White Christian Nationalism, Biblical Proof Texting, and Literacy Curriculum and Instruction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract If 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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".