Reading is an exercise for learning how to write and vice versa. I have read myself into being a Christian, but I have also written myself into being a Christian. —Stanley Hauerwas It’s weird how language and ideas morph in response to developments in the political ecology. When I was undergoing—as a surprise to myself and those who had known me—my Christian conversion around 2008, my pastor, Greg Moore, was a former student of Stanley Hauerwas. Dr. Hauerwas was teaching at Duke at the time, and we lived in Raleigh, so Greg took me to Duke one day to meet the Texan theologian who had referred to himself once as “a high church Mennonite.” I’m a Stanley and Stanley is a Stanley, and, more than that, we both shared a strong interest in the greatest of all social obscenities—war. After that meeting, I proceeded for the next four years to read, study, re-read, and reflect on everything I could find that Stanley had written. He was my theological on-ramp into the faith; and you could do a lot worse, because inside Stanley Hauerwas’s head is a vast palace complex of life experience, history, philosophy, theology, and good will. In the middle of that palace is Christ. (He once said, “Jesus is Lord, and everything else is bullshit.”) And one thing that Stanley refused to put in his head-palace, and which he has continually criticized the presence of in the sanctuaries of churches, was the national flag. To the best of my memory (which is not altogether reliable), Stanley did not use the term “Christian nationalism.” What he harped on, though, was what another student of his—William Cavanaugh—called “the migration of the holy” from God to the nation-state. It’s not “Christian nationalism” exactly, but it’s within stone-throwing range of it.
This essay is excellent. The topic is very urgent and very important. Thank you.