(RNS) — Owen Strachan, a Southern Baptist seminary professor turned anti-woke activist, has spent years warning that liberals were undermining America’s evangelical Christian churches.
Now Strachan is taking aim at a new threat: “mono-ethnic Christian nationalism.”
In a series of recent posts on social media and in his newsletter on Substack, Strachan makes clear that the ethnicity in question is European American. He warns that Christian nationalism — or, as Strahan described it, “the unbiblical view that we must preserve white ethnicity to build a Christian nation” — has taken root in the Reformed wing of the evangelical church.
Strachan has singled out for disfavor Christian nationalist activists such as Andrew Torba, founder of the far-right social media platform Gab, and conservative internet influencer Matt Walsh, who describes himself in his X (formerly Twitter) profile as a “Theocratic fascist” and bestselling children’s author.
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“By the minute, we are smoking out white nationalism — godless ethnocentrism — in Christian circles,” Strachan wrote in a series of posts on X. “By grace, we will fight this wicked ideology.”
Strachan, who is provost of Grace Bible Theological Seminary, a small school in Arkansas, and author of a popular book called “Christianity and Wokeness,” said he has been concerned for some time that racist and antisemitic ideas have been finding their way into conservative churches.
He felt the need to call out the trend earlier this month after a video appeared of Walsh saying that white Americans needed to have more children to save the country from outsiders. Strachan had already seen comments from Torba on social media, since deleted, saying that God created different ethnic groups with a purpose and that preserving them “is to preserve God’s creation and is therefore an inherent good.”
Strachan called Torba’s comments “hot nonsense” that was nonetheless invading churches. (Torba declined to be interviewed for the story or to respond to Strachan’s comments.)
Once a rising star among Southern Baptists, Strachan (pronounced “STRAY-han”) is a former president of the Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, an influential group that promotes complementarian theology — based on the idea that men and women have biblically circumscribed roles in the family and society. He also taught at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary before moving to Arkansas.
But in recent years, he has become best known for his stature within a corner of the evangelical world known for its love of stark Calvinist theology and dark-suited, bespectacled and bearded pastors, often tagged by evangelical insiders as “Theobros.”
