Speaking Pejoratively?
It all depends on how you use that word
Recently, Dr. Joseph Lear, a fellow Pentecostal scholar here on Substack (give him a follow) responded to a note from Dr. Matthew D. Taylor that quoted one sentence from one of Taylor’s longer articles:
To call someone a Christian nationalist isn’t a pejorative: it’s an analytical description.
My fellow scholar’s comment was, “I’ve literally never heard someone not use it as a pejorative.”
I replied:
It’s the difference between seeing it in the media at large (where it is often used sloppily) vs academic works like those of Paul D. Miller (himself a conservative Christian political scientist) or pastoral works like Disarming Leviathan by Caleb Campbell.
To which Dr. Lear responded:
Yes, it’s used in a very sloppy manner. But very, very few academics themselves are using it in a non-pejorative way.
I replied in turn:
Maybe that’s because, in most cases, any type of religious nationalism eventually winds up being a negative force.
A few years ago, when “Christian nationalism” first started getting more mainstream use, some FB friends asked what it even meant. I gave the example of Hindu nationalism in India as a parallel, pointing out how the majority religion in a nation tries to assert that to truly be of that nation, one needs to be of that religion.
Let’s Start by Defining Terms
I decided to do a bit of research to make sure I was understanding the English usage of “pejorative” correctly (as a theology nerd whose undergraduate degree was in computer and information science, with a minor in math, I tend to be a tad OCD when it comes to precision).
Dictionary.com defines the noun pejorative as
a form or word that is disparaging, derogatory, or belittling, such as bean counter for an accountant, or the -nik in peacenik.
and the adjective as
having an unpleasant or disparaging connotation
Vocabulary.com says:
Call a word or phrase pejorative if it is used as a disapproving expression or a term of abuse. Tree-hugger is a pejorative term for an environmentalist.
Coming from the Latin word for “worse,” pejorative is both an adjective and a noun. As an adjective, it means disapproving or disparaging. Hack is a pejorative term for a bad writer. If you call someone a politician in the pejorative sense, you mean that they are scheming and out for personal gain. Terms of abuse such as jerk and negative euphemisms such as bottom feeder are pejoratives, words you use when you want to call someone a bad name.
I find that vocabulary.com description very helpful, especially the example about how “politician” can have both a non-pejorative and a pejorative connotation. If we’re talking about a person who serves in elected public office, then “politician” is simply an accurate descriptor that applies based on the occupation of the individual in question. But when it is used in the sense of “someone whose positions on issues, and apparent values held to, shift with the winds of public opinion, for the sake of retaining his/her office and power” (the “out for personal gain” piece from the example), then it is clearly a term of disapproval.
Side note: A classic pejorative commonly used to label Pentecostals is “holy roller.” Some friends of mine in youth group decided to embrace the epithet, though in a different sense. There was a group of them that would sometimes apply a generous supply of toilet tissue to trees and roofs on Friday nights, and they called their TP team the “Holy Rollers.”
The Case at Hand
So is “Christian nationalist” a descriptor or a pejorative? Before we answer that question, we need to look at religious nationalism more broadly.
Further down in his article, two paragraphs after the sentence quoted in his note, Taylor writes:
Religious nationalisms, to offer a simple definition, are the organized efforts by religious actors to exert influence over the government and sacralize the state through enacting their agenda. It’s no more pejorative to call some American Christians “Christian nationalists” than it is to call Indian Hindutva activists “Hindu nationalists” or pro-Erdoğan Turkish Islamists “Islamic nationalists.”
This goes well with the example I mentioned in my reply to Dr. Lear regarding Hindu nationalism in India, where the Hindu majority tries to enforce the fusion of religious and national identity (“to be Indian is to be Hindu”) through government power, including the enacting and enforcement of anti-conversion laws. In Christian nationalism in the United States, we see similar sentiments such as wishing to make non-Christians into second-class citizens who would not be allowed to vote or hold elected office—if you can even call someone without the right to vote a “citizen” at all in America, as that is one of the basic rights that comes with U.S. citizenship.
Can CN Ever Be a Good Thing?
If we stick with the definitions and descriptions from the social sciences (sociology, political science, religious studies, etc.) instead of allowing politicians and media talking heads (now there’s a common pejorative term) to define it, I think we can establish that Christian nationalism is almost always, at the very least, generally a negative thing (despite the efforts of some people to rehabilitate the term “Christian nationalism” and make a positive case for it). That could make it fall under the parts of the definition of “pejorative” that relate to “disapproving,” “unpleasant,” or “disparaging,” even when used in a technically correct sense as a valid descriptor. I would say that religious nationalisms—regardless of the religions involved—are worthy of being disapproved of and disparaged as dangerous distortions of faith.
In that same sense, “demonic” would always be a pejorative, whether used as an accurate technical descriptor (the Gadarene man among the tombs, the fortune-telling girl with the Python spirit in Philippi) or as a disparaging epithet (“That politician’s policies are demonic”) because, due to the very nature of demons, anything “demonic” is negative and should be disapproved.
The question becomes not so much whether we only see “Christian nationalist” used as a pejorative—since it is for the most part a negative thing by virtue of its definition— but whether the term is being used correctly and accurately. Chicago pastor Chris Butler points out that not everything getting called Christian nationalism actually is Christian nationalism. He writes about how some things that are simply normal Christian involvement in society, and discussion of religious differences between Christianity and other faiths, sometimes gets sloppily labeled with this negative term as a type of cop-out:
But it similarly is not helpful to weaponize Christian nationalism as a conversation-ender on this or any other topic instead of substantively engaging with genuine questions and concerns posed by brothers and sisters in the faith.
I have been on the record talking about the detrimental ways our political culture is forming us, and this is just another example that shows how. As our politics have become more bifurcated, public discourse has also become increasingly centered on one’s opponents. Political candidates have built successful campaigns talking about whom they’re against, and fear has become a major motivator for both sides of the aisle.
In this environment, the charge of “white Christian nationalism” has become a rhetorical escape hatch.
I would add that it doesn’t help matters when conservative Christians blithely embrace the moniker with statements such as, “Well, I’m a Christian, I love my nation, and I want my values represented in the public square, so I guess you can call me a Christian nationalist.” That’s just as sloppy and unthinking as the way many in the media and progressive politics are using the term.
Butler goes on to write:
The pattern is consistent: Label the concern as white Christian nationalism, and you’ve absolved yourself of the responsibility to engage the underlying question seriously.
And while it is patently true that some people use “Christian nationalist” in the very loose way that Butler describes—sometimes with the express purpose of shutting down discussion rather than debating the actual issues at hand—we cannot err on the opposite extreme and claim it is simply a term concocted by the left to silence conservative Christians who are politically active. Brandon Basse points out that
Where this critique goes wrong is in assuming that rhetorical misuse means the concept itself does not exist. The fact that a phrase is used as a political weapon does not mean the phenomenon it describes is imaginary. Christian nationalism did not originate in contemporary American politics, and it certainly was not invented after the 2016 election. The ideological pattern long predates the current debate.
Simply dismissing the term or avoiding its use isn’t really an option. We have to deal with the ideology, and it is helpful to give it a name. We just have to insure we’re all working with the same definition as the other participants in each discussion, as specialists use varying details in their framings of it.
In Closing
As I look back over this somewhat rambling discourse, I realize that maybe we need to each define what we mean by “pejorative” just as much as we need to clearly stipulate which characteristics we include in “Christian nationalism.” I think perhaps Taylor, in saying that it is a diagnostic descriptor and not a pejorative, may have meant that the term as he uses it isn’t meant to be belittling, abusive, or disparaging, even if it is generally negative, unpleasant, and worthy of disapproval. And maybe what appears in the articles and videos Lear’s feed presents to him have truly been used the term pejoratively as a way to simply label and dismiss.
Or maybe I’m just being too academic and hair-splitting when it comes to definitions. I am from Arkansas, after all, and some of us have trouble with the meaning of the word “is.”
For further reading:
Paul D. Miller, “What Is Christian Nationalism”
Russell Moore “The Uneasy Conscience of Christian Nationalism”
George Yancey “It’s Not ‘Christian Nationalism.’ It’s Conservative Identity Politics”
Brandon Basse “James Talarico and the Confusion About Christian Nationalism”
Brandon Basse “A Response to R. R. Reno’s Case for Christian Nationalism”
Brandon Basse. “When Does Jesus Become a Political Instrument?”
And a couple of my own articles: