One of the recurring themes on this blog is epistemic humility — the discipline of recognizing the real limits of what we know. A key part of that discipline is staying genuinely open to perspectives beyond our own. This is harder than it sounds. When a particular view resonates with us, it’s tempting to stop looking around, assume we’ve arrived at the truth, and start filtering everything else through that lens. Once we’re there, rationalization comes easily.

The pattern shows up on all sides. Some Christians seize on a handful of unresolved challenges to evolutionary theory and conclude the whole framework must be false — conveniently setting aside the enormous body of evidence that supports it. Some atheists point to the Crusades and treat that history as a decisive refutation of Christian faith itself, ignoring centuries of counterevidence and the faith’s positive contributions to human civilization. In both cases, a real and legitimate concern gets weaponized into a sweeping verdict that the evidence doesn’t actually support.

Christian Nationalism is a prominent contemporary example of the same dynamic working in a different direction. At its core, Christian Nationalism holds that the United States was specially established by God to fulfill a divine purpose, and that the country should therefore be governed according to Christian principles — either explicitly or implicitly. A softer version of the argument doesn’t go quite that far but insists that America’s Christian heritage must be protected and privileged at the institutional level. Either way, the practical result tends toward a kind of mandated religious legalism.

I think Christian Nationalism is mistaken, both politically and theologically. But perhaps more relevant to the epistemic point here is that many of the ideologies associated with it are rejected by large numbers of Christians and Christian denominations. It represents one particular strand of the faith — a vocal and visible one — not Christianity as a whole. Treating it as the defining face of Christianity is as much an overgeneralization as treating the Crusades that way.

And yet that overgeneralization is increasingly common. Christian Nationalism has become, for many skeptics, the latest exhibit in the case that Christianity is obviously false or obviously dangerous. The move is understandable — these are real and serious problems — but it’s still a logical leap. The failures of a particular political-religious movement don’t settle the deeper questions about the truth of the faith’s fundamental claims. Confident as that reasoning can feel, it mistakes a legitimate criticism for a decisive refutation.

This blog doesn’t traffic in dogmatic conclusions — with perhaps one exception: a fairly firm conviction that dogmatism itself is a trap. So I’m not interested in defending Christian Nationalism, which I think represents a genuine distortion of the faith. But I’m equally skeptical of the move to reject Christianity wholesale on the basis of its worst expressions. The more honest and intellectually productive path is to push past those surface-level examples and engage with the broader tradition and its actual claims. That engagement won’t deliver certainty. But it does require the kind of open-minded, evidence-sensitive thinking that Christian Nationalism, ironically, seems least willing to model.

(Note, this essay was created with assistance from an AI, but the ideas and overall organization are mine.)