when those desires are viewed by many in society as misguided, distorted, or immoral (which descriptors have been directed at both queer people and Christian nationalist people)—has the potential to introduce depth and empathy into debates that have been more characterized by facile performance and defensive antipathy towards the other.

Centering desire alone, though, neither adequately shapes responses to Christian nationalism nor names some of the depth and breadth of queer theology. So to a focus on centering desire, I would add the way some contemporary queer theologies focus on troubling settled identity and the equally troubling attendant claim that pinning down our identities is a first and vital step towards resolving political issues.¹¹ And here I am thinking not only of the way that queer theology has complicated questions of identity by adding letters to the “alphabet soup” of identity (LGBTQIA+), but the way that such additions are meant to destabilize conventional identity-based politics.

Take, for instance, recent work by Mark Jordan. Not only does Jordan chafe at identity politics; he argues that the way some scholarly approaches to identity have been reduced to identity politics has happened only because such scholarship has been badly misconstrued. So, for instance, in exploring intersectionality as espoused by Kimberlé Crenshaw—whose work has been read to multiply identity rather than complicate it—Jordan argues that 

[u]nfortunately, intersectionality can be misunderstood as the sum of different identity markers, each identical to other markers of the same kind and all identical as identities.  But we falsify our punishing or privileging divisions when we treat them as coordinate numbers on a universal grid. The reduction of intersectionality to a sum is roughly the opposite of what earlier writers like Audre Lorde or Kimberlé Crenshaw meant.¹²

Whatever else identity does, Jordan reminds us, it cannot be done through reduction or addition because identity is neither sufficiently stable, sufficiently transparent, nor sufficiently singular to allow for such calculus. “Our lives need speech that is more adequate and evocative than the terminology of identity . . . [and my] complaint against identity-names is that they are not new enough. They are flat, boring, unimaginative, pseudoscientific, and overbearing.”¹³ For Jordan, the issue is not that we should avoid naming things; it is that meaningful naming has to be a protest against reduction and complacency. Names, as all metaphors, need to carry a whispered “and yet is not” within them—and in a time when naming is so weaponized, that whisper needs to be louder.

In light of this, Christian nationalism’s first sin may not be its inherent heresy; it may be its slothfulness. It starts with naming—whether of itself or the others it opposes—and assumes that such names are adequate to the purposes of drafting teams and mapping agendas. It relies on such shorthand to inflate its own virtues and to bowdlerize its opponents’ playbook. It presumes not only that the power of naming is a kind of power over but that the power of naming is instrumentalizable in the first place. If centering desire might help make sense of Christian nationalism’s drivers, troubling identity can help make nonsense of one of Christian nationalism’s more potent weapons.  

To centering desire and troubling identity I add a third feature of many queer theologies that is pertinent to this context: the subverting of conventional narratives; indeed, the subverting of conventions of narrativity. Posing questions about what James Hoke calls “chrononormativity”¹⁴ and its attendant claims about how to live in time and advance into the future funds queer visions of futurity that escape the confines of linearity even as they surface often nefarious political uses of time. So many narratives of temporality are weaponized against queer persons and queerness that it is worth taking a step back and asking whether we have construed time and narrative in ways that consistently favor some over others. These narratives of temporality include “having  children is how we signal our trust in God’s future” (so we should support traditional family structures), “we are now facing an apocalyptic threat” (so we have permission to violate the Golden Rule when dealing with people not like us), and “America was once great and can be made great again” (so we can build our politics on nostalgic falsehoods of the days of sexual binaries). 

Even beyond subverting conventions about time and narrativity, queer theology also subverts the characters and plot devices of narrative. Many modern narratives assume conventional answers to surprisingly complicated questions: Who counts as an agent—let alone a hero or a villain? What forces drive agents to behave the way they do? What are the results of any action going to be? How do those results reveal a moral order to the universe? These questions and their tacit conventional answers need to be subverted; they need to be challenged because those tacit answers exclude, penalize, and harm. Queer theology doesn’t disorient because it favors a kind of frivolous vertigo; it disorients because too many orientations—sexual or otherwise—get used to reinforce structures and systems that do real harm to real people.  

Elsewhere, I have argued that social media is reshaping Christian nationalism by favoring its abbreviation of its own faulty telling of American history in order to emphasize its political agendas.¹⁵ If this is the case, then queer subversions of conventional narratives about agents, motives, consequences, and temporality may actually surface the subliminal commitments of Christian nationalism—especially its commitment to strained versions of American history. Said differently, queer theologies invite us to name and question the norming power built into telling history rather than attempt to simply tell a better history. When Christian nationalists don’t actually care about the religious views of the founding fathers, getting into a debate with them about such views is energy wasted. And when Christian nationalists reveal that they care more about coating their political purposes with a veneer of sanitized history, it makes more sense to focus on those purposes than the veneer.

Yet these three features of queer theology—whether in isolation from each other or stacked on top of each other—don’t necessarily suggest what it might look like to use the wisdom of queer theology to dismantle Christian nationalism. What I want to suggest here is that these three features come together in queer emphases on parody and camp. After all, if Christian nationalism is really a kind of parody of Christianity, then turning to parody and camp in response constitutes a kind of intellectual aikido: it uses its opponents’ own strategies and strengths against it.  

What, then, are parody and camp as they have been promoted within queer theologies? They are ways of intentionally distorting conventional narratives and identities in order to bring to the surface not only the drivers (i.e., desires) but also the distortions, incoherences, and lacunae that were already at work in those narratives and identities. They point to the absurdities not only of assuming that we know the way the world works but that our assumptions can be justified by appealing to a natural order of things within that world. That is, queer uses of parody and camp invite us to ask, “What made us think that order of things was natural, that we had access to it, and that we weren’t projecting ourselves into those questions?” but without the ostentations of taking ourselves and the world around us seriously and somberly in order to address such questions. Indeed, parody and camp broadly hint—in a kind of “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” way—that being serious and somber are, themselves, parts of the conventional narratives and identities that need to be exposed and challenged. Don’t just dress; drag. Don’t just walk; sashay. Don’t just dance; vogue. Don’t just be an individual worth being loved; be a character who assumes that others should love them.

I think those of us who are cis and straight miss the purposes of queer uses of parody and camp when we treat them only as opportunities for queer persons to affirm their own loves, express their own identities, and tell their own stories. The queer uses of parody and camp also intend for us to question just how much we understand our own desires; just how stable we think our own identities are; just how much our own narratives are cause for harm to self and others.

Unsurprisingly, most queer theologies that attend to parody and camp have focused on matters of sexuality and gender; these are, after all, the matters that queer theologians have not only foregrounded but, mostly, had to address and defend. What I am suggesting here, as I move towards a conclusion, is that parody and camp need not be focused only on matters of sexuality and gender; they can also be focused on things like Christian nationalism.  

Part of the way they do so is by offering, paradoxically, a subtle and precise way to introduce joy and laughter into topics that are both weighty and common through modes that emphasize exaggeration and hyperbole. They display things not so much acutely as obliquely: still on a slant but not with a sharp point; still angularly but in wide angles rather than narrow ones. Such an approach, when done well, doesn’t so much laugh at others as evince laughter with others. That is, parody and camp self-indict without self-condemning; they challenge their audiences without mocking them; they induce discomfort but in the mode of an amusement park ride rather than a traffic accident.  

Nobody—including Christian nationalists—wants to be laughed at, but pretty much everybody enjoys a good laugh. And laughter, after all, has the capacity to circumvent the barriers to communication that can be driven by distrust of others and deep self-doubt. Think of the way that The Colbert Report parodied conservative opinion shows in a way that, say, Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update”—or even The Late Show with Stephen Colbert—does not. Both types of parody are funny, but the latter preaches to a choir whereas the former avoids character-breaking winks at the audience about how enlightened we all are compared to “them.”

Camp then adds a transgressive quality to parody. It introduces exaggeration and heightens artifice through an aesthetic that shapes non-weaponized mockery. Everyone, and everything, gets to be a little bit distorted within camp and, in the process, gets freed from wearying (and perhaps even overwhelming) obligations associated with maintaining socially acceptable desires, tightly framed identities, and politically cramped narratives. It invites not only parody’s laughter but shoulder-releasing, hair-unbinding, life-relaxing release. That it can also make us queasy—think about some of the grosser scenes from John Waters’s movies—may say more about our need to stay existentially clenched in a world we fear will undo us than it does about anything like a natural gag reflex. Camp is a Bronx cheer oriented towards a narcotized world more than an expletive directed at a particular group.¹⁶

Introducing camp into engagements with Christian nationalists doesn’t so much ask, “How can we get someone to change their minds while still protecting their dignity?” as tacitly ask, “Can we all be a little less dignified around here in the hope that we can all find a bit more belonging?” Camp is, perhaps ironically, what Christian nationalists wearing “Deplorables” T-shirts are performing—especially if they’re wearing “I’m an adorable deplorable” tees (albeit in unhelpfully tribal ways). And camp definitely helps mitigate the stench of self-righteousness and moral superiority that too many of us who decry Christian nationalism emit. After all, Christian nationalism can leave even Christian nationalists nervous about who or what may out them on their own impurities. In the right setting—which is to say a setting shaped by parody—camp invites in rather than calls out.

Will queer theology-inflected expressions of parody and camp succeed in dismantling Christian nationalism in the US?  Maybe: such expressions at least have the potential to go viral, aligning the power of social media towards ends that build up rather than break down. Randy Rainbow is, at least in his better musical numbers, both funny and disarming. Making responses to Christian nationalism attractive—in the literal sense of that word—is a start toward making Christian nationalism unappealing.  

Maybe parody and camp won’t fully dismantle hard-core US Christian nationalists, many of whom are less shaped by the adjective than the noun and so more oriented towards power politics than movement building. After all, not every response to Christian nationalism is going to work. Maybe, though, we should at least concede that as we try out new responses to Christian nationalism, we should want to favor the ones that keep us engaged and thinking—especially when staying engaged and thinking are in short supply. Even if parody and camp don’t convert hardcore Christian nationalists, they may inhibit others from thinking that Christian nationalism offers much of interest by way of coherence, control, and community.

The trick will be shaping parody and camp that don’t scorn or alienate. And that, probably, will take some practice. But all of life is practice; this is just practice directed towards addressing a particular problem which has been too slippery for some of us to get a good hold on.

Notes

1. Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). The fifth of these values is awkwardly stated; it argues that Christian nationalists would not favor a strict separation. The authors’ desire for consistent sentence structure (no sentences phrased in the negative) inhibits the rhetorical and substantial clarity of their argument.

2. To be fair: there are ways I can describe (or, better, distort) my own Reformed theological convictions to support at least three or four of those statements).

3. David P. Gushee, Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 2023).

4. Public Religion Research Institute, “A Christian Nation? Understanding the Threat of Christian Nationalism to American Democracy and Culture,” February 8, 2023, https://www.prri.org/research/a-christian-nation-understanding-the-threat-of-christian-nationalism-to-american-democracy-and-culture/, accessed on February 5, 2025.

5. Aaron Earls, “Churchgoers Increasingly Prefer a Congregation that Shares Their Politics,” Lifeway Research, November 1, 2022, https://research.lifeway.com/2022/11/01/churchgoers-increasingly-prefer-a-congregation-that-shares-their-politics/, accessed on February 5, 2025.

6. See, e.g., Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2021); Gorsky and Perry, The Flag and the Cross.  

7. PRRI, “A Christian Nation?” Related, Gorski and Perry note that a growing number of non-white, non-Christians identify themselves with Christian nationalism. It all but sets up a Saturday Night Live skit: “White Christian Nationalism is neither white nor Christian nor nationalist. Discuss.”

8. Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sexualities and Communication in Everyday Life: A Reader, ed. Karen E. Lovaas and Mercilee M. Jenkins (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007), 87–92.

9. Kent L. Brintnall, Joseph A. Marchal, and Stephen D. Moore, eds., Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018).

10. Linn Tonstad, Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2018). I note that thoughtful theologians who do not identify as queer but are nevertheless shaped by and engaged with queer theology regularly highlight the role desire plays in queer theology. See, e.g., Adrian Thatcher, God, Sex, and Gender: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).  

11. Think, for instance, about how many of us include our pronouns in our email signatures or Zoom names as a way of broadcasting identity-claims as we enter spaces with others.

12. Mark Jordan, Queer Callings: Untimely Notes on Names and Desires (New York: Fordham University Press, 2024), 8.

13. Jordan, Queer Callings, 16.

14. James N. Hoke, “Unbinding Imperial Time: Chrononormativity and Paul’s Letter to the Romans,” in Brintnall et al., Sexual Disorientations, 68–89.

15. See Mark Douglas, “Calvin, Complicity, and Communication: Reformed Reflections on the Rhetoric of Contemporary Christian Nationalism in the United States,” in Emder Beiträge zum reformierten Protestantismus, ed. Matthias Freudenberg and Marco Hofheinz (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2026).

16. The queer uses of camp have long been a subject of scholarly attention, and I can hardly do justice to that scholarship here. Start, perhaps, with Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp” and proceed from there.  I’d suggest Marcella Althaus-Reid’s work both reflects on and can, in moments, display camp. Though not from a theological perspective, see Fabio Cleto, Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). More recently, see Katrin Horn, Women, Camp, and Popular Culture: Serious Excess (New York: Palmgrave, 2017).