When White Power Gets a Gospel Remix
- C. Aigner Ellis
- 2 hours ago
- 9 min read
Rev. Dr. Edward Donalson III says “Christian nationalism” is too clean a name for what is really happening: white dominion dressed in church clothes, waving a flag and asking God to bless the takeover.
Let’s start with the name.
“Christian nationalism” sounds almost respectable.
It sounds like somebody loves Jesus, loves America and maybe owns too many flags.
But Rev. Dr. Edward Donalson III is asking us to stop letting the branding do all that work.
Because what happens when the movement is not really about following Christ?
What happens when Christianity is being used like a sample—lifted out of context, looped behind a political message and played loud enough that people stop asking who owns the original?
Donalson offers a sharper name:
White Cristo-nationalism.
Not Christianity.
Not simply patriotism.
A political project using Christian language to rebuild white authority.
That distinction is the whole conversation.
Because if the movement is mostly about controlling schools, elections, families, gender, sexuality, history and public life, then maybe “faith” is not the mission.
Maybe faith is the cover art.
The label is giving the movement too much grace
Words matter because words tell us what kind of conversation we are allowed to have.
Call something “Christian nationalism,” and the debate becomes:
Should Christians have a role in politics?
Of course they should. Christians are citizens. They vote, organize, protest and bring their values into public life like everybody else.
But that is not the real question.
The real question is:
Should one religious movement be allowed to define who counts as a legitimate American?
Should its interpretation of Christianity control what children learn?
Should its beliefs determine which families deserve recognition?
Should its theology become the limit of somebody else’s freedom?
That is not participation.
That is dominion.
Donalson’s language forces us to look underneath the Sunday-best outfit and inspect the structure.
Who gets power?
Who becomes the threat?
Who has to shrink?
And who gets described as “anti-Christian” simply for refusing to live beneath somebody else’s doctrine?
The danger of the original label is that it gives the movement a little halo before the debate even begins.
It makes domination sound devotional.
It makes hierarchy sound holy.
It makes a political takeover sound like a prayer meeting.
They are not losing freedom. They are losing control.
One of the most powerful ideas in Donalson’s analysis is what the source material calls reverse victimization.
That phrase is academic, but the behavior is all over the timeline.
A group has been culturally dominant for generations.
Its religion shaped the laws.
Its families defined “normal.”
Its history filled the textbooks.
Its values were treated as neutral.
Then other people begin demanding space.
Black people want the full history taught.
Queer people want legal protection.
Women want bodily autonomy.
Religious minorities want equal standing.
Immigrants want dignity.
And suddenly the people who once controlled the whole playlist are yelling because somebody else got the aux cord.
Equality starts feeling like persecution when you are used to being the default.
That is the trick.
The movement frames the loss of exclusive power as the loss of freedom.
Other people existing openly becomes an attack.
Other religions becoming visible becomes erasure.
A school acknowledging queer students becomes indoctrination.
A history lesson naming racism becomes anti-white hatred.
The country becoming more pluralistic becomes evidence that “real America” is being stolen.
But let’s tell the truth.
They are not always mourning the loss of faith.
Sometimes they are mourning the loss of control.
And once control has been recast as a divine right, almost any political retaliation can be sold as self-defense.
Cruelty becomes courage.
Punishment becomes protection.
Taking rights away becomes “restoring order.”
That is how power puts on a victim costume and still keeps the keys.
This remix is older than Trump
Donald Trump did not invent this.
He understood how to perform it.
He understood that grievance could become a political identity.
He understood that people who felt their cultural authority slipping could be organized
around the promise of restoration.
He understood that religious language could make a power grab feel like prophecy.
But America has been editing Christianity to protect hierarchy since long before Trump ever walked into politics.
Slaveholders did it.
Segregationists did it.
Colonizers did it.
Politicians did it.
Churches did it.
There was even a version of the Bible created for enslaved people that removed major portions of scripture connected to liberation. The Exodus story was dangerous because a God who hears the cries of oppressed people might give enslaved people ideas.
So the text was edited.
The obedience stayed.
The freedom got cut.
That is the historical lesson.
Power does not always reject religion.
Sometimes it remixes it.
It keeps the parts that protect authority and mutes the parts that threaten it.
Love your neighbor?
Lower the volume.
Welcome the stranger?
Skip.
Set the captive free?
Definitely not radio-friendly.
Obey those in authority?
Put that on repeat.
The Bible is not automatically liberating simply because somebody is holding it.
You still have to ask who is interpreting it.
Who benefits from the interpretation?
Who becomes more human under that theology?
And who becomes disposable?
Dominion has church merch. Stewardship does the work.
Donalson draws a major distinction between dominion and stewardship.
Dominion asks:
How do we control the culture?
Stewardship asks:
How do we care for the people?
Dominion wants power over.
Stewardship wants the power to serve.
That is not just theological wordplay. It changes everything.
A dominion mindset sees government, education, media, business, family and entertainment as territory to capture.
It treats society like a map in a strategy game.
Take the school board.
Take the courts.
Take the legislature.
Take the curriculum.
Take the culture.
Then call the takeover “revival.”
Stewardship moves differently.
It asks whether people are safe.
Whether children can thrive.
Whether the hungry are fed.
Whether the sick can access care.
Whether the vulnerable are protected.
Whether power is being used to help people live—or merely to force them into
somebody else’s image.
And let’s be honest: domination is easier to market.
Stewardship is less cinematic.
It does not always come with a stage, a flag and a dramatic soundtrack.
Sometimes stewardship looks like showing up consistently, sharing resources and doing
the kind of community work that never trends.
Dominion wants the throne.
Stewardship carries the folding chairs.
One gets photographed.
The other builds the room.
A Christianity obsessed with control has forgotten Jesus
This is where the contradiction becomes impossible to ignore.
The political version of Christianity often speaks most loudly about strength, order, borders, punishment and authority.
But the Jesus in the text repeatedly moves toward people the respectable crowd wants pushed away.
The poor.
The sick.
The foreigner.
The condemned.
The socially untouchable.
He does not spend his ministry trying to become emperor.
He does not organize a campaign to seize every institution in Rome.
He keeps disrupting the hierarchy.
He keeps embarrassing the powerful.
He keeps treating people at the bottom like they belong in the center.
So how did a faith built around a colonized man executed by the state become a mascot for domination?
How did the refugee child become border militarization?
How did the healer become healthcare denial?
How did the defender of the condemned become the patron saint of public shaming?
How did a religion that claims God entered the world through vulnerability become so addicted to political muscle?
At some point, the movement has to answer a basic question:
Are you trying to follow Christ—or are you using Christ to follow power?
Because those roads are not always going in the same direction.
Whiteness has always had a guest list
Donalson’s framework also challenges the idea that white dominion includes only white people.
Whiteness has never operated solely as a skin tone.
It can function like a membership program.
People of color may be invited in—as long as they protect the hierarchy.
Defend the system.
Minimize racism.
Distance yourself from other marginalized people.
Tell the dominant group that its power is innocent.
Then your presence becomes evidence that the movement cannot possibly be racist.
You become the screenshot.
The testimonial.
The “see, we have one” defense.
But an invitation is not ownership.
Being allowed in the room does not mean you helped design it.
Being handed a microphone does not mean you control the sound system.
And being visible does not mean you possess power.
That is the cruel bargain.
A marginalized person may believe proximity to the hierarchy will eventually provide protection from it.
But the protection usually lasts only as long as the person remains useful.
What happens when they raise a question?
What happens when they center Black pain?
What happens when they challenge anti-immigrant policy?
What happens when they defend queer people?
What happens when they stop performing gratitude?
Do they still belong?
Or does the guest pass expire?
Grandma’s house knew something the institution forgot
One of the most compelling ideas in the conversation is the image of Grandma’s house.
Not as nostalgia.
Not because everything our grandmothers believed was automatically right.
But because Grandma’s house represents another kind of knowledge.
Knowledge built through survival.
Memory.
Prayer.
Observation.
Community responsibility.
Knowing who needed food.
Knowing whose child was struggling.
Knowing which family was pretending everything was fine.
Knowing how to stretch a meal, hold a secret, organize a funeral and keep people alive
when the institutions were nowhere to be found.
Academic theology may explain suffering.
Grandma had to get people through it.
That kind of knowledge deserves more than a guest appearance at the end of the panel.
It belongs in the foundation.
And that is where the metaphor of “the table” becomes important.
Marginalized people are constantly told they deserve a seat at the table.
But whose table is it?
Who built it?
Who owns the room?
Who created the agenda?
Who can end the meeting?
Who has to be invited back?
A seat can still be conditional.
A seat can still be decorative.
A seat can still place you inside somebody else’s structure without giving you any power to change it.
Maybe the goal is not another seat.
Maybe the goal is to build another table.
Not a diversity version of the same hierarchy.
Not the old table with brighter chairs.
A new structure where people usually treated as guests become architects.
The movement is selling a throwback nobody should want
White Cristo-nationalism is ultimately a nostalgia project.
It promises a return.
Back to a country where Christianity had greater cultural authority.
Back to a time when families looked one particular way.
Back to a time when gender roles seemed more fixed.
Back to a time when history was cleaner because the people writing it left half the story out.
Back to a time when whiteness did not have to explain itself.
But return to what, exactly?
The past being sold was never safe for everybody.
That “great” America required some people to remain silent.
Some people to remain closeted.
Some people to remain segregated.
Some people to remain grateful.
Some people to remain invisible.
Nostalgia can be beautiful when it helps people remember love, music, family and community.
It becomes dangerous when it airbrushes the violence out of history and sells hierarchy as heritage.
That is not tradition.
That is selective memory with a campaign budget.
Where does the conversation go next?
Donalson gives us a language for naming the problem.
Now the harder work begins.
What would a public faith built around stewardship actually look like?
What would religious freedom look like if it protected everybody—not just the loudest
Christian institution?
What would politics look like if faith communities measured themselves by how well the most vulnerable were doing?
What would churches have to surrender if they stopped confusing access with influence and influence with righteousness?
What would happen if Christians cared less about taking over the seven mountains and more about helping people survive at the bottom of them?
And how do we challenge white Cristo-nationalism without treating every Christian as the enemy?
That matters because Black America’s relationship with Christianity is not simple.
The church has wounded us.
It has also held us.
It has condemned queer people.
It has also produced queer artists, musicians, leaders and cultural workers whose gifts kept the institution alive.
It has been used to defend oppression.
It has also given Black people language for liberation, endurance and moral courage.
So the answer is not pretending the faith has only one history.
The answer is refusing to let dominion claim the whole story.
The cross cannot become campaign merch for empire.
The Bible cannot become a playlist with every liberation song deleted.
And Christianity cannot demand credibility while producing politics that make vulnerable people less safe.
The question is not how loudly a movement says “God.”
The question is what happens to people after that movement gains power.
Are they freer?
Are they safer?
Are they more fully human?
Or are they being forced beneath another hierarchy that learned how to quote scripture?
Because white power with a gospel remix is still white power.
A flag beside a cross does not make domination holy.
And calling a takeover a revival does not make it good news.
Join the conversation
Watch the complete Uncommon Voices Unbound discussion and tell us: When does faith become political domination—and what would spiritual stewardship look like instead?
Related Rainbow Soul reflection: Rainbow Soul explores the complicated inheritance of Black queer faith—the institutions that raised us, the doctrines that wounded us and the spiritual traditions we continue rebuilding for ourselves. The book arrives August 31, 2026.
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