Rob Reiner is deluded about 'Christian nationalism'
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Give Rob Reiner this much: he’s always known how to capitalise on a trend.
On December 7, the outspoken Democrat announced that “God and Country,” a documentary about the left’s boogeyman du jour, will be hitting theaters in February just in time for election season. “Christian Nationalism is not only a danger to our Country,” Reiner assured his 2.5 million X followers, “it’s a danger to Christianity itself.” This raises the question of what exactly Reiner thinks Christian Nationalism is.
The two-minute trailer that accompanied his announcement failed to provide a definition, but an interview he gave to the Hollywood trade publication Deadline last year provides clues. In it, Reiner says that Christian Nationalism is reflected in “stacking the Supreme Court.” By that he apparently did not mean Congressional Democrats’ 2021 push to expand the Court from nine to 13 justices, but Republicans doing what they had every right to do when they held control of both the White House and Senate – fill SCOTUS vacancies. Did Reiner think Republicans were obligated to appoint and confirm progressive atheists like himself instead of the three conservative Christians they chose?
Reiner also cited the overturning of Roe v Wade as evidence that Christian Nationalism poses a grave danger to our body politic. In that case, the term appears to mean religious people making use of the same Constitutional remedies – freely speaking, freely associating, and electing candidates who promise to enact their preferred policies – that secularists do. How dare they!
Near the end of his Deadline interview, Reiner offered one more piece of evidence that a feral form of Christianity threatens American safety. He blamed Christian Nationalism for the mass shooter who killed ten black victims in Buffalo, New York, in May, 2022. Speaking of the murders in light of his film, Reiner said, “That’s part of it…We want this [film] to be out in October as we want people to understand the trajectory, so we’ll probably have to fold this [shooting] in somehow.”
Except, the New York Attorney General’s investigative report into killer Payton Gendron’s online activities never mentioned Christianity or Christian beliefs as a possible motive. In its extensive detailing of his manifesto, his private diary, and his social media posts, the report noted only that Gendron “explicitly touted his fear of ‘ethnic replacement,’ ‘cultural replacement,’ and ‘racial replacement’ based on a combination of declining white birthrates and ‘[m]ass immigration and higher fertility rates of immigrants.’” His hatred of Muslims and Jews was also noted throughout, but not whether he had any religious beliefs of his own.
Still, the “God and Country” trailer did feature one particularly frightening scene that suggested Christians can be public menaces. In it, a gray-stubbled man is being wrestled into submission by no fewer than four officers at what appears to be some sort of seminar venue.
It turns out, though, that Jon Tigges, the man being arrested for trespassing, was a Loudoun County dad who was at a school board meeting to speak out against the district’s new policy of allowing biological males into girls’ bathrooms. Hundreds of other parents also attended the event to raise objections to the rule, and, in an attempt to shut them down, the superintendent tried to cancel the meeting before they could speak. It would later be revealed that only a few weeks prior a transgender boy had raped a girl in a Loudoun school bathroom, suggesting the parents had been quite right to be alarmed.
Where did Reiner and his filmmaking team get the idea that Tigges was a Christian Nationalist? Perhaps because after a circuit court judge dismissed all charges against him and ruled that the superintendent had violated Tigges and the other parents’ First Amendment rights to speak and assemble, Tigges posted on social media, “My thanks to God for justice.”
The source material for Reiner’s film, the book “Power Worshippers” by left-wing journalist Karen Stewart, is no more insightful. It, too, cites opposition to abortion and LGBTQ ideology (as well as the temerity of some Christians to fund causes they find worthy just like other Americans do) as indicators of the dreaded religious affliction.
And what of Reiner’s experts, the progressive academics featured so prominently in his trailer? The examples of Christian Nationalism some of them offer are so broad that even the late Queen Elizabeth had a brush with it. The way historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez uses the term is elastic enough to encompass Billy Graham, who she accuses in her book, “Jesus and John Wayne,” of “wedding patriarchal gender roles to a rising Christian nationalism.”
The inescapable conclusion is that average Christian beliefs and average Christian engagement in the public sphere is exactly what Reiner and his abettors hope to target. They want to shame followers of Jesus from taking part in the very same political activities their secular counterparts do and convince everyone else that there’s something uniquely insidious when they do. To my fellow believers tempted to buckle under this derision, I’ll remind them of the counsel of 2 Timothy 1:7--God has not given his children a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. And we should never let a smear campaign convince us to stop using them.
