…when many people more to the right use the term, they have something specific in mind. Stephen Wolfe’s (no relation to William Wolfe) The Case for Christian Nationalism isn’t arguing for a pro-life, pro-natural marriage Christian liberalism. He is, rather, echoing interwar European right ideas about natural greatness, hierarchy, and political power. Consider this excerpt from Wolfe on the necessity of a Christian Prince to usher in a new era of Christian Nationalism:
The civil magistrate, or what I’ll call the ‘Christian prince,’ mediates the people’s national will for their good, providing them the necessary and specific civil actions for that end. More than that, however, the magistrate is also the head of the people—the one to whom they look to see greatness, a love of country, and the best of men. He is their spirit. Civil law is the life of the commonwealth in relation to its activities and operations, but the magistrate is the heart and spirit of the people. He is, or ought to be, the quintessential great man. …
The prince is the first of his people—one whom the people can look upon as father or protectorate of the country. I am not calling for a monarchical regime over every civil polity, and certainly not an autocracy, though I envision a measured and theocratic Caesarism—the prince as a world-shaker for our time, who brings a Christian people to self-consciousness and who, in his rise, restores their will for their good. ‘Prince’ is a fitting title for a man of dignity and greatness of soul who will lead a people to liberty, virtue, and godliness—to greatness.
Wolfe’s Christian Nationalism is about a Christian Nation bound together by common practices, culture, and customs which are exemplified and embodied by a Christian strong man who really becomes the nation. It has strong resonances with the European far right of the 1930s. Consider how one student of Carl Schmitt, who was himself a Nazi, wrote of the Fuhrer:
Nazi political theorist Ernst Rudolf Huber in Constitutional Law of the Third Reich stated that the Führer is the “bearer of the collective will of the people.” In the will of the leader, Huber said, the “will of the people is realized.” Hitler’s will was not the “subjective will of a single man.”
Rather, the “collective national will” was embodied within the leader. A people’s collective will, Huber explained, is rooted in the “political idea which is given to a people.” The political idea is present in the people, but the Führer “raises it to consciousness and discloses it.”
The role of the leader according to Huber is to “disclose” a people’s political idea—to bring into consciousness that which had been unconscious. The leader brings forth—makes manifest—ideas and desires that are latent within a people. His ideology reveals and crystallizes a people’s shared fantasies.
The leader invents images, metaphors and phrases to convey these fantasies. He processes his own fantasies and those of his people—and “returns” information to his audience in the form of a societal discourse.
If that sounds like Wolfe’s Christian Prince, well, yes. Precisely. You understand. This is Christian Nationalism as articulated by the author of the most popular book arguing for it.
Unsurprisingly, such an understanding of “nations” quickly veers into racial directions, as Wolfe has done in his own work. Consider this excerpt from an essay he wrote on the concept of “anarcho-tyranny,” which he is taking from the noted white supremacist essayist Sam Francis.
In the United States, this anarchic element is composed largely of black Americans. For complex reasons, blacks in America, considered as a group, are reliable sources for criminality, and their criminality increases when constraints diminish. Despite being around 13% of the US population, blacks have consistently committed over 50% of the homicides for decades, and it is getting worse. In 2020, according to the FBI stats, blacks committed nearly 57% of all known murders. Even the left admitted that the “Ferguson Effect” — the theory that negativity toward police reduces “proactive policing” and, in effect, increases crime — is likely true. Less constraint means more crime.
It should not be hard to read between the lines here: Wolfe wants a Christian Prince who becomes the nation, and he thinks that Afro-Americans need to be “constrained” in order to reduce crime.
…So: The Christian Nationalist political project, as defined by Stephen Wolfe, Andrew Isker, and Andrew Torba and their close associates is a) Nazi-adjacent, b) seeks to retrieve such political tradition as the Confederacy and the interwar European right, and c) routinely engages in anti-Semitic and anti-Black racial speech. These are the core ideas and practices that define the movement.
Jake Meador | “If It Were Me, I’d Try Not Helping the Christian Nationalists” | March 8, 2024
Editor’s Note: Meador refers to an essay by Joshua Abbotoy, “Is A Protestant Franco Inevitable,” in First Things (October 6, 2023) in which Abbotoy wrote, “Struck by the similarities of our current situation to 1930s Spain, I mused on Twitter some months back:’“Basically, America is going to need a Protestant Franco.’ By this I meant that unless something changes, our anarchic trajectory will soon require a person like Franco to reestablish order, and that this muscular leader would most naturally be Protestant. I didn’t expect the prediction to be controversial. The Spanish Civil War haunts savvy observers of modern politics because we see in it a warning for our own democracy. Stanley Payne recently examined the unsettling parallels for First Things. Or read Nathan Pinkoski, writing in the Claremont Review of Books: ‘the most unsettling relevance of the Spanish case is its demonstration that modern liberal democracies are not immune to revolution. They can succumb to internal revolutionary processes. Liberal democracies are not guaranteed happy endings.'”
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Highly well stated yet again, Darrell! I always marvel at your obvious learned positions on these matters. I commend you with an “I also have been doing my homework all these years!” Kudos, my brother! Yahweh Bless always!✝️📖🙏👍😊
Thank you for your input AND article, AJ. I recall most of the W. Post’s info, tho I was a lost, semi lib… back then,…saved, sealed, and sanctifying since then, @ late 1981. Praise Yahweh!
Thanks again! Very excellent read!✝️📖🙏👍
Thank you, Rob Iggy. Somehow I didn’t see your post until now and didn’t mean to ignore you.
I believe the roles and movements under review are clearly defined in this article by the Washington Post. The good guys are the practical-atheist humanitarians that promote equality and civil/human rights on a global-international scale. The bad guys are the evangelical-fascists who want to establish a nation that caters to white-America. … Wolfe is definitely promoting and representing his particular brand (as highlighted in this article) faithfully. The confessional-Reformed-American Calvinist is not represented via either camp, thankfully).
One group uses religion for politics while the other uses politics as religion and both discredit themselves.
“ This history exposes how the best counter to Christian nationalism might be Christian internationalism, and a religious community that can serve as a political counterweight to far-right evangelical Christianity.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/05/06/christian-nationalism-is-surging-it-wasnt-inevitable/
For those criticizing Dr. Clark for drawing parallels between the advocates of Christian Nationalism and the Nazis, ask if the parallel would be less shocking and cause more hard looks at the historic problems of European conservative political theory if we used the word “fascism” rather than “Nazis.”
The fascist movement was broader than Hitler and he was a johnny-come-lately to it. Fascism survived World War II in the person of Franco in Spain, and prior to World War II it existed in numerous forms in Italy, Spain, Hungary, and a number of second-tier states in the Balkans and elsewhere, a number of which had strained relationships with Hitler and were allies due mostly to convenience, a desire to be on the “right side of history” (which looked a lot better in 1939 than 1942 and 1943) and raw political reality that in late 1930s Europe, it was often less risky to have Hitler as an ally than an enemy.
I would argue that fascism “morphed” into what I call the “caudillo culture” of Latin American strongmen who combined cultural traditionalism, Catholic faith, and anti-communism with a reliance on the military, which for better or for worse, was actually somewhat of a meritocracy in the Latin American context, being one of the few ways that a young man of humble means could rise to power since business and educational avenues were open mostly to the landed elite.
One of the worst problems of European conservatism prior to World War II was a reliance on a blood-and-soil ideology of nationalism. I don’t disagree that we can identify a “nation” in ethnic terms, and apart from the United States, most nations have historically been defined by ethnicity. Fascism arose out of socialism but co-opted traditional conservative political parties because it turned in an anti-Communist direction, and put bluntly, when Bolsheviks are rioting in the streets, fascism’s reliance on paramilitary forces with strong support from the traditional military and police starts to look like a “lesser of two evils” to a lot of Christian conservatives and economic conservatives. Mussolini would never have come to power in Italy without presenting himself as a defender of traditional values and of law and order, which meant co-opting conservative language for an ideology whose roots lie elsewhere and does not value personal liberty and freedom. Much of that was deeply linked with the concept of Italian nationalism, and the same can be said for Spanish nationalism and Hungarian nationalism, entirely apart from the German project which was “pan-Aryan” and relied on German nationalism but was far worse than that.
The problem we face as Christians is that our identity is **NOT** based on our “ethnos” but our relationship with Christ and His church.
A Christian nationalist project that begins with the ethnos and not the Christos ends in chaos.
I am learning so much from the insightful articles Dr. Clark shares on the Heidelblog. I pray folks won’t read this particular article and have a knee-jerk reaction when responding; but instead they will take a few minutes to think about what is being said. I left the theonomy movement years ago and I still struggle with how to be a Christian citizen in our nation. I certainly don’t care for “Christian Nationalism” and all the baggage that term carries, yet I want to be faithful to Christ in all things. Dr. Clark has helped me sort things out down through the years and I appreciate the articles he writes and shares.
It’s incredibly disingenuous to say “The Christian Nationalist political project […] is a) Nazi-adjacent, b) seeks to retrieve such political tradition as the Confederacy and the interwar European right, and c) routinely engages in anti-Semitic and anti-Black racial speech. These are the core ideas and practices that define the movement.” Maybe even slanderous.
It’s disappointing that an article like this would be re-posted on the Heidelblog. If you want to veer people away from CN, fine, but most CN people are trying to recover political theory from the Reformers (and prior). If you disagree with their the analysis or conclusions, that’s fine, but I don’t think we should villainize people for trying to recover these things from Christian thinkers of the past that we otherwise draw from and respect so heavily.
Please at least wrestle with the actual arguments instead of making false equivalances like “strong national identity = literally Hitler.” There’s not a single argument here, just blindly upholding the post-war consensus without actually engaging with any of the substance of what Christian Nationalists say.
Jay,
It’s not disingenuous if it’s true.
I can’t believe you actually said, “post-war consensus.” I actually wondered whether your comment was the product of a bot/AI.
More substantively, when I began to look into the language “blood and soil” (“Blut und Boden“) I found a pre-WWII journal article which described the ideology and rhetoric of the National Socialist movement in Germany. What astounded me was that I had already seen the very same language in contemporary Christian Nationalist tomes. Documentation forthcoming.
Meador is right. The evidence is right there. When he published his initial Twitter thread I didn’t sleep the next night. It was that disturbing. You should be disturbed too.
I understand that you’re concerned about the culture but this is not the way to respond.
Jay,
I keep hearing this “post war consensus” from some folks on the right. What do you mean by that?
I have an idea what Jay means by the “postwar consensus,” which is a common theme of attack in conservative circles, but I don’t want to put words into his mouth. There’s a fair amount of difference in how that term gets used by conservatives who oppose it.
Since Jay brought up the term it’s best to let him explain what he means by it.
If he doesn’t, I’ll respond, but I don’t want to set up and tear down a straw man he may not believe.
The critics aren’t all in the same category. Yes, some are right-wing cranks who see “Europeanism” and “one-world ideologies” under every rock and tree, giving the United Nations an authority and respect that its incompetence clearly doesn’t justify. Other conservative critics of the “postwar consensus” are right on the money. For example, the so-called “Eisenhower Republicans” were part-and-parcel of the older mainline “civil religion” that we as confessional Calvinists believe was fundamentally destructive to what was left of the Reformed faith in the 1950s. The Northern Presbyterians were long since lost and had been lost before World War II ever broke out, but by the end of World War II, both the UPNA and the PC(US) might have been saved if they had maintained their older emphasis on confessionalism and the antithesis rather than being drawn into the “postwar consensus” of watered-down “Americanism” and “civil religion.”
I personally think the concept of a “postwar consensus” is too vague to be useful, but others do use it, and if I were Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater, working in an era when the political elites probably **COULD** be described by that phrase, I might use it, too. I think by the 1970s and 1980s the term had worn out its usefulness as the academic world was taken over by children of the hard left of the 1960s and conservative politics moved, thanks largely to Reagan, in a very different direction from the conservatism of the 1950s and 1960s.
I doubt he was being that sophisticated with his take. From what I can tell many on the right use that term to describe the entirety of western history since WWII. It’s a pretty ahistorical take.
It’s a CN talking point.