Christian Nationalism is a “Dangerous Ideology”

Christian Nationalism is a “Dangerous Ideology”

Aug 27, 2023 | Western Civilization

When I saw those words I almost laughed out loud. Yeah, I thought, really, really dangerous. These words unsurprisingly come from an article from the very left side of the political-cultural spectrum: “Disciples Confronting Christian Nationalism.”  Although, Sadly, many conservative Christian leaders and intellectuals believe the same thing. It seems the idea of a Christian nation to these Christians of both the left and right is a discredited and archaic position which inevitably leads to stoning homosexuals, burning witches at the stake, and basically a 21st century version of the Spanish Inquisition. They have a deficient understanding of both Christianity and what a nation is in God’s economy. Here are a few quotes from the article demonstrating what this looks like from the left side of the political/cultural spectrum.

Liberal Christians as they used to be called in the early 20th century always had a heretical understanding of the gospel, as so-called progressive Christians do now. So this sentiment wouldn’t surprise us: “Christian Nationalism betrays the gospel and threatens the church.” What exactly is the gospel if it doesn’t apply to nations? Their supposed Savior explicitly says it does when he tells his closest followers just prior to ascending to the right hand of God to exercise the rule he has been given with “all authority in heaven and on earth”:

19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

He did not say to make disciples of all people, but all nations, ethnos in Greek. Even most Bible-believing, gospel-declaring conservative Christians miss this one, completely. That’s sad because it isn’t seeing nations as potentially Christian that “betrays the gospel,” but it fulfills it! This doesn’t threaten the church, but it’s one of the primary reasons for its existence! Or maybe Jesus was just kidding.

This leftist/liberal/progressive “Christian” assembly also passed a resolution denouncing Christian nationalism as “a distortion of the Christian faith.” How can you say making nations Christian distorts a faith whose founder commanded his followers to do just that? Again, most conservative Christians, primarily leaders and intellectuals, agree. I’ve found most Christians sitting in the pews every Sunday most definitely want their nations to be more Christian. If they didn’t why would they complain about it all the time? And we see in the following quote how the leftist antipathy to the concept of a Christian nation differs markedly from the conservative one:

The resolution notes Christian Nationalism promotes violence, authoritarianism, “White Supremacy, antisemitism (and other forms of religious bigotry), xenophobia, persecution and scapegoating of LGBTQ+ persons, misogyny, and ableism.” But this dangerous ideology does this, the resolution points out, as it “appropriates the name of Jesus Christ and the language and imagery of scripture to promote this ideology, in direct contradiction to the gospel Jesus preached.” 

And to put the cherry on the top they commit to working “to counter this heretical ideology.” Karl Marx could have been a member in good standing of this denomination.

Let’s make the case that a Christian nation is in fact a thoroughly biblical concept. (I try to stay away from the phrase “Christian nationalism” if I can because of the baggage it’s enemies put on it.) It’s actually an easy case to make, which I attempt in a chapter in my, God willing, forthcoming book, titled,

“The Westphalian Nation-State and The Christian Nation.” If you’re a Christian and believe in nations (i.e., you’re not a globalist), you should be a Christian nationalist. The concept of the nation, or specific people groups, is an important biblical concept, the word being used well over 600 times. In addition to the Great Commission, the Apostle Paul in Acts 17 lays out the case for the God ordained nature of nations:

26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 

You can’t get more biblically unequivocal than that!

Further, a religiously or morally neutral nation cannot exist, a myth far too many Christians believe. This idea of neutrality is the crux of the issue. Most Christians, and all non-Christians, believe a Christian nation is a synonym for theocracy, which is bad, and neutrality is the answer! Although why God ruling a nation (what the word means) is bad I have no idea. Their confusion lies in thinking theocracy means the church ruling the nation, or some man or people ruling in the name of God. Whatever the thinking, it leads inevitably to tyranny and the destruction of liberty. This distortion is more of the poisonous fruit of secularism.

So as not to be the big meanie Christians, they mistakenly believe religious freedom means a type of pluralism where all faiths are equally welcome at a neutral public table with mutual respect and tolerance for all. A perfect example of this misconception comes from David French, a one-time conservative who became an implacable foe of Donald Trump (joining what came to be called the NeverTrumpers). This quote comes from an article in the left-wing Atlantic magazine titled, “Pluralism Has Life Left in It Yet”:

The magic of the American republic is that it can create space for people who possess deeply different world views to live together, work together, and thrive together, even as they stay true to their different religious faiths and moral convictions.

This magic world of America French invents out of whole cloth never existed because in God’s created reality, currently fallen and chock full of sinners, such a pluralist Utopia does not and cannot exist. In fact, America was founded as a Protestant republic with shared biblical assumptions and the Bible as its foundational religious text. Most people don’t realize, obviously including French, that for the first approximately 170 years of America’s history most states had anti-blasphemy and sabbath laws. Doesn’t sound very magical or pluralistic to me!

What French and others like him seem to miss is that we are living in an era when America’s (and the West’s) established religion is secular progressivism, otherwise known as wokeness (i.e., cultural Marxism). It has its own anti-blasphemy laws, as we know all too well. There can be legal consequences, for example, for speaking any words perceived as racist or anti any so-called sexual minority. Despite all evidence to the contrary, well-meaning Christians and liberals who believe in liberty and truth think secular pluralism is the answer to getting rid of the established religion of wokeness. I’m afraid the world as God created it, and fallen, does not work that way. Every nation and the peoples in them exist and live out their collective world view. Vishal Mangalwadi states an unalterable fact of existence in his wonderful book, The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization:

Every civilization is tied together by a final source of authority that gives meaning and ultimate intellectual, moral, and social justification to its culture.

Every nation has some kind of religious establishment, some foundation upon which social order, or disorder, is based, and the consequences will naturally follow. As Christians we can either stick our heads in the sand and pretend neutrality exists, or start thinking seriously and rigorously about what a Christian nation would look like. Secularism cannot be fixed, and true pluralism, true respect for the faith commitments of all people can only exist in a nation that is Christian. Because of the spirit of Babel (Genesis 11) secularism will always and everywhere lead to tyranny and the destruction of liberty. Only where the Spirit of the Lord is can there be liberty (2 Cor. 3:17).

 

Christian Nationalism, What Is It, and Why We Should Embrace It

Christian Nationalism, What Is It, and Why We Should Embrace It

Jun 22, 2022 | Western Civilization

In my last post I promised I would define “Christian nationalism,” and why we ought to be Christian nationalists. It is actually rather simple. If we are Christians and we live in a nation, we should be Christian nationalists. First, we need to understand what nationalism is, and realize why it is so critically important in our time as it stands in stark contrast against globalism (when you see that word, think tyranny). The modern nation-state is a relatively new phenomenon in the history of the world. It only goes back to the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the 30-Years War in 1648 that established the concept of a sovereign nation with well-defined boundaries. Prior to that, military power determined boundaries which were ever shifting based on that power. Nationalism, however, refers to more than merely geographical boundaries, and on the political and cultural left it is considered downright dangerous. Unfortunately, there are many Christian leaders from various traditions, otherwise conservative, who also think nationalism is a negative, especially a kind of patriotic populist nationalism.

For these Christian leaders it isn’t so much the nation-state that is the problem, like it is with the globalists, it is thinking our nation is better than others. This criticism is specifically geared toward Patriotic Christian Americans who embrace something called American exceptionalism. For some reason with these folks, loving America and thinking it is the most exceptionally blessed country in the history of the world is something to be avoided. They’ll often warn that America is not a theocracy like ancient Israel, but I don’t know any Christian who thinks it is. God, however, has a relationship to every country on earth, and blesses or curses these nations to the degree they look to him as the ultimate governor and ruler of the nation. America is no doubt judged more harshly because she has been blessed most singly, and since I’m an American in America, that will be my focus in these posts.

Having said that, I will continue the discussion with Brexit, the movement in the UK to pull out of the European Union. The election to confirm England’s exit from the EU was on June 23, 2016, but the debate had been going on for a while. The two sides were predictable and the precursor to same dynamic that led to the very unlikely election of President Trump. The cultural elites, globalists all, thought Brexit had no more chance of passing than Trump had of winning later that year. They also thought British patriots were deplorables, in the infamous assertion of Hillary Clinton’s about Trump’s followers. I bring this up because it is of the same kind of patriotic nationalism that made the MAGA, or Make America Great Again, movement possible. Christian nationalists ought always to cheer on nations that stand against the globalists who think nations only get in the way of the enlightened globalist agenda.

This brings me to the Christian part of “Christian nationalism,” and why it is necessary. Secularism as commonly understood is an illusion that some kind of moral or metaphysical neutrality exists where religion won’t get in the way of a harmonious society; religion stands in the way of that. The wars of religion, which weren’t really wars of religion but an excuse for the power I mentioned above, are what led to the intellectual elite’s obsession with secularism. The problem that created war and misery, in this view, was religion. If only we get rid of religion, or at least make it a purely personal thing, then people will stop making war and killing people. John Lennon’s great secular anthem Imagine says it pathetically well:

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

 

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

A better secular globalist’s wet dream could not be found, lies built upon delusional lies. The religion and state-hating communists of the 20th century butchered a hundred million human beings in the throes of such lies; living life in peace, not so much. Such is the existential battle we now face, although seemingly not in such stark life and death terms. But make no mistake, the totalitarian leftists we now battle are every bit as deadly, if not as apparently bloody. Christianity, in fact, is the only hope for a truly harmonious society, one built on the commitment to Truth. We can have Christ or chaos.

I wrote recently that this commitment to truth is the dividing line in Western culture. This commitment is why not everyone has to embrace Christianity in the culture for the civilization to be Christian. In the entirety of Christian Western civilization there was never a time when everyone embraced Christianity. Rather, it was the Christian worldview, its morals, manners, and mores that were widely accepted. That is a more complicated battle, but a more hopeful one because victory is not determined by mere power. The totalitarian left’s only value is the will to power that serves their ideology, while truth is not relevant to them. Those who believe in Truth, however, can appreciate and embrace the worldview, morals, manners, and mores of Christianity without embracing the risen Lord Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.

This is a deeply significant point that I don’t think most Christians have really thought through, and there are a growing number of non-Christians, agnostics, and atheists who affirm that Christianity is central to, and necessary for, Western civilization to succeed. In other words, we have allies in this existential war against the totalitarian left who are not Christians, and this is also deeply significant. It also gives us reason to hope that the fundamentalist secularism that has been suffocating Western culture for the last 60 years will not last. It cannot last, or Western civilization is doomed. Thankfully, Truth is more powerful than lies because he who is The Truth exists and rules over all things (madidate on Ephesians 1:15-23 if you want hope). We have no idea what God in his providence has in store for America or Western civilization, but not fighting for it is not an option. If we complain, we must fight.

I hope to flesh all this out in, God willing, another book, but the point of these posts is to address what Christians might be able to do to save this greatest experiment in republican government in the history of the world. I will address that in my next post.

Chris Ruffo: Critical Race Theory and The Assault on the Soul of the West-Watch This!!!

Chris Ruffo: Critical Race Theory and The Assault on the Soul of the West-Watch This!!!

May 30, 2022 | Western Civilization

By this time almost everyone in America has heard of critical race theory. They are also aware that all the elite cultural institutions, corporate America, and government believe America is and always has been fundamentally racist. For these elites, the adjective “white” has taken on ominous tones, and “privilege” has become a kind of original sin. Unfortunately, in this religion of cultural Marxism, there is no repentance, nor mercy and grace, and redemption is not possible.

I’ve been surprised, although I shouldn’t be, that wokeness has taken over not only education, Hollywood, and government, including the military, but the whole of corporate America, including professional and college sports. When I attended a large public university from 1978-1982, and this kind of Marxism and postmodern hatred of America and the West was common among the humanities faculty, but that it’s completely taken over almost every aspect of American society and culture is, well, shocking. Fortunately, having this poison come out of the closet because of the modern Guttenberg Press (aka, the Internet), the vast majority of the American people don’t like it one bit! The radical left that pushes this evil (and it is Satanic) is a fringe minority of the population, but regrettably they have the most cultural power, including the biggest microphones.

That is all changing, slowly but surely, and I’m hopeful for the future of our country for the first time in my adult life. That is a topic for another book that’s rolling around in my mind, but for now, educating our fellow Americans about this pestilence is what we need to do. Watch/listen to this Hillsdale talk by the great Chris Ruffo, and you’ll learn why things are where they are, and how we can change them.