In Defense of the Idea of Christian Nationalism

 **As a disclaimer: I am not a Christian Nationalist & have not read the recent apologetic for it. This essay is primarily responding to the basic claims in it, the criticisms of it (most of which are idiotic), & the vicious attempt to discredit it through an ugly guilt-by-association takedown**

The basic point of Christian Nationalism is that it is neither contrary to Scripture nor reason to love what is more like you than not. Homosociality is not, and should not, be an alien or hostile thing. Boys like to play with boys, girls like to play with girls. Children will find physical differences - hair, eyes, clothes, smells, and, yes, skin color - to be odd when outside their normal experiences. This may lead to aggression (bullying), fear, or curiosity. Nevertheless, it is not a defect of nature for this reality to come about. Even Thomas Aquinas argued that God loves sinners not as sinners, but because they resemble him. It is God's love for his Goodness, Beauty, and Truth that spills down to even the lowest creature.

None of this is controversial even among carbon-copy Non-Denominational Evangelicals. However, the obvious point of contention appears effortlessly. If the above is true, then how should Christians, in the realms of political thought, consider racial and cultural differences? What exactly is a nation?

As fairly good academic literature has demonstrated, it is true that national-ism is a product for the eighteenth century. As part of the fiery revolution, 1789 saw the explosion of a new idea of a consolidated and homogenized people. Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French, not of France, signifying a shift in ideas about statehood. Kingdoms and republics were increasingly organized around the idea of citizenry bound to soil and blood, rather than bonds of personal loyalty (a foundational concept for the loose heuristic "feudalism") or geographic dominion. This is not to say that the ideas of National Socialism or Wilsonian Liberalism were nascent to Jacobinism. Nevertheless, the notion of a homogenizing force to produce a people began in the explosive rise of the French Republic. The idea of "French" was pursued rigorously over and against regional varieties in custom, language, and home. Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities" is foundational for this new notion of belonging to a Nation, often combined with the rising "bourgeois" notion of "society" found in the work of Jurgen Habermas.

I say the above to get it out of the way, for usually the semi-learned will stop there and smooth out their academic robes. It is also incontrovertible that the idea of 'nation' has existed since antiquity. Even though the Hellenes had an innumerable amount of cults, loyalty to their city, and variations in ethnic constitution and language, they were always Greek. They saw themselves as Hellene against the Barbarian. Outsiders recognized that they possessed a homogeneity that spanned across the Mediterranean. Similarly, the diaspora of Jews across the ancient world possessed a similar kind of ethnic unity. Jews developed different customs and rites in places as far flung as Rome and Babylon, yet they still had a core sense of ethnic identity. Second Temple literature has debated what exactly this unity looked like. Some scholars take a much more post-modern (and mostly dull) approach that such conceits of unity only existed in texts and the "reality" was much more fluid. It should not surprise that this sentiment is the dominant paradigm within the North Atlantic (but I will return to this point later).  Nevertheless, despite various differences in language, custom, and culture, Jews recognized one another through both a shared constellation of practiced ideas (Jerusalem Temple, Hebrew as sacred tongue, monotheistic/monolatrous), but also ethnicity. They were, after all, the seed of Abraham and were bound through kinship. There were ways (found in and after Scripture) to assimilate foreigners, but it was seen by all as a transition. Even foreign affairs involved this question of kinship. One of the Hasmonean Priest-rulers wrote to the King of Sparta extolling their shared blood to justify a treaty. For some Jewish apologists, who admired and envied the Greeks, the sons of Israel were Greek! They just happened to have the best city (Jerusalem), customary law (Nomos-Torah), and best cult (Temple).

It's from this vantage one can understand the point of Christ's intervention. The peculiarity of Israel was not to be crowned the best among nations, but to be called out from the nations. With the Temple having fallen into the hands of politiques, Israel seemed doomed. It's perhaps this juncture which created the Essene movement (which is nowhere mentioned in the Gospels), who were themselves radical Sadducees (meaning 'the righteous'). They remained loyal to the Temple, but found Jerusalem inextricably corrupt. It is possible many early Christian converts came from the informal network of Essenes. They were deeply opposed to another movement hostile to the Temple establishment: the Pharisees (meaning "the pure"). Whereas the Hasmonean priest dynasty and their supporters seemed to have saved Israel, they did so at the expense of their purity. The Pharisees were akin to middling grass-roots reformers, who challenged the Temple cult to not compromise fidelity to Torah and the Prophets. Nevertheless, the Pharisees could be themselves cunning (which perhaps explains Christ's constant condemnation that they were 'hypocrites', or actors). They used their public piety to try to force the Hasmonean hand, only resulting in their massacre (an event the Pharisees never forgot). Between the two factions, Israel overwhelmingly had lost its way. Rather than a light unto the nations, the fountain of their redemption from the devil and death, they had become embroiled in the same mode of thought. They had forgotten the point of their circumcision - a scar upon the instrument that created life,  a sign of the Passion that was to come. The importance of their race - which St Paul enumerates as the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the law, the service of God, and the promises (Rom 9:4) - had come from God. With the revelation of the God-man & his atonement before the foundation of the world, the dividing wall had perished. Israel had now accomplished His mission and freedom was available to the Gentiles.

But what does that have to do with contemporary questions of race and culture? For many today, the answer seems obvious. Just as Christ put an end to the separation between Jew and Gentile, so too should the church facilitate racial reconciliation. But what, precisely, does this mean? The unity of Christians, which St Paul described in his Epistle to the Galatians, described that there was no Jew or Greek in Christ (Gal 3:28). But there is also no freedman or bondman, not man or woman. Have these categories ceased? For many modern interpreters, the arc of exegesis bends towards Quakerism. Nevertheless, the Apostle will describe elsewhere peoples according to these categories. Modernist scholars, deriving from the Luther Renaissance of the late 19th c. and its liberal Nationalism, often argued that pseudonymous authors steered the churches away from this charismatic radicalism. The Paul who exalted freedom *appears* to contradict the Paul who silenced women and created a government of "overseers" with moral qualifications. If this path is not taken (and it should not be), then what is Paul saying? The obvious context from Galatians, and the entire crisis of Judaizing, emerged from a reimplementation of Torah. It was once again the idea that the Law (Nomos) was a set of ideal cultural instructions. The Galatians were not turned away for being ethnically different from Jewish Christian. Rather, they were expected to become Jews. It was a confusion of the Gospel for a cultural universalism, as if this culture was in se part of redemption. It had nothing to do with questions around the cultural composition of churches and their diversity.

In contrast to modernists and contemporary Evangelicals, who believe the early church was a charismatic house-church drum circle, early Christians were fairly loyal to St Paul's injunctions in the Scripture. Roman Christians did not cease to be Roman, or praise the good of the Empire, even as they criticized Rome's failings. The "anti-imperial" reading of Paul has, thank God, fallen off into disrepute. Ante-Nicaean Christians (and Ante-Constantine) did not hate Rome. Justin Martyr, Origen, Irenaeus, to name a few, all wrote encouraging things about the good of the empire. Justin's account of the Thundering Legion was proof of a more sublime way to stave off the barbarians (prayer, not violence). Origen countered Celsus that Christians did more than the Legions through their prayers. Irenaeus believed it was providential that Caesar established safe roads and sea-lanes for the Gospel to spread. They were also highly critical of Roman idolatry, sexual immorality, greed, brutality, and lust for conquest. But even the Pagan republican Tacitus would exalt the austere and free morality of the Germans against Roman decadence. Thus when Apologists praised barbarian Christians over their countrymen, it was a rhetorical technique to shame their fellow citizens. They wanted to save their kinsmen, not to abandon them. They still spoke Latin-Greek and adhered to the customs of their fathers, except in as much as they contradicted the Evangel. Hence many were considered anti-social, for when a nation was as soaked in idolatry as ancient Rome, it became almost impossible to function. Nevertheless, Eusebius of Caesarea's church history was in this same spirit. There was no radical transition pre- and post-Constantine (though the influx of poorly educated converts became a major challenge). Despite the unjust reputation that Eusebius was a bootlick, his history is very clear that it was a victory of the martyrs. It was not a celebration of violence. Christ had conquered Rome through the prayers of the faithful and the blood of the martyrs.

Thus again, unless one takes the hermeneutics and historiography of Quakers, you are left with nothing. Rome was fairly diverse and multicultural within its borders, but what is found? Congregations separated according to ethnicity, which implied culture as much as biology. The controversy between Bishop Victor and the Asians in Rome is solved if one recognized that Victor was dealing with Asian churches within the city of Rome. It was a question of imperious claims over churches on the other side of the Mediterranean (and the fairly absurd logistical question of how they carried over the eucharist on a long boat ride). Instead, it was a debate about the unity of traditions, with Victor expecting conformity to Roman norms around the Pascha. Befitting his name, Irenaeus preached unity amid diversity: the Asians could practice their Easter fast and dating, the Romans could practice theirs. Victor could tolerate this divergence and recognize both as Christian. Irenaeus did not expect uniformity within a jurisdiction, but this judgement was predicated upon the normalcy that different peoples would congregates together separately. It was no blow against the catholicity of the church. Of course, in the expedience of imperial uniformity, Constantine would later determine the proper norm for all Roman Christians, encouraging the bishops of Nicaea to side against the Quartodecimans. But rather than a case of imperial bullying, let alone a cynical ploy to use the church, the bishops had their own reasons. The Asian tradition had become fairly parochial and there was apologetic-pastoral value in separating out Easter from the Passover. Many ignorant Christians found Jewish festivals and apologetics compelling enough to convert, or at least double-dip. It's in this way that Judaizing returned as a serious problem. Yet even as the bishops of Nicaea believed they had helped settle a number of problems (most important involving Arius), this council pertained to the Roman world. Hence why these kinds of councils were called "ecumenical", which referred to the oikumene (household) of the Roman Empire. There still, at the same time, existed churches throughout the Persian Empire. These Christians did not follow lock-step, but held their own council (called and under the oversight of philochristian Zoroastrian Shah of Iran, Yazgird I) to ratify Nicaea.

This recognition that there could be wide unity that crossed nations, yet did not overthrow them, seems to be a fairly natural norm that ceased in the West. Over the 19th and 20th centuries, more radical forms of Protestantism (emergent in the Radical Reformation) became increasingly normative. The expectations of a universal world producing a universal culture seemed to be on the cusp. There was an idea that the British Empire or the United States (or some kind of combination of the two) would usher in a postmillennial dream of a fully Christian world. For those of a more Liberal persuasion (found among Whigs and Republicans in the US), there was a strong expectation that Anglo-American culture was the universal bond, having been fully Christianized. For those of a more Tory bent, there was a simultaneous revulsion and admiration of these different nations. Nevertheless, it is among the most radical visions of this potential, which saw Christianity increasingly more according to social change than doctrine, which became dominant. The fairly progressive and modernist Baptist John D. Rockefeller (and most especially his son, Junior) helped create ecumenical Christianity through funding the World Council of Churches. It was world where war, famine, illness, and poverty ceased. It both offered ideological justification for the First World War, as well as the solutions to repair a broken world. J. Gresham Machen referred to this kind of Christianity as "Liberalism" and considered it an entirely alien faith. It was what led Woodrow Wilson triumphantly into Paris, a dream which would not come about until his heir, Roosevelt, brought about the United Nations.

Now this situation poses a bizarre irony. Wilson was a liberal nationalist, believing all the nations of Europe should possess their own government, according to their own culture and race along democratic norms. However, Wilson also believed in the idea of a world government. Woodrow's right-hand man, Colonel House, admired Wilson deeply and believed he could be the caesarist savior found in his anonymous fiction, Philip Dru: Administrator. For some on the right, Wilson appears as the precursor to globalism. For some on the left, Wilson is the racist Anglo-Saxon imperialist who admired the heroism of the Ku Klux Klan as freedom-fighters. Which is it? Both, as Walter MacDougall describes in The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: Wilson's globalism was truly hyper-Americanism, Anglo-America (he was a consummate Anglophile) as a universal empire, the American flag as the flag of Man. 

It was this vision which inspired Roosevelt's United Nations, which both globalized American power and constructed the basis of Third World socialist nationalism that spanned across the globe. Again, the paradox is often misunderstood. Rightwing critics, in the mold of the John Birch Society, often saw the Washington Consensus as a sell-out of America for a global elite. Leftwing critics will damn American foreign policy as unabashed Neo-colonialism and world-wide dominion. But both are correct: it is the transubstantiation of an "American nation" (meaning, the values of cosmopolitan urban businessmen, bankers, and professionals) into a global world-order. The US will spend trillions of dollars on foreign aid, not only to Europe but Africa, as well as intervene in various coups. Washington was not only worried of losing ground to their main ideological universalized competitor, the Soviet Union, but losing any of the "global community" to resistant impulses. Third World nationalism was supported, until it interrupted the normal channels of the UN and the IMF. Conservatives (in the precise sense of those who defended the Ancien Regime of throne, altar, and nobility) were often obliterated through compromise or defeat. Eisenhower laid the final blow to the British Conservatism in the Suez Crisis. The CIA was involved in OAS coordination to kill off DeGaulle. These events paralleled efforts to remove Third World social nationalists, such as the Assads in Syria, when they threatened to defy this order. Understanding the mechanism of this ideology explains how the US can simultaneously support and oppose communist, Third World nationalists, military juntas, and conservatives. It depends on the meat of practiced doctrine, not talking-points.

What does this have to do with Christian Nationalism? In contrast to the sneers of "bigotry" or "racism" that this term has been smeared with, it is often the critics who take for granted this globalized hyper-Americanism. Some ignorantly attacked The Case for Christian Nationalism by drawing a genealogical tie between J.G. Herder and Hitler's National Socialism. Besides the boilerplate Hitlerian demonology that all accepted as a given, Herder was himself a liberal republican! He believed races developed separately, but not according to any fixed hierarchy. Races could degenerate, but also regenerate. Part of this self-conscious effort at cultural formation was establishing scholarly means to collate and recognize a culture. This was not through Napoleon's cannon, but Grimm's Fairy Tales. It was the beginning of a serious development of historical study, philology, and literary criticism. Herder's ideas were critical of the universalizing impulse of Jacobin France, as well as imperial Britain. He was firmly against empire, which smashed and smoothed over various national developments, in defense of the nations. It was no different than the ancient effort to find the ur-text of Homer in the Library of Alexandria. Herder's nationalism was more akin to the ancients, than modern efforts at universalizing. Anarchis Cloots, a German delegate to the French National Assembly, believed in the universality of revolution, but the Republic of Man had a capital in Paris! The paradox is not difficult to solve.

Thus, for all the wincing about Christian Nationalism, it in fact emerged from the modernist impulse that many Evangelicals (as well as self-professed "Traditionalists") claim to deplore. The same who lament the evils of "populism" and "nationalism", and their concomitant bigotry, are often the same who cheerlead the Empire's intervention in Iraq and Ukraine. They are basically of the same spirit as the Pharisees, who want a little moral gloss on imperial adventures. Maybe Ukraine - a depot of sex trafficking, child pornography, and vegetable oil before the Russian intervention - will be smashed up by transgender mercenaries, but at least it will be a little bit better. Similarly, these same conservatives will wrinkle their nose at the effects of Black Lives Matter and the evils of critical race theory. Yet they do not cast off the same universalizing impulse that provoked this kind of grievance mongering. If the only race is the Human race - a Marxist-lite cliche - then it really does not matter how its complexion changes. If it becomes all black, who cares. But if it becomes all white? The value judgement has become reversed. Perhaps a more reasonable Christian would bite the bullet and, in the name of Gospel equity, commit to either side of the statement. But that's not what seems to be coming forth. For these types, the minor grumbles about replacement theory are gauche and low-brow. They belong to jump rednecks who "cling to their guns and bibles" (Obama) and monitor Tucker for updates on the world. And like many cosmopolitan liberals on the media: it's conspiracy disinformation, but even if it is true, so what. All's the better to remove the sting of white culture from the world.

Given the fact that Christians, since their very inception, have not abhorred racial differences and recognized their existence (and preservation) could coincide with a Catholic Evangel, then perhaps the reaction against Christian Nationalism (which all-in-all is fairly tame) reveals more about the critics. It shows the lines between those who defend the hyper-"American" global order and those who criticize it. And to iterate, one can admire traditionalism while at the same time expect universal expectations. Clinton bombed Yugoslavia into oblivion to punish the Serbs for their recalcitrance to the "rules based order", while at the same time dressing up in a pre-packaged West African garb for his arrival in Ghana. You can have you parochialism and your traditions, just make sure file down your teeth before you bite. If you are concerned for an idea of "American" that is not a set of universalized ideas, but a particular people with a culture, language, border, and, yes, racial composition, than you have stepped out of line. The West is simultaneous gutted of particularity and universalized into dominion. It is the reign of an empty-signifier, which leftists would condemn as capitalism. 

The idea of Christian Nationalism is, simply, that you may like what is like you, without losing the Catholicity of the Gospel. It requests a masculine defense of these ideas, lest Christians remain handmaidens to a globalized hyper-American Universal Social Democracy of the Rainbow Flag. It is this notion that is admirable and worthy of defense against all its unworthy and spineless critics.

After all this, why am I not a Christian nationalist? Primarily because I do not think it is truly tenable. It is a rearguard defense of a particularity that cannot be sustained. I am not talking about things like limiting immigration and having a secure border (though these are beneficial policies). I am referring to the technological integration that our world entirely depends upon. Like the 19th c. self-conscious efforts of self-professed nationalists of small and fairly fictitious nations, there is too much fabrication and contrivance necessary for an adequate result. American culture has primarily been turned into plastic. The national culture of most Americans is football, rap, and marijuana. Obviously there is much more beyond this, and like the Apologists of old, these degeneracies would be criticized by fellow Americans as lapses. Christians will increasingly become anti-social pariahs in order to maintain their fidelity. And while the goal of reestablishing what an evangelized American culture would look like, there is not much in the way of a political platform. Perhaps I would benefit from reading the eponymous book. Nevertheless, reminiscing about the old ways of Sabbath laws and prosecution of blasphemy are not a way out of the current morass. While these discussions put self-professed "Confessional Protestants" in their place as foolish progeny who have abandoned their fathers, I do not think a return to the 17th c. (let alone a return to any particular era) will bear much fruit. The fundamental reality of a surveillance-security state, which operates according to the bio-political apparatus of managing bodies and resources, is universally present in NATO as much as it is in the PRC. This threat, which conducted a global experiment in gene therapy, operates at a far deeper level. 

But let me state an agreement before I continue. Most modern Evangelicals assume a kind of multiculturalism in Heaven that operates on some absurd levels. Some Evangelicals think all our Human achievements will be translated, so we will be no less gross and grubby than most Muslim accounts of Paradise. Would I really want to play baseball in the New Jerusalem, when there is infinite beauty splayed out before me? On the other side, there's an old Fundy instinct that everything will be obliterated. But what language will we speak? Obviously Paradise will maintain the totality of all nations, and what that entails is not known. But this means there is nothing wrong in the sheer preservation of these nations, whatever they may be, whether Jew or Greek. The Herderian project, to uncover what American culture is (with all its distinctions of the English from which it emerged), is a good and necessary one. In light of vile post-modernists who have eviscerated any sense of canon, it would be good to recover American folkways. Against localists, who have often turned their face into a mask, there really is an American culture that was apparent to men like Ben Franklin and George Washington.

To conclude, I want to turn to the Parable of the Good Samaritan, which is often touted as a rejection of any kind of nationalism whatsoever. In Ivan Illich's masterly exegesis, the point of parable is particularity. Who is your neighbor? It is the man right face-to-face. It is not an abstract group, but a particular name and face. It was this burden which enflamed Christian ethics. It was in no way against nature (even Pagans recognized the need to treat the alien well), but intensified nature. One must love the particular man before you, not only when he is alien to you, but even when he is your enemy. However, modernizing tendencies from the Enlightenment onwards had metastasized this catholic ethic into universal morality. Your neighbor is not this particular man, but all Humanity. The Messianic politics of the Gospel do not obliterate difference, but suspends it in clear relation. It is precisely that the Samaritan and the wounded Jew are entirely different to one another that this love may reach out across. While the familiar may breed one kind of love, the other breeds a sense of eros, a transcendent love which may be poured out. This new bond of friendship does not replace or synthesize the differences between, but allow them to exist. This ethic in no way contradicts admiration for what belongs to you, but should intensify it. The same love you have for your family, kin, culture, language, and so on, should breed a love to see the same preserved in the other. Such is part of what it means to love your neighbor as yourself. Yet the corruption of Christian invites a sinister reversal, where nature is obliterated for an apocalyptic grace. You must love your neighbor, despite yourself. As Illich would say corruptio optimi pessima.

My hope for the future is a disintegration of this false gospel of antichrist, where catholicity becomes universalized and grace becomes debt. It should not be a coincidence that the reign of fiat money and financialization coincided with an increasingly culture-less people reduced to their basest appetites. As Marx waxed, all things solid have melted into air. Yet communism is in no way approaching and, instead, it produced the ugly and plastic people that marks out most socialist regimes. The Evangel must start afresh amidst people, where bonds are reestablished. I hope in a return to Christian federalism, the kind that helped unite and ameliorate various warring and barbarized Germanics into the settled kingdoms of Europe. For all its faults, the so-called "Dark Ages" glimmered with a light, which shone amidst the decay and chaos of this world. Despite his roaring like a lion, men and women continued to trample Satan under his feet. The power of Christ in the saints was memorialized in painting, song, and architecture, testimonies that the Devil has been overthrown despite how vile things may be.