A Word for the Thing That Is Not Christianity
This book needs a word for something that Christianity does not have a word for: the political ideology that deploys Christian language, Christian symbols, and Christian authority in the service of a program that Christian scripture, rightly read, does not sanction.
The word this project proposes is Christism, and the reason it is needed is precise. Without it, every criticism of the movement reads as a criticism of Christianity, and every defence of Christianity reads as a defence of the movement. The two become impossible to separate in ordinary speech — which is a condition that serves the movement and injures the faith.
Christism, as distinct from Christianity: the political ideology that deploys Christian language as an instrument of coercive power.
Islamism Is to Islam as Christism Is to Christianity
The construction is not novel, and that is the point of it. English already has a word that performs exactly this function for another tradition. Islamism names the political ideology that deploys Islamic language and authority toward a program Islamic scripture does not sanction — and no careful speaker confuses it with Islam.
The distinction is understood well enough that scholars, journalists, and Muslims themselves use it routinely, and its use is not taken as an attack on the faith. It is taken as a defence of the faith against something wearing it.
Christianity has had no equivalent. The absence is not neutral. It has meant that the only available vocabulary for the movement — ‘Christian nationalism,’ ‘the Christian right,’ ‘evangelicals’ — all place the word Christian in the subject position, and so concede in advance the very claim the movement most needs conceded: that it is a form of Christianity.
The same structural diagnosis applies, in each case from inside the tradition rather than against it. It has been made by Muslims, on Islamic grounds, against the Islamist theocrat. It has been made by Jews, on the Torah’s own account of freely chosen covenant, against Jewish theocratic claims. The argument against theocracy is not one tradition’s argument against another’s. It is each tradition’s argument against its own theocratic temptation.
Seven Dimensions, Side by Side
The difference is not a matter of degree along a single axis — not a stricter or looser Christianity, not a more or less conservative one. It is a difference in what the words are being used to do. The comparison below sets the two against each other on the dimensions where they diverge most sharply.
Paving the Garden
The book’s governing image supplies the sharpest test of the distinction. The Garden of Eden was designed for flourishing, and it contained — by the same structural necessity — the possibility of the Fall. You cannot have a garden containing genuine freedom without the genuine possibility of its abuse. The vulnerability was not a defect in the design. It was the shadow of the design’s greatest gift.
The theocrat makes the identical mistake in every tradition: he attempts to abolish the freedom in order to prevent the refusal. He looks at the garden, sees the serpent, sees the real possibility that human beings will choose wrongly, and concludes that the solution is to remove the possibility of the wrong choice by force of law.
He paves the garden to prevent the Fall. And in doing so he destroys the very thing the garden was for — because a garden in which no wrong choice is possible is not a garden. It is a machine for producing compelled behaviour, and compelled behaviour is not what any of the three traditions understand God to have wanted when God made humanity free.
Why the Word Matters, and Why the Field Cannot Be Ceded
There is a strategic argument that follows from the terminological one, and the book gives it a full chapter. Abandoning religious vocabulary to the Christist movement is not a neutral act. It is a specific concession with documented consequences.
If the only people speaking in scriptural terms about American politics are those using scripture to justify hierarchy, then scripture will be understood by everyone else as an instrument of hierarchy — and the movement will have been granted, without contest, the authority it claims. The vocabulary is not the opposition’s property. Conceding it is a choice, and it is the choice the movement is counting on.