Full of Schmitt
Christian Nationalism1 is not the radicalization of a Christian worldview, but the Christianization of a radical worldview. Though the men of this movement insist that they are recovering a Reformation-era magisterial Protestantism that was lost to the “postwar consensus,” in reality, they do not start from a position of 16th-century principles and then make use of certain prewar political notions. Instead, they approach their philosophy from the opposite direction. Reformation thought is selectively, and dishonestly, quoted to support interwar political suppositions that, on the other side of the atrocities committed in the second conflict, are taboo for good reason.
I present the following proof, that of perhaps the most commonly cited early-20th century political philosopher among Christian Nationalists, the German jurist and Nazi Party member Carl Schmitt and his friend-enemy distinction. His concept, simply put, is that those who may appear to be culturally similar to us can have differences that are at fundamental odds with our own interests. Therefore, political reality requires that we treat them as enemies for the sake of our own survival, because that is how they will treat us. This, of course, is in direct contradiction to the clear instructions of Scripture:
Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.”
—Romans 12:19-20 (quoting Proverbs 25:21-22)“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
—Matthew 5:43-48
We can see, in the simplest terms that even a brand-new Christian can understand, the notion that we should proactively seek to separate the world into “friends” and “enemies” is antithetical to the core teachings of our faith. Remember, Christ and the Apostles were not instructing disciples to only be kind to enemies within an arbitrary “reasonable” set of bounds, but to treat the very people who would murder them with the same benevolence one shows to his friends. Yet, the men at the forefront of this new, supposedly Christian movement consider the friend-enemy distinction to be a key component of their philosophy. Stephen Wolfe, author of The Case for Christian Nationalism, goes as far as to claim that Christians who publicly counter his political philosophy for, among other things, seeking to order the nation via “blood-ties,” and who exposed his podcast co-host as having an anonymous white-nationalist Twitter account, are hypocrites who uphold the friend-enemy distinction they denounce.
Authoritarian political philosopher Charles Haywood, founder of The Society for American Civic Renewal, a rightist fraternity with secret member rolls, is perhaps the most proactive Schmitt fan, going as far as to design a friend-enemy distinction yard sign. He left no question as to along which lines he applies the distinction when he posted it in response to columnist Bill Kristol’s concern of growing racism among the middle-class. One of the few known members of Haywood’s organization is Josh Abbotoy, Executive Director of American Reformer, which has published a long-form defense of Schmitt’s theory. Abbotoy is perhaps best known for having caused an uproar when he tweeted, “Basically, America is going to need a Protestant Franco,” in reference to the mass-murdering Spanish dictator who was an ally of Hitler and Mussolini.
American Reformer’s Managing Editor, Terry Gant, cited the friend-enemy distinction in an essay for the publication in defense of Haywood’s promotion of No Enemies on the Right, the notion that right-wingers should ignore the worst actors in their midst, in order to not afford their enemies on the left a win. For his example of a non-enemy, Gant named Bronze Age Pervert, a pseudonymous, Nietzschean positive-eugenicist (the promotion of selective human breeding). He is very popular among Christian Nationalists, including Stephen Wolfe, who has integrated “BAP’s” racially-tinged terminology into his own talking points.
Blaze Media host Auron MacIntyre, a prolific proponent of Schmitt, claims the friend-enemy distinction is “an inescapable fact of the human condition.” Podcast host CJay Engel, who markets books from white-nationalist publisher Antelope Hill as “based,” attempted to make the case that Martin Luther was “Schmittian.” MacIntyre, Engel and Wolfe are also vocal proponents of the late racist author and political philosopher, Sam Francis, who was fired from his position at the Washington Times in 1995 when he was quoted by conservative journalist Dinesh D’Souza as blaming “humanism and universalism for facilitating ‘the war against the white race.’” He went on to form an organization that was officially against “all efforts to mix the races of mankind.”
Christian Nationalists will protest that Schmitt only joined the party in 1933, when Hitler took power, and that he wrote of the friend-enemy distinction before this. Both are true, but in 1932, when he wrote The Concept of the Political in which the friend-enemy distinction is defined, he had already renounced Catholicism for atheism and was an ardent antisemite who was hoping for something closer to Mussolini’s Italian fascism in his nation. Though he would be politicked out of his position in the government before the war began, Schmitt refused to renounce his party membership afterwards and narrowly escaped being a defendant at Nuremberg. He remained unrepentant over his membership in the Nazi Party, of his work as the chief jurist in the defense of Hitler’s extrajudicial execution of his political enemies and of his efforts to rid the German legal system of what he believed was Jewish influence. He was barred from German academia and later found an outlet for his work in Spain, where his son-in-law was a member of the FET y de las JONS, Franco’s party that he co-opted from the nation’s fascists, the Falangistas.
Thus, we see that one of the most cited political philosophers of the Christian Nationalist movement is an atheist Nazi whose best-known political philosophy directly contradicts a core-requirement of the Christian walk. This is not a project to recapture Reformation-era civil government and inject its principles into a nation that has not had anything resembling such since it was a colony of European powers. It is a movement using a false appeal to Christian tradition as a motte for the bailey of reviving the interwar volkish nationalism that our predecessors gave their lives to send back into the shadows eighty years ago.
In this I include those who have adopted the moniker, as well as those who share a near-identical political philosophy, but who do not use that nomenclature.