SAGLRROILYBYGTH: If you want small, unsatisfying, boring meals, don’t come to Dayton. As far as I can tell, thanks to hospitable hosts, life in Dayton is a steady stream of fantastic meals and challenging, thought-provoking conversation. At a talk yesterday at the University of Dayton about the connections between white evangelicals and “Make-America-Great-Again” patriotism, one grad student brought up an absolutely essential point. Namely, when it comes to understanding fundamentalist politics, we can’t leave out Satan.

We’ve talked about this topic recently when it comes to the specific topic of creationism. As I’m arguing in my upcoming book about creationism, secular folks like me have often misunderstood the nature of creationist thinking. We have assumed that creationists are making decisions based on secular reasonings. We forget that many creationists understand the world in supernatural terms, at least in some measure. When we do, we give up any chance of really understanding radical creationist thought.

The same is true for understanding the politics of conservative evangelical intellectuals.

From the Bob Jones University archives…

In my talk yesterday, I tried to explain the long tradition of MAGA patriotism among white evangelical intellectuals and academics. Today’s leading evangelical intellectuals often don’t like the idea, but in the twentieth century evangelical higher education was firmly committed to the notion that their schools would teach a certain sort of defiant, nostalgic patriotism.

One graduate student—a self-identified “recovering fundamentalist”—brought up a key idea: If we really want to understand how conservative evangelicals could combine their faith so tightly with their nationalism, we need to remember the supernatural context. Especially in the twentieth century, this student pointed out, the cold war often took on the shape of an apocalyptic showdown between the Soviet Union and the United States.

How to mix church and country, Bob Jones style…

For many fundamentalists at the time, the supernatural connections were too obvious to need explaining. The Soviet Union was the political incarnation of Satan. It was a nation and empire wholly guided by the devil’s machinations. Its goals were nothing less than both worldly and eternal domination.

It wasn’t much of a leap, then, to mix together a patriotic faith in the United States with a religious devotion to evangelical Christian values. Defending traditional Americanism was entirely equal to defending true evangelical religion, and vice versa. When the eternal mixed so profoundly with the national, it was not at all difficult or unusual for white fundamentalists to mash together their religious faiths with their patriotic fervor.