From “American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays The Gospel and Threatens The Church” by Andrew L. Whitehead
To fulfill the example of self-sacrificial love set by Jesus, American Christians can seek religious liberty for all people. We can reject and resist the temptation to cheapen fights for religious liberty as opportunities merely to make life easier for fellow Christians. Again, religious liberty is the constitutionally ensured right of all Americans, religious or secular, to believe or act on religious or personal conscience without unnecessary government interference. White American Christians can seek to share cultural and political power and privilege so that our neighbors can live, work, and worship in peace.
Therefore, when Christians oppose building permits for other religious groups seeking to build a house of worship, we are abusing our cultural and political power. Consider how this must make our neighbors feel. Do they sense that we see them as fully and deeply loved by God, people whom Christ died for and then called us to love and serve? They become merely objects, those we must control, oppose, or change.
When we demand that symbols of the Christian faith occupy places of honor in the public sphere, we likewise abuse our cultural and political power. Our commitment to faithfully following Christ is not dependent on posting the Ten Commandments at the county courthouse. Our ability to love, serve, and act as salt and light in our communities is not dependent on various symbols of Christianity dominating the civic landscape.
When we demand the right for coaches to lead prayers at the fifty-yard line of a high school football field, we abuse our cultural and political power. We ignore the discomfort of non-Christian or nonreligious student athletes who merely want to participate in team activities but whose sincerely held personal beliefs are trampled on by our desire to center ourselves and our faith. We interfere with the religious freedom of other Christians, too, by ignoring diversity within our religious tradition. Even more, we outright ignore Jesus’s distaste toward public, showy prayers (Matt. 6:5-6).
If anything, our continual fight for those symbols and “rights,” despite those outside our faith registering their discomfort with what we are doing, merely confirms to them that we are much more committed to our faith standing supreme above any others than to loving or serving them. Jesus calls us to the latter, not the former. And such fights can even serve to empty our sacred symbols of their central meaning, co-opting them in service of other ends.