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.