‘Exvangelical’ warns: Christian nationalism a looming threat

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After his DFL legislative colleagues talked about threats to reproductive care and transgender Minnesotans, Rep. Andy Smith of Rochester delivered a broader, more jarring warning at a recent State Capitol news conference.

“I want to step back a bit and talk about one of the roots of this movement that we are fighting, and that root is Christian nationalism,” Smith said.

He described a push for the country to be defined by a specific type of Christianity that would be enforced by the government, a concept that should terrify all Americans, he said.

Smith, 33 and in his second term, is uniquely qualified on the subject, having been raised in an evangelical family. His father is a conservative Baptist minister and Smith was on that path after graduating from Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and the Westminster Seminary in Escondido, Calif.

Attending religious schools as schoolboy, Smith said he and his classmates followed the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance every day with a second pledge to the Christian flag in which they referenced “one savior crucified and coming again with life and liberty for all who believe.”

The insinuation, Smith said, is that “those who do not believe in that particular religious vision do not deserve life and do not deserve liberty.”

Over time, Smith and his wife, Anna, who own Garden Party Books in Rochester and met in seminary school, became “exvangelicals” when they came to the realization that the church wasn’t embracing “love and inclusion” as fully as it should.

One of the early warning flags for Smith was that women weren’t given equal standing to men in the church and couldn’t become pastors or elders. His concerns increased when the church vehemently opposed the legalization of gay marriage.

His consternation grew after the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. “My community didn’t react with compassion and sort of reacted with this aversion to fighting for civil rights; I couldn’t understand that,” Smith said.

Then, in 2016, he was a pastoral intern at a church in Wheaton, Ill., when Donald Trump was running for president. Smith decided to leave after seeing his Christian community rally around a man accused of mistreating and denigrating women.

“It was lots of hard conversations with a lot of close friends, certainly my parents, my siblings,” he said.

Luckily, Anna was with him on the same journey. In recent years, the couple has faced unexplained infertility, which also caused Smith to shift from being “pro-life” to supporting reproductive choice.

“Anti-abortion rhetoric is founded, especially in religious circles, on a religious idea that life begins at conception,” he said. “It’s: ‘I understand my holy text to say this about this issue and I think that should apply to you as well,’ and I think that it’s a very scary thing to go down this path.”

Sen. Erin Maye Quade, DFL-Apple Valley, who has studied the enthusiasm for Christian nationalism, said she absolutely agrees with Smith’s concerns.

“It’s an incredibly dangerous ideology that seeks to create a racial and gender hierarchy and rejects secular laws, including the U.S. Constitution, in favor of a strict interpretation of the Bible,” she said. “Those who are not white or Christian, or who do not conform to a narrow view of Christianity, are seen as enemies of God, justifying actions against them — such as silencing or taking away their rights — as necessary to fulfill God’s mission.”

In the Minnesota House under the current GOP leadership, Smith said many of the early bills would be celebrated by Christian nationalists, including proposals to exclude trans girls from girls' sports, define a fetus as a person and to funnel public money to private religious schools and crisis pregnancy centers.

He mentioned more widespread impact advanced in other states — such as requiring a Bible in every classroom in Oklahoma and the advancement of a bill in the South Dakota Legislature to require the display and teaching of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom.

According to the nonprofit, nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), a third of U.S. residents qualify as Christian nationalism adherents or sympathizers. The group’s survey found the numbers in Minnesota to be nearly identical.

As for Smith, he’s still a regular churchgoing Christian who considers his parents his heroes despite his differences with them.

“I think Christ teaches very specifically about caring for the least of these my brothers, caring for the poor, those who are imprisoned, those who are looked down upon, who are othered and I think championing that in the Legislature is championing my Christian values,” he said, but he doesn’t want his religion to be superior.

“It’s such an exhausting political environment right now that I think people look at it and just say, ‘Oh, everyone disagrees,’ ” he said, but he hopes that Minnesotans can agree to fight for religious liberty for all. “I truly want that to be the cornerstone of our society. It has been for a long time, but I’m scared of losing it.”