White Christian Nationalism, Biblical Proof Texting, and Literacy Curriculum and Instruction

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AbstractIf the White Christian nationalist movement has significantly galvanized parent, community, and larger‐scale political groups whose guiding ethos challenges teacher professional roles in shaping literacy curriculum and instruction, then how can literacy teachers and teacher educators better understand this movement, its interpretive orientation to biblical proof texting, and implications for literacy scholarship and education? We focus on the locality of Ottawa County and surrounding areas of western Michigan, where Reformed [Calvinist] Christianity became the dominant ethnoreligious group after Dutch immigrants colonized the area in the 1800s. Grounded in this context, the essay describes the Christian nationalist movement, distinguishing it from the American evangelical movement and exploring the significance of biblical proof texting to it. We then discuss implications of our argument about biblical proof texting and White Christian nationalism, focusing around three questions: (a) What is the significance of naming, identifying, and situating the White Christian nationalist movement (as a type of ethnoreligious nationalism) for literacy stakeholders? (b) How, if at all, can the Bible and biblical interpretation be engaged in US public school literacy classrooms—and other commons concerned with literacy teaching and learning—without embracing “cultural uniformity through coercion”? and (c) How can Christian school literacy educators engage the Bible in ways that challenge White Christian nationalism appropriations of it? We engage these questions by sharing examples from our own teaching and from an elementary teacher whose literacy pedagogy in a Reformed Christian (Calvinist) school in western Michigan gently challenges the core assumptions of this movement and its orientation to biblical interpretation.