Conservative evangelicals conflated God and country, endorsing any means to advance both

Evidence

In 1990, North’s convictions were reversed on a technicality. The following year, North was a featured speaker at the Southern Baptist Convention, the first where moderates were not expected to challenge the conservative majority. Oliver North had become a hero of the Christian Right. The affinities were clear. Conservatives in the SBC had skirted conventions and eschewed niceties in order to wrest control of the denomination, just as North had skirted the rule of law in order to pursue a greater good. For both, the ends justified the means. But it wasn’t just tactics that united fellow renegades. Like North, conservative evangelicals defined the greater good in terms of Christian nationalism. It was this conflation of God and country that heroic Christian men would advance zealously, and by any means necessary, with their resurgent religious and political power. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 273

Categorization

• XREF: Picks up the North-as-hero thread from the Iran-Contra material in earlier chapters; this paragraph cements the ends-justify-means ethos as the connective tissue between SBC takeover tactics and North’s lawbreaking.
• DEFINE: Here Du Mez states her definition of Christian nationalism as the conflation of God and country defining the greater good for conservative evangelicals.