Last updated on October 5th, 2024 at 11:40 am
A Christian Nation would crush our right to freedom of religion. If Trump wins, I have a feeling we will be living in a Christian nation, having read their plans in Project 2025.
Editor: This man made a lot of points that have been in my heart for awhile, but I’m too scared to say them. I don’t know why churches and very religious people freak me out, but they do. I used to believe in God and all that, but I’ve seen too much pain and suffering, evil things done to children, that I can’t believe a God would allow to happen. People in the hospital would have friends pray over them and then thank God when they recover.
So God is going to save an old rich lady, while children being tortured are begging him for help? Sorry, but no. That’s how my journey to atheism began. It culminated when I researched the origins of Christiany and learned who wrote some of the Bible and why. I read about the group of men who had a meeting to decide if Jesus should be worshipped as well or if he’s a regular guy. Everything has been done for nefarious reasons like controlling a population with rules in the Bible.
Funny story and then I’m done. As a teenager, I dated a guy that was from a Bible Baptist family where they were home schooled, no TV in the house, and they couldn’t listen to music or dance. My first meeting with his parents was nerve-wracking. My boyfriend’s little sisters were peeking around the stairs and I later found out it was because I had short hair, makeup on, and I was wearing jeans. Something they had never seen before! At one point I said to his mother, “When they wrote in the Bible that women should not dress like men, the men wore long robes and dresses. So shouldn’t the girls be wearing pants?” 🫣
Alright, it’s time for Max McCoy to tell his story.
Let me tell you an Easter story.
The First Baptist Church in Baxter Springs sits on the northwest corner of 10th Street and East Avenue. It’s a solid brick building, and its front doors are perched atop a cascade of concrete steps leading to the sidewalk below, a literal stairway to supposed salvation. It was inside this church that, when I was 14 years old, I was dunked in a big tub of water that represented the river Jordan.
My high school principal did the dunking. His name was Bud Johnson and he lived down the street from my folks and he was an Army veteran of Korea and approached most tasks with a studied resolve. He wasn’t the preacher, but a deacon whose job it was to make sure the newly washed stayed under long enough for the dunking to take but not so long an ambulance was required.
I remember standing in the tub with him, waiting for the immersion, both of us wearing robes, and thinking how odd it was my principal was involved in the affair.
I knew I wasn’t his favorite student, although he was kind to me and the other kids in a way that men who have seen rough things are kind to innocents, and I regret now the problems I caused him during the rest of my checkered high school career. My regret is not for the things I did, which involved fast cars and varying degrees of misadventure with the police, but because I did not appreciate him as a good man who had been through some stuff. Please note: I use “stuff” here, but in my original draft I used something earthier, something scatological.
It was about this time of year — Easter — that my baptism occurred, although I don’t remember whether it was before or after the holiday. But I’m pretty sure the month was April. I already knew then that Easter was a holiday of spring and rebirth lifted from the pagans — which helps explain the rabbits and colored eggs — but is also tied to Passover, a moveable feast tied to the Jewish lunar calendar. So, the events that led me to declaring my belief and being briefly submerged in front of the congregation are a bit complicated.
There had been a revival in town with a preacher from Joplin as the star attraction, and I had been dragged to the event by some kids I knew. These kids were members of the church, and I believe now they saw my conversion as a kind of challenge, because my folks weren’t churchgoers (unless you count the times when I was very small when my mother would dress me up and take me with her to various Catholic churches in the area, where we would remain in the back and she would cry silently).
I never had much interest in religion except, perhaps, as an intellectual exercise, and I came to the early conclusion that one person’s religion was just another’s superstition. I had read the King James Bible and could recite some passages by heart. Sometimes when I sign books people will ask me to write my favorite Bible verse, and that’s an easy one. It’s also the shortest. John, Chapter 11. “Jesus wept.”
The summer before, I had read the absurd religious fantasy potboiler, “The Late Great Planet Earth,” by Hal Lindsey. I had been sleeping in a tent pitched in the back yard and sneaking cigarettes and reading like mad by lantern light. Did I mention I was a weird kid? But I was fascinated by this book, which was my introduction to eschatology, a subject that led me from Millerism to Christian Identity.
The premise of Lindsey’s book is that the events of the 1970s were foretold by Bible prophecy and that the return of Jesus Christ — with the believers raptured out of their everyday lives to meet their savior in the air — was imminent.
The followers of William Miller had believed something similar.
On Oct. 22, 1844, the Millerites donned robes and climbed up on high rocks and rooftops to await their savior. A few other dates had been previously suggested, based on intense and sometimes nonsensical study of scripture, but many were confident the world would end in the early morning hours on that date in October.
The day became known as “The Great Disappointment.”
A part of me wanted to believe the fantasy spun in “The Late Great Planet Earth,” but the better part of me said it was hokum. But then this preacher from Joplin came and some older kids I wanted to be friends with invited me to the revival. I felt something at the revival, although it might have simply been a manifestation of how badly I wanted to fit in with this crowd, which included a somewhat older girl I had a crush on. In any event, I declared my belief — sincere in the moment — and not long after found myself getting dunked by my high school principal.
After the baptism — or was it the revival? — I remember standing on those great concrete steps beneath a canopy of spring stars shivering a bit in the chill wind and talking to my new friends. This older girl, the one I mentioned before, told me how proud she was of me and gave me a warning.
“The devil is going to come around,” she said. “He’s going to try to talk you out of your belief. He’ll use every trick in the book. But you have to resist, even though you’re still just a poor boy.”
Those may not have been the exact words she used, but close enough.
I nodded my understanding, but beneath those April stars I could already feel a gulf opening between reality and desire. It didn’t take the devil to come calling, it just took the well-meant words of somebody who both believed in this stuff and took it for granted I was beneath her. I don’t know if she meant “poor” in the sense of unfortunate or beneath her class, but it didn’t really matter.
By the time I reached the bottom of those long concrete stairs, I knew I wouldn’t be back in any regular way to that or any other church. The theater of immersion didn’t stick, at least not in making me a churchgoer, but if pressed for a religion I’ll say “Baptist” because of the dunking — although agnostic is closer to the truth. When I’m writing, a King James version is never far from hand, mostly for reference.
The point of this rather long story about my baptism at 14 is this: Never once did politics enter the conversation. At no point did the preacher from Joplin or the one at the Baptist Church or my high school principal ask my political beliefs, attempt to persuade me that it was unpatriotic to belong to one of the two major political parties, or try to tell me that America was a Christian nation. To be clear, this was during the Vietnam War. I was too young for the draft, but there was every reason to believe the war would last long enough for my number to come up. Oh, President Richard Nixon had played to the evangelicals all right, but I never recall the political pressure filtering down to the revivals and church sermons.
Contrast that with today.
At no point did the preacher from Joplin or the one at the Baptist Church or my high school principal ask my political beliefs, attempt to persuade me that it was unpatriotic to belong to one of the two major political parties, or try to tell me that America was a Christian nation.
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– Max McCoy
There are some who would have you believe America is, or should be, a “Christian nation.” They have misrepresented the intentions of the founders so badly they would have you believe that Adams (both of them) and Hamilton and Paine helped bring forth a nation where Jesus gave us the Constitution, sort of like Moses handing down the Ten Commandments.
There’s a painting by Jon McNaughton called “One Nation Under God” that depicts Christ holding the Constitution with a host of figures — from George Washington to Christa McAuliffe — in a circle around him, with the U.S. Capitol and the Supreme Court in the background. Oh, Satan’s in the painting too, as a dark hooded figure hovering over entertainment and the “news media.”
This view of the founding gets history dead wrong, as Thomas Jefferson and his brothers and sisters in liberty were Deists, meaning they placed “reason over revelation” and rejected orthodox Christian dogma such as the virgin birth and the resurrection.
Nearly one in three Americans believe the federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation, according to a 2023 poll and many others like it. Unsurprisingly, this belief is strongest among Republican evangelicals, part of the base that put Donald Trump in the White House in 2016 and seeks to return him in November.
This desired erosion of separation of church and state was once the realm of extremists like the Ku Klux Klan or terrorist Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh was one of the conspirators who blew up a federal building in Oklahoma in 1995, killing 168 people. He was an adherent of Christian Identity, an antisemitic movement that holds only white people are the true chosen of God and that Armageddon will be fought in the American Midwest.
Christian Identity came out of much older traditions, going back through Gerald L.K. Smith and Father Charles Coughlin to British Israelism. What ties Christian nationalism to extremists like McVeigh and the others, and makes it a danger to democracy, is the belief that America is the result of Bible prophecy and should be led only by the faithful. This point of view is no longer confined to the far right fringe, but has lied its way into the mainstream. Mike Johnson, the current speaker of the U.S. House, has an “Appeal to Heaven” flag — the widely-recognized symbol for Christian nationalism — outside his office door.
Just in time for Easter, Trump is selling something called the “God Bless the USA Bible,” a King James version complete with Constitution and the lyrics to the Lee Greenwood country hit. It’s a steal at $60 bucks. This from a guy who held the Good Book like it was on fire during a photo op in 2020 at Lafayette Square.
All of this is simply madness.
Being a Christian must not be regarded a prerequisite for being an American. The First Amendment, in its Establishment and Free Exercise clauses, protects us from the establishment of a state religion and also guarantees our right to practice the faith of our choice — or not. Freedom of religion also means freedom from religion.
Yet, one of our major political parties is racing down that path and embracing a coalition of Christian nationalism that encompasses not only the old-guard religious right but also political extremism and the conspiracy fantasists of QAnon/MAGA world. They get by with this because most of us defer to religion. They also get by with it because we have lost our capacity for nuance. We have turned political discourse into a grimly absurd spectacle of ignorance.
The Trump Bible, the Jesus paintings and the “Appeal to Heaven” flags are all symptoms of a disease, which left untreated, will prove deadly to democracy. That disease is a fatalism that we are living in the end times, that all is about to be brought a conclusion, and any further progress is unnecessary.
The problem, as the Millerites discovered, is what happens on the morning after the trumpets don’t sound.
The trumpets may or may not call for each of us, individually. As a long-lapsed Baptist, I have no idea what awaits in the undiscovered country. If your faith is strong, if it brings you comfort, then well done you. But don’t inflict your faith on me. Leave us doubters to find our own truths. I suspect that whatever good or bad we do here on earth will be rewarded — or go unnoticed — right here on earth.
So, did that baptism all those years ago do me any good?
Of course it did.
Standing on those concrete steps in front of the First Baptist Church, looking up into a sky full of April stars and standing on the edge of a great disappointment, my journey limning the edges of faith and fact began.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
Excerpts or more from this article, originally published on Kansas Reflector appear in this post. Republished, with permission, under a Creative Commons License.
