About this time last year I shared an unusual religious license plate – a cross beside “REP3NT” – in a wide ranging reflection titled “It’s Lent Again.” While focusing on my Lenten journey for 2022, the piece also mentioned a number of posts from previous Lenten experiences.
Then it happened again. This past Sunday I was on my way to church to worship on the first Sunday in Lent. As I made my final roadway turn before turning into my congregation’s parking lot I saw the most unexpected thing: a Texas license plate containing an American flag beside “HESAVS.” He saves. Beside the American flag.
Christian Nationalism
I’d like to say I’m not sure what the owner of the Cadillac intended with this vanity plate since I didn’t have the opportunity to engage the driver as they continued on the road beyond my destination.
I’ll confess my initial assumptions are focused on Christian nationalism. One can select nearly any not yet claimed letters on their vanity plate and one can opt for a large number of symbols to be placed alongside those letters. This person intentionally selected the Evangelical sounding message, “he saves,” and placed it beside the American flag.
So What?
Symbols of Christian nationalism – white Christian nationalism – aren’t new (nor is the troubling ideology). And, while it isn’t often as clearly advertised as in the image above, it is all around us.
In the sermon I heard just minutes after this encounter, Rev. Dr. Neil G. Thomas, Senior Pastor of Cathedral of Hope United Church of Christ, offered the first message in a series inspired by Walter Brueggemann’s devotional book A Way Other Than Our Own. Pastor Thomas encouraged those who follow the Way of Jesus to be mindful during the Lenten journey ahead of the many competing voices in our world today, including that of empire.
More specifically, he called out Christian nationalism (begins at 34:45) and invited folks to a better way:
. . . so much of our theology comes from a white dominance and from an empire that is more concerned with replicating harm and damage than it is with offering liberation and hope. How we as people of faith remain faithful to a way other than our own – a way other than white nationalism or white Christianity . . . is to move beyond just those limitations to a God that is so big and so expansive and so majestic and so loving and so kind and so gracious that God is calling you and I to be those very vessels in the world today.