Would Teenage Ben in 2024 be a Christian Nationalist?

My friend Renee recently wrote how if her 20-year-old self were here today, she’d be a Christian Nationalist. It got me thinking about the political and religious beliefs of Past Ben. In high school, I was very conservative. My U.S. history teacher gave us a political spectrum quiz at one point and I was to the right of Reagan. The highlight of my school breaks was being able to catch Rush Limbaugh on the radio.

It’s an understatement to say I’m not like that now. I can’t pinpoint when I moved left. It was a gradual process throughout my early 20s in particular, but even now into my early 40s. Past Ben would certainly have blamed this on liberal indoctrination in college, but I couldn’t begin to tell you the political beliefs of most of my professors. The one professor where I did know his political views was, in fact, a socialist. He told us so at one point, but I wouldn’t say there was a particularly socialist bent to the class. I don’t really remember much of anything about it, other than his imitation of his Irish grandfather saying “It’ll be Tammany Hall or no hall at all.”

So I don’t think Professor Hogan had much to do with it. But after reading Renee’s post and thinking about Past Ben, I recalled what might have been the first step in being more self-reflective about my politics. I remember at one point in high school (I think) that I drew a bunch of sketches of politicians in a grid. They weren’t particularly accurate renderings — I was going for clownishness, not realism. Each of them were labeled with some prominent Democratic politician of the time. They had speech bubbles saying some silly thing or another. But at the end was Rush Limbaugh, and his speech bubble said “I am the truth!”

That gave me pause. I’m not sure if Limbaugh ever said that specifically, but it was certainly plausible to me. I thought “wait. That’s a statement only Jesus can make, and Rush Limbaugh is not Jesus.” Nothing changed for me that day, I think, but it opened the door for more critical thought.

As most kids who have any interest in politics do, I followed my parents. Or at least my dad. Mom has always been quieter about her politics. It wasn’t until I was an adult on my own that I started to examine my views in terms of “based on what I value, here are the positions and candidates I support” instead of “well I’m a conservative, so of course I’m in favor of such and such.”

Like 20-year-old Renee, I’d like to think that Teenage Ben would find Trump repellent and unqualified to be president, no matter what he thought of the policies. But I’d probably have found Elon Musk hilarious in a douchey edgelord sort of way. Would I have been a Christian Nationalist if I were a teenager today? It’s hard to say. I can’t remember ever having a desire to explicitly make my religion the dominant one. I had no desire to talk about my beliefs to anyone who wasn’t interested in them. Whatever else I may have wanted to promote politically, I believed that the promises of equality and freedom that the US was notionally founded on. So maybe I would have avoided that path. I’m glad I don’t have the opportunity to find out.

America has always been aspirational

A few nights after the election, I was at a basketball game. At the conclusion of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” my buddy said “still the best country in the world.” “For a few more months, at least,” I quipped. I’m not convinced that America is the “best” country, if for no other reason than I don’t know what “best” means.

What I am convinced of is that America has never been what we claim it to be. America is not great, it is an aspiration.

From the very beginning, we have failed to live up to the story we tell about ourselves. Virginia’s House of Burgesses sat for the first time in the same year that the African slave trade began. Thomas Jefferson, while perhaps one of the greatest philosophers on human rights, did not act on his philosophy.

As our ancestors forced Africans from their home and sold them into slavery an ocean away, they also pushed out the indigenous people by force and treaty after treaty that would be broken to be replaced by another treaty that would also be broken. Centuries before Adolf Hitler gave it that name, it’s hardly a stretch to say that the British and Americans pursued a policy of lebensraum.

As late as 1840, the “antislavery” north still had 1,000 enslaved people. And while the Civil War may have ended legal slavery, that wasn’t the goal. Lincoln was more concerned with preserving the union than freeing an enslaved people. For almost a century more, segregation was legal, voter suppression was rampant, and racism ruled policy. The effects of these policies is still visible today.

The target of our racism has shifted over the years. For a time, southern Europeans were the lesser “other”. Then east Asian. The U.S. built concentration camps for the Japanese in World War II, but had no similar facilities for Germans or Italians. The Supreme Court upheld the legality of these, in one of the all-time worst decisions to come from that body.

We tell ourselves that America is a land where anyone can go from rags to riches. While some do achieve that level of class mobility, it’s not true for everyone. As far back as 1770, 1% of Bostonians owned 44% of the wealth. Wealth disparity has only continued to grow in my lifetime. The educational outcomes of school districts remain best correlated with the income of the districts residents.

We have done much of what we accused the bad guys of. Sometimes to a lesser degree, sometimes not. So as the worst person to occupy the White House returns today, I will remind myself that the work never ends. The poem “Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes captures the sentiment far more eloquently than I could.