As we reflect on our existence as a nation, it is critical that we move beyond the hubris and the racism of an “America First” mentality and instead ask ourselves what our country can do to contribute to a more beloved community throughout the world. 

Today we hear an increasing number of politicians who openly refer to themselves as “America First” politicians. Many of these America First politicians openly embrace Christian nationalism, and we have been seeing some very extreme expressions of Christian nationalism in the last few weeks, with unconstitutional attempts to require Bibles and the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.

The founders of the United States were deeply flawed, but they got some things right, and two of those things were the constitutional protection of religious freedom and the constitutional prohibition of government established religion found in the First Amendment of Constitution of the United States. The founders knew that millions of lives were lost in the religious wars in Europe, and the oppression of religious minorities was a significant factor in many people leaving Europe to come to America. The efforts to require the Bible and Ten Commandments in public schools are a direct threat to a system that has served us well by protecting religous freedom, which also includes the freedom not to be religious. Unfortunately the America First movement and Christian nationalists are failing to heed the wisdom of our founders.

To understand the American First movement today, it is helpful to look at the origins of the slogan of this movement in the 1930s. The America First movement took on the name and slogan “America First” in the late 1930s, and its most prominent spokesperson was Charles Lindbergh, a white supremacist, antisemite, and Nazi sympathizer who argued for the United States to take a neutral position on the war on Europe. He also happened to be the first person to successfully complete a transatlantic flight, a feat which gave him international fame and a platform for his racist views.

Lindbergh attended and spoke at the infamous America First rally in Madison Square Garden in October of 1941 that was attended by many persons with pro-Nazi sympathies, with many in attendance greeting Lindbergh with Nazi salutes. Lindbergh spoke and wrote often about the importance of protecting the European blood of the American people and publicly spoke out against the influence of Jewish persons in America. A few years earlier, in 1938, Lindbergh received the Service Cross of the German Eagle from Hermann Göring just weeks before Kristallnacht.

The original America First movement was white, Christian, racist, nationalist, and open to authoritarianism; and many of its members saw what Hitler was doing in Germany in the 1930s as a model for what could happen in the United States, and they worked very hard to keep the United States from intervening in the war in Europe. The America First Movement of the late 1930s and early 1940s is stunningly and shockingly similar to the America First Movement today, which is difficult to fully take in given how much sacrifice was made to eliminate the threat of fascism during World War II.

Today’s America Firsters are also predominantly white, they identify openly as Christian nationalists, and they are drawn to authoritarian leaders both at home and abroad who they think are working to protect their interests by any means necessary. They see authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin and Victor Orbán as models and partners in the protection of their religious and ethnocultural interests. Like fascist movements of the past, they seek to control the content of the education of youth so that they are only exposed to a positive framing of their Christian nationalist views.

Many in the ranks of the contemporary America First movement are simply pawns being used by oligarchs who have the real power, but given their economic desperation, they are extremely prone to manipulation and propaganda that promises to fix all of the ways that they perceive themselves to have been wronged. And like in fascist movements of the past, they are offered scapegoats to blame for all of the problems they experience – it’s the immigrants’ fault, it’s the Muslims, it’s the gays, it’s the feminists, it’s the trans persons, it’s the media, it’s the college professors, it’s the Hollywood elite, and an almost unending list of persons to blame who are “otherized” and dehumanized. “If only we could deport them or get them out of country in some other way, or maybe lock them up, all we be well” they are told.

But the urgent challenges of our world will not be solved by isolationism or nationalism, and they certainly will not be solved by fascism. Blaming others and scapegoating others will not improve our economy or lift people out of poverty. Withdrawing from global environmental agreements will not solve the climate crisis or contribute to the health and well-being of all life in earth. In fact, it will do just the opposite.

The promise of the America First Movement that if we simply focus on one set of ethnocultural interests that we will somehow be great again is a false promise. It fails to see the realities of who we are as a diverse and pluralistic humanity. It fails to see ourselves as all being interconnected, with problems and challenges that are not confined by national borders or narrow national interests.

The America First movement points us precisely in the opposite direction of where we need to be going in the human community. It sees our power and interests as only being preserved by diminishing the power and interests of those who we see as being different than us. It mistakenly sees the power gained through competition as being greater than the power gained through collaboration. It fails to see the reality in nature that we don’t really live in a zero sum game world of the survival of the fittest, but rather in a world of survival of those who are able to work together and cooperate for the flourishing of all.

The way forward to human flourishing and ecological flourishing is not the way of America First but the way of Beloved Community, a way in which we all humble ourselves and see that all persons have sacred value and recognize that we ultimately diminish ourselves when we diminish the value of others.