A Quaker Response to Christian Nationalism 

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1. Scott admits he has the “innocent as a dove” part down, but struggles with being “as wise as a serpent without becoming the evil I resist.” Where in your own life do you find it difficult to stand firmly against injustice without adopting the toxic tactics of your opponents?
2. The tragic flaw of the original Barmen Declaration was its silence on the Jewish question, completely ignoring the primary victims of the regime it was protesting. When crafting our own modern responses to injustice, who are the vulnerable groups we might be leaving out of our advocacy?
3. Quakers have a long, complex relationship with peace and neutrality when confronted with governing authorities; How do you discern when remaining “neutral” or apolitical serves your faith, versus when your spiritual convictions require you to definitively take a side?

Zack Jackson
Hey Friends. Zack here. Before we get into our episode today, I wanted to let you all know about a very special live Zoom event that we are hosting next month. 

With the 250th anniversary of the founding United States right around the corner, we have an upcoming episode featuring Quaker historian Max Carter. It’s a look at how Quakers “Invented America”, digging into the many, and sometimes very surprising, ways that Friends influenced the foundation, history, and culture of this country.

To pair with that release, we are hosting a live Zoom event with Max on July 7th at 7:00 PM Eastern Time. He’ll be going even deeper into these surprising stories and answering your questions live. It’s a perk exclusively for our podcast supporters, so if you’ve been waiting for the right time to become a monthly supporter, this is it. 

And if you can’t make it to the live Zoom event, don’t worry, we’ll record the whole thing and share it with supporters afterward. If you are already a supporter, check your email for the registration information, and if you’d like to become a supporter, you can just go to QuakerPodcast.com and click support in the top right corner. Thank you so much for making this show possible. 

And now, here’s today’s episode. 

Scott Holmes  
There’s this particular view of Christianity who has set out as its goal to dominate and take dominion over our political spheres, our family spheres, our cultural spheres, our sports, our music, every aspect of human life, and imprint and control those areas with a kind of Christianity that is divisive, that is prejudice, that is not inclusive, that is controlling, that is demeaning to women, that is harmful to people of different sexual orientations and expressions, that that particular narrow view of what they call Christianity should also have the full force of the state across all human experience. 

That’s the most dangerous thing that we are facing.

Jon Watts
Hey Zack.

Zack Jackson
Hey Jon. So today’s episode comes from an interview that you did recently. You wanna it up for us? 

Jon Watts
Yah so, a few months ago, I noticed a blog post from Scott Holmes. Scott is a conservative Quaker in North Carolina… and after I finished the post I immediately texted you saying, “We have to interview him.”

Zack Jackson
You did! You knew him from way back when you were running the Quaker Speak project, right?

Jon Watts
Yeah, exactly. Before we started Thee Quaker, I interviewed him for a video. As a Quaker lawyer, Scott felt a spiritual leading to stop wearing ties in court. It’s a really interesting story. But recently, he wrote this really thoughtful, deeply researched piece of writing. He wrote it specifically to push back against the rise of Christian Nationalism from a spiritual, ecumenical place.

Zack Jackson
Yeah. Thank you for sending that over. It was absolutely brilliant. And what’s fascinating is that he didn’t write it from scratch. He drew a lot of inspiration from how the church in Germany responded to the rise of authoritarianism back in the 30s.

Jon Watts
Right, the Barmen Declaration. And I thought our listeners might like to hear Scott’s modern take on it.

Zack Jackson
Yeah but, I’ll be honest, when I read through what Scott wrote, it sent me down a rabbit hole of research into the original Barmen Declaration, and I couldn’t believe the historical parallels. But, I’m not an expert on 1930’s German theology, so I drove down to Lancaster Pennsylvania to talk to an expert who is…

Randall Zachman
I’m Randall Zachman. I am Professor Emeritus of Reformation Studies at the University of Notre Dame and the theologian in residence at St. James Episcopal Church here in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Zack Jackson
So can you sort of paint a picture for us of Germany in the 1930s

Randall Zachman
Germany in the 1930s had just come out on the other end, as we know, from their rather crushing defeat at the end of World War I. They were feeling very, very much like their faces were being rubbed in the mud by larger European forces… So they were very much susceptible to a kind of resurgent nationalism and a pride in the German people, both politically and religiously, which is really important to keep in mind.

Zack Jackson
Randall explained that while Adolf Hitler wasn’t particularly interested in Christianity, there was a large faction within the church known as the “German Christians” who were eager to align the church with the Nazi regime.

Randall Zachman
Their agenda… was to consolidate the German identity of Christianity and purify it of alien influences, which would mainly be Jewish. As you can imagine, they’re arguing for getting rid of the entirety of the Old Testament. And they argued that, since we knew the Apostle Paul wrote the letters and he was Jewish, get rid of Paul’s letters.

Zack Jackson
The German Christians essentially tried to recreate Jesus as a white, Aryan figure. And they successfully created a church structure that worked hand-in-glove with the Third Reich. But there was a small resistance.

Randall Zachman
Within the German Evangelical Church there are pastors like Niemöller, in particular, and Bonhoeffer, and theologians like Karl Barth… who realized this was really just a catastrophe in the making.

Zack Jackson
This group became known as the Confessing Church. In 1934, 139 ministers, plus some laypeople and professors, gathered in the city of Barmen.

Jon Watts
Okay, so they get together to write a document condemning the Nazi government?

Zack Jackson
Actually, no. And this is the crucial part. They didn’t write it to the government. They wrote it to the church. They were watching the church become infected by the state, and they needed to draw a hard line. The main architect of this document was a theologian named Karl Barth, and he began with a very strong stance…

Randall Zachman
“Jesus Christ, as He is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death… We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.”

Zack Jackson
So basically, the whole thing is centered around the idea that Jesus Christ is the only source of truth, and any other means of discerning truth is a gateway to corruption. 

Jon Watts
So I can imagine some listeners feeling uncomfortable with that statement.  Saying that the historical Jesus is the only source of truth kind of limits the whole revelation of Quakerism, which is that God speaks to everyone… as George Fox would put it, Christ has come to teach his people himself.

Zack Jackson
Exactly. To a lot of modern people, that language sounds way too rigid, and many people in the 30’s felt the same way. But Randall explained why Barth felt he had to build that theological firewall in 1934. If you let any other source of revelation in, the Nazi ideology was ready to exploit it.

Randall Zachman
Yep, yeah. No, that’s exactly right. And that’s what Barth sees. He says you open that door a little bit, and it just comes flooding in, and then you can’t control how much of it’s going to come in.

Zack Jackson
This is what Karl Barth recognized as the fundamental danger: The word, “and”. Jesus and the German Folk. Jesus and the Third Reich.

Randall Zachman
He always said that the attention will gravitate very quickly because we think we know all about Jesus Christ. It’ll gravitate very quickly to the other side of the “and.” So, revelation and reason… Or revelation and politics.

Jon Watts
So Barth is saying that if you mix the gospel with nationalism, the nationalism ends up swallowing the gospel whole.

Zack Jackson
Right. It’s like when you’re making a smoothie. It doesn’t matter how much banana you put in there. The whole thing is gonna end up tasting like banana. 

The Barmen Declaration was a desperate, imperfect attempt to save the soul of the church and to stop them from lending its authority to the atrocities that the Nazis were planning. And today, many people are looking at the political landscape in America and feeling a similar sense of urgency.

Jon Watts
Which brings us back to Scott Holmes. Scott isn’t a theologian. He’s a lawyer working in civil rights and poverty law in North Carolina. But he felt that same need to clearly articulate what the church stands for when faced with authoritarianism.

Zack Jackson
Right. Scott’s modern declaration isn’t about rigid dogmatism. It’s an ecumenical document, shaped heavily by the Quaker belief in the Light Within and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s an attempt to draw a line in the sand today, just like they tried to do in Barmen in 1934. But this time, instead of shying away from the controversial elements, he addresses them head on. 

Jon Watts
So I sat down with Scott to talk about why he felt called to write this, what exactly it says, and why he believes that people of faith cannot remain silent in the face of Christian Nationalism.

Jon Watts
So today we were going to be talking about this shared declaration that you, that you posted on social media last month. Can you tell us a little bit about it? What inspired you to start working on this,

Scott Holmes  

So a number of years ago I felt a leading to really start looking at responses, social responses, spiritual responses to evil in the political sphere, so you know, my, my study of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, his conscientious, deeply religious, theologically brilliant, ethical life placed in the context of the rise of Nazi Germany is a really powerful example of someone who took Christianity and non violence and love and the power of community very seriously, and was faced with evil, politically the greatest evil that we have really probably known in our history. 

There are some really strong authoritarian powers at hand in our current present moment. There are there are dehumanizing, dangerously dehumanizing political policies and political actions that are happening by the folks in charge that are very, very reminiscent of the kinds of strategies and language and power that was used and employed by the National Socialists in Germany So it’s not just that the state is harming the church in our situation, there is a church that’s trying to usurp and take charge of the state and use the tools of the state to accomplish its own vision of what it calls Christianity, which is really, when you boil it down, a kind of Christian nationalism that’s more of an idolatry and a blasphemy than it is an actual religious sect. 

Jon Watts

So, can you expand a little on this modern evil? When you call it a blasphemy, what do you, what do you mean by that? 

Scott Holmes

There’s this particular view of Christianity who has set out as its goal to dominate and take dominion over our political spheres, our family spheres, our cultural spheres, our sports, our music, every aspect of human life, and imprint and control those areas with a kind of Christianity that is divisive, that is prejudice, that is not inclusive, that is controlling, that is demeaning to women, that is harmful to people of different sexual orientations and expressions, that that particular narrow view of what they call Christianity should also have the full force of the state across all human experience. 

That’s the most dangerous thing that we are facing, and it’s a blasphemy, because it is absolutely contrary to what God is. It is the opposite of love. It is the opposite of care for people who are different. It is the opposite of letting people become who they are, and so the things that are contrary to the divine are blasphemy, but it has taken power and taken root in our state in a way that harms both the state and the rule of law and Christianity for all of us who have a very different view of what that means, so it feels important in our context that our whatever declaration we’re able to come up with addresses not only the harm to the church, the way the folks who signed the Barman Declaration were worried about, but also the harm to our state and

Jon Watts

We’re going to take a quick break. When we come back, Scott reads from his shared declaration against Christian Nationalism and lays out a spirit-led hope for a brighter tomorrow. Stay tuned.

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Zack Jackson: We get so many wonderful messages from people who have decided to support the podcast. But recently, I got a comment from a new supporter that really caught my eye. She said she was a new Quaker and that she found this podcast to be a helpful supplement to her in-person community. Her name is Ayana Gray, and I was so moved by her message that I invited her to chat. It turns out, her journey to Quakerism is one I think a lot of people can relate to.

Ayana Gray
I went to a Southern Baptist Church in Atlanta. As I got older, I found that Baptist doctrine, and specifically Southern Baptist doctrine, just wasn’t able to answer questions that I had in a satisfactory way. I felt my morals and my values shifting and not always aligning, and then that made me wonder, Am I a bad Christian? Am I a bad person? And so I kept identifying as a Christian, or a spiritual Christian, is what I would say. But I wasn’t going to church, and at some point, like I was on this journey trying to find a home, but at some points, I just thought, well, maybe, maybe Christianity is not it. Maybe there’s just not going to be a church that checks all the boxes for me. I was researching locally, like looking at different churches, and there was always just something. It felt like I always had to compromise something, and I just would give up and come back to it, and then one day it’s, funnily enough, like, this is a lot of people I’ve talked to have done this. 

I went on like, Belief Net, I think it’s .com or .org and just took, like, a quiz to say, to see, you know what faith most aligned with my values. Just kind of a last ditch effort, and I got liberal Quaker, which I was shocked by, because I had no knowledge of Quakers, any kind of Quakers, let alone liberal Quakers, started reading and just felt this immense relief, because I wasn’t having to compromise any of my values or beliefs. So I just felt like all the boxes were being checked. I felt this immense relief. I went to my local meeting. Everyone was extremely welcoming and kind, and there was just this peace. I felt very at home. I felt like I had always been a Quaker and just hadn’t had a word for it.

Zack Jackson: So how does the podcast fit into your journey? 

Ayana Gray

Anytime you’re joining a new anything, and especially a new faith, it can feel really daunting. People are using words you don’t know, terms you don’t know, and you feel kind of silly asking questions. So I always look for the accessible points. And this was one of those. This podcast was one of those places where I’m like, Okay, I don’t I don’t feel silly for it, like wondering and asking questions. I feel like I’m being talked to. Like, no pun intended like a friend,

I’m still very new, but I appreciate as I try to gather information and learn, I appreciate that the podcast is helping me apply Quaker practices and Quaker teachings to the real world and even what we’re experiencing as of this week.

Zack Jackson: I mean, that’s it right? That’s what we’re going for. Quaker stories and wisdom that are equally valuable no matter where you are on your journey. So what inspired you to take the next step? To go from a listener to a monthly supporter? 

Ayana Gray

Again, I just, I was able to, I’m able to listen and apply things to my everyday life, and it sits with me. And I want that to continue. And I know that, as much as dreams and wishes are wonderful, you need to be able to financially support these endeavors so that they can continue. It’s one thing to say, hey, thank you for what you do. It’s another thing to say, hey, I want here’s me giving something so that you guys can continue to do the great work you do.

Zack Jackson: Ayana, thank you. And thank you to all our supporters. You make this work possible. 

If this show means something to you, if it’s been a supplement to your spiritual life, if it’s made you feel less alone, or if it’s given you that same sense of relief Ayana talked about, I hope you’ll consider following her example. Become a monthly supporter. You can join for as little as $5 a month. Every new supporter helps us bring this Quaker wisdom and practice to a world that desperately needs it.

Please visit our website at quakerpodcast.com and click “Support.” Thank you. And now, back to the show. 

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Jon Watts  

Yeah, thank you for that setup. I’m ready to get into it. Can you walk us through the document a little bit? I know, so the, so this document is organized into 16 points, each point has a title, a belief, a statement of opposition, and a query. Do you want to share a few examples with us? What are some of your favorites?

Scott Holmes  

Yeah, thanks. The first one that has to do with truth, unity, and love. I like that one, because everything else seems to be kind of built around that. What I found by the time I finished this thing was that a lot of the concepts are interrelated. 

Jon Watts

Can you read it for us? Read us the title and the we believe and the we oppose part. 

Scott Holmes

Sure, so it says truth, unity, and love. We believe the power of truth is rooted in love and unity. We aim to live a life that exemplifies these values. We believe the sinful idolatry of political power and economic wealth manufacture false division within the human family and exploits prejudice to seize power and accumulate and concentrate wealth for the few. We are against the way political idolatry labels leads to babble and the confusion of speech, quote alternative facts unquote propaganda. propaganda and lies. We oppose efforts to manipulate and control people with lies and propaganda. We believe the truth will set us free from efforts to distort reality with false narratives of the past and the present. 

The Bible verse that the truth will set you free by itself. That phrase sounds great, like just give me the freedom. I love me some truth, but exactly what that means and how that looks is really powerful. For example, one of the ways people can abuse each other in a relationship. The worst is to gaslight each other. It’s an abusive practice to try to convince your partner that something is true when it’s not. That’s abuse, and it really hurts a person’s self-esteem. It hurts their ability to choose. It even impacts your memory if you are, if you are subjected to gaslighting for extended periods of time and don’t share a consensus view of reality, you can lose your memory of that period of time because you have been gaslit so bad. 

Well, when you extrapolate that practice across a community and use lies and propaganda and alternative facts and double speak and babble and blasphemy to try to convince people that lawful protesters are actual domestic terrorists, then you are robbing people of their reality, and you’re robbing us of our history, and our agency, and our ability to act. So, when we say, when I say, and when the Bible says the truth will set you free, it literally means by removing the falsehood by ending the. Babble by getting rid of the gas lighting, it enables you to act according to your conscience as a full human being, and see clearly what you are facing, and choose with your own agency and your the agency of your community to react to it in a powerful way, you

Jon Watts  

Thank you, that was fantastic. Let’s do another one.

Scott Holmes  

Human dignity. We believe that all people are created with a divine spark, a holy seed, and the light of God within them, and endowed with unique purpose and vocation and creation. The full human dignity of each person is achievable when basic material, intellectual, and spiritual needs are met in the context of a loving community. We believe everyone is equally deserving of love, acceptance, and the chance to achieve the fullness of their vocation and creation. Our own dignity is dependent on others reaching the full measure of their human dignity, and no one is beyond our love. Human rights are essential to realizing and naming the conditions necessary to achieve human dignity. We believe the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 is a helpful framing for the kinds of rights necessary for human dignity. 

The Quakers played an important role in the evolution of human rights, because what Quakers were insisting upon in the 1600s was that whatever these lords and ladies can do in terms of not being seized for property and their debts or not having to go to church or getting to walk around with their hats on, we demand that for everybody, that for us there’s this radical equality where every human being deserves the measure of human dignity that the law accords the lords and ladies and judges and magistrates, and as a practical matter, their civil disobedience around that really pushed the society to to expand its understanding of human dignity and human rights, so that by the time you got, you know, the John Locke and the people who were trying to write about these inalienable rights. 

Many of them came from activism by religious folks who were pushing for an egalitarian view of the world. We were fortunate as a group to kind of have gotten to be a little bit ahead of the curve on the progress of human rights, and my, my sense of that is because we have rooted ourselves in this divine light within each person, and if that’s true, then what does that mean in our time and place that we have to treat other people a certain way and

Jon Watts  

Let’s do one more.

Scott Holmes  

Okay. All right. Skip one and go to one human family. We believe in the love of our neighbor, the life and dignity of one human family, and the great variety of peoples and beliefs in God’s creation. We believe we are part of the human family worldwide, interconnected by a web of mutuality and interdependence of fate. We believe the common good aims at the care for creation and the meeting the material and spiritual needs of people living in loving community, fully achieving human dignity. We believe it is the vocation of government at every level to achieve the common good. We oppose the view that there is a them who deserve less than us. We believe in one human family. We oppose efforts to sow division, mistrust, and prejudice among. Our brothers and sisters, through lies and propaganda motivated by the sinful idolatry of political power aimed at the oppression of some groups to benefit the few. 

So the this idea of a common good can be misused into other contexts, so it’s important for me to root it in human dignity and the care for creation, it’s also a radical rooting in our Christian tradition that the answer to who is our neighbor is the person from the other town who we don’t know, and that the parable of the Good Samaritan becomes a powerful political analogy for how we ought to be engaging in politics and Dr. King, he would say at some point with all these people getting beat up on the road to Jericho, somebody needs to ask what’s wrong with the road to Jericho, and what he’s pointing at at that point is the systemic harm, like the system itself has a spirit, the powers and the principalities, they have their own evil that’s embedded in them, a sense of self preservation, a sense of use of state coercion to accomplish its means, and that could be a social security check that is meant for a good thing, but the policies and procedures for how to get your check are demeaning and dehumanizing to the point of being evil. 

So, the idea that we, there is one human family, that there is a common good, and that we can achieve it by focusing on the human dignity of people and community is a powerful thing to be for right now, in a time when so much of the politics is against it.

Jon Watts

Thank you, Scott. I’m sorry we don’t have time for all 16 points, but we’re going to encourage listeners to go to your website and read all of them and share their own wisdom in the comment section. Thank you so much for your time and for your faithful response to the leading of the spirit. 

Zack Jackson

Thank you for listening, and thank you again to Scott Holmes for this shared declaration and to Randall Zachman for helping us to understand the original declaration.  For discussion questions and a transcript of today’s episode, make sure you check out Quakerpodcast.com. We’ll also include a link to Scott’s full declaration. 

This episode was produced and edited by me Zack Jackson, Jon Watts wrote and produced the music. 

Thee Quaker Podcast is a part of Thee Quaker Project. We are a nonprofit Quaker media organization dedicated to giving Quakerism a platform for the 21st Century. 

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And now your daily Quaker message as read by Kent Laturno.

Kent Laturno  

William Penn. 1693. A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil, that good may come of it… It is as great presumption to send our passions upon God’s errands, as it is to palliate them with God’s name… Let us then try what Love will do: for if men did once see we love them, we should soon find they would not harm us. Force may subdue, but Love gains: and he that forgives first, wins the laurel.

Zack Jackson  

To get Quaker wisdom in your inbox every day, go to dailyquaker.com That’s dailyquaker.com.

Hosted, produced, and edited by Zack Jackson.

Original music and sound design by Jon Watts (Listen to more of Jon’s music here.)

This season’s cover art is by Todd Drake

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