Following Christ through the fog of Christian nationalism

It’s hard to be clear-eyed about the failures of American Christianity while remaining wholly given to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In my experience, it’s easier to choose one of two options: ignore the American church’s dysfunctions or focus entirely on litigating its flaws.

I like talking to Christina and Christian Gonzalez Ho because they try to walk the line of being intensely critical and intensely faithful. I first interviewed them in 2016 for a Relevant magazine feature about helping believers make sense of the church’s post-election traumas (the linked interview was republished in 2021). During that interview, we talked about how the church can engage with our politically fraught moment. Since then, we’ve had many more conversations, some of which I’ll link at the end of this post, because the anguish and fragmentation we saw in 2016 clearly hasn’t gone away.

More crucially, the question underlying all these conversations hasn’t gone away: given all that we’ve seen, how do we continue to follow Christ?

Yi Ning: Ok, let’s start by addressing our shared backgrounds: all of us attended universities with strong visions for social justice and systems change; all of us joined churches with intensely felt convictions that Divine intervention was arriving to repair the world. I would say that we have some uncomfortable overlap with our current presidential administration, which has a vision for systemic change, and has also assumed a sort of Divine mandate for waging war and persecuting the marginalized.

This is not the outcome I wanted. Even so, I can see parallels between what our government is currently doing—aggressive reform in the Lord’s name—and the kind of action I aspired to as a progressive kid in Berkeley who participated in protests and prayer rallies with equal fervor.

All three of us still believe God is capable of intervening in human affairs. I’m guessing, however, that we’ve had to interrogate our assumption of what God wants to intervene in, and how he wants to do it. As you’ve watched things like the mainstreaming of Christian nationalism and the weaponization of Scripture, how has your understanding of God’s activity in the world changed?

Christina: I’ve actually never been a big believer in political change, which I know is a heretical thing to say in some circles. But I’ve always been too much of an idealist to be very invested in political change. I don’t like the idea of having to compromise or make backroom deals, or water down a message to gain mass appeal.

It’s true that I grew up going to conferences where people focused a lot on mass-scale divine intervention, aka revival, in America. And I was very taken with that idea in middle school, high school, and college. In my mind, revival looked like the Holy Spirit descending on an entire campus or city, and thousands of people falling to their knees and repenting and giving their lives to God. I think I saw it as a more extreme and intense version of the Harvest Crusades that I attended every year as a child. You’d sit in this huge stadium, and the speaker would give an invitation to accept Jesus, and all these people would leave their seats and go down the field, and it was a really powerful, beautiful sight to see. So that’s what I thought revival would look like. I actually didn’t think much about political reform as an engine of revival, or as a way to bring God’s kingdom. I just assumed that, if people gave their lives to the Lord, laws and systems and cultural mores would automatically start to reflect the Kingdom.

That is what has changed for me over the past decade: I no longer believe that a Christian faith and desire to enact what I define as positive social change go hand in hand. That was a painful realization to come to, and it was a direct result of seeing one evangelical leader after another fall in line behind Trump, beginning around 2015.

I wouldn’t say my understanding of how God’s presence operates in the world has changed. I still think he works through people’s obedience to him, and despite people’s disobedience to him, and in a million other complex and mysterious ways I can’t articulate or even understand. I still believe that prayer is important, and that when a person gives their life to Christ, an incredible transformation occurs, and I actually still do believe that that is the seed of all positive social change. But that alone won’t make laws and systems and nations more just or human or holistic. That’s the work of cultural change, which we try to unpack in our podcast.

Christian: Perhaps we need a clearer assessment of the kinds of change we are capable of enacting. Most of us start out with the assumption that we need to make the world a better place or place it on a trajectory for greater good, however you want to define it, and come to understand that we are not as capable or trustworthy as we thought. I think that’s a process most of us undergo as we get older. There’s disillusionment that comes from learning about things like the Vietnam War—I’m dating myself, but that was my moment—which reveal the divergence between the values we think we are promulgating and the policies we execute.

I think the conflict between what we say we want to do and what we actually produce is endemic to every human institution. It’s not just the church. I think all of us are susceptible to an “ends justify the means” mentality. We have a willingness to momentarily suspend our principles when it seems like some greater moral outcome will be realized through doing so.

Recently I was reading Galatians 3, where Paul says “Foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?...Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?” There’s something really convicting about that question. Paul is articulating the problem hovering over this discussion about human effort: It’s dangerous to think that I could come up with some foolproof rubric that is not absolutely contingent on the Holy Spirit.

The clarity we need in our assessments of ourselves, and of our circumstances, is not just an intellectual clarity. It’s a clarity that comes from recognizing that the goodness we seek is embodied in the person of Jesus Christ. It’s a clarity that aligns our body, soul, mind, and spirit around this recognition. It’s a spiritual discernment. It requires criticality, and embedding ourselves in communities that are healthy.

The reliance on the Holy Spirit and the total surrender to Christ are crucial and critical. These things are not accoutrements to Christianity. We need the entire ecology of what it means to be a believer in order to discern and know what is right, because regardless of what we want to believe about ourselves, we are often not on the side of goodness.

Yi Ning: We’re also living in a moment where Christian or Christian-curious public figures seem to be emerging on a daily basis. I try to take everyone in good faith, but this phenomenon can be confusing. People can make ardent public confessions of faith while behaving in ways that appear hostile to the teachings of Jesus. For example, I had no idea that Turning Point USA had any Christian affiliation whatsoever because I had only seen a handful of tweets by some of its affiliates, all of whom sounded ferociously partisan, and contemptuous of their adversaries. I was genuinely confused when I saw the headlines about the religious significance of Charlie Kirk’s death—up until that point I had assumed that Turning Point USA and the people who ran it were exclusively interested in political victories.

How do you retain your criticality in these moments while remaining tender to the possibility that many people could be sincerely looking for God?

Christina: I am naturally suspicious whenever I hear about a public figure converting to Christianity or talking about Jesus. Whether it’s a celebrity like Justin Bieber or a political figure like Charlie Kirk, I don’t place much stock in the faith of public figures, because I simply don’t know them. I have no way of knowing, from a few interviews or statements, what these people actually believe, or whether they’re sincere or disingenuous or a mix of both. And at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what they believe on a personal level if what they do doesn’t align with the Sermon on the Mount and the fruits of the Spirit.

Since I can only judge public figures by what they do in public, if I see someone professing faith in God while making derogatory comments about undocumented immigrants or celebrating porn or whatever, then to me, they’re not acting like Christians and therefore, I’m not excited or even interested in what they have to say about God.

That’s when it comes to public figures. When it comes to everyday people that I can actually see and interact with, it’s a different story. I think it’s absolutely important to celebrate any step a person takes toward God, no matter how small, no matter how “far away” they may seem from God in terms of their lifestyle or political views or moral philosophy. I think if I’d known Charlie Kirk in person, I would have admired his love for God and passion for Christianity, while being alarmed and disapproving of his work and political views. In that sense, I know a lot of Charlie Kirks in my personal life, and depending on the nature of our relationship, at times I’ll push back on things I see them doing that I don’t feel are godly—and I am thankful to have friends that do the same for me. I hope those public figures have people in their lives who are doing that for them.

Christian: I became a Christian while surrounded by a lot of white believers within the suburbs. I was a Hispanic kid, being raised in a poor family, living in the inner city. So I definitely encountered classism and racism in the church.

I think when you’re a minority, you’re kind of used to the majority culture behaving towards you in strangely dehumanizing, contradictory ways. Even so, you have to live in the same space as the majority culture, and to treat others as human even when you yourself are being treated as “less than.” This helped me enter the church with the assumption that yeah, people might behave in ways that are really off, and I can still resolve to treat them like human beings. I can assume that they know what they are talking about in some instances, and that I can disregard their words in other ones.

You just toggle. You discern when to take people seriously and when not to listen to them.

I actually think a lot of my faith has been formed by this practice of questioning the relationship between cultural forms of morality and the Scriptural vision of goodness. Part of my conversion experience came from my engagement with Marxism. I read Marx and was like, yeah the systems that have formed the United States are wrong. Then I read the prophets and realized that these systemic critiques about poverty and the exploitative accrual of wealth precede Marx, that these problems are already inside Scripture and resolved in the teachings of Jesus. Criticality opened my eyes to the depth, complexity and incisiveness of Scripture, and its capacity to parse through all the complexities we might encounter in a given historical moment.

Criticality in connection with the Holy Spirit is part of my testimony, so when I look at the cultural landscape now, none of it dissuades me from my relationship with Christ. I think this has to do with how I came to faith through reckoning with the flaws endemic to America and its versions of Christian faith.

Yi Ning: So, given all you’ve seen, why do you still believe in the nearness and immanence of a good God?

Christina: Are you just casually asking why I believe in a good God, despite the existence of evil in the world?! How can I possibly answer that question?? Okay, I will try! I believe because it was told to me by people I trusted from a young age, and although those people went on to let me down in myriad ways, the story of Jesus became inextricably embedded in my psyche, consciousness, soul, whatever you want to call it. I’ve lived the past 30+ years as though it was true. I’ve consistently felt the life and peace and loveliness of Christ emanating from the Bible and the gathering of the saints and times of worship and the love of fellow believers, even at the lowest points of my life. I often feel confused at an intellectual/rational level about whether God is really there or really good, and sometimes feel confused at an emotional level, but at a spiritual level, I always come back to the words of Peter when Jesus asks the twelve disciples if they want to leave him, too. “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.”

Christian: Honestly, even though we are witnessing historically significant shifts, suffering and injustice are not new: abusive systems have always existed.For black and brown churches, I think Christianity has been a part of our wrestling with suffering. In these contexts, Christian faith has not been about staying in power, or maintaining power, so I think our theologies are very different from the forms of nationalist, politically expedient Christian thought that are currently so visible.

I distinctly remember watching footage of Rodney King being beaten by officers as a child, and how scarred I was. This was a formative memory. Also, my parents were youth pastors and we lived in a rough area, so stories of domestic abuse and horror were a constant reality. From a very young age, I was aware of how terrible life was.

Over time, though, I think my heart has accommodated the dominant forms of cultural Christianity. I definitely know that I have engaged with Christianity in order to ask God to preserve me, to give me a good life, to keep me from suffering.

Now I’m like—I have to return to the faith of my people, the faith of people who have suffered, and not embrace this American version of faith that is preoccupied with self-preservation. Christianity is a faith of suffering people. Historically. Not in this abbreviated American version. Think of Henri Nouwen, think of missionaries in Japan, of historic and contemporary martyrs. Christianity is wild in that way. When you hear about people’s relationship with the Holy Spirit and how he carries them in times of suffering, it’s evident that it doesn’t exist as a purely theoretical, ethical framework, but is robust enough to deal with the harsh, grotesque realities of the world.

The authority of God, the sacrificial love of Christ, and the nearness of his Spirit mean the suffering of the world doesn’t have to be the last word.

In the Scriptural narrative, the blood of Abel is placed in contrast with the blood of Christ: whereas the blood of Abel bears testimony to the cruelty of this world, the blood of Christ witnesses to the possibility that everything we see can be redeemed. Christ is still extending an invitation to communion with God, still reminding us that the reality we inhabit now will soon give way to a new creation.

Here are our previous conversations, if you’re interested. I think we’re on track for one per election cycle. I haven’t reviewed this content, so it’s possible that our concerns from a few years ago will sound so, so quaint in the context of 2026.

Thanks for reading. Consider pressing the heart button if you liked the post, and leave a comment if you have thoughts—for this topic, especially, I’m guessing that many of you do. xx