On Reckoning with "Christian Extremism"

Giving Theological Definition to January 6

AP Photo / John Minchillo

About the author: Rev. Dr. Jared Stacy (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is a theologian and ethicist whose work centers on political extremisms and evangelical theology in America. Alongside serving as a hospice chaplain, his work has been featured on platforms like TIME, BBC, and Seen and Unseen, an outlet for the Centre for Cultural Witness for the Anglican Church. He resides with his wife and children near Washington, D.C.

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Daniel Hodges, a Metropolitan Police Officer, testified to the House Committee on January 6: “It was clear the terrorists considered themselves to be Christians.” While his testimony was offered to a governing body, I think it is also a witness worthy of the Christian community.

Popular (albeit earnest) accounts of January 6 have tended to interpret the storming of the Capitol in various sub-theological ways. That is, many accounts of January 6—even ones that center the religious element—offer insights that correspond to their own disciplinary logic. They emerge from non-theological grounds, like sociology or security studies. It is not that these disciplines have nothing to say: they do! It is just that the Church cannot rely solely on these disciplines to map accounts of Christian involvement of January 6.

These accounts applied to January 6 also generate moral activisms and answers to the questions of “What should we do?” and “Why?” These activisms emerge from accounts that seem potent but lack theological orientation. It may be true, in a sociological sense, to suggest a movement “co-opted” by nationalism or a people (in this case, white evangelicals) trading a “religious identity” for a “partisan” one. And then there is: “Christian Extremism.”

The point is not to decry other disciplines and enthrone theology. The point worth surfacing is whether other discourses give the Church the content and language to speak of January 6 as Church. Christian extremism provides a good starting point for examining distinctly theological ways to name and narrate January 6 in ways faithful to the witness of the Scriptures. Is there room, then, to speak of Christian extremism? 

At present, the standard definition of extremism arises from security discourses. J. M. Berger offers a good industry standard. He writes that extremism is characterized by the notion that “an in-group’s success or survival can never be separated from the need for hostile action against an out-group. The hostile action must be part of the in-group’s definition of success.”¹

Few would argue that the elements storming the Capitol did not align with this definition. This illustrates how this securitization concept, applied to January 6, might help generate knowledge and orient practices for the national security apparatus. However, a problem arises at this point for the Church because “Christian extremism” is too tightly bound up in the concepts and assumptions of securitization and thus too thin for theological consideration. “Christian extremism” too easily lends itself towards the particular telos that orients most securitization activisms: the preservation of the State, a tautology for the national security apparatus. Without critical reflection, the embrace of “Christian extremism” risks coding January 6 as the result of social radicalization and an untenable threat landscape, all of which obscure the irreducibly theological elements that fueled it.

I suggest that Barth offers the Church a better way to narrate January 6: to shore up the Christian community's memory and continue to pursue Christian responsibility in freedom. So, what is wrong with “Christian extremism”?

To put what we have previewed earlier in more direct and theological terms, the logic and grammar of theology lead us beyond reading January 6 as a case of “Christian extremism.” As we have stated, at base, securitization discourses linked to the national security apparatus tend to assume the state's givenness, generating activisms that reify the State’s inevitable and assumptive claims to ultimacy. Claims which the confession, “Jesus is Lord,” interrogate and implicate as false.

Theology must question such givenness in light of God’s revelation. Further, if, as Robert Jenson observes, theology is the “thinking involved in making that move from B to C, from hearing the gospel to speaking it.”²

Its commission compels the Church to name and narrate January 6 theologically, too—in its language. There is a public service bound up in the Church being the Church in this way, but we must begin with theological accounts of Christian Extremism.

To resist Christian Extremism, we must name it by the logic and grammar of the Christian story. This is a form of witness. All else is activism. So, how might we speak of “Christian Extremism” by theological categories? Might we dare to speak of January 6 as sinful?

Barth writes, “There must be a clear doctrine of sin…but it must not be a doctrine of sin that is autonomous.”³ In Barth’s Doctrine of Reconciliation, Sin is only seen clearly in the light of Christ. Barth depicts sin in three ways, corresponding as the shadow to Christ’s offices: thus, sin as pride, as sloth, and as falsehood.

Of these, the “Christian Extremism” of securitization is best named and narrated as sin and falsehood. Falsehood is—Barth says—“sin in its most highly developed form” and “the specifically Christian form of sin.⁴ The sin of falsehood signifies humanity’s paramount resistance to the Word by creating rogue words—counter-insurgencies against the Word of the Crucified and his kingdom.

January 6, as the sin of falsehood, is a window into the Christian character of the creeping authoritarianism in America. It is a sin but of a certain sort—one that rages against the Word as a rogue word. MAGA is “Christian sin.” The movement displays the “characteristic damage” of Christian proclamation to apply Lauren Winner’s excellent treatment of the intrinsic deformity of Christian practices.⁵

This thicker account of Christian Extremism, a theological one rooted in the sin of falsehood, can occur alongside securitization discourse while resourcing Christian community and confession to speak clearly and courageously of the Word over and against rival words.

We are speaking of “sin” in public, and we risk falling into a ditch of trite sentimentality on the one hand and public intelligibility on the other. For Christians, talk of sin comes packaged with talk of piety, not polity. For our fellow citizens, talk of sin might seem either ludicrous or an imposition of faith on the assumed neutrality of the public square.

But because January 6 is a theological event—a day of prayer draped in Christian imagery—the Church must name and narrate January 6 in the Church’s own language: Sin in the light of the Word.

The offer of this naming and narration is two-fold: it primes Christians in America towards confession and witness, that is, confession is worship—a public declaration of not only opposition to Christian nationalisms and extremisms but one that functions as witness to God’s revelation.

There is a broader public service bound up in this irreducibly Christian narration. In The Church and Civil Community, Barth offers an account of Church and State that conceives of the Church as the “true prototype” of the State. Or, the Church exists as an inner circle within the outer circle of the State. In these relations, the Church preserves the State by its freedom—the Church must be itself in relation to the State by its proclamation and practice.

The Church serves the State in America by offering an explanation of January 6 by the very logic and grammar that fueled it, that is, by Christian theology. This is the path of freedom pioneered by Christ for the Church. By naming elements of its sinful corruption in the honest hope of renewal, the Christian community in the United States makes a theological resistance in the raging fury of idolatry and violence.

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1. J. M. Berger, Extremism (MIT Press, 2018), 44.

2. Robert Jenson, A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Live? (Oxford University Press, 2016) 8.

3. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics VI.1, eds. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (T&T Clark, 1957),139.

4. Barth, CD IV.3.I, 374–76.

5. In my dissertation, I highlight 5 key prayers uttered by those who stormed the Capitol that day. Their prayers were decidedly “biblical,” invoking OT passages of nationhood and revival. Winner’s concept of “characteristic damage” highlights the diverging and disorienting ways damage can be sustained by Christian practice directly. She writes, “Although twenty-first-century Anglophone Christians often speak of practices like Eucharist and prayer only to commend them and laud the benefits they bestow upon practitioners, Christians need also to give accounts of, rather than evade, the damages Christian practice sustains by sin; in The Dangers of Christian Practice I attempt some of that accounting” (Lauren F. Winner. The Dangers of Christian Practice: On Wayward Gifts, Characteristic Damage, and Sin [Yale University Press, 2018] 10).