loading . . . Conservative think tank: Immigration ‘undermined Christianity’ _Brian Noble preaches at Valley Assembly where he was the lead pastor for several years before working for Family Policy Institute of Washington. (Photo by Aaron Hedge.)_
_This story was written in partnership between RANGE and_ _FāVS News,__a nonprofit newsroom covering faith and values in the Inland Northwest. Learn more about FāVS’s work_ _here_ _._
The Family Policy Institute of Washington (FPIW) — a conservative evangelical Christian nonprofit that champions conservative legislation and works as a network for Christian activists — wants to raise up biblically “healthy families” and to promote their flourishing in the state.
For its research fellow, Travis Pardo, who has a PhD in Religion from Baylor University, that means in part dramatically curtailing immigration from countries that are not majority-white, establishing English as the official language and “a re-Christianizing of the United States.”
This signifies a marked foray into American identity politics. Pardo’s articles include two recent series arguing for a more established sense of American identity and worrying that Islam has too much influence in Washington.
“We were told for decades that ‘diversity is our strength’ justifying mass immigration,” FPIW researcher Pardo wrote in the latest article, “The Rise of Islam: Its Power in Washington State,” the first in a series that claims to chronicle the rise of Islam in Washington.
He argues, “In practical terms, such immigration rates undermined Christianity, i.e., British-American culture. Islam is a key example.”
Critics interviewed for this story said such rhetoric perpetuates a Christian nationalism that is unhealthy for American democracy.
In an email to FāVS News, Pardo defended his writing.
“We have love and compassion toward all people (as people), but not toward all ideologies, nor all political agendas, nor all laws,” he wrote in the email.
The broadest and most widely agreed upon definition of Christian nationalism by experts across various fields of study is that it’s a political-religious creed that fuses a particular brand of Christianity with civic life.
This is according to Andrew Whitehead, author of “American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church.”
“It demands our government, at all levels, vigorously defend this ideology as central to our national identity, public policy, and social belonging,” Whitehead wrote.
The Rev. Terry Kyllo, a Lutheran pastor and interfaith expert in Washington State who has worked to counter anti-Muslim bigotry, finds the syncretization of Christianity and the state dangerous.
Specifically, he noted that Pardo’s writing about Muslims and Islam is dehumanizing. Kyllo added it is “an attempt to weaponize people’s desire to protect themselves — their own love of their own community — with slander about another group.”
“They may not intend for anyone to be harmed, [but] they are actually creating it,” said Kyllo, who is the executive director of Paths to Understanding, an interfaith community that works for the common good.
Kyllo pointed to a white supremacist who in 2017 murdered two men and injured another after trying to assault two women, one of whom wore a hijab.
“They’re adding to a permission structure for violence against against people,” Kyllo said.
Pardo, who started at FPIW in 2023, sees Muslims active in the public square, mass immigration and multiculturalism as threats to America’s future broadly and to Christianity’s influence specifically. He argues that because Washington is the first state to formally recognize Eid al‑Fitr and Eid al‑Adha as state holidays and the state is home to 100,000 Muslims and 79 mosques or Islamic centers in 36 cities, Chrisitianity is under threat.
“Islam seeks to influence our society, shape the story of our state and thus determine our course,” Pardo wrote in his article. “As Christians who seek to defend and advance biblical values, we have good reasons to be concerned about Islam’s impact upon our families.”
Only about 2% of Washingtonians are Muslim. More than half identify as Christian.
Kyllo sees Pardo’s words as Christian nationalist rhetoric and a way to keep Christians in power and as tearing down America’s democratic principles, he said.
“They’re trying to say that it’s OK that I steal your TV, because I’m sure you’re going to steal mine,” Kyllo explained. “So this is part of a gaslighting process where they’re trying to justify their desire to create a status-keeping system in the United States where only conservative Christians are on top.”
The vast bulk of literature produced by FPIW touches on common Republican themes around the values on life, marriage, religious liberty and parental rights. The last five articles sound alarms about America losing her identity and express an “us-or-them” fear-driven approach to maintaining political power, which mark a different focus.
Prior pieces have focused on such things as “Biblical principles to ground your conservative philosophy,” praying for elected officials and how important it is for Christians to vote.
This is one of at least a couple of shifts FPIW CEO and President Brian Noble has seen working with the organization over the years. He started as a consultant. As the former CEO of Peacemaker Ministries, he’d been hired to provide FPIW’s human resources departments’ conflict resolution training, which led to contracts working with all Family Policy Councils across the nation.
FPIW liked what they saw, Noble said, and asked him to be their CEO — five times. He said that, initially, he didn’t like their “activist” and “negative” approach to engaging in politics, including the name-calling aimed at political enemies, the power and controlling of people to get them to do what they wanted and the intimidation. But on the sixth ask, FPIW decided to change that culture and Noble has led the organization since 2023.
“First and foremost, I see every opportunity … as an opportunity to minister to people and to be salt and light in the public square,” said Noble, who approved Pardo’s articles for publication, though Noble said he doesn’t agree with everything Pardo writes.
Those changes were not meant to be Christian nationalist ones, he said. He also said in his biblical worldview, it’s impossible for him to be a Christian nationalist.
“So this is where I do take offense when people call me a Christian nationalist, because, I’m like, ‘No, that’s everything opposite of me,’” said Noble.
“I’m a Christian who lives in a nation,” he clarified, saying he does believe that America is a Christian nation in the sense the government is established on biblical principles. For example, he said the three branches of government came from Isaiah 33:22, where the passage calls God judge, lawgiver and king.
Whether Noble is a Christian nationalist or not, FPIW has advocated for laws that follow Christian doctrine.
The idea that the US was founded as a Christian nation has been deeply challenged by scholars like Andrew Seidel, a lawyer with the Freedom From Religion Foundation. He has written that the founding fathers wanted a public square where everyone has the opportunity to practice their religion, but no one religion dictates how that works — an inherently secular idea, according to Seidel.
Noble’s defines Christian nationalism as the belief that Christians must “clean up” America for Jesus to return and the belief that the power of government should be used to coerce an individual to become a Christian. Noble said he doesn’t believe either of those things..
But some of Pardo’s views, articulated in an earlier four-part series titled “Renewing America’s Identity,” are adjacent to forcing Christianity on people, not so they convert, as Noble discusses, but so the society must adhere to Christian principles, FPIW critic Cornell Clayton, director of Washington State University’s Foley Institute.
Since the country’s inception, legal systems protected Americans from just this, Clayton said.
He noted there is a “whole history of jurisprudence” around “what constitutes an establishment of religion.” He stated that the court had moved substantially toward a “high wall of separation of church and state,” citing Establishment Clause jurisprudence from the 1950s through the 1990s.
However, he also noted that the wall has since “started to break down” allowing “a lot more mixture of church and state.”
Pardo’s mixture includes legally establishing a specific Anglo-Protestant Christian morality and culture as the main one, prioritizing Christianity in the public square, which could move from non-compulsory religious practice to government-endorsed practice. This could make non-Christian and other believing Christian Americans feel less American or like second-class citizens, Clayton said.
“What they’re really saying is to be an American, you need to be a Christian,” Clayton said.
Noble does not see it that way. He sees legislating his moral beliefs, which he gets from the Bible and believes are “written on every human heart,” as not trying to preserve a Christian nation or elevate Christianity above all other religions through government power, but as one of loving his neighbors.
“Why do I create good policy?” Noble said. “It’s not to control my neighbor. It’s because I want to have more opportunity for them to hear the good news of Jesus.”
These policies, though, tend to cross into areas that conservative evangelical Christians, like Noble, see as policy issues in need of moral guardrails, where other citizens do not. One noteworthy example is gender-affirming care and do parents have the right to allow (or not allow) their children to receive such care.
Noble said he classifies gender-affirming care for minors as child abuse, and he would legislate against that. And while he wouldn’t usurp a parent’s current authority to allow this for their child, he said he does think that parental right is an unjust law.
“It’s silly, because we’ve had decades of laws that put some parameter around what a parent can do,” Noble said, referring to child abuse laws.
Not everyone agrees. And not every conservative evangelical Christian approaches their civic involvement in the manner reflected by FPIW.
One such person is Paul Miller, professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and author of “The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism.” In an article on Christian nationalism for Christianity Today, he wrote there are differences between “normal Christian political engagement” and Christian nationalism.
Conventional Christian engagement works to “advance Christian principles” like justice, not for “Christian power or Christian culture,” which Miller writes is what Christian nationalism does.
“Normal Christian political engagement is humble, loving, and sacrificial,” he wrote. “It rejects the idea that Christians are entitled to primacy of place in the public square or that Christians have a presumptive right to continue their historical predominance in American culture.”
Pardo agreed, rejecting the notion that his views exclude people. Instead, he seeks to diminish ideologies that don’t support a nation’s way of life.
“Every nation has a right to protect its common core culture, often by immigration policy, and often by encouraging assimilation — which many immigrants are choosing not to do here in the United States,” he said. He explained the primary concern in his articles revolved around “values and ideas, or what some call ‘culture,’ i.e., ‘what people have, do, and think.’”
He hopes to publish Part 2 of “The Rise of Islam” in January. This time he will explore less political themes but more theological and philosophical ideas comparing Christianity and Islam, he said, “in a spirit of charity and fairness toward all Muslims and Islam itself.”
Brad Payne, FPIW Action’s chief lobbyist, said he would work with Muslim groups to establish policy if those groups found common political ground with FPIW. Noble said that means it would need to be “a biblical principle that promotes the common good.”
“I’d work with anyone who wants to get someone across the street,” Noble said. https://rangemedia.co/conservative-think-tank-immigration-undermined-christianity/
