The Religion of American Greatness Quotes

“Progressivism is a religion, but one without grace. It is a return to Puritan roots in the worst sense of the word, an endless crusade of moral reform with no forgiveness, no atonement, and no savior.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“To beat nationalism, we need to tell a better story…The national story can and must include both triumphs and failures because that is the best way to include everyone—victor and victim alike—and to inspire people with a sense of responsibility.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“Nationalism is a con game, a lie sold to empower one set of elites over against a different set of elites by manipulating the masses while rarely addressing any legitimate grievance.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“The Bible is universal truth, but our interpretations of it are always historically and culturally conditioned.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“White Christians’ distinctive worldview is a not a simple function of their Christianity (or else Black Christians would agree with them), nor of their whiteness (or else White non-Christians would agree with them), but of the interaction between them: this is a distinctive ethnoreligious historical community of White Christianity, or Anglo-Protestantism, that interprets the world in a unique way, one that is uniquely blind to the realities of racial inequality and a racialized society.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“Nationalism is a totalistic political religion that is inconsistent with orthodox Christianity, a false religion that places the nation in the place of the church and the leader in place of God.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“The danger of nationalism is not that it encourages us to cultivate loyalty to and affection for our country—which is inescapable—but that it endows the state with almost limitless jurisdiction to reshape culture, imagines the nation as a quasi-religious body, and exacerbates sectarian and ethnic cleavages at home. Christians who uncritically buy into nationalism are giving support to an incoherent secular idea with a troubled historical record and making themselves credulous supporters of a dangerous and thoughtless theology.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“The groups we are part of—our peoples, cultures, or heritage—are fluid and malleable; we create and refashion them with our participation; cultures overlap; the boundaries between them are fuzzy and indistinct; and we can, over the course of our lifetimes, pick and choose which traditions and cultures to recognize and cultivate as central to our lives and our families.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“Nationalism is incoherent in theory, illiberal in practice, and, I fear, often idolatrous in our hearts.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“When modern nationalists want to treat national culture with the same reverence and separateness that Israel was supposed to have for its covenant relationship with God, they are treating their national culture as a form of religious worship, the preservation of which is a religious duty, with the nation playing the role of God.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“People need to be taught how to live as part of a body, how to understand and live out our roles as a member of a church, citizen of a nation, and resident of a community. In our self-centered, narcissistic, individuaistic, expressionist age, we are incompetent in the arts of living together. We may be naturally social and political animals, but we still have to acquire the cultivated virtues of citizens. Churches must help form us into better political animals.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“So long as we live in a democracy, it is good to love our neighbors politically by pursuing justice together in the public square. That means it is right for Christians to puruse and use political power and to influence public policy--so long as we are doing it for justice and peace for all people. The difference between this stance and Christian nationalism can be sublte, sometimes a matter of our inner motivation and the orientation of our hearts. We might pursue the same policies--school reform, say, or religious liberty--for republican motives or for nationalist motives.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“The common good--ordered liberty and human flourishing, not the pursuit of our own tribe's power and privilege--must be the animating vision of Christian participation in American democracy.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“The Christian Right is identity politics for tribal evangelicals, a response to the decline of Anglo-Protestant power, more than a movement or ordered liberty and equal justice for all.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“Because nationalism is simply another form of identity politics, it perpetuates the cycle of political warfare between nationalist majorities and identity group minorities, each side approaching politics as nothing more than an extended exercise in special pleading, trying to seize state power and milk it for perks for their tribe until the next election, driven by the inexorable logic that if they do not, the other side will.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“Culture war is only possible when Americans look to their government to establish a cultural template for the nation but disagree about what that template should look like. Another way of putting it: culture war is the natural consequence of nationalism because people will inevitably fight over the definition of the “nation,” especially who counts as a member of the nation.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“At no point has America’s culture been defined by its concern to “preserve” anything, but rather to constantly reinvent everything.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“Justice requires neutrality, at some level.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“How hard is it to say both drag queens and fundamentalist Christians can both use the library and host events there? This isn’t especially hard, no matter how deep original sin goes, no matter the noetic effects of the fall. And if it is possible, it is also desirable: drag queens are people too, and no matter our views on their sexuality, they are tax-paying citizens and deserve equal treatment under low and thus equal access to public resources. Denying them access to public facilities on the basis of their beliefs or identities would be simply unfair and unjust, a clear misapplication of government’s duty to promote good and punish evil.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“Treating one culture as the embodiment of virtue and giving it government sponsorship ends up rigidifying cultural practices and places emphasis on the wrong thing—on the culture rather than the virtues it supposedly embodies. It turns into a kind of ancestor worship in which we revere and try to emulate or “get back to” the practices of previous generations under the assumption that because their ways et down the template we inherited, they must be closer to true, unspoiled virtue. Worst of all, this approach treats other cultural embodiments as inherently less valuable and intrinsically less capable of virtue, which treats the people of other cultures as second-class citizens while simultaneously cutting us off from new cultural resources from which we might grow and learn.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“When nationalists go about constructing their nation, they have to define who is, and how is not, part of the nation. But because there are no rational or objective bases for doing so, nationalists can never have moral authority to persuade those who are hesitant to join the nationalist bandwagon—and there are always dissidents and minorities who do not, or cannot, conform to the nationalists’ preferred cultural template.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“Sometimes Christian nationalism is most evident not in its political agenda, but in the sort of attitude with which it is held: an unstated presumption that Christians are entitled to primacy of place in the public square because they are heirs of the true or essential heritage of American culture, that Christians have a presumptive right to define the meaning of the American experiment because they see themselves as America’s architects, first citizens, and guardians.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“The resurgence of nationalism in the twenty-first century is a response to decades of weaking national identities driven by globalizations and tribalization…Globalization led to deindustrialization; the loss of manufacturing jobs, and the homogenizing and depressing sameness of “McWorld,” as Benjamin Barber termed the global monoculture that was everywhere and nowhere.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“Most white American Christians have a unique way of interpreting the world and the Bible that is not shared by any other group or sect, including by other Christians.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“Being an evangelical [religiously understood] does not lead one to enthusiastically support border walls with Mexico; favoring Christian nationalism does. Being an evangelical does not seem to sour Americans’ attitudes toward stronger gun control legislation; endorsing Christian nationalism does. Being an evangelical was not an important predictor of which Americans voted for Donald Trump in 2016; supporting Christian nationalism was.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“It is telling that when the Bible seeks to convey the reality of demonic power, oppression, and deceit, the image or metaphor it uses is a government trying to be a god.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“Nationalism is the identity politics of the majority tribe; identity politics is the nationalism of small groups. In each case, groups of people defined by some shared identity trait look to the public square for status, spoils, recognition, and power.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“Nationalism is the belief that humanity is divisible into mutually distinct, internally coherent cultural groups defined by shared traits like ethnicity, language, religion, or culture; that these groups should each have their own governments; that one of the purposes of government is to promote and protect a nation’s cultural identity; and that sovereign nations with strong cultures provide meaning and purpose for human beings.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism