Best of: Dr. Walter Brueggemann on Christian nationalism

What does the Bible have to teach us about Christian nationalism? How does that political ideology undermine the Christian faith and the nature of God? In this interview from 2019, author and scholar Walter Brueggemann talks with Amanda Tyler about the theological dangers of Christian nationalism. Don’t miss his thoughts on what the prophets have to teach us about our current times, the importance of the crucifixion and resurrection narrative in these conversations, and what the Bible says about oppression, hope, truth and power.

This program originally aired August 21, 2019.

 

 

SHOW NOTES:

Segment one (02:45): Conversation with Dr. Walter Brueggemann

This program originally aired August 21, 2019, as episode 4 in our 10-part BJC Podcast series on the dangers of Christian nationalism.

One of the most influential Bible interpreters of our time, Dr. Walter Brueggemann was the author of more than 100 books, including The Prophetic Imagination. He passed away June 5, 2025. Visit his official website to learn more about his work and his legacy.

This is the fourth episode in our 10-week series on Christian nationalism. Other episodes are available at this link or on the feed called “BJC Podcast” on Apple Podcasts (iTunes), SoundCloud, Spotify, and more.

Amanda mentioned the Easter Monday message she sent in 2025, which quoted Dr. Brueggemann from this episode. Sign up for our email list to get more emails by visiting this link.

To learn more about BJC’s work countering Christian nationalism, visit ChristiansAgainstChristianNationalism.org or BJConline.org/ChristianNationalism.

Respecting Religion is made possible by BJC’s generous donors. You can support these conversations with a gift to BJC. 

Transcript: BEST OF: Dr. Walter Brueggemann on Christian nationalism (original conversation airdate: August 21, 2019) (some portions of this transcript have been edited for clarity)

AMANDA: Welcome to a special episode of Respecting Religion. I’m Amanda Tyler. While I’m on sabbatical this spring, we are revisiting some of our favorite episodes. Today, we’re sharing a show that predates our Respecting Religion podcast. It’s a conversation with someone that we all lost last year, Dr. Walter Brueggemann.

I spoke to him in 2019 as we were launching our Christians Against Christian Nationalism initiative. That year we also released a podcast series on the dangers of Christian nationalism to explore the topic from different angles.

I actually didn’t know Dr. Brueggemann until we reached out to him for this show. We wanted a theological criticism of Christian nationalism, and we thought he would be someone who could really shed light on that topic. I consider him one of the most influential Bible interpreters of our time.

He said yes, and almost seven years later, this conversation is one that I think about often. Dr. Brueggemann was on the phone for this interview. I didn’t see him as we spoke, but his words continue to resonate with me and many of our staff members.

In fact, just last year in 2025, I quoted Dr. Brueggemann from this same interview in my Easter Monday message that I sent to people on BJC’s email list. I also talk about this conversation in my book, How to End Christian Nationalism.

I reached out to Dr. Brueggemann last year after writing that Easter Monday message, letting him know how much we continue to appreciate this conversation and how grateful I was for his prophetic witness. He wrote me back with a kind thank-you and noted that he was glad that we were, quote, “on the same page.” He passed away less than two months after our email exchange.

Here’s my conversation with Dr. Brueggemann in 2019. I hope that you find it as thought-provoking and challenging as I did.

 

Segment 1: Conversation with Dr. Walter Brueggemann (starting at 02:45)

DR. BRUEGGEMANN: Empires and monopolies of power generally depend on very anemic gods who do not do anything except smile and bless. And obviously the God to whom the prophets bear witness is not an anemic god.

 

AMANDA TYLER: Welcome to the BJC podcast as we continue our special series on Christian nationalism. I’m Amanda Tyler, executive director of BJC.

We wanted to learn from a true expert on what the Bible has to say to us about Christian nationalism. For this week’s episode, I have a conversation with Dr. Walter Brueggemann, one of the most influential theologians and scholars of our time, on how he understands Christian nationalism and the troubling implications for Christian faith.

Dr. Brueggemann, thank you for joining us today.

DR. WALTER BRUEGGEMANN: Thank you. I’m glad to get to do this.

AMANDA: The author of more than a hundred books and countless scholarly articles — I could spend our entire time together just reciting your CV, but that would rob our listeners of listening to your voice and perspective on this important issue that we are exploring in this series, that is, Christian nationalism.

And as we were considering this episode, your seminal text of The Prophetic Imagination, which recently celebrated its 40th anniversary, seemed particularly relevant to our conversation. You know, I’ve been having a series of conversations about Christian nationalism, and a place I like to start is to hear from you about how you define or understand Christian nationalism.

DR. BRUEGGEMANN: Well, I think nationalism, any -ism, is an idolatry, and I think when Christians sign on to nationalism as Christians, they imagine that that particular nation, in our case the United States, has a peculiar connection to the purposes of God, and so you wind up with U.S. exceptionalism that we imagine gives us special privileges and special rights and special guarantees that ought to absolutize the nation state, when, in fact, no nation state can be absolutized, but all of them are relative to the will and purpose of the Creator God.

So I think it is essentially an idolatry, and I think that Christian nationalism in our particular case is heavily tinged from the beginning with racism, so I do not think we can speak of nationalism without speaking of white nationalism.

AMANDA: You know, part of this podcast is to run alongside an initiative called Christians Against Christian Nationalism, and there’s a statement that Christians from across the country are adding their name to. One of the points in that statement — I’ll just read from it — is that “conflating religious authority with political authority is idolatrous and often leads to oppression of minority and other marginalized groups, as well as the spiritual impoverishment of religion.”

That comes to mind just based on the answer you just gave. And I just wonder if you could talk some about what the Bible teaches us about oppression and how it speaks to this issue.

DR. BRUEGGEMANN: Well, oppression is the direct and active violation of the commandment that we should love our neighbor. And our neighbor is entitled to a vital, secure, dignified life, and when economic leverage reduces our neighbor to hopeless debt and dependence through economic exploitation, that’s a violation of the justice — the economic justice — that is intended by the Creator God.

And, of course, the prophetic tradition and the book of Deuteronomy are saturated with warnings against oppression, and the judgment of the prophetic tradition is that any society that practices economic oppression finally is not sustainable.

AMANDA: At the heart of that idea of oppression seems to be a sense of power — who has power, who doesn’t. You know, a lot of your work that you’ve written about talks about power and talks about truth. And I wonder if you might explain a little about how you think about truth and power, and how it shows up in the Bible.

DR. BRUEGGEMANN: Well, I think that truth and power always have a tense, ambiguous relationship, but I have come to think that truth characteristically arises from below. And anytime truth is foisted upon us top down, it is distorted by the assumption and the exercise of power.

And it seems to me that Jesus is an exact embodiment of truth from below, by which he confounded the truth from above that was embodied by the Roman Empire. And I think you can trace all through the Old Testament — that if you take the book of Kings, for example, that truth there is not carried by the kings but is carried by Elijah and Elisha who occupy most of the narrative of the book of Kings, and they are obviously characters from below who are unprovincial.

So my sense is that the primary carriers of truth in human history are people who operate economically and politically from below, and we ought rightly to be suspicious anytime anyone from above imagines that they are truth carriers. This does not mean that it can never happen, but it ought to be handled, it seems to me, with a due sense of suspicion.

AMANDA: I think how we sometimes see this arising — again in the context of Christian nationalism — is we can see Christian leaders who are attempting to be political power brokers. And I wonder if you might speak some to, you know, what the dangers of that stance are and what we should be wary of.

DR. BRUEGGEMANN: Well, we should be completely wary of it, because when our claims for gospel truth are attached to political economic power, they are inevitably distorted and designed to maintain the privilege of the status quo. And it seems to me that in gospel truth, there is something inherently subversive about it, and obviously that subversive edge disappears when one gets allied with power.

So it seems to me it’s a very seductive way of being talked out of the critical edge of the Gospel, and I think obviously if you look at Christian leaders who have signed on with power, they characteristically have no critical edge left anymore. And I think that those of us who are entrusted with the Gospel are, indeed, entrusted with a critical edge that continues to point out the way in which power depends upon injustice for its maintenance of privilege.

AMANDA: When you talk about leaders having a critical edge, I can’t help but think of the prophets that you’ve done so much writing and study of, whether it be Moses and Jeremiah and even Jesus. And I wonder how you think of what they have to teach us on how we should be responding to our current times, in a different way than perhaps some of these political power brokers are responding.

DR. BRUEGGEMANN: I think the prophets are big imaginers, and what they do is imagine the world as though the Creator God were really sovereign. And that imagination leads the prophets to speak judgment against regimes that are not accountable to the Creator God. It also leads the prophets to imagine that the world could be different when we get our practices and policies allied with the Creator God.

Empires and monopolies of power generally depend on very anemic gods who do not do anything except smile and bless. And obviously the God to whom the prophets bear witness is not an anemic god. Anemic gods can do nothing by way of judgment and can do nothing by way of creating newness. And those are the gods, of course, that the status quo always prefers, because such gods do nothing but legitimate the way things are.

So it really is a God-versus-god issue — a robust true God versus false, anemic gods — but then the god issues immediately descend into political and economic matters. But I think we have to start with an understanding of what the God of the Gospel is really like.

AMANDA: I think that’s so — I’m just pausing. I think that really is just so profound in how Christian nationalism attempts to put God in a pretty small box, one that can be controlled, one that can be understood through a prism of a certain national identity.

The idea of nationalism being merged with religious identity or being at odds with a certain religious identity seems to be a theme that runs through the Bible. I wonder what you think about that and what the Bible can teach us, understanding the Bible can teach us about what happens when nationalism is merged with religious identity.

DR. BRUEGGEMANN: Well, I think that’s right. I think you can trace all the way through the Old Testament that the royal temple apparatus in Jerusalem had really domesticated God, and therefore, the prophetic tradition is a great nemesis to the Jerusalem establishment. And as you know, the way the Old Testament is put together, if the destruction of Jerusalem — the wholesale biblical witness is that the Jerusalem establishment of king and priest finally was unsustainable because God finally will not tolerate that kind of idolatry.

And I think when you read beyond the destruction of Jerusalem to the Babylonian Empire, it is the same. I was just working on a text in which I wrote that Nebuchadnezzar had wanted to make Babylon great again. His hubris in trying to make Babylon great again caused the prompt downfall of the Babylonian Empire.

So the story of arrogant power that imagines that it is religiously legitimated runs all through the Old Testament, and time after time, such a hoax turns out to be unsustainable, because God’s way in the world finally will not tolerate that. So it becomes a question in the United States, with our idolatrous religious ideology, is how long is this enterprise sustainable in the real world where God is sovereign. And that’s a very, very sticky question that admits of no easy answer, but it seems to me it’s a question that we need to entertain.

AMANDA: Yeah. And I think what I hear in what you’re pointing out is that there are dangers to the empire itself — right? — to take on this kind of religious justification, that the hubris that comes from that, you know, as you point out, can lead to its downfall. I think that’s an angle I haven’t explored as fully as I think I’ve reflected more on the dangers to religion itself.

And so how do you see that? What are the dangers to our religion, to our faith for this merging of religious identity and nationalism?

DR. BRUEGGEMANN: Well, I think it makes God a captive and domesticates God, and when God is domesticated, it really leaves us without hope. And I think that what’s going on in U.S. politics, it is essentially a politics of despair in which we believe that nothing radically good can happen, and therefore it is a scramble to get as many of the marbles in our pocket before the game ends.

But that’s a no-win strategy, because in the long run, it diminishes everyone’s life, those who are on top of the heap and those who are underneath them. So despair with a domesticated God is no way to have a viable politics or a viable economics.

And what the freedom of the Gospel God does is permit us to imagine that there is hope and possibility that we will fashion new policies and new relationships that are beyond anyone’s particular vested interest. So that kind of hope is a peculiar gift of the Gospel to our political conversation.

AMANDA: I think it’s that kind of hope that has led the Christians who have signed on to this statement, who want to be engaged in this project of standing up against Christian nationalism, to be engaged. You know, I think they also — of course, Christians share the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Bible as our Old Testament, and they also, you know, lean on the example of Christ and this Christian story of his oppression in the Roman Empire.

What particularly about the Christian story — and the story of Jesus Christ — does it have to teach us about Christian nationalism and its dangers?

DR. BRUEGGEMANN: Well, I think that Good Friday was the pinnacle of the power of the Roman Empire. The execution of Jesus, they thought, was the ultimate defeat of the good news of the Gospel. And what Easter Sunday morning asserts is that the power of the Roman Empire was superseded by God’s power for life in the person of Jesus.

And what the crucifixion/resurrection narrative bears witness to is that the presumption of any nation or any empire has its limits and finally cannot defeat God’s intention for an alternative way in the world.

So I see the confession of Easter as being pivotal for political practice in the world, because it says that God’s will for life and for well-being finally is the truth of the world, and when we sign on for that, we sign for all kinds of possibilities that the nation or the empire does not want to entertain. So I think it’s all right there in that confession.

AMANDA: I think a lot of Christians see that like that right there. And then there are others who don’t — right? — those who are propping up Christian nationalism. You know, why do you think some people are so quick — in knowing the crucifixion and resurrection story, but why are they so quick to adopt the idea of Christian nationalism? What do you think makes it so attractive?

DR. BRUEGGEMANN: Well, we have disposed of the Friday-Sunday story by privatizing it and imagining that it’s some kind of private little magic event, rather than seeing it as a public event. So once you get that out of the way, then we sign on for Christian nationalism and Christian white nationalism because it authorizes our privilege. It authorizes our capacity to seize property from other people. It authorizes our capacity to take cheap labor in the form of slavery. It authorizes us to engage in military colonialism around the world.

Once you get rid of that check on Friday-Sunday, then our appetites and our greed and our fear just run wild without any restraint. And I think that’s what we’re witnessing. I think we are now being devoured by greed that is grounded in fear and despair, and it’s killing us all.

AMANDA: I think you’re right. And I think that, you know, we are discovering now, hundreds and hundreds of years in, what this has done to our society, to our world, and here we are, doing our best, muddling along to push back against it and to try to, you know, make Christians Christians again in some ways.

When we see things that are claiming to be Christian but run counter to our faith, how do you suggest we speak truth to power?

DR. BRUEGGEMANN: Well, I think we need many strategies. I don’t think there’s an obvious right way to do that, but I think we have to be working at the reform of the church so that the church community really becomes a place of truth-speaking rather than privatized other worldly stuff. I think we have to be politically active. I think we have to be on the streets in protest. I think we have to be performing the truth that is entrusted to us in every way that we have the courage to do.

AMANDA: I think we should end on that call to action, because I think sometimes this problem can feel so large, what can we do about it? This project, Christians Against Christian Nationalism, is one small way we’re trying to take a stand and help others take a stand against it, but we shouldn’t let the enormity of our problem stand in the way of us starting to do something.

Just thank you, Dr. Brueggemann, for being with us today, for sharing your insight and encouraging us to be Christians and to be prophets in the world today.

DR. BRUEGGEMANN: Well, thank you. And I am so grateful for the enterprise in which you are engaged. I think it is exceedingly important, and I wish you well with it.

AMANDA: Thank you to our listeners and to Dr. Brueggemann for joining us for that conversation on the BJC podcast back in 2019.

You can learn more about the work to counter the dangers of Christian nationalism by visiting our website at ChristiansAgainstChristianNationalism.org. This episode is available as part of our 2019 podcast series. We also have a discussion guide that goes with this episode and others in that ten-part series. We’ll add links and more details in our show notes.

We’ll be back in two weeks for another special episode of Respecting Religion.