Unhappily relevant

It was a little disturbing to find materials I'd included in one of my lectures in "After Religion" quoted in a piece in the New York Times. This isn't because I don't wish in that class to be au courant, but because that was the lecture "The Elephant in the Room," about white Christian nationalism in America and its efforts to dial back the clock, and this was a piece about the unassuming new Speaker of the House of Representatives. The founding director of PRRI, some of whose recent studies I discussed with our class, is quoted saying:

while Johnson is more polished than other right-wing leaders of the G.O.P. who support this worldview, his record and previous public statements indicate that he’s a near textbook example of white Christian nationalism — the belief that God intended America to be a new promised land for European Christians.

Those last words name the dangerous lunacy of this theological persuasion more clearly than anything else I've seen. Even as, well, isn't that what lots of people de facto think "America" is about? Happily our students have been exposed to a richer and more complex history, and the need for "new stories" - stories in the plural.