PC(USA)’s chapel service highlights practicing honest patriotism and confronting white Christian nationalism
The Rev. Dr. Aimee Moiso stirs staff with a mediation on where the nation and church have been and where they might be headed
LOUISVILLE — On the day following elections in several states, the Rev. Dr. Aimee Moiso, who manages Social Witness Policy in the Interim Unified Agency of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) delivered powerful lessons from history during Wednesday’s online chapel service.
Citing General Assembly statements including Honest Patriotism for Christian Citizens as well as important work the denomination has been doing on confronting white Christian nationalism, Moiso first took those in worship through the adoption of the Pledge of Allegiance, including a pivotal 1954 worship service at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., where President Dwight D. Eisenhower heard a sermon urging the insertion of the words “under God” into the pledge, which Ike and members of Congress soon enshrined in law.
Moiso took the history of the Pledge of Allegiance back to the late 1800s, a time when many immigrants were arriving from Eastern and Southern Europe. By 1892 — the year a popular magazine urged teachers to have the Pledge recited in classrooms around the country — 72% of public school students in Brooklyn, New York, were immigrants, according to Moiso.
“It’s no coincidence this influx of immigrants coincided with a mass demonstration of patriotism in public schools,” she said. “This strengthening of public education was a means to ensure the teaching of so-called American ideas to an increasingly diverse population.”
Pivoting to the evils of white Christian nationalism, Moiso noted the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy is currently writing a policy in the matter. “White Christian nationalism stands against the love of God for all people, it rejects justice and equality, it makes the nation into an infallible idol and it places its leaders above critique and the rule of law,” Moiso said. “It is catalyzed in this moment to fully embody and embrace the racism and xenophobia we reject and which we have fought and continue to fight in our communities and in our houses of worship.”
But it’s also part of the story of the rise of American civil religion, “a development that was frequently championed by mainline churches like ours,” Moiso said. “The assumption behind civil religion is there are universal values we all share about what our nation is supposed to be and uphold, and we offer those in religious language. In the United States, our civil religion has generally reflected Protestant-oriented traditions.”
Moiso posed this question: What do we believe about the idea that the United States is or should be Christian?
“For the majority of our nation’s history, white Protestantism has enjoyed privileged locations in the halls of power,” she said. “We take pride in the ways our church governance is a model for American democracy, and we celebrate the role of our Presbyterian forebears in creating it. Our clergy have been chaplains to the Congress, and our members have been senators and presidents.”
But “in this moment in our history, it seems critical that this church that we have loved asks some new questions about being Christian in the United States,” she said. Such questions include:
- How will we pray if our prayer is no longer acceptable and protected?
- For what will we stand when we are shunned rather than applauded for our social witness?
- For whom will we speak if our speech is no longer free or safe?
“I keep thinking that our congregations are in desperate need of a pastoral approach to this moment,” Moiso said. “By all means, we need to vehemently denounce white Christian nationalism and its political ideologies of exclusion and supremacy.”
“But in addition, we’re going to need to help our people identify and name what we are experiencing,” she said. “We need to talk together about how our identities and self-understandings are being challenged as American Protestants.”
What we need, she said, are places “to honestly and openly dismantle our American exceptionalism and replace it with humble appreciation and clear-eyed reverence.” That includes untangling “our Presbyterianism from our Americanism so that we can be faithful to Jesus and advocate for a better nation without confusing one for the other.”
Those are “hard, uncomfortable and scary things to do,” Moiso said, and they’re “not for the faint of heart.” The good news is, “we know something about how to do this.”
We come from a tradition “where confession is always coupled with repair,” Moiso noted. “We confess that we have sinned, that we have screwed things up, and we ask not only to be changed, but to help make things right.”
In addition, “our church is older than this country,” she said. “We minister and labor within the larger trajectory of God’s time, God’s Chronos and Kairos. We don’t presume our discipleship is indispensable to the Missio Dei; nor do we dismiss it as insignificant.”
There’s “a lot to lament in these days, and lament we must, for what has been lost and for what may never be,” Moiso said. “And yet here we still are, right now, seeking and speaking truth about the complexities of this moment.”
In all the current friction and tension, the contractions and confusion, “in the things we believe, the things we’re not sure we believe, in the things we no longer believe, we are beckoned back into God’s love in this moment, for this time, and again we come,” she said, “the body of Christ, through God — indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
You may freely reuse and distribute this article in its entirety for non-commercial purposes in any medium. Please include author attribution, photography credits, and a link to the original article. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDeratives 4.0 International License.
