According to a certain line of thinking, there is not greater threat to the Christian message in our current day than to tie Christianity to a political movement which half the country considers obviously villainous.
It is quite possible that this is true. It is also possible that the greatest current threat to the Christian message is the idea that one's creed hardly matters beyond personal taste since anyone can be "a good person".
If we look to the previous century as an example (in which many Christians endorsed nationalism in the first world war and fascism in the second, all the while thinking that they were fighting the good fight against godless socialism, while those who successfully rejected nationalism and fascism all too often endorsed indifferentism and held that Christianity was only good, if it was good at all, when it served as a force to unite the poor against the powerful in a stricture secular struggle) it's pretty clear that both of these contentions are true in what they critique but blind in what they endorse.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
7 hours ago
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“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
Nobody endorsed fascism under the misapprehension that they were fighting socialism, unless they were already so far on the left that adhering to fascism while fighting Communism or socialism or national socialism was just a differentiation between closely related Crayolas.
Now, of course those are pretty nasty fights, but it takes a lot of self-delusion to see that it's not just Crayolas, or to think that you can keep your Crayola after the war while throwing out the rest of the box. (Although to be fair, the UK's political parties seem to have done this, as did a lot of Europe.
Nationalism is a bit different. But in practice, an awful lot of Eastern European socialists, Communists, et al were whipping up nationalism when they thought it would help them get in power over the aristocrats or whatever, and going for peace party and internationalism when they thought it wouldn't. Not exactly a movement, so much as an excuse to be dropped or used.
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