Baptizing America Quotes

“the man long credited with writing the Pledge in 1892 left it out.3 And ‘God’ would stay out of it for another 62 years—until mainline Protestants pledged to change our nation’s oath.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“Christian Nationalistic prayers didn’t just come into the Capitol during the insurrection; mainline clergy first spent two centuries regularly baptizing America’s leaders as instruments of God.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“Christian Nationalism in the Capitol didn’t end on January 6. And mainline Protestants created this daily display of the ideology.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“Civil religion depends on downplaying differences in ways that empty religious affirmations of their meaning.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“What happens when “ordinary Americans” no longer share “common beliefs” or understand the “commitments of the Western religious and philosophical tradition”?”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“The second divergence is fear. By making people feel like they are constantly under threat from the racial, immigrant, or non-Christian “other,” Christian Nationalism provokes people to act in ways that are decidedly unlike Jesus.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“As Jemar Tisby, author of The Color of Compromise, added in the same report on Christian Nationalism and January 6, “The White Christian Nationalist version of patriotism is racist, xenophobic, patriarchal, and exclusionary.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“Ambassadors believe the United States has a special relationship with God, and thus, the federal government should formally declare the United States a Christian nation and advocate for Christian values,” Whitehead and Perry explained. “Ambassadors support returning formal prayers to public schools and allowing the display”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“Christian Nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy. Christian Nationalism demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

“When the government sponsors the prayer vigil as a way to commemorate a Christian Nationalist attack on the U.S. Capitol, it is especially insulting to our foundational principle of religious freedom. Instead, the government should use the occasion to remind people that it is the secular nature of our government that fortifies our democracy and frees us to come together as equals.”
― Brian Kaylor, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism