Wednesday, January 21, 2026: For those unfamiliar with the term, what is “Christian nationalism”?

PART 3: James Talarico Interview with Ezra Klein: For those unfamiliar with the term, what is “Christian nationalism”?

You can define it a lot of different ways. I define it as the worship of power in the name of Christ. I define it that way because I want us to see it as part of a very long tradition.

How do they define it? “They” being the people who would self-identify with it.

I would think they would define it as wanting a Christian nation. But again, these politicians want a Christian nation — unless it means providing health care to the sick or funding food assistance for the hungry or raising the minimum wage for the poor. It seems like they want to base our laws on the Bible until they read the words of Jesus: Welcome the stranger, liberate the oppressed, put away your sword, sell all your possessions, and give the money to the poor.

I mean, I’m not exactly sure a Christian nation is really what these people want. Again, I believe the separation of church and state is sacred. I think a nation with one supreme religion is not just un-American, I also think it’s un-Christian, given how Jesus taught about religious supremacy. But I do think if these people are going to call for a Christian nation, they need to reach for all of it.

I’ve fought the bill to require the Ten Commandments to be posted in every classroom. And I’ve often wondered, instead of posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom, why don’t they post “Money is the root of all evil” in every boardroom? Why don’t they post “Do not judge” in every courtroom? Why don’t they post “Turn the other cheek” in the halls of the Pentagon? Or “It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven” on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange?

This is the inconsistency I’m trying to call out, because they’re using my tradition — they’re speaking for me — and so I think I have a special moral responsibility to combat Christian nationalism wherever I see it.

One thing I appreciate about President Trump is he doesn’t pretend that his politics are built on piety. That’s not his style. But the vice president, JD Vance, does suggest that his politics are built around a Christian ethic. And I want to play a clip of him for you.

Archival clip of JD Vance: As an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. It doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders, but there’s this old school — and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.

What did you think when you heard Vance say that?

That’s not the gospel. And I don’t think I’m saying this as a Democrat. I think I’m saying this as a fellow believer. JD Vance and I are part of the body of Christ together, and I think this is antithetical to the Gospel.

The Gospel is all about prioritizing those on the outside, those who are least lovable, and that’s what’s so revolutionary about it. There are some strange passages in the New Testament, and one of them is when Jesus tells his followers that they have to hate their mother and father. I don’t think Jesus was speaking literally — I don’t know, but I don’t think so — because I think we should love our moms and dads. I love mine. The Ten Commandments require us to, and Jesus was a devout Jew from the day he was born until the day he died.

But I think he’s using shocking language to teach us something, that our little loves for our parents, for our friends, for our children, for our neighborhood — really important, crucial, beautiful, profound loves — can sometimes get in the way of the big love — the love for the stranger, the love for the outcast, the love for the foreigner. And I should add love for our enemies — the hardest love to achieve.

And so what JD Vance is describing is the culture that we already live in, that’s the world. And we Christians are called to see beyond the world, and that’s to a divine love, a godlike love. Because as Scripture says: “The rains and the sun fall on the righteous and the unrighteous alike.” God loves all of us, no matter what we’ve done, no matter how good or how bad we are. And we as Christians are called to have that divine agape love for every person equally.

And that’s hard to do. I fail at it. I love my family more than I love other families. I’m guilty of that. I think we all are. But the gospel is pushing us to move beyond that and to have the same love for a child on the other side of the world that we have for our child. It’s almost impossible to do that, but it is what we are called to do.

I think as somebody who is outside Christianity, and as such, is always a little bit astonished by the radicalism of the text and the strangeness of it — God incarnated in a human being, that human being is tortured and murdered and rises again as a lesson in mercy and forgiveness and transcendence. There’s all manner of violence I’m doing to the story there. And the structure of the New Testament, to me, is: Jesus goes to one outcast member of society after another.

Then I look up into this administration, in particular, and I see people who are incredibly loud in their Christianity and also incredibly cruel in their politics. Put aside the question of what borders you think a nation must have — you can enforce that border in all manner of ways without treating people who are coming here to escape violence or to better their family’s life cruelly.

You can do it without the memes we see them make on social media of a cartoon immigrant weeping as she’s being deported. Of the A.S.M.R. video of migrants shackled to one another, dragging their chains, with the implication being that the sound of that should soothe you.

It is the ability to insist on your allegiance to such a radical religion, and then treat other human beings with such, genuinely, to me, unmitigated cruelty that I actually find hard, at a soul level, to reconcile.

Scripture says you can’t love God and hate other people. That’s in John 1. You can’t love God and abuse the immigrant. You can’t love God and oppress the poor. You can’t love God and bully the outcast. We spend so much time looking for God out there that we miss God in the person sitting right next to us, in that neighbor who bears the divine image. In the face of a neighbor, we glimpse the face of God.

The Commandment to love God and love thy neighbor is not from Christianity — it is from Judaism. And all Jesus is clarifying, as a kind of radical rabbi, is that your neighbor is the person you love the least.

The parable of the good Samaritan may be the most famous of Jesus’ parables. I think we forget in our modern context how shocking it was. Because today, being a good Samaritan just means helping people to the side of the road — which is good, you should do that. But for listeners in the first century, the Samaritans were not just a different religious group. The Samaritans were their sworn enemies.

And so he is pushing the boundaries on how we define “neighbor” and who we’re supposed to love.

Loving our enemies? Again, it has become trite in a culture dominated by Christianity, but none of us actually do that. None of us actually loves our enemies, even if we say we try to. So yes, I share the same revulsion: that Christians in the halls of power are blatantly violating the teachings of Christianity on a daily basis and hurting our neighbors in the process.

End of Part 3.

Please check out the complete interview between Ezra Klein and James Talarico on YouTube using this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa6fiO2EgJ4