White Christian Nationalism as Heresy: A Conversation with John Fanestil

Why do so many Americans believe the U.S. is God’s chosen nation? And how did Protestant ideas of martyrdom, land ownership, and war shape the founding of our democracy?

In this episode, Will and Josh sit down with Dr. John Fanestil, a United Methodist pastor, historian, and author of American Heresy, to explore the deep roots of white Christian nationalism in early English Protestant colonization. Fanestil traces how ideas about land, race, and theology became embedded in the American story—and how those ideas still echo today, particularly in the rhetoric of political leaders like Donald Trump.

From George Washington’s land grabs to Jefferson’s complex faith, Fanestil offers a compelling look at how Protestant theology shaped America’s founding myths—and how nationalism, racism, and religious triumphalism became bitter fruits of that legacy.

🧑‍🏫 Guest Bio:

John Fanestil is an ordained United Methodist pastor, historian, and author of American Heresy: The Roots and Reach of White Christian Nationalism. A Rhodes Scholar, he holds degrees from Dartmouth College, Oxford University, Claremont School of Theology, and a PhD in history from the University of Southern California, specializing in religion and early American history. He currently works on cross-border reconciliation efforts through FriendshipPark.org.

🔗 Resources & Links:

• Get a signed copy of American Heresy: johnfanestil.com
• Learn more about Friendship Park: friendshippark.org
• Book Mentioned: American Heresy: The Roots and Reach of White Christian Nationalism (Fortress Press, 2021)

Transcript

0:17

Hey, welcome back, Faithful Politics listeners and watchers. I'm your political host, Wright, and I'm joined by your ever faithful, faithful host, Pastor Josh Bertram. How's it going, Josh? And today we have with us, John Fannistil. Dang it. You just told me. Fannistil, right? He was a native Californian. He's an ordained United Methodist pastor, scholar of religion, early American history. a Rhodes Scholar and graduate of Dartmouth Oxford and Claremont School of Theology, which is not the Claremont Institute in case you're wondering. He earned his PhD in history from USC and wrote a a couple years ago called American Heresy, which traces the roots of white Christian nationalism to early English Protestant colonization and challenges white Christians to confront its ongoing legacy. And welcome to the show, John. So glad to have you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so, wow, what a time we, we live in. you wrote this book back in, 2023. if you could add a addendum or, or modify it, what would you change? But maybe even before that, like, tell us what the book is about and then tell us like what, what you would, you would amend it here in 2025. Yeah, the book as per, you know, most books published in 2023, it's a pain. And in that book, I was tracing the powerful motif of martyrdom and how influential that was in the shaping of American culture. You know, the roots of a lot of our most famous religious or political rhetoric from the revolutionary period is rooted in this tradition of English Protestant martyrdom. So a lot of the slogans from the American revolution, know, give me liberty or give me death. I regret that I have but one life to give for my country, live free or die. This is all language that was very deeply rooted and very powerfully resonant in revolutionary culture because it inspired people to step up and be willing to sacrifice their lives for the revolutionary cause, which they considered to be a sacred cause. So that book was published in 2021, but I didn't have anything else to do because I was shut down for the pandemic. So I turned around and tried to write a book that... took that historical stuff that I'd been, you know, I'd been moshing around in that pit for, you know, six or seven years, including the PhD work, and try to draw some connections between those deep roots of the origins of American culture and the mixing of religion and politics, which is just utterly characteristic of the Revolutionary period, and try to show how some of those roots can be traced into the flowering of the branches of our political and and public culture today. And the argument of my book, American Heresy, is that these deep roots are a tree that springs forth both sweet and bitter fruit. There are good things that come from these deep roots and this unique cultural inheritance that is ours as citizens of the United States, but they're also bitter fruit and it requires discernment and confession, among those of us who count ourselves Christians. and an honest spirit of reckoning with our heritage and with our present moment to try to be faithful in the midst of, you know, the midst of times where both the sweet and bitter fruit are, you know, all around us and ever on full display. Yeah, I told you. Yeah, go ahead. good. Well, I was going to say, so writing the book, book comes published, it's 2025. Give me kind of like your assessment if you think the lessons have been learned, assuming everybody in the country read your book. Yeah, I would say, you no is the short answer. We aren't all good at learning lessons and we tend to repeat patterns. Again, I would say we repeat healthy patterns and we repeat unhealthy patterns in our public life. And the temptations of what I call the bitter fruits of this religious inheritance, which include things like, you know, an extreme form of nationalism, the presumption that the United States is the ordained instrument of God's salvation and that all other nations are inferior by their very nature. The kind of the hard boundary drawing of controlling borders and controlling land, which is a healthy part of creating an orderly society, but also lends itself to kind of demonizing those on the other side of borders. These kinds of, again, these things that cut both ways. So, I look around and I do see if My own assessment is that the Trump administration, just to name it, is really tapped in very deeply into some of these bitter fruits and is very adept at conjuring the religious heritage of our nation, but often does so in a way that invites people to indulge themselves in the lesser, less noble parts of ourselves instead of the more noble parts of ourselves. You know, that might be true of any presidential administration. I don't believe any political candidate or any political administration can ever fully embody God's will for us in this life. But I do see some specific dangers to the current administration and the politics that they practice as a matter of course. Yeah, I would love to dig into that a little bit more. Even this concept of bitter fruits, like what do you mean bitter fruits? Dig in a little bit deeper for us on understanding what is bitter about them. What's the difference between the good fruits and the bitter fruits? Like how is it that on one hand it can produce these great fruits? This, and I assume part of that has to do with just kind of this underlying moral agreement among people, a certain moral standard that creates some kind of unity that creates a cultural unity there and then really a way to be sustained in democracy. mean, correct any of that. Right. But then there's this negative, this bad bitter fruit. So how do we distinguish them and where? Yeah, I'm really curious on how you see this being displayed and manifested right now in the current administration. Sure, and in each chapter of the book, there are six chapters, each one does one of these compare and contrasts. It taps a deep, it's really in some respects a systematic theology. Each book is a kind of a theological reflection on early American history. And then I surface one of these themes and then I show how that deep root gives rise to both sweet and bitter fruit. So just as for example, chapter one, I talk about the way that, and I'm really focusing on English Protestant culture or. European Protestant culture, most of the early colonists who came across the Atlantic and became the colonies that eventually became the United States, the overwhelming majority of those were Protestant folks. They were deeply shaped by their Protestant inheritance. so the theology of the book, if you will, is focused on the, and I'm not saying that's all there is in American culture by any stretch, but it's by far the dominant culture of early American history. And so the book is very much a Protestant book and a reflection on. the legacy, the Protestant legacy that is ours as a nation. And so for instance, these early English Protestants, had a very specific way of understanding the nature of God's creation. And that was partly drawn from the biblical account of creation, of course, but it was also profoundly influenced by their own English cultural tradition, like the tradition of English common law. And they were unaware of that distinction. They weren't sophisticated Bible scholars. They brought their English cultural assumptions to the text, like we all bring our assumptions to the text. But they just sort of assumed that was their way, was the right reading of the Bible because they didn't know any other way to read it. So for instance, English common law had very specific assumptions about property. I'll just give you a real nutshell description of that. And this is what I kind of try to trace out in that first chapter of the book. The English understood that to bring order to creation was to take what was called the commons, common lands, and to fence it off and create. And once you fenced it off, it became private property. You separated it from the commons. You put a perimeter around it, usually a fence. And once you had done that, it became your property. And from that point forward, you cleared it and you planted it for what they called settled farming or farming or settled agriculture. And that that was a natural and a natural, a human way of bringing order to God's creation. And when people didn't conform to those expectations, they thought people were violating God's laws. So when they came across the Atlantic and began to establish, for instance, private farms in New England or plantations in colonies like Virginia, and they began to establish perimeters around those land holdings. You know, they didn't have, it was a new world for everybody. They didn't have the wherewithal to understand Native American practices of land use, just like the Native Americans didn't have a way of understanding English uses of, these were completely, know, alien cultures, no way of understanding each other. So once they'd put a, you once they'd taken land, which they thought was being unused, because nobody was farming it, it must be, you know, part of the commons, they didn't understand native practices, for instance, of seasonal hunting and forest husbandry and all the rest. And then when native peoples continued to cross over the boundaries that they had drawn after they'd cleared their field, well, they thought the natives were trespassing, which they considered immoral and illegal. The native peoples didn't understand that concept, of course, and so that is source of an enormous amount of the conflict between these early English colonists and the native peoples of North America is this fundamentally different understanding of land use and of what it means to bring order to creation. So the sweet fruit of that is that this English tradition, which is still very much shapes our understandings of property and American jurisprudence and American law, it's very fruitful in the sense that it facilitates the creation of an orderly society. I've lived briefly, I've traveled in Central America widely, and I've been in disorderly societies. I'm telling you, most human beings, if you could choose between living in disorder and order, you'd prefer order, I can tell you. And so that's a sweet fruit, the tradition of law and order, the tradition of private property, the orderly use of resources, this practical matters of stewarding the land in an orderly way. The sinister side of that, the bitter fruit, is that presumption that anybody who doesn't adhere to those standards that we set must inherently be evil. And the English, of course, came to conclude, they arrived with very fanciful notions about evangelizing the Indians, but it didn't take them too long to really conclude that the Indians were savages. That because they didn't understand this way of using the land, they persisted in using the land in ways that did not conform to English expectations. And the English came to demonize them and ultimately concluded that they were subhuman because they didn't conform to these English cultural expectations. So yeah, that's a nutshell of this. There's positive sweet fruit to this tradition of order. and law and order. The dark side though is the temptation to demonize any who don't conform to it and to presume that those who would trespass, so to speak, on lands or properties that we conceive to be our own, that those people must necessarily be savage, must necessarily be even evil, or at worst be somehow less than fully human. And I'm afraid both of those impulses are very alive in our culture today. Yeah, it seems like they are. You know, I've never heard it explained that way. That is so like enlightening to me to think about how this issue of land and it came down to differences in how the natives and the English viewed land and viewed how it should be treated and parsed out and then even differences in morals like Hey, once they cross this line, this is trespassing. It's immoral and moving. So it's like it's and I think the reason that's fascinating to me is because you get this sense like that both sides just came together and they kind of immediately maybe they demonized each other from the beginning or maybe the English came and they just wanted to exterminate. And yet that seems like, you know, or wanted to, you know, bring like basically capture. all these people and bring a lot of chaos and destruction. And of course, there could have been those motivations, no doubt, but it makes a lot of sense that like these were people trying to live their lives, do the best that they could with what they knew and then deep levels of misunderstanding create issues. the English and Europeans routinely referred to this as the new world, know, as if nobody lived there previous, but it was truly a new world for everybody, this deep and there had been, you know, really actually a couple of centuries of explorers and, know, kind of, you know, kind of... remote or one-off navigations to North America from the European continent. But this settling of North America or the peopling of North America by these European colonists brought about an encounter between cultures. remember, this is a great diversity of cultures on both sides. Many European nations, many native tribes, each with their own particular rift and... cultural distinctives, right? Things that made them different from even their own neighbors. But this monumental encounter across the Atlantic was totally unprecedented and neither side was equipped at all to make sense of how the other was conducting themselves. Another classic illustration of this is the way they practiced war. Native peoples were very, many of the native peoples in North America were war-faring nations, but they fought war to acquire captives, not to acquire land. Again, not lacking a common understanding of property that the land could even be owned was really alien to a lot of native people's thoughts. So typically, know, native war practices included things like raids and captive taking. And that included a bunch of practices that involved, you know, slaughtering some in order to gain captives of others. And then English, of course, thought this was just barbaric. They had no experience with this kind of warfare and they couldn't make sense of it. And it seemed utterly just cruel. and even, again, kind of demonic. So the portrayals of these early Native raids, like there were famous narratives in early American English colonies called the captivity narratives, and it's about Indians who took captives from the colonists. And they portrayed the Indians in these, again, demonic ways because that practice of war seemed. so bizarre and inhuman. Well, the same went for the native folks who didn't understand the notion that the English were warfaring to try to acquire land and would presume that if they routed an English settlement... that they then, that that piece of land would forever be off limits to the native peoples again, which was the English assumption. Hey, we kicked your ass in the war and you should never again darken this territory. Again, native people simply couldn't have anticipated that. So you end up with these real powerful conflicts that turn into large scale wars. The great American war before the American Revolution was called the French and Indian War. That was the English against the French and the Indians. The French and the Indians have, in many instances, formed kind of alliances and, you know, a major player in that. In fact, the fellow who kind of kick started that French and Indian War was George Washington. He was then in the Virginia colonial militia and he was out scouting new lands and kind of charting the perimeter of the Virginia colony. The native peoples in that area, your neck of the woods, actually had a nickname for George Washington. They called him the town destroyer because he was known for his aggressive predatory land holding practices. So George Washington and the other colonists and the Virginia militia are out there pushing out the perimeter of the colony, drawing these hard boundaries, setting up forts, trying to ensure a perimeter, what they consider to be a safe or secure perimeter to their colony. And they were evicting people from, native peoples from lands that they had traveled and migrated and hunted and farmed in a different manner for centuries. So again, they see a deep rooted conflict of misunderstanding, cultural misunderstanding. And what we today might call, what do you want to call it, cross-cultural competence or something like that, that wasn't really, that was really a big part of the agenda for any of these folks in the 17th and 18th centuries. That's really, really cool. I'm like, you've, you've like set off something inside of me. I'm that after this conversation, I'm probably going to be reading a bunch of stuff because like, that just sounds really fascinating to me. And like, I didn't know that, that story about George Washington and the land thing. know, speaking about, you know, maybe having some clarity with, with culture. I want to kind of. maybe fast forward to the future where we hear the term Christian nationalism a lot. More specifically, we hear it framed as like white Christian nationalism. You made a comment earlier talking about theological heresy and I know in some of your writings you've maybe combined the two. So I'd love for you to talk. First, why is it white Christian nationalism? Because I do think that is something that a lot of people have questions about. They don't know if it's just a progressive thing, always making things about race. But then also, why is white Christian nationalism a theological heresy? Yeah, so I go along with the school of thought, is pretty widespread, that white Christian nationalism is best understood as a story, a systematic story about the American founding and about the American nation. The presumption that it is the unique and divine instrument of God, the presumption that all other nations have a lesser calling, the presumption that the nation is intended to fulfill the... a particular reading of the Christian Gospels and ultimately to become the instrument of the fulfillment of the end of times as forecast in the Bible's book of Revelation. So a story about our nation and the presumption that a particular reading of the Bible can tell us everything we need to know about our nation, its past, present, and future. That story about our nation is what I would call Christian nationalism. And it's rightly, I believe, identified as white Christian nationalism because another part of this unfolding, this founding of our nation, this is not news to anybody or it shouldn't be, is that part of, as the English colonists formed this nation, they did harden and develop hardened categories of race. African slaves became denoted as black, native peoples became denoted as red. and American, European, folks of European descent, people that look maybe something like me and Josh, began, and this was not, this was kind of new, began to be denoted as white over and against the black and the red neighbors or residents of the land. So there was a racial consciousness that emerged in conflict with both native peoples and with African slaves and their descendants. And that white consciousness very much influenced and shaped the founding of our nation. you know, some people call it America's original sin, the sin of slavery or the sin of, you know, you know, quasi or actual genocidal practices, vis-a-vis native peoples, whatever you want to, however you want to characterize those early conflicts in our nation's history, they did create an identity and fashion a narrative, which I and many others, you know, think is accurately described as white Christian nationalism. My own particular spin on this, I call white Christian nationalism a distinctly American Protestant brand of Christian heresy. And I call it a Christian heresy because it's a systematic theology. know, other, and there some great books out there that refer to idolatry, Andrew Whitehead's American Idolatry. My understanding, idolatry is something that all of us human beings are susceptible to. You know, the temptation to make things that we care about an idol and to elevate them and make them our primary commitments over and above even our commitment to God, that's idolatry. We're all susceptible to it. very part of the human condition, part of the Ten Commandments. It's part of the Ten Commandments because that's part of what means to be human, is to be emptied by these powerful forces in our life that want to capture our attention and capture our devotion. But when you put together a whole systematic linking of practices and theology or beliefs and stories, you create what I would consider a heresy, which is to say a systematic teaching that really does not fulfill the the demands of the gospel that runs counter to the essential demands of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And so my book is, along with others again, is a denunciation of this form of Christian heresy, which is shaped by our American Protestant inheritance. What I try to do in each chapter of the book, I conclude with a little self-reflection because I don't believe that this is something that, that white Christian nationalism is something that only, only a bunch of other white folks out there are susceptible to. I think I, my life is profoundly shaped by this inheritance. I think all of us who live in this culture in some ways are shaped by it. And in that regard, it's a temptation not just for any particular political party or any particular racial group even, or certainly not any particular ideological profile. This white Christian nationalism is a cultural inheritance that's all around us. It's in some respects the... the air we breathe and the water we swim in. And all of us have to be aware of it. And I try in the book to adopt a little bit of confessional tone to acknowledge the ways in my life where my life has been shaped by this and where I've maybe not lived up to my own high aspirations with regard to my cultural inheritance, which is, I'm a white Protestant on one side by way of Germany and a white Protestant on the other side by way of Scott. Scotland, Ireland, know, the Scots-Irish. And I count that cultural heritage a real blessing. I count myself extremely fortunate and blessed to have been born into the family I was born into. But as I look back through my life and the life of my ancestors, I don't pretend that we lived out the gospel fully in our lives and that we weren't ourselves, you know, privileged and at times fell prey to the temptations of this way of thinking. Josh, this seems like a really good time if you wanted to just talk about your cultural history. I'm always poking him about. I won't give it away if Josh doesn't want to disclose. Oh, that's fine, dude. We've already talked about it a thousand times on this podcast. yeah, I'm sorry. don't know it, Josh. Feel free to give me a nutshell if you like. Your call. Sure. No, mean, I just and my family's from the South, you know, my so racial issues are deeply embedded in my family's history in Alabama and then in the Midwest and from, you know, from England and from that whole area. And so, yeah, that's like all of my genetics is from northwest Europe and. So yeah, I we're kind of like the center of like, you know, that whiteness and, and yeah, so it's in deep roots in the South. I've watched many a story, I imagine you have as well, folks from the South, or white folks grappling with the history of their families slave-owning and slave-holding, right? In my instance, my family were not from the South, they were not slaveholders. But my folks, my German side, which is where the name Vanistel comes from, were beneficiaries of the Homestead Act. These were German settlers who... They actually came by way of Russia, that's another long story, but they came to the US in the 1860s when the US government was making land available to landholders. And this is at the same, and my folks moved into Kansas and acquired land that turned into very fruitful cattle land and became a part of a growing cattle business that was handed down and that I'm an heir of a thriving cattle business. Well, that was at the same time that the US government was failing to fulfill its promises to give 40 acres and a mule to emancipated African slaves. So our government, the US government, was on the one hand giving white settlers free land and pretty much free reign, and also rights to that land over against the native peoples who still had claim to it. So it was really a land grab and a power grab. and a wealth delivery system propagated by the federal government very transparently. At the same time, the federal government was systematically denying those kinds of privileges to others. So, you know, my grandfather who was the cattle rancher and who I love dearly and his generation and his parents and grandparents, you know, I, again, very proud and blessed to be a part of that family, but I also recognize how much they were a part and much of it beyond, you know, These weren't decisions that they were driving, but they were decisions that they were benefiting from. You how much their wealth and their family history was shaped by this history, which again, I believe can be rightly traced to a spirit of white Christian, not just a spirit, but a practice, a practice of white Christian nationalism. Yeah, I mean, I totally get that. And my family certainly was beneficiaries of the same cultural milieu, right, that was there. There's no doubt. I don't think they owned slaves, but I don't know. That's what I was always told, but I never, I don't know, I'm not even sure how to figure that out. I guess I'd have to go deep into the, you know, the records or look and try to see is any Bertram want to purchase, you know what I mean, record or anything like that. And I don't know. And far back, Josh, how far back do your folks go? you know when they arrived in the? my grandfather traced Bertram's all the way to Jamestown. So they've been here at some level all the way since the beginning. And so it's like... fascinating stuff, again, I don't know when your family ended up in Virginia or if they did, but some fascinating stuff about how lot of poor white folks were very, actually lived their lives very close with poor or African folks, both slave and free. So it wasn't always the case that the whites were slaveholders and slave owners. Sometimes they actually intermingled quite intimately, including in that area of religion, of course. which is how so much of black Christianity, African-American Christianity was shaped so powerfully by particular readings of the gospel. And so this intermingling of Africans religious practices and Christian religious practices was part of this. And that changed over time. These things change over time, of course, always. And there was a period of time leading up to the American Revolution when the system of slavery hardened. They call it chattel slavery, right? the system of slavery hardened and the people began to be more more separated from each other, where earlier generations had lived in much closer proximity and co-mingling together. And as they separated both the institution of slavery, hardened, and all those racial categories I mentioned earlier, kind of hardened. so these things evolve over time, and they're powerful cultural forces that those of us who are caught up in the midst of them, we're just ordinary old human beings trying to make a way in the world. And these powerful forces are shaping our lives often in ways that we're unaware of. Yes. And I think that's a crucial point that you hit on there because, you know, I we talk about white guilt. You know, we've talked about that on this show and it's hard because on the one sense you're like, well, I, know, when I'm thinking about this, I'm like, I mean, I grew up in in racism from the very time I first was aware of the word was condemned in my in my home. And now whether that was perfectly practiced, whether that was an ideal and then right. then jokes or, you know, certain ways of saying things that might, you know, imply that, you know, you know, we're superior. I don't think my parents ever intended anything like that. I'm pretty sure they didn't. But that was, you know, I'm sure that that was there. Right. And so like trying to work through what do we do? Like we've been. given only what we've been given in terms of where we've been raised, who we were born to, the privileges we did or didn't get growing up. And all those things, right, are given to us. They're not chosen by us. And then we make our choices within that matrix, within that context of trying to figure it out. And history is complicated. Even something you said to me, like you just said, where it's like, yeah, well, we're in German, but actually they came through Russia, which is a lot. Look, that just it hits me because history doesn't go the way you want it to go. And it doesn't just do whatever you think it should do. Right. People respond to incentives. There's a cheaper passage through Russia. I'm not saying that's what it was. You're free to explain that. But like then people from Germany go do that. And then other people migrate to this other place different based on different incentives and motivations and all of that. And yet in history, what we try to do is we try to crystallize everything. We try to bring things together so that we can explain it. And yet by the very process of doing that, you have to cut out enormous amounts of data, even to make sense of it, because we can't make sense of it otherwise. is a tricky business because as human beings we need categories. You can't function without categories. There's no such thing as a generic human being and therefore we all have to create categories to just make sense of our surroundings. But yeah, those categories are again, they present a certain peril because as soon as we start hardening these categories and casting people into boxes with rigid sides and bottoms and tops, you're into a very, again, I would argue that's a very human temptation. the history of racism is not unique to the United States. It's, of course, a global and human phenomenon. So it is one of those things that human beings, need categories to make sense of the world, but we fall prey to categories and end up using them as means of exclusion, means of demonization. means of dehumanizing all of the negatives that are so tempting to us. Man, that is like, that is so fascinating to me, the double-edged sword of these categories. But I want to get back to this, to like the issue at hand, right? And I would love for you to help us understand people like Jefferson, people like John Winthrop, which people have probably heard of Jefferson. Maybe they've heard of John Winthrop. Obviously, Washington, you talked about him and you talked about, right, we get this idea, well, Washington didn't tell a lie. you know what I mean, or cutting down the cherry tree or what, you know, all this crap and is it true? Is it not true? But you get this mythology around these founding fathers. But I would love you to work through, because part of what you do is you recenter on them, these characters, but their theological influence and what that reveals. What is, I would love for you to talk about the theology of Jefferson, the theology. Like how were these people theological? Because we don't tend to think of them theologically and yet now people, pastors quote them like they quote the Bible. You know what I mean? Trump quotes them like he quote like like the Bible. Maybe he thinks they wrote the Bible. Who knows? I'm not sure what what Trump thinks. Sorry, that was that was a low blow. I should. But anyway, trace this theology for me a little bit from these founding fathers and then how that how that shaped us. Yeah, very, you know, of course, again, you know, as soon as you, historians will always want to, you know, him and Hans Abels are very, you know, very complicated, a lot of different influences. So I'll make my, I need to make my own categories, right? To answer your question. But, you know, one way of doing it, this is a old, a little bit old school for academic historians, but, know, it serves its purpose is to understand, maybe think of three, three streams of Protestantism that kind of colonized North America. You know, the Puritans. up in New England, the Quakers in say Philadelphia, and then the Anglicans, the Church of England, know, folks in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, that kind of, you your neck of the woods. And those are all three branches, if you will, of the Protestant family tree. They were all protesting against the established authorities back in Europe, against the Roman Catholic Church, or against the Church of England, when, you know, some of these folks felt the Church of England was too, you know, vulnerable to the influence of the Pope in Rome. or when there were Catholics on the throne of England. mean, for English Protestants, was just the, you know, that was the worst, worst of all possible worlds. So these folks were all protesters, right, Protestant, and they all came with a very deep conviction to religious liberty, but they practiced that religious liberty in different ways. But they shared a kind of a common, and over time as those colonies, you know, got closer and closer in touch with each other, like through the 18th century, the buildup to the American Revolution, know, communications technology improved, they started to... churn out books and newspapers and pamphlets and flyers and they start, the communication between the colonies got much better so they started talking to each other. Instead of, you know, it used to be that the colonies were really kind of like spokes on a wheel, always, always related back to London, but more and more the colonies were starting to talk to each other and they kind of fashioned what some scholars call a kind of an American Protestant vernacular. This is a way of talking a kind of a general Protestant language that would work across all these boundaries. and you'd be able to buy in the New Englanders with their Puritan heritage and the Quakers in Pennsylvania and their heritage and the Anglicans and other, and more than that. again, French, know, French Huguenots, the Dutch in New York, on and on and on, right? But there was this kind of Protestant, and Benjamin Franklin was a master of this, right? Which is how he turned into, you know, the kind of the Elon Musk of the 18th century. He was like the scientific inventor and, you genius, but also this huge media mogul. with his books and his almanac and his publishing house. And he mastered this kind of language that talked about the Protestant culture as kind of the norm. And that Protestant culture was very much a oppositional culture. You were opposed to some things. You were opposed to the pope. You were opposed to the agents of the pope in North America, specifically the French and the Spanish, right? Those folks were, they were instruments of the pope and the pope was the instrument of Satan and you know it was a straight line for them to that kind of thinking. So a very oppositional character, very typical American, know, very opposed, right? We're opposed to anything that smacks of foreign influence and somebody trying to exercise their power over us. So this Protestant American culture was shaped in that kind of crucible and that war I mentioned, the French and Indian War, was where really was the first time that from across the colonies, the militia from across those different colonies came together to fight against the French and the Indians. And that was an explicitly holy war, man. You go back into the sermons that were preached and the way the militia were mobilized out, it was like we're good Protestants and we're going to fight the demonic Catholics and their, you know, satanic agents of, you know, in North America who are the French and the Indians. was, not exaggerating by any stretch. It's very transparent and very clear. This was a religious war of Protestant English folk or Protestant European folk against the Catholic Pope and his agents in North America, being the French and the Indians. Well, as the revolution rolled around, they shifted their animus from the Pope to the King of England. King George III became kind of a convenient substitute, and all those same impulses were very powerfully at play in the revolution. They perceive King George III in the Declaration of Independence, they call him a tyrant. Well, why did they call him a tyrant? Because in this language of Protestantism, a tyrant is the one you fight to the death. It's where you get to prove your mettle. And you ultimately prove your mettle by willing to go risk your life against it, by willing to become a martyr to the cause. So by characterizing King George III as a tyrant, And by saying, you know, we pledge our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor, that's the conclusion of the Declaration of Independence. It's really a call to martyrdom, a call for these English Protestant folks in the colonies, basically the sons and grandsons of the men who had fought in that French and Indian War to go to war against the new threat. This time it was King George III and to be willing to risk their lives for it. So that was, you know, all of these colonists, Jefferson, the major founders, familiar to us, but also a huge swath of the rank and file who joined these colonial militia were driven by a lot of these same impulses. They understood themselves to be fighting a holy war. It's very transparent in the personal testimonies of revolutionary soldiers, again, in the muster sermons where they mustered troops to go to war, in the rally sermons where they rallied the troops. Before you went to battle, you heard a good sermon and the sermon inspired you to... be willing to risk your life because it was characterized as a matter of faith, you know. And you were doing what your fathers and grandfathers had done, which had risked their lives for a sacred cause. So the American Revolution in that fashion became a sacred cause for this broad swath of these colonists across these division boundary lines that even a generation or two before, you know, would have been real unsurmountable hurdles. You know, they found this kind of common cause, which is a language drawn from some of these sermons and made very popular by the famous American historian Robert Middelkopf, common cause was kind of a Protestant cause in North America that gave shape to the American Revolution. So each founder, of course, is his own person, our famous founders I'm talking, is his own person, and they change over time. The Jefferson of 1776 who wrote the Declaration of Independence is not the same Jefferson of 1820. You he lived a long life. They evolved over time. And typically my experience is that people tend to read back into Jefferson, you know, like we hear, well, he was a deist and he was a rationalist and he was an enlightenment thinker and therefore the presumption is that he wasn't very Christian. Well, sorry, not true. He was a deep, you know, founded the University of Virginia. He was a vestry member of his Anglican parish or his Episcopal parish, right? Which you had to be to be anybody in colonial Virginia. He was a devout reader of the Bible, even though he later edited it down. You may be familiar with his famous, you know, editing of the Bible. But he understood himself to be very, very profoundly shaped by his religious faith, even as he was kind of heading in a more, what today we might call a secular or enlightenment direction. But at the time of the Revolution, those boundaries between religious, the sacred and the secular, between religious and politics, By the time of American Revolution, those things hadn't really been separated out. People were kind of, it was both a religious and a political movement at the same time, the revolutionary movement. So yeah, in the book I kind of tell, I feature one or two of the most familiar founders in each chapter as a way of illustrating some of the points. But I do, as you said, I try to platform them as whole human beings, not just political actors, but also how they were shaped by their. faith and their religious context and by this changing religious environment of the late 18th century. Everything you just said is like tripping me out a little bit because like you had said something about, you know, sort of using the language and I'm totally going to butcher it. about Protestant, and, and, that, got me thinking because I. I just started reading Andrew Seidel's other book, the Founding Myth, because we just ran into him at the Summit for religious freedom a of weeks ago, or a week ago. And his book starts off talking about the terminology Judeo-Christian. And I'd never really heard that before. based on what you're saying, you were saying, OK, we had to create this new language to kind of like... characterize what type of Christian or believer you are, separate from theology, more like geographical, political, whatever. That's one data point, and I'd love to have you talk about that. then the other thing you said that shook me was how they used religion as a- unifying like force and then also frame their battles in a good versus evil which is like exactly what's happening today so so yeah i love i love for you just to kind of maybe comment on on either one of those yeah, thanks for picking up on those threads, because they're very, I think they are very important. The notion, yeah, the language of a Judeo-Christian tradition, came along much later, but it was kind of reading back, it's a later generated name or nickname, reading back into this origin of an American Protestant. The scholars call it an American Protestant vernacular. Kind of a common simplified, not too sophisticated, but not empty of content by any means, but not highfalutin, and in a language that didn't kind of trigger bells in any particular quarter of the colonies, right? So there wasn't anything in this new way of talking that set the Puritans off of New England and get them upset. And there wasn't anything that the Quakers would too strongly object to. And it was a kind of a discourse that kind of worked for everybody. And there were some famous propagators of this discourse. mentioned Franklin and some of these folks who had to publish. Well, when they, know, Franklin started his publishing empire in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, but as the, you know, again, the opportunity to get his books and almanacs and all the rest sent all over North America. Well, he had to figure out a way that these would sell to New England, you know. So he couldn't go bashing Puritans, which is, you know, his forebears might well have done or other folks from Pennsylvania might be tempted to do, because he wanted to sell them almanacs. You know, he was a... very savvy businessman. He was not about to lose a buck on taking a swipe at somebody. So he developed this way of speaking that evoked these Protestant themes that talked about the Bible and creation and God's providence was a big part of this language, the providential nature of God and the providential nature of God's work. And also the providential nature of God was seen in the wars that they fought and the victories they won over against the Native Americans, for instance. in their survival of plague, their survival of the harsh realities of this new world. All of that was reinforcement of this notion that we were coming together as a quote unquote American people with the hand of God upon us. So that way of kind of, another famous propagator was the lyricist, the hymnist Isaac Watts, whose hymns just swept the entire English speaking world, both sides of the Atlantic. and became very popular throughout North America. They became very popular in the African church and a lot of the origins of African American spirituals and hymn singing are out of that. They call it singing in the style of Dr. Watts. It was kind of a way to take language that in verse form that you could put any tune to and you could sing collectively and rhythmically and generate a really powerful emotional connection in a congregation. And it was language that it didn't sound distinctive to one particular church or another. It kind of brought everybody together. So that was a very unique time of creative, common discourse that they figured out. And it really was powerful influence in overcoming these distinctions that they'd drawn with each other in previous generations. And then, the warfaring was banned. Man, warfaring was just another very American thing, man. And I think in some aspects, you know, we talk about the crisis facing young men today, but American culture has always been kind of hardwired that, you know, the way you really become a man is you go to war, you know. That's where you prove your mettle. That's where you prove your valor. That's where you prove you're worth something and you're worthy of, you do the, you stand up, you know, you man up. You know, and if you don't have an, if there's nowhere in your life where you get to man up and show your, you know, prove your manhood. and maybe even take it like a man, right? If there's no way get to do that, then how do you fulfill your identity? How do you realize yourself or have a sense of calling and purpose in your life? I think there's a real crisis in that regard in our day, but across the East period, the early generations of American history, was pretty much men went to war and women went into childbirth. Because childbirth was also a very perilous undertaking and there was no presumption that women were going to come out. on the other side of their childbearing years because, you know, mortality and childbirth was so high. So for young people coming of age, you know, they had this very powerful sense that these were the 20s, late teens and 20s were a perilous time. You might not make it through. A lot of your peers didn't make it through. And you had to be willing to, you know, risk your life for something, a cause that was bigger than yourself, whether it was fighting a war or giving birth to a large family. And, you know, this was the way that Americans kind of proved themselves worthy. And ultimately they proved themselves worthy by risking their lives. And if they died in the pursuit of that cause, they became heralded as martyrs, right? People who witnessed to their faith, who risked their lives for the faith, and who ultimately became worthy of veneration, right? And in most of Christian history, the language of martyrdom, was prevailed and including in the early English Protestant period, know, 16th, 17th century English Protestant martyrs, mean, the martyrs were the paradigm of faith. There was no truer expression of faith than the martyrs. In the American vernacular, you know what that word became? It's patriot. A true patriot is somebody who's willing to risk his life for the cause, right? And there's a lot of sermons in this period where, you know, you could have taken the sermon straight out of the French and Indian War 30 years earlier, but instead of martyr it says patriot and it just works, you know? And the revolutionary generation who went to war in the Continental Army and then subsequent generations of Americans who fought in the War of 1812 and the Indian Wars and then US-Mexico War and on and on and on, the Civil War, right? I'm talking 100 years of early American history here, but they all were very powerfully shaped by this tradition which said, you know, There's a cause larger than yourself. It's a sacred cause and it might require that you lay down your life for it. Are you willing to step up and do as your ancestors did, as your forefathers did? And that powerful current in American culture is still at work, but we don't often have particularly healthy expressions for it. You know what I mean? So that's a legacy that again, cuts both ways. you know, great value. have, you know, veterans in my family tree who I, including some who've died in wars, and I honor their sacrifice and recognize the extraordinary sacrifice they made. And then I also see a little bit of, you know, kind of militancy. And if you don't have a worthy cause to fight for, well, maybe you better just find a cause, God damn it. And we'll go out and make it a cause. And then this temptation to turn almost any conflict into a holy war, if you're in that mentality, right? Everything becomes a... good or us or them, good or evil, insiders, outsiders, and you turn any conflict into a of a holy war even if it's not holy. That's also unfortunately a part of our history. It totally is. This idea keeps coming to me, this conversation that you might have with someone who has Christian nationalism, they've heard of it, and they're just not convinced. And they're kind of like maybe they're looking at critiques and they're saying, you know, it's just Christian values. You know, it's not, it's not Christian nationalism. It's just Christian values. What's wrong with having Christian values? What's wrong with having Christian values on a broad, you know, in a broad way and a wide application through a lot of the different, through people in the populace. Or they might think you're against patriotism. You you talked about how patriot is this word that became to come out. And basically it's within that word, that concept of your sacrifice, that you're willing to go and prove yourself, you prove your manhood, prove your commitment to God and country, things like that. And what's wrong with that? What's wrong with someone wanting to go out and prove that they love their country, that they love God, they're willing to sacrifice their life? It's a cause worth dying for, those kinds of things. And having a nation that honors God. I I used to say to people like, the closer a nation can align itself, with, you know, the God of the universe. It seems like, although, and this is how I would kind of justify this, right? I would be like, well, the closer that someone is, a nation is, that there would be some kind of blessing that maybe because you're lining yourself with the way that God has ordered the world or the way that he's ordered the universe. So the moral imperatives that God has kind of baked into reality. And so as you do that, then, then of course, like aligning yourself with the river and how the river is going. If you're going, if you're trying to get out of the river, it's going to be hard. If you're going upstream, it's going to be hard. Now let's align ourselves with the stream of what the creator of the universe is doing. And the closer a nation does that, there is no nation that's chosen by God anymore. But the closer a nation does that, they can be blessed. And maybe that still is true. the question is the definition of what is moral in... immoral. Do you see, mean, I know you understand the complicated nature of this because we're dealing with people who are trying to figure out how do I live life in the public sphere. And even at this conference that we went to, they're like, you need to be able to bring your whole person into the public, into what you're saying, into your political engagement. They made a big deal about that. And this was a what, you know, I don't know if they would consider themselves a liberal conference, but there was a And that's what I would have considered. All my conservative friends would have been consider this a very liberal conference, summit for religious freedom. That's what it was. And I enjoyed it. But I don't want to get off track. What I'm trying to say, though, is that people, how do we actually bring ourselves into the public discourse? How would you teach the church to do that? How would you teach people to do that? a couple of tricks that again I can recommend and owning my own need to reckon with these, know, practice what you preach. Preachers, it's always a tricky business for us preachers. Yeah, the trick with that aligning yourself with the Spirit of God and if things go well, that's very easy to use as a justification or rationalization for outcomes that you deem as good. Well, you won the war, it must have been a holy war. Sadly, in our hypnations history, you know, we might conclude that not all sides of the wars we fought on were the holy side or the right side. So there's a bit of humility that one has to bring to bear that you're always in the moment going to see things from a limited and narrow and human perspective. You have to be careful to check your presumptions, And the presumption that ours is always the right side is a dangerous presumption, spiritually speaking. So, know, in the midst, I'm not saying soldiers in the midst of battle have time to be, you know, checking their moral compass. They need to be fighting the fight, but just the kind of the presumption of moral sanction is the dark side of that tradition that you're talking about. And then for individuals, I think of it as a kind of a practice of, I call it reckoning and reconciliation. This is of where you reckon with your own personal and collective history and then you seek some form of reconciliation, some expression of reconciliation out of that. And that's again, often easier said than done, often difficult to practice in isolation, better practiced in community like in the body of a church or a community that shares a common practice. And these common practices, humble practices of confession, asking God's pardon, because you recognize you need God's pardon, because you haven't always read the tea leaves correctly. and you haven't always, you know, fulfilled, aligned your spirit with the flow. So, you know, those are very generic, you know, but I think a posture of humility, a posture of penance and a willingness to confess and ask for pardon, and then a willingness to pursue reconciliation, which is very hard work, or can be very hard work. Sometimes it's not as tricky as it might seem, but other times it's very hard work. And then also, and this is, you know, then to seek out leadership, both ecclesial leadership and also political leadership that embodies those practices. You know, so, you know, I'm looking for some humility. Thank you very much. I'm not finding a lot of it, I'm afraid to say. in our current public life. And I'm looking for little bit of penance and a little bit of confession and a little bit of, you know, willing to reckon with the hard parts of our nation's past and, you know, present even. And I'm looking for somebody who has a spirit of reconciliation about them and is seeking to remedy harm and build futures together as opposed to divide and conquer and beating down people and bullying people and dismissing people and diminishing people is bad Christian practice, first of all. Bad Christian practice. I'm not, maybe it's short-term political gain. But I can't believe it's in the larger public interest of our nation to be building political coalitions around those kinds of practices. It seems to me that's asking for trouble. you know, if we get that far out of alignment with that flow you were talking about, I like the river of God metaphor very much. I do believe there's a river, a spiritual river that flows toward justice. Yeah, I do too. and it flows ultimately towards a fulfillment of the kingdom, the reigning of God. So aligning our spirits with that individually, collectively, is kind of the essence of the spiritual life, trying to follow, and for those of us who claim ourselves as Christians, trying to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. If only he had left a real steady trail of prints that we can easily identify, that would have made it easy. It's not that easy. But yeah, where's that spirit in our public life today? And I certainly don't see it in the Trump administration or in the person of Donald Trump. I don't see it. I don't hear it. I don't feel it. And it makes me worried for the future of our nation. I mean... I understand. I think there's a lot of people that understand that sentiment. I'm trying to figure out how to navigate this myself. I know Will is and too and we all are. This is the water we're in now in America. So this is it. And we voted in the president. We voted in the previous one. We keep voting them in and we'll keep dealing with what they're doing. I assume we'll keep voting them in. And if somehow that changes. Josh. I don't know, dude. I mean, here's the reality, dude. I don't I don't think anyone knows what will happen. And that's and we history is so weird. As you were pointing out, it has these trends, but it's so weird. And, you know, I was thinking I really appreciate your words, John. I really appreciate your heart. I appreciate your work on this book. I think that all of us have to. work through, you know, how we're going to live out our moral lives and how we're going to live out our lives in this in this nation right now and proceed. And we are, everyone's going to, they're trying, everyone's trying to figure it out to the degree that they can. Well, I mentioned that in my book, in each chapter, kind of contrast out of a root, a bitter fruit and a sweet fruit. And so, in terms of the way forward, the sweet fruit, as I list them out in my book, are order and orderly society. We all want that, a destiny, a sense of purpose. We want to move forward and we don't want to just progress in the sense of improvement of our condition and the condition of others. innovation, characteristic of American culture, independence, and patriotism. I mean, those are, in my mind, the sweet fruit of our nation's religious and cultural inheritance. And then the shadow side are the, you know, they're right next to each other. In some respects, sometimes they're almost, they're like, you know, intertwined. It's like the person who's especially devoted to, you know, their family. might become paranoid about their neighbors. That kind of where your strength, your spiritual strength can sometimes be closely aligned to the worst spiritual temptation, right? So the dark sides are violence and nostalgia, white racism, propaganda, conspiratorial thinking and nationalism. I distinguish between patriotism and nationalism there at the end. And so that's this game, like you're saying, that we're all having to try to play and trying to live into those. Envibe, know, partake of the sweet fruit, brothers, you know, do the, live into that noble part of our heritage and be on guard about the sinister part, you know. And when the storms around are swirling, right, so much of it's about, you know, daily practice and community, you know, commitment. whether it be a church community or another community that people can find where they can, know, that feed this noble parts of themselves, that encourage the better parts, what do they call it, the brighter angels of our nature. Better angels, that's Lincoln's phrase, the better angel. And I do think we're in that kind of, you know, a time, Abraham Lincoln kind of time with the divisions, right? How do we live through this time, you know, and how do we... respond to the better angels of our nature is really, it's a big one. I'm fearful for where we're at. So. and history's looking at us and we're trying to, we're gonna do our best in it. Yeah, you did. You talked about the myth making and I'm sure we're about to close, but thanks for the conversation. I very much appreciated it. You know, that, you know, that's how nations make themselves as they tell stories about their origins. So in that regard, myth making every nation has stories to tell and how you create a bond and so forth. But it is a question, or sometimes it's a good question. You know, what do you want? What do we want our children and grandchildren to say about our generation, right? Our time, you know, how did we, how did we give shape to something, you know, that I have a little seven year old when she's 37, what will she remember of me? That's a question I wish more of us were asking, maybe a whole bunch of us are. I'm thinking about that for my kids. I want to respond in the way that honors Christ and honors others as best as I can. And we are at time, John, this has been an amazing conversation. So enlightening in so many ways. How can people get the book? mean, is there a particular place you'd like them to go? great. No, no appreciate the interest. Thanks. Yeah, you know, I do I sign I send autographed copies if somebody wants to go to JohnFanistil.com they can get one from me, but it's available everywhere And I'm not I'm mostly here in Southern California these days. My work these days is actually all on the US Mexico border And some other time if somebody wants to learn about that they could look us up at FriendshipPark.org We're an organization that's trying to create an international park on the US Mexico border a park of friendship between the peoples of the United States and Mexico. Yeah, so it's a long game. Right? Correct? That's exactly our game. Yeah. And that's another long game we're playing. yeah, if they wanted to connect with me around the US-Mexico border, they could look at friendshippark.org. If they want to learn more about the books, it's johnfanistol.com. So that's where you can find me. Well, thank you, John, so much for coming on the program. You're welcome. And we're going to put all your links in the show notes. So those who are interested, go check out the show notes on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And we appreciate you guys joining us. This has been John Fanastil. And go check out his stuff, his website. And until next time, guys, keep your conversations. wait, I need to say this. Like and subscribe, share. Please, because we want to keep getting this content out to you guys. Can't say that. Can't forget to say that, dude. So make sure, because we really work hard to do this. And this is like amazing content that like I'm getting my mind blown and I'm studying this stuff all the time. Will is studying this stuff all the time. So I guarantee something you're going to get something out of this. I promise you. So make sure you share it and listen. God bless, guys. And until next time, keep your conversations that right. We'll see you then.