An exploration of the Christian nationalist ideology ascendant in the days of the Bush 43 administration, its historical antecedents, and a contrast with the ideology of the Kingdom of God in Scripture as understood through the prism of many modern theologians.

The book's cover jacket picture well encapsulates the picture of "Christian America": the cross and the flag intertwined in a pin on a business jacket. The author is at his best and incisive in his exploration of the Christian nation ideology, its origins in the Constantinian compromise, how it is informed by Reformed conceptions of God's sovereignty and the Puritan goal of theocracy, and its primarily white Protestant impulses toward exclusion. The author spends much time unpacking its influence in the Bush 43 administration and its triumphalist decisions: the myths of innocence and a task to spread the gospel of democracy, etc. He also does well at showing how whereas many of the Founders believed in Christian principles, many were Deist, and all rooted American democracy in a more deistic, Enlightenment concept of nature's God and inalienable rights.

The author's discussion of the Kingdom of God and relevant texts in the Old and New Testaments are more of a mixed bag. He sets forth many important principles of the nature of how God would have His people ruled according to the prophets and does establish the countercultural, upside down values of the Kingdom proclaimed by Jesus. Yet he anchors and grounds it in the most liberal of scholarship, quite enraptured by Crossan, and will not allow the Biblical evidence to get in the way of a good theory. As in far too many theologians of this bent, whatever in the New Testament does not align with his particular view of the Kingdom is itself evidence of corruption and is to be discarded as the influence of society and the powers. He would have been able to ground the discussion of the Kingdom just as effectively for his rhetorical purposes without the baggage by a good study of N.T. Wright and many others who do well at showing the challenges with Crossan et al and their presentation.

It is also very interesting to return to this book a decade after its publication, both to revisit the way things appeared and felt in the aughts and to see how much has changed (and how much has not). In the meantime "Christian America" has gone from ascendance to fear; it has abandoned principle in the name of clinging onto some vestige of power. The white supremacist undertones of American "Christian nation" ideology have become more apparent (and the author has revised another one of his works to address the subject), as has the folly of American nation-building as the Iraq and Afghanistan debacle became apparent for what they were. Perhaps no subject is more telling about what has gone on over the past decade than gay marriage: the book was written in the wake of many states banning gay marriage in some way or another, and it was successfully used as a wedge issue against the Democrats in the 2004 election; now almost all religious conservatives have conceded the fight on gay marriage is almost completely lost, the Supreme Court has upheld the constitutional right of gay marriage, and the Christian nationalists have been reduced to striving to carve out space to maintain their own viewpoints in their own spheres in church and in the workplace. This would have been utterly unexpected in 2008, let alone 2004, and shows how the whole time the strength of the Christian nationalist enterprise was never very deep.

Not to say, of course, that various theoretically "Christian" forms of influence are not pervasive in the political arena, or will somehow cease to be in the near future, and generally not in alignment with the Kingdom of God as the author well established.

There are better works out there on the same theme. Go there instead. ( )