Two recent episodes provide some insight into the sensibility behind American Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism in the United States refers to the belief that the US is a “Christian nation” in the sense that the country’s laws and national identity should explicitly reflect Christian religious identity. Although American Christian nationalists hold to an identifiable set of theological and political beliefs, what I mean by a “sensibility” is the underlying, often implicit, attitudes and mindsets that help make more explicit beliefs plausible or convincing to their adherents.
The first episode occurred on July 30, when an Alaska Airlines bound from Orlando to San Diego was delayed for takeoff and the passengers were forced to wait on the plane. Whitney Lynn, a 40-year-old self-proclaimed evangelist, stood and began preaching about the salvation that comes through Jesus Christ to the passengers and crew. Soon after, Lynn was escorted off the plane and later temporarily banned from all Alaska Airline flights while the airline further investigates the matter. A video later posted by Lynn shows her referring to her removal as a form of “spiritual warfare,” and in a social media post she suggests it was a kind of “persecution.” Lynn was highlighted in a Washington Post feature, published just days before the incident, noting the growing trend of evangelical Christians preaching or singing praise and worship songs on flights. While some Christians see these preachers as evangelists effectively spreading the Gospel, many other passengers and social media posters have criticized them for forcing passengers to listen to an unsolicited message.
In the second episode, William Donahue, the president of the Catholic advocacy organization the Catholic League, published an open letter to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on August 3 urging the mayor not to participate in an upcoming commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, claiming that “your presence would clearly be divisive.” Donahue then launches into a lengthy diatribe filled with the same mischaracterizations and Islamophobic attacks that have been lobbed at Mamdani since the mayoral campaign last year, including the claim that, “You have made it very clear that you are infinitely more upset about prejudice against Muslims following 9/11 than the deadly events of that day.”
Donahue’s letter was published just over a week after the New York Post published a false story claiming that “thousands” of family members of 9/11 victims had signed a petition demanding that Mamdani be banned from the 9/11 commemoration. The petition’s organizer—who has falsely claimed that Mamdani is “a Muslim that has thoughts to get rid of all Jewish people, and to agree with 9/11”—later admitted that the New York Post’s numbers were fabricated and that he had not maintained a list of family members who had signed the petition. Even so, other news outlets like CBS News, Fox News, and the Washington Times amplified the Post’s false reporting.
What can these two episodes tell us about Christian nationalism in the United States? In his 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis introduced the somewhat cryptic maxim: “Time is greater than space.” He explains:
One of the faults which we occasionally observe in sociopolitical activity is that spaces and power are preferred to time and processes. Giving priority to space means madly attempting to keep everything together in the present, trying to possess all the spaces of power and of self-assertion; it is to crystallize processes and presume to hold them back. Giving priority to time means being concerned about initiating processes rather than possessing spaces. (#223)
Francis here suggests that we are tempted to seek control—over our personal life, the lives of others, or our community—out of a misguided need to see immediate results, when in reality authentic transformation is a long process that requires patience and humility. Pope Leo XIV made a similar point in a recent Sunday angelus address (which I first noted here), explaining that while “we sometimes expect God to do something spectacular[,] we want him to intervene from on high,” the Kingdom of God “comes like the smallest of seeds and thus calls for patience in accompanying these processes.”
Pope Francis’s formulation provides the further insight that this temptation to control often expresses itself through a desire to “possess” what he calls “spaces of power and of self-assertion.” Our need for immediate results becomes manifest, sometimes quite literally, in the demand for control over territory.
We can see Pope Francis’s insights illustrated in some intriguing ways in Whitney Lynn’s case. In an interview with the Washington Post for the above-cited feature, Lynn claims that one of the benefits of preaching on planes is “They [i.e., the passengers] have no choice but to hear the truth,” and in an earlier social media post she openly admits, “I love a captive audience.” Lynn genuinely seems to have good intentions and to desire for those who hear her to encounter Jesus Christ, but—as Pope Francis suggests—she mistakenly believes that this outcome is best achieved through “power and self-assertion” by taking control over the passengers and the space aboard the plane. She doesn’t seem to realize that an evangelical approach that allows others to freely turn away, but also to freely engage in dialogue, is ultimately more fruitful, even if it involves becoming vulnerable and giving up control over the process. This more vulnerable approach to missionary discipleship better embodies the very message of salvation and grace one is hoping to share, whereas Lynn’s aggressive approach betrays it.
