SO here's the thing. or whatever. Evangelicalism and what's being called Christian nationalism aren't the same thing, sure, but they exist on a Venn diagram with a LARGE degree of overlap. How much can be the subject of debate but like, it's a lot. More than half.

There are certainly evangelicals who aren't Christian nationalists (mostly communities of color) as well as Christian nationalists who aren't evangelicals (groups I won't name because I don't want to attract people interested in them On Here but you can google).

But overall this impulse to distance Christian nationalism FROM Christianity in general & evangelicalism in particular is, at best, both extremely White and extremely ahistorical. It's a No True Christian fallacy, and it serves to alleviate anxiety about one's complicity in evil.

The thing is, there's no such thing as "True Christianity." It doesn't exist, floating out there in the world of the forms or the ether, in its pristine glory, waiting for humans to manifest it correctly. The only Christianity that exists is Christianity as instantiated by people

You can debate whether certain groups, FOR EXAMPLE, follow the teachings of Jesus better or worse, but the teachings we have were written down by people & collected by people and—most crucially—interpreted by people. There's no pure scripture. It is always interpreted. By people.

So I can't help but feel we'd be having this same conversation in other time periods in history. Like. Puritans were Christians. Slave apologist preachers in the 1800s were Christians. People that supported the Nazis in Germany were Christians. Trumpy evangelicals are Christians.

Praise whatever God may or may not exist that Christianity is a very wide stream. I consider myself an ex-evangelical and still Christianity-adjacent. These days more apt to describe myself as culturally/socially Christian rather than as *a* Christian. Church? Sometimes

I'm in seminary and reading all of the incredible liberation theologians and queer theologians and womanists and biblical scholars that I've been reading this year has made me more open to the potential goodness of Christianity than I have been in YEARS. And yet…

I'm not about to sit out here pretending like True Christianity is a thing and the goal ought to be to find it and rinse all the white supremacy and fascism off of it. Y'all that is fundamentalism. We have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. This is gray.

I'd encourage my fellow white folks who identify as progressive Christians and feel the need to defend the life-giving Christianity you've found from others' experiences of evangelicalism and Christian nationalism (which often go together) to take a moment, respect their pain, &