The Christian Nationalists are at it again. This time they are spreading false tales about Haitian immigrants eating pet cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. They’ve upended and endangered the lives of a hardworking community to peddle their restrictive immigration agenda. I led the litigation department of a refugee rights organization that challenged the Muslim Ban and other anti-immigrant policies prior to joining Americans United earlier this year, and this tactic is all too familiar to me. (Americans United also was heavily involved in challenging the Muslim Ban.)
A diverse nation of immigrants inclusive of non-white, non-Christians threatens Christian Nationalists’ core belief system. Christian Nationalists believe in the lie that America was founded as and must remain a Christian country and that our laws and policies must ensure that white Christians hold onto power and privilege. Among white Christian Nationalist adherents, 81% believe in the “replacement theory” that immigrants are “invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.”
Christian Nationalists even claim a “biblical” grounding for their anti-immigrant agenda. They argue with a straight face that “love your neighbor” applies only to your fellow countrymen, not all humans. Wink, wink: actually, they mean your white, Christian countrymen.
More than 200 evangelical Christian leaders issued a letter last week disagreeing with such a cramped reading of the Bible, again proving that Christian Nationalism is not the same as Christianity. But Christian Nationalists have been successful, time and again, in forcing their beliefs on the country.
Christian Nationalism has been at the heart of immigration restrictions throughout history. The United States had one of the most liberal immigration and naturalization laws in the world at its founding. The naturalization law passed by the first Congress allowed anyone living for more than two years in the United States to naturalize – if they were “a free white person.”
The beginnings of major immigration controls in this country date to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a law that we now recognize embodies the white nationalist backlash against increased Chinese immigration to the United States. The senators supporting its passage likened Chinese immigrants to “parasites” and proclaimed that the United States was “a country of white men.” Never mind that the Chinese immigrants were instrumental to building the railroads in the American West.
The first time I saw Christian Nationalism at work was in January 2017, when the executive order known as the Muslim Ban had just been signed. At JFK Airport where I joined thousands of protestors, U.S. Customs and Border Protection had handcuffed, detained and threatened to deport an Iraqi man who had served the United States Army as a translator for a decade and who held a visa evidencing that his service had put his life in Iraq at risk. No matter: he came from one of the banned Muslim-majority countries.
The Muslim Ban was, much like the Chinese Exclusion Act, a product of Christian Nationalist fear-mongering. In the years before the ban, Christian Nationalists had stirred a moral panic over the increasing number of Muslim refugees seeking and finding safety in the United States. The ban and other policies succeeded in greatly reducing the number and percentage of Muslim immigrants and refugees entering the United States.
Earlier this year, I left my job in the immigrants’ rights world to join AU. I made that hard decision because I came to understand that Christian Nationalism – the billion-dollar, extremist movement that AU has been fighting – lies at the root of the anti-immigrant forces in this country. We need the wall of church-state separation to protect us from those forces.
At the airport on that chilly day in January 2017, I captured a picture of a defiant sign: “First they came for the Muslims and we said not today… .” The Christian Nationalists have come for the Muslims, the Asians, the Haitians, for all immigrants. They have come for LGBTQ+ people, for women, for Black and Brown people, and for anyone else they consider second class.
At Americans United, we say, “not today.” Not ever.
