American Idolatry: A Review

Reviewing Andrew Whitehead's American Idolatry

Living and pastoring in New Orleans destroyed the logic fusing America with Jesus Christ in my soul. None of this happened in a day, but over years. None of it was easily perceived.

I’ve since come to recognize in those years a host of fragmentary moments of disruption, dispossession, and divestment. Together no act of accounting could ever make sense of it all. It was a good ruining.

Over those years, it wasn’t just national headlines, but friendships, interruptions, and conversations. All became rocks in my shoes I could no longer tolerate. But the big picture was clear:

I had been formed to call “Christian” what was “American.” I had equated the “Kingdom” with “Empire” and the “Church” with “the Party”. The collapse of this logic was something I felt viscerally long before I could narrate it verbally.

The entangled elements of race, greed, violence—all the logics of Empire—had shaped me and my understanding of what it meant to follow Jesus of Nazareth in the “Land of the Free.” Untangling them would not be, and is not, easy. But it is never a threat to the church to do this. Instead, it is the path towards freedom and responsibility.

For me, this (continuing) process has been both freeing and one of lamenting, relying on gracious and generous friends, silenced voices, and marginalized witnesses to show me and teach me I had otherwise discredited or denied.

I’m talking about, theologically I think, a dimension of what Scripture calls “conversion”. Not a single transaction, but the unfolding transformation of every dimension of our thinking and our being, disciplined according to the reality of Jesus Christ, and accomplished by His Spirit in a particular place: the church. And so to the Spirit-filled family, who might be reading this from Metairie Church: thank you for being the church.

The Confusion of “Christian” and “American” (and the Politics It Creates)

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas comments that, in times past, to be an American and a Christian was often an identity without difference among white Christian Americans. Even today, we can recognize how claims to be Christian are synonymous with American-ness (whatever that might contain) and vice versa. This folding of national and cultural identity into theology always brings with it fragmentary elements of racism, violence, and supremacy, and reduces theology into an ideology.

Hauerwas describes our moment as a period of collapse, one where the powers that be are losing the array of social controls that once constructed and maintained that folded identity.

And count me among those who find this collapse a good thing. But not everyone agrees. Like Jacques Ellul says, “Christians have yet to renounce the ideology of Christendom.” And that refusal gives birth to all sorts of reactionary politics, seeking to “take back” and “recreate” the canopy of Christendom where theology can once again breath the air of the social and political supremacy that gave it birth. The politics of Christian nationalism is one elementary force in our politics attempting this sort of change, and Ellul—who served with the French Resistance in World War II— wouldn’t be surprised by it

Ellul is one of my interlocutors in my dissertation. A highly influential advocate of “Christian anarchy”, he’s a powerful lay theologian, and perhaps more well known for his sociology and writings on the modern condition. All that to say: Ellul is rare breed, a trained sociologist whose work as a lay theologian is still resourcing the church today to take its stand in the midst of corrupting and corroding nationalisms.

Which is why I was glad to read and review the work of sociologist Dr. Andrew Whitehead over at

American Idolatry

writing as a lay theologian for Christians in America today.

Reviewing American Idolatry

In his recent book, American Idolatry, sociologist Andrew Whitehead speaks as lay theologian, a Christian to Christians, on the theological dimensions and dangers of Christian nationalism. It is an excellent primer, drawing from theological thought across expressions, offering ways to talk about Christian Nationalism in theological grammar and to contend with the idolatries it perpetuates.

Mapping “Christian Nationalism”

While the term didn’t originate with Dr. Whitehead (Gerald L.K. Smith in the 1930/40’s started the “Christian Nationalist Crusade” for example), he along with Dr. Perry helped revive it in our current lexicon in their sociological study, Taking America Back For God.

In the media vortex where “Christian Nationalist” is thrown around, both as a slur and a slogan, both Whitehead and Perry offer a solid, sociological definition:

a cultural framework asserting that all civic life in the United States should be organized according to a particular form of conservative Christianity (xii)

What I appreciate most about American Idolatry as an extension of this definition is how it provides handles for dialogue in the church. Those handles come in two forms: existential witnesses (people who are contended against Christian nationalism as Christians) and exegetical reflections (how readings of Scripture resist Christian nationalism)

Whitehead’s chief claim is that the Christian Nationalism depicted in his sociological work with Dr. Samuel Perry becomes idolatry when mapped in theological terms and described by theological logic and grammar. I can’t commend this move enough.

Theology needs to be in endless conversation with sociology, history, etc. But it must do this (as Karl Barth says) without giving up its distinctive rationality bound up in the Word of Jesus Christ. When the church gives this up, its existence and witness is often determined by false necessities and fatalisms.

Resisting these false necessities is the task of the Church. We have an example of this in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, during contentious meetings of the Confessing Church, grappling with how a church-community ought to respond to the Third Reich. He stood and recited the poetry of Theodor Storm:

One man asks: What is to come?

The other: What is right?

And that is the difference

Between the free man and the slave.

The church-community can enjoy all the political religious freedom it wants, and still not be free in this way, free from false necessities and fatality. The church-community never knows “what is to come” in the fullest sense, we only know who sustains the world. And it is this confession, the one that Whitehead enters from the very first page, that ought to determine the church-community, and leads us to resist the idolatries of fear, power, and violence.

The Idolatries of Christian Nationalism

These three dimensions: fear, power, and violence show up across Whitehead’s sociological work as political realities. But mapping them as idolatries takes us out of the realm of immediate political strategies and into the realm of the church’s own existence.

This isn’t apolitical. It is a powerful way to construe and coordinate a politics that shatters the false necessities of partisan warfare. This theology is free and responsible towards a politics that seeks the good of our neighbor (refusing to confuse that with self-interest) and the glory of God. (refusing to confuse his kingdom with the self-defense strategies of the satan.)

These three idolatries of Christian nationalism are the central part of the book. Each section builds on each reality as feature of sociological Christian nationalism. Like violence, and Rep. Boebert saying that maybe if Jesus had an AR-15 he wouldn’t have died. Whitehead then translates thesis sociological realities into a theological framework. Here, he shows how each is problematic to Christians, and attempts to point the church towards a different path.

I think we could use more reflection on the temptations of Jesus, which is where Whitehead takes readers to contend with power. Reminded me of Ellul, who remarks on that same passage: “Satan offers all the kingdoms of the world, and Jesus refuses, but the church accepts.” Whitehead is bringing readings and reflections, long stewing in academic theology, into public, common spaces. We need more of this transportation of the rich insights of theology into palatable formats.

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American Idolatries is an excellent primer on the theological dangers contained in the Christian nationalism of sociological study. Whitehead writes with the sort of self-awareness that popular Christian writing often neglects: the lines of demarcation where one discipline ends and another begins. In an effort to talk about Jesus as the meaning of all things, Christians don’t have to assume ourselves to be authorities in every thing. As a lay theologian, professional sociologist, and practicing Christian, Whitehead acknowledges this in a really compelling way. This has the effect of introducing the reader to worlds beyond the book, pointing to theological streams and lived practice that has mounted resistance to corrupting nationalisms long before the current crisis.