There once was a man who was apparently healthy who nevertheless carried within himself a fatal disease. Remarkably, he did not feel the effects of the disease yet wherever he went he carried and spread it to others. We will call him Typhoid Larry. Wherever he went he left behind a trail of death and destruction. When someone dared to mention the correlation between his presence and the spread of the disease he was offended and even wrote a public letter to denounce the disease and to distance himself from it. The community, of which he was a prominent member, was split with some siding with Larry, who his friends promised was a good and gracious man who would never spread a disease. His detractors, however, were unpersuaded since they could not help but notice that wherever Larry went, the disease went after him.
In our parable, Larry is the Christian Nationalist movement and the disease is racism. By Christian Nationalism we mean that movement that, according to James Silberman, Dusty Deevers, William Wolfe, Joel Webbon, Jeff Wright, and Cory Anderson,
is a set of governing principles rooted in Scripture’s teaching that Christ rules as supreme Lord and King of all creation, who has ordained civil magistrates with delegated authority to be under Him, over the people, to order their ordained jurisdiction by punishing evil and promoting good for His own glory and the common good of the nation (Isaiah 9:6-7; John 1:1-3; 3:35; 17:2; Ephesians 1:20-21; Philippians 2:9-11; Colossians 1:15-18; Romans 13:1-4; 1 Peter 2:14; Deuteronomy 6:5, Matthew 22:37-39).1
When these Christian Nationalists speak about “nations” they refer to “a particular people are necessarily bound together by a shared culture, customs, history, and lineage while sharing common interests, virtues, languages, and worship.”2 They have adopted a view of the state that has echoes of the Covenanter position that demands that the civil magistrate recognize the “crown rights of King Jesus” by acknowledging, as these proponents of Christian Nationalism say, Christ’s “mediatorial rule” by acknowledging his rule “by his Spirit and Word through the saints in their earthly authority.”3 They also echo the language of Roman Catholic integralists and neo-Kuyperians when they inveigh against “any attempt to segregate sacred aspects of life, where God’s Word is authoritative, and supposedly secular aspects of life, where the Christian must operate by a standard other than God’s Word.”4
To those who know the history of the church-state complex that we call Christendom, post AD 380, after Theodosius I made Christianity the state religion of the Roman empire, the agenda of the Christian Nationalists is clear: turn back the clock to Christian theocracy, in which the state imposes Christianity upon the Republic and punishes religious dissent. On these points, the Christian Nationalists seem to agree.
Embedded in every form of Christian Nationalism we have seen, however, and particularly in their concept of “nation,” is also an ethnocentrism or to put it plainly, White Nationalism. It is latent in the language of the Statement on Christian Nationalism when they write of shared “culture, customs, history, and lineage.” Do naturalized immigrants from Nigeria meet this standard? Do they have the same culture as seventh-generation Americans of Scots-Irish descent, who settled in the hills of Kentucky? Where do they fit under the rubric “lineage“?
The framers of the Statement attempt to address this problem but in so doing they only make it worse when they write, “[w]e further deny that sovereign nations must only be composed of mono-ethnic populations to be united under God. Therefore, as Christian Nationalists, we utterly repudiate sinful ethnic partiality in all its various forms.” The qualifier only stands out as they reject “sinful ethnic partiality,” which opens the door to what the framers seem to imagine as righteous ethnic partiality.
This is not hypothetical. More than one reviewer of Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2022) has observed in it kinism and ethnonationalism. Kevin DeYoung observes that for Wolfe, “ethnicities shouldn’t mix.” Wes Bredenhof notices that Wolfe “uses a racial slur on p. 288. He opposes open immigration since it undermines a nation’s ethnic particularity. Spuriously using a reference to Thomas Aquinas, he suggests immigrants shouldn’t receive citizenship until the second or third generation of residency (p.168).” In his review, Jake Meador argues Wolfe’s “understanding of ‘nations’ quickly veers into racial directions,” and he calls attention to the influence of the “noted white supremacist essayist Sam Francis” on Wolfe’s own work.
Meador writes Wolfe “wants a Christian Prince who becomes the nation, and he thinks that Afro-Americans need to be ‘constrained’ in order to reduce crime.” He characterizes the “Christian Nationalist project, as defined by Wolfe, Andrew Isker, and Andrew Torba and their close associates” as “Nazi adjacent.” He is not imagining things. In this space the open embrace of Kinism (i.e., racial segregationism) by some Christian Nationalists has already been documented. One needs only listen to Chris Gordon’s recent interview with Wolfe to notice how Kinism and ethnonationalism are present in the movement.
We do not need to convince the Christian Nationalists that they have a problem with racism. Some of them have recently published a statement on this very issue. They call it The Antioch Declaration (hereafter, Declaration) after the Apostle Paul’s confrontation of the Apostle Peter at Antioch (Gal 2:11). They accuse the racists and ethnonationalists in their movement of “compromising the gospel Jesus Christ by subjecting it to racial barriers….” The Declaration contends some of their co-belligerents, on the “fringes” of the Christian Nationalist movement, have become “reactionary” and from there proceed to a series of affirmations and denials.
Like the Statement on Christian Nationalism, the Declaration regularly confuses secular with pagan. Like the rest of the movement, even the ethnonationalists and racists they ostensibly oppose, they invoke the obviously coded language of “post-war narrative” (usually “post-War consensus”) as they, like Wolfe hanker for a nation free of “self-doubt and self-loathing.”5 As Meador has noted, this is the language of Blood and Soil Nationalism, which is so deeply embedded in the movement that even while they ostensibly oppose Hitler and Nazism (which they do explicitly) they continue to spread the very disease Hitler himself spread. They are carriers and they are unaware.
One of the many weaknesses of this document is that it is very heavily coded with insider (ethnonationalist, Kinist) language that it becomes vague and undecipherable. E.g., “WE DENY that any particular view of the Allied leaders, their strategies, or tactics during World War II should be a test of Christian orthodoxy.” This evidently sends a signal to fellow Fascist travelers that they understand that even though they are critical of “racism” etc they share a concern about some group’s interpretation of World War II. Which group could that be? One wonders.
They diligently try to rinse themselves of the dirt of antisemitism and bizarre theories about Jewish conspiracies even as they, like the framers of the Christian Nationalism statement, couch their opposition to racism and anti-semitism very carefully:
WE DENY that the church of Jesus Christ in its particular locale has any compulsory quotas or assigned ratios for ethnic mix. The make-up of any local church community will be dependent on many socio-cultural, lingual and regional factors, and there is no requirement that any given congregation “look like the new Jerusalem.” But WE FURTHER DENY that a Christian congregation has the right to arbitrarily exclude any person based on prejudice, malice or bigotry toward their ethnic group.6
Those outside the movement may be forgiven for reading this disavowal to say, in effect: we are all in favor of integrated churches but if our church is not integrated, well, that is just the way it turned out. Contrast the language of the Declaration with that of the Apostle Paul: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28; ESV) or “Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all” (Col 3:11; ESV). Even as the Declaration formally agrees with Paul that the dividing wall has been torn down (Eph 2:14), one has the sense that, for the framers of the Declaration it has been replaced by a cyclone fence.
This ambiguity should not surprise us. After all, one of the collaborators, Doug Wilson, published Wolfe’s book and continues to defend its publication even as he and the other collaborators and signatories seek to distance themselves from the book and the ethnonationalist and racist elements in the Christian Nationalist movement. Those of us who were not born last week remember that Wilson and his co-author Steve Wilkins published a volume, Southern Slavery As It Was, lauding Southern slavery as a benevolent institution, which volume, according to Nick Geier, in a recent podcast episode, was largely compiled by Wilkins from materials published by the League of the South, an overtly secessionist organization.7 In that work Wilson claimed, “[t]here has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world.”8 If manstealing, whipping, and raping are included in “intimacy and harmony” then the Declaration is put in a rather different light. Wilson’s own impenitent use of the N-word makes us wonder, even as he tries to clear the racist brush from the Christian Nationalist compound, whether this is all nothing more than spin.
notes
- Statement on Christian Nationalism, Definition.
- Statement on Christian Nationalism, Art. IV.
- Statement on Christian Nationalism, Art. V.
- Statement on Christian Nationalism, Art. V.
- Declaration, 8th paragraph.
- Declaration, 24th paragraph.
- According to Rachel Tabachnik and Frank L. Cocozelli, “Wilkins is also a former board member of League of the South and the founder of the Southern Heritage Society.” The League of the South was founded in June, 1994 and is “dedicated to promoting states’ rights and Southern secession.” Unfortunately, most of the literature on the League of the South seems to be rhetorically overheated, far left, and dominated by the now discredited Southern Poverty Law Center. One of the “core beliefs” of the League of the South: “Is structured upon the Biblical notion of hierarchy. In short, a recognition of the natural societal order of superiors and subordinates where Christian charity (as found in the second Table of the Law) toward our neighbors produces harmony and stability. Christ is the head of His Church; husbands are the heads of their families; parents are placed over their children; employers rank above their employees; the teacher is superior to his students, etc” (emphasis added). Tabachnik and Cocozelli are correct regarding the aims of the League, which published in 2014: “We seek to advance the cultural, social, economic, and political well-being and independence of the Southern people by all honourable means.” The (now-defunct) League of the South website featured ads and articles calling for secession from the USA. The 2013 League conference featured a special speaker on Rhodesia and South Africa. One can only imagine the content of that talk. That website is preserved on archive.org and provides the archival material for a fascinating study.
- Steve Wilkins and Douglas Wilson, Southern Slavery As It Was (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 1996), 24. After the plagiarism of this volume came to light, Wilson published Black and Tan: A Collection of Essays and Excursions on Slavery, Culture War, and Scripture in America (Moscow, ID: Canon Press,2004), which repeat the same arguments.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to HRA Board Member Brad Isbell for his editorial help with this essay. Any remaining flaws are solely the responsibility of the author.
©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.
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R. Scott Clark
R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.
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As both a former (long ago) CNer AND CIer, and denouncing it as I just couldn’t go ‘along with it’ any longer, I found the hardest part was TOTALLY letting go of one’s (mine) desire to still both love & see America ‘get Right!’ Just being honest.
I simply yet profoundly embraced God’s Most Holy Word & knew & still know, that in spite of perhaps ‘wanting’ the so called Glory days of the 1950s-mid 1960s, the real Biblical Truth is NOT to embrace the Racism with our Lord’s love for ALL his elect! I now have a number of great brothers & sisters who are non White, including my very own wife. Praise our Most Holy Lord & HIS Truth! (Thank you, Jesus✝️📖🙏). Yet, it’s not always so easy, admittedly! 📖
I have a decades-long history on ethnic issues and the Reformed faith. As someone who sings from the Genevan Psalter on Sundays in English and Korean (and occasionally in Italian), and who has yet to serve a church without at least some non-white people attending, my “bona fides” on racial issues and my strong antipathy toward people who identify the Reformed faith with ethnic heritage are well established.
Trust me on this — growing up in Grand Rapids in the 1970s and early 1980s was not a good way to see the Reformed faith as welcoming toward “my kind,” i.e., people who are not tall, blonde and blue-eyed. I know what it’s like to be treated as an “uitlander” (outsider) and my response is that I am “ware Geformeerden, nein Hollandse” (truly Reformed, not Dutch”).
When dealing with some of the ethnic bigots in the Christian Nationalist movement, I’ve been known to remind them that even Hitler liked Mussolini and Tojo, so what’s their problem with Italians and Asians?
Now obviously I do **NOT** support Hitler, Mussolini or any other form of fascism, and I’ve written for years against the “caudillo culture” which I believe is a direct descendant of Francisco Franco’s form of fascism that, unlike other forms of European fascism, was never uprooted and came to dominate the military-run governments of Latin America. I have an even stronger animosity toward Japanese militarism which didn’t even pretend to be defending Christian culture and actively persecuted Christians for failing to worship the Japanese emperor. What I’m doing is pointing out that the people who talk that nonsense in American conservative circles aren’t even being consistent with their own supposed fascist ideals of ethnic purity. Hitler himself, as bad as he was, had a better attitude toward (some) non-Aryans than some of our supposed “Christian Nationalists.”
However, I think fairness requires us to recognize that Stephen Wolfe, author of “The Case for Christian Nationalism,” has said at conferences of self-described “Christian Nationalists” that he believes the American “ethnos” includes “Chocolate Knox” (a modern Black Reformed podcaster) as well as some people he named who were ethnically white but were fundamentalists of the Fundamentalist/Modernist conflict a century ago, far outside what most Reformed people would consider doctrinally tolerable views.
For Wolfe at least, being part of the American “tribe” or “ethnos” is not based on being white or being theologically Reformed, or even soteriologically Augustinian. That latter point, which is quite consistent with Southern fundamentalism and evangelicalism and doesn’t surprise me from a man living in Louisiana, should give pause to some of Christian Nationalism’s conservative Calvinist defenders who place a higher value on shared doctrine than Wolfe appears to do.
Furthermore, we need to be clear-eyed before we point fingers at others. Racism, racialism, and race-based theologies have not been unknown in the Reformed world — think of South Africa, or closer to home, the history of the Christian Reformed Church in advocating what was de facto “separate development of peoples” for most of its early history. Also, the history of Southern Presbyterianism is far from free of such things.
We need to recognize distinctions in that movement. I have huge problems with race-based theologies, and it’s clear to me that some of those in the Christian Nationalist movement are “playing too close to the fire” with some really awful stuff.
But I’ve seen racism up close and personal, including from some of the most important leaders of a previous generation in the Reformed world, who had to figure out a way to be polite when meeting my obviously non-white wife. There are things that white conservatives honestly don’t know happen because they don’t see them. I have. And it’s not just personal interactions but actual articles written decades ago in long-forgotten conservative Reformed publications attacking such things as interracial marriage.
I could tell some pretty awful stories, to which my response even decades ago was more or less this: “White people have done an absolutely horrible job of protecting and promoting the Reformed faith for the last century. Apparently God got sick and tired of us and decided to raise up another people to praise Him who never before knew His name. Is that not what the Belgic Confession teaches about the providential preservation of the church when godless sons of the covenant become covenant-breakers? Did not God raise up the Dutch and the Scots because of the horrible way we Italians were acting? Do we think God will eternally overlook gross failures in doctrine and life of those who take His covenant on their lips but reject it by their actions?”
I think a fair case can be made that whatever we think of Doug Wilson and Stephen Wolfe on racial issues, they would be considered moderates if not liberals on racial issues in the context of the 1960s in the American South, or in South Africa when Elon Musk’s father moved from Canada to join the South African project of “preserving Western Civilization.”
Even in his own circles, I suspect that Wolfe’s views on race would not have been welcomed in the halls of Louisiana State University in the not-so-distant past.
Let’s attack racists when their racism can be proven, while recognizing that some come close but haven’t crossed the line — at least not yet, and not in public.
Darrell,
I think you’re wrong about Wolfe. He is an ethnonationalist. Multiple reviewers have observed this in his book. Chris Gordon elicited it in his recent interview today.
Thank you, Dr. Clark. I will watch Chris Gordon’s interview.
I do believe that Wolfe does dance around the edges. If he’s crossed the line, I want to know.
One complication here is that I’m old enough to remember when Don McGavran’s “homogenous unit principle” was all the rage in evangelical missiological circles. McGavran, for those reading this who got involved in church affairs within the last three decades and missed his stuff, was the dean of Fuller Seminary’s School of World Mission. His views on missions were seriously wrong in many ways but I don’t think he can fairly be accused of racism. He can, however, be accused of being overly willing to accommodate the Gospel to the existing class- and caste-based culture of India.
A lot of people in the Christian Reformed Church bought into his principles. At the time, I was furious, and said what the CRC was doing was finding a way to take its VERY longstanding Dutch ethnocentrism and baptize it (or perhaps rebaptize it) with “church growth” terminology borrowed from broad evangelicalism. “Separate development of peoples” sounds too much like South African apartheid to be palatable in North American circles in the 1980s for a white ethnic denomination, but I can’t deny that McGavran’s approach worked for the CRC, and allowed it to bring in all kinds of ethnic minority churches.
How much of what Wolfe is saying is based more on McGavran than on South Africa, or the American South? And if it’s McGavran, is it really the same thing? McGavran spent most of his life on the mission field, as did his family before him, and I don’t think he can be accused of racism.
Back in the early 1990s I believed the way to save the CRC was to take the Koreans, the Hmong, and the growing number of Hispanic churches, all of which come from very conservative and very traditional cultures, keep the denomination from wrecking their faith commitments by saying “this isn’t our culture, keep your white values to yourselves,” and wait a generation until the churches had grown so large they couldn’t be gotten rid of, and the second-generation immigrants who were native speakers of English began to take church leadership roles.
What I wanted to see happen in the CRC ended up moving into the PCA with the Koreans, who are now “too big to boss around,” and the PCA is forced to deal with its Korean churches doing whatever they want. A great deal of that happened because of one man — Dr. John E. Kim — and his decision to take what was then the CRC’s second-largest church out of the denomination, and then to take a call to become president of Chongshin Seminary in Seoul rather than staying and fighting in the United States. I understand Dr. Kim’s decision and he did what he believed was best for him and for his church. But it had long-term effects in the American Reformed world.
There’s no spinning what he’s written. It’s bad. Kevin DeYoung has seen it. Others have. It’s worse than they’ve said.
It’s in the book.
It’s blood and soil nationalism.
Listen to the nationalism episodes in the Sons of Patriarchy series.
Church growth pragmatism is one thing. Ethno-nationalism is another.
Fair enough, Dr. Clark. I have to deal with racism in an unreconstructed and unacademic form. Pure bigotry with no effort made to conceal it or justify it, just an assumption that anyone with a “mixed marriage” is a liberal who hates America and American values. I’m not going to say that’s common in today’s South — it definitely is not — but it used to be more of a problem than I see today, and to be fair, I’ve run into it in the rural North as well as the rural South. To cite just one example, when I accepted one newspaper job decades ago, I was given a list of towns where I shouldn’t live because of my interracial marriage, and I soon learned the list was given for good reason. “Sundown towns” used to be a major problem, and while the problem is dying out, it’s not yet gone entirely.
I’ve also spoken at Reformed conferences with open and unabashed neo-Confederates in the audience who viewed me as a “race-mixer” and tolerated me only because I was a well-known conservative. I think some of them wanted to see if a Yankee could really be a conservative Calvinist, and ended up deciding I was okay “as long as you stay up North with your people.” I have nearly zero tolerance for that stuff, though I will be polite to such people if they choose to be polite to me. Some do, and I can respect that — and given the names involved, and their prominence in the conservative Reformed world of a previous generation, it wasn’t a good idea for me to pick fights as a “Yankee interloper.” I felt like reminding them that we won the Civil War and they lost, but if I had tried that, they’d probably respond by saying America lost its Christian convictions in 1865, and that’s not an argument worth having.
I’m citing that to avoid any doubt about what I think of those attitudes. I’ve seen things with some of Wolfe’s supporters that fall into that category.
I’ve also spent time with actual “blood and soil” European “national conservatives” who seek to “school” me on what they see as the “inherently Arminian and pragmatic” approach of what they call “Americanized Calvinism,” and make a serious argument that Christianity, to succeed, must be deeply embedded in a community’s consciousness and part of the “warp and woof” of the culture. I hear echoes of Eastern Orthodoxy there, particularly its modern Russian form, because it’s the sort of thing I was hearing in the 1980s and 1990s from American evangelicals who joined the Antiochian Orthodox because the Patriarch of Constantinople didn’t trust their Orthodox commitments.
However, when I hear such things from Calvinists in Europe who point out — with legitimate grounds — that they’ve been teaching the same thing for hundreds of years and that it’s we Americans who adopted “pragmatic methods,” it makes me wonder how much Wolfe has bought into a much older type of Calvinism that we don’t usually see in the United States, but used to be much more common than it is today.
Kuyper didn’t get his ideas out of a vacuum. When people argue that Calvinism cannot survive without either transforming the culture or creating a separatist subculture, and that the American approach of divorcing faith from culture leads to the atomized individualism of Arminian evangelicalism, they may be right or they may be wrong, but they are saying things that used to be normal in Christian circles.
I’m not yet clear where Wolfe stands on those issues. If he’s an old-school European Calvinist, maybe he’d be best advised to move to someplace like Hungary where such views are deeply embedded in their society and their view of what it means to be a a Hungarian Calvinist (or Hungarian Catholic). Viktor Orban might like him better than most American evangelicals.
I saw this type of thinking in the Christian Reconstruction/theonomy movement which CN is bound to. There is an element of racism in these things that Christians need to be aware of and to flee from. My parents simply didn’t raise me to be a racist as they told me stories of Native American ancestors (Eastern tribes) who hid there ethnicity to avoid persecution. This element of racial superiority was/is rupugnant to me and I hope I soundly denounced it to those who I had contact with.
How ironic this declaration seems as it seeks to protect our young men from racial minefields while driving them towards a new Christendom with all its false trappings. As a PCA pastor who once ministered in CREC and served as a church planter from Christ Church, Moscow, I’ve looked behind the green curtain and am left wanting. Whenever I come across a young man who is attracted to the Moscow vibe, I do everything in my power to show how the couch burning message of Moscow is not the Gospel of the Scriptures nor the Reformation.
“We do not need to convince the Christian Nationalists that they have a problem with racism. Some of them have recently published a statement on this very issue. They call it The Antioch Declaration (hereafter, Declaration)”
I believe that is incorrect. The Declaration was written by pastors like James White who for several years now have discouraged and disagreed with CN. Notice no signers/co-authors in both documents.
David,
I’ve seen White defending theonomy for probably the last 18 months or more. Just as he flipped on the Federal Vision (he originally called a “sacerdotal” error, about which he was right and now he defends it) so also he seems like a theocrat/theonomist to me. What’s the material difference between that and Christian Nationalism?
The point of the Declaration is to clean the image of Christian Nationalism.
Thank you for the thorough article. I have been meaning to take the time to understand what this “christian nationalism” is about. I think that because of christian support of trump- a lot of things are being lumped together (understandably) and applied to christians, unfortunately. It’s hard to see salt and light when it’s standing behind a trump sign….or a christian nationalist flag apparently. Thank you again
Josie,
You might check out this series of articles/podcasts, where I tried to explain the movements and its problems.
Is there something we can learn about the framers of the agreement by the title they assigned it?
Rick,
Please explain.
Seems to give a sense of an exaggerated importance in how they perceived the status of their agreement.
Never heard of Typhoid Larry, can you share the source? I have heard of Typhoid Mary.
Otherwise this is a fantastic article and very timely due to many Christians I know in the “Trump” camp sounding very Nationalistic in these dangerous ways (conflating Christianity with Government).
Ryan,
It’s a parable.
Appreciate the fast reply! Faster than I could self correct.
I see you said “parable” so you made it up to make the point? Just ironic since Typhoid Mary is real and sounds like Larry lol
In case one thinks that the TheoRecon movement is having no effect, here is a sample of some of the correspondence the HB has received recently:
It has been very interesting (and I would say frightening) to see a large community of self-called Christians turning from Wilson, White for this declaration, as riddled with errors as it is, for making such basics statements as “we are against antisemitism.” A frightening sign.
On a curiosity note, I have been curious for a while about the “neo-kuyperian” term. I have heard it used interchangeably with “neo-calvinism.” Is that right?
Ben,
Had they not started with Wilson. They might not now be turning to the even more radical elements of the movement.
Yes, since the early 20th century, the terms have been interchangeable.
In recent years, people have sometimes used the expression neo-Calvinism to refer to the young, restless, and Reformed movement.
This is a similar note to what I sent Dr. Clark a few days ago via email, I just thought some of the folks on this thread might have some thing to add:
I listened yesterday to Chris Gordon interview Stephen Wolf, the author of ‘A Case for Christian Nationalism’. While I thought that Gordon made very solid points arguing against the CN project from a scriptural perspective, I was sort of shocked that he never bothered to attack the soft underbelly of this positively bonkers movement, that being the ‘how’ or the feasibility of it.
Is it considered unsporting or mean (sort of like kicking a fat kid on the playground) to ask a CN/theonomy guy just, uhm, how…exactly, he envisions this kind of thing actually coming to fruition? Does anyone bother to think about trend lines of serious-minded Christian participation in the United States? Inconvenient hindrances like our political/electoral process? Is the hope that one day God will wave a magic wand and some 300MN+ non-believing Americans, dead in their sins and trespasses, will wake up one morning and decide that it would be a great idea to consent to be governed by a muscular conservative Christian regime that is going to place so many pesky restrictions on their ability to chase the lusts of their flesh with gusto? Do the CN people think that vast swaths of Americans will look to a place like Iran, where a small conservative religious minority rules with an iron fist over a relatively huge secular majority, and say ‘great idea, let’s do it!!’?
And am I crazy for thinking that until some CN/theonomy guy can come up with super-plausible answers to these obvious how/feasibility questions, that the rest of us should stop wringing our hands, clutching our pearls over the whole thing and not even expend one single more brain cycle over it?
For a good laugh watch Dr. Clark and the Babylon Bees talk about “cosplay.” It was interesting that Chris Gordon did get Wolfe to say the CN view is just ” a theory.”
Yes I saw that. Curiously, of all the talk I’ve heard about this topic, curiously, his bit on Babylon Bee was the only time I’ve ever heard of anyone being up anything about the feasibility of the whole thing, which, to me (call me stupid!) is BY FAR the most obvious objection. Why is no one else taking about that?
Paul,
I still believe it is cosplay but it’s also clear to me that this cosplay is lead young men down some very dark paths. I agree about that with the framers of the Declaration. What they don’t seem to see, however, is that they made this mess and this Declaration isn’t going to fix it. A guy who literally sets things on fire every November is trying to put out with a garden hose the fire he started.
I think we shouldn’t be wringing our hands, but we should still be condemning sin, proclaiming the gospel, and being faithful to fight those that teach another gospel. Since CN claim (most at least) that only they are faithfully following the gospel, we need to counter with Christ and his word.
It is the ironic thing has well that in fighting the culture wars, many far right CN adherents have joined against “the woke” with those publicly in sexual sin, open LGBT, avowed atheist etc….
Most “cristian nationalists” don’t even want Christian nationalism, whatever Wolfe or Wilson posit as ideal. They simply want rampant nationalism