The Quest for Christian Symbolic Dominance

The battle for symbolic recognition in a diverse, post-religious America

Many of the culture war debates are about which identities and groups will receive symbolic recognition in our society.

America was historically an Anglo-Protestant country that largely did not symbolically include black Americans. One of the ongoing themes of the civil rights movement has been the fight for symbolic recognition, such as through the creation of a Black History Month, a holiday for Martin Luther King, etc. Some of affirmative action itself is for symbolic purposes. Black Americans want to see “people that look like me” in important positions in our institutions. They want to see black heroes in their kids’ history books.

Large scale demographic change from the Ellis Island era led to an actual symbolic redefinition of the nation, from Anglo-Protestant to Judeo-Christian, a label that included Catholics and Jews. The brief promotion of “Abrahamic Faiths” was intended to expand this still further to include Muslims, but didn’t work. That’s most likely due to the extremely variegated nature of modern mass immigration, as well as the general post-religious character of our modern society. But if it had just been Muslims that had been immigrating to America, perhaps it would have stuck.

As immigrant groups grow in a community, often an ethnic festival will be added to the community calendar. Here in Carmel, Indiana, our Diwali festival is coming up on October 18. We just had our Chinese Moon Cake festival and a Día de la Familia festival last month.

In some cases, smaller minority groups can receive disproportionate levels of explicit recognition. The reason for this is that the mainstream culture and its institutions are presumed to already symbolically represent the majority population and culture. For example, the people on our coins were all white. There was no need for a “white history month” when America was an overwhelmingly white country and its history books reflected that.

This sort of quest of symbolic representation by minority groups is legitimate and even healthy.

Modern American leftism, and especially its “woke” manifestation, has gone well beyond this. There been an ever proliferating list of identities and methods of recognizing them, sometimes far out of proportion to actual population size. For example, it’s been claimed that 145 days every year are now devoted to some aspect of LGBT recognition. Even if that’s an exaggeration, there’s certainly an enormous number of these days and months.

But more important to the left than the politics of recognition is the politics of anti-recognition. The woke are better defined by what they are against - white, implicitly Christian America - than what they are for. We even see this on the liberal Bluesky social media app, where the left spends more time devouring its own over perceived crimethink than they do celebrating anything.

This has been actioned by explicitly evacuating all mainstream institutions of any symbolic association with their founding population or the historic white Protestant majority in America. In the 1950s, a big part of the blowback against William F. Buckley’s book God and Man at Yale was that this Roman Catholic upstart they had welcomed into their WASP institution had shown such ingratitude. Some of the responses specifically noted Yale’s Protestant and Puritan heritage, and how that conflicted with Buckley’s Roman Catholic conception of Christianity. Suffice it to say, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton would no longer consider themselves Protestant or even Christian schools at all. Far from dominating those schools, WASPs are increasingly marginal within them.

While the idea of a war on Christmas is exaggerated, it is undoubtedly the case that institutions prefer to avoid recognizing the religious nature of the holiday, using terms like “Seasons Greetings” or “Happy Holidays.” As is probably near universal now, our local school system refers to the Christmas break as “Winter Break.”

There have also been explicit attacks against public symbols of the people they hate. The toppling and destruction of statues is a good example. Monday is Columbus Day. Originally a holiday to provide symbolic recognition of Italian American immigrants, Columbus is now just another white guy, so naturally having a holiday named for him is intolerable. The left has counter-programmed with this with the so-called “Indigenous People’s Day.” Statues of Columbus are a frequent target of would be vandalizers.

This of course extends beyond the symbolic. Under the regime of affirmative action and DEI, whites, and especially white males, are explicitly discriminated against in employment and other benefits.

The left’s vision of society is essentially an inversion of the old hierarchy of identities. While there are ongoing debates over which identities are on top, there’s no doubt which ones are on the bottom.

These cultural and political changes have been very disconcerting to many white American Christians to say the least. Part of today’s culture war for them is specifically about achieving symbolic recognition for Christianity (or other aspects of American heritage).

This is legitimate at some level. The idea that we can have a society that is super-saturated with identity recognitions for a wide variety of groups, but denies explicit symbolic recognition - and indeed attacks any such recognition - for what is still its majority population is ridiculous.

At the same time, rather than seeking proper recognition, I see some American Christians today seeking to, in effect, re-establish symbolic dominance in society. Rather than a White House saturated with the colors of the pride flag, they want to bring back a country where the skyscrapers are lit up with huge crosses for Easter.

I don’t think there is anything theologically wrong with a society where Christianity is symbolically dominant. While religious establishment is not part of our tradition, other countries do have established churches, and I don’t see any theological problem with that.

At the same time, this is not the America of the 1950s or earlier. White a majority of the population still identifies as Christian, the share of the population that regularly attends church is probably around 30%. And only a subset of those would want to pursue to some type of symbolic dominance.

Trying to achieve not just recognition but some kind symbolic superiority is difficult to pull off from a minoritarian position. It only invites blowback and typically isn’t prudent.

What am I talking about here? First, let me say what I’m not talking about: Charlie Kirk’s memorial service. I didn’t watch it, but from everything I read it seems like a completely appropriate public expression of Christianity in an appropriate forum. This is the sort of thing we probably should see more of.

An example of the quest for Christian symbolic dominance is passing laws to require posting of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms, which has been done in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. When I’ve talked to people about this, they try to come up with some sort of evangelistic rationale, but the real purpose is clearly symbolic. It’s to establish Christianity in a symbolically dominant position in a public space. This might have been fine when America was 98% Protestant - note that Catholics and Protestants have different Ten Commandment lists, and Jews a different one from those -- but it seems a stretch today.

Another example is Pete Hegseth hosting a “Secretary of Defense Christian Prayer and Worship Service” in the Pentagon auditorium in the middle of the day, broadcasting it through the department’s internal cable network, and posting a video of it on the department web site.

Having an office Bible study or prayer meeting in the morning or on lunch break is perfectly fine. I don’t think he would even have to take any steps to try to hide it or anything. But pointedly doing this in a way that makes it appear that it’s a quasi-official function is designed to assert symbolic dominance.

A good chunk of the Christian nationalist movement also seems concerned with the symbolic status of Christianity within society, rather than simply having Christianity inform laws and governance. Again, there’s no inherent theological problem with that in a predominantly Christian society, but we are far from that today. (And just as with, say, a monarchy, some of what might be theologically permissible may not be part of our American cultural and theological tradition).

There’s a lot that’s wrong and untenable in the present left dominated system in America. The idea of affirmative action may have made sense in 1965, when America was overwhelmingly white demographically and in terms of its leadership, and black America had legitimately experienced centuries of unique oppression and injustice. Today, where large numbers of people living in America, including many who are black, are actually from privileged foreign backgrounds but nevertheless benefit from DEI is ridiculous. This regime of what is essentially anti-white discrimination needs to be thoroughly dismantled. (However, we should continue to recognize that symbolic recognition is actually important, and a “colorblind” society where there are few if any blacks or other groups in visible elite positions will also not be viewed as legitimate).

Now that American demography and institutions have been transformed, American Christians do have a legitimate claim for more explicit symbolic recognition in our society, one at least plausibly proportionate to their size in society. What that looks like isn’t entirely clear, but perhaps Kirk’s memorial service is a start at figuring it out. As R.R. Reno notes, this isn’t how Gerald Ford or Cyrus Vance would have done things, but it’s also no longer their America either.

At the same time, American Christians should avoid attempting to impose symbolic supremacy on the culture and institutions of society at large. It’s important be aware of where America is today, and be prudent in how one engages with it.