The Case for Christian Nationalism

5. The Good of Cultural Christianity | II. Definition and Explication (Part 1)

Previously:

The Case for Christian Nationalism

Wolfe’s technical definition of cultural Christianity is as follows:

Cultural Christianity is a mode of religion wherein social facts normalize Christian cultural practices (i.e., social customs) and a Christian self-conception of a nation in order (1) to prepare people to receive the Christian faith and keep them on the path to eternal life, (2) to establish and maintain a commodious social life, and (3) to make the earthly city an analog of the heavenly city.¹

I slightly break with the foundation of his definition of cultural Christianity, because he is primarily concerned with normalized praxis as a form of social pressure, while I find its greatest benefit in the cultural acceptance of the public witness of the saints; it provides the eternal kingdom with more room to work in the temporal realm, for example, making it less of a social taboo to invite an agnostic neighbor to a fellowship group at your church. Also, while Wolfe’s definition may seem benign on the surface, it dovetails perfectly into an authoritarian nationalist power structure, because it is rooted in a desire for societal order though a collectivist identity - what he calls the “Christian self-conception of a nation in order”.

It is true that the normalization of Christian cultural practices can “prepare people to receive the Christian faith” and that it assists in the maintenance of a “commodious social life”. But, only the genuine heart change that comes from the work of the Holy Spirit can even begin to “make the earthly city an analog of the heavenly city.” This is an overbold assertion by Wolfe, though it once again comports with his propagandistic view of “the nation perfected”. Though Christian nationalism seems to be gaining the most ground among postmillennials, it is not my intent to directly challenge their eschatology of the world becoming Christendom before the Second Advent.² Still, whatever our eschatology, we must be cognizant of the limits of our human reach. The gate is still narrow and few still find it (Matthew 7:14). It is not within the nation-state, but the local church, that we find the greatest opportunity to create an “analog of the heavenly city”. Even then, we regularly fail to achieve such ends on that smaller level; how often do we sin against each other and need to ask forgiveness? Knowing of that persistent battle of spirit and flesh within ourselves, how far astray will we go if we move beyond public advocacy for Second Table mores to become obsessed with forcing an entire Western nation into affirming orthodox Protestant Christian culture, especially when the majority of our fellow citizens are unfriendly to the core tenets of our religion? From a solely earthly perspective, and by pure demographics, it would be easier to get America to collectively pray the rosary.

The remainder of this subsection is a good explanation of how societal norms build a “pre-reflective judgement on particular thoughts and actions.”³ Most people, including Christians, are not predisposed to philosophical inquiry and will assume the inherent goodness of whatever customs their society promotes. Thus, social facts become a self-referential and self-propelled cultural modality. Wolfe rightly notes how abuse of this can lead to sin, which is ironic considering that the one of the most widely acknowledged promulgators of this abuse are identitarian nationalists. Wolfe will end the chapter by advocating for such abuse (and commit the monumental blunder of placing supremacy after his nationalist theory’s key identity), by writing, “A Christian nation that is true to itself will unashamedly and confidently assert Christian supremacy over the land” (emphasis mine).⁴ Again, this is not just an unfortunate turn of phrase or only a call for more verbal assertiveness; he promotes violent revolution by Christians in our time and place.

Wolfe further solidifies his hyper-concern for unified outward performance with his definition of Christian culture, which he considers a “necessary element of cultural Christianity.”

Christian culture is a public culture in which a people presume a Christian relation between themselves and adorn their collective, everyday life with Christian symbols, customs, and social expectations in order to mutually orient one another to worship God and love one’s neighbor in Christ.⁵

His examples of the “symbols, customs, and social expectations” of Christian culture could be more accurately and succinctly described as a sort of civil liturgy. He claims that “Festivals, feast days, and civic observances - though not in themselves holy or administered by spiritual authority… can be means of faith, sanctification, repentance, and spiritual reconciliation.”⁶ Civil liturgy in a majority Christian country can be a normative practice by which our faith is strengthened, but it can just as easily be abused by the majority to impress their cultural dominance upon the minority. Wolfe calls for Christians to drive away the open mockery of God and protect orthodox doctrine using the full force of the state, up to and including execution. Thus, it is difficult to not envision a more forceful side to his Christian culture’s presumption of “social expectations”, one that ramps up the frequency and severity of its efforts as it gains more social power. Forceful promotion of state-sanctioned, ideological homogeneity creates a performative standard by which an underclass of conscience is inevitably created. The Partito Nazionale Fascista and Falange Española not only treated those who would not publicly condone their ideology as dissenters, but as betrayers, and separated them from the state community both physically and morally⁷, something that Wolfe argues for later in this section. As Priorelli writes, “Only the Blackshirts benefited from the status of authentic Italians, while those who did not embrace the PNF belief received different treatment as ‘excommunicated and renegade’.”⁸ This type of in-group/out-group antagonism towards ideological dissent (both in and out of the church), that is characteristic of previous authoritarian nationalists, has already been shown in Wolfe’s “psycho-sexual ethno-masochism”. In this chapter he will turn a similar eye towards Russell Moore, former President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, soon to be Editor-in-Chief at Christianity Today, whose beliefs have taken a much-noticed politically and theologically liberal turn in recent years.

Wolfe appeals to the scripturally sound example of a father raising his children in the “discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4) to make the factually and scripturally unsound claim that cultural Christianity “provides what no ecclesial institution can fully provide - social direction to perform Christian practices in every area of life.”⁹ This statement is ridiculous; if the church can not sufficiently provide “social direction to perform Christian practices” without cultural Christianity, then it would have never survived the first two centuries of its existence. Secondly, Scripture provides us with two different intents and methodologies for exhibiting moral standards, depending on the target. This is best exemplified in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, where he discusses the different approaches to sin inside and outside of the church:

I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.” (1 Corinthians 5:9-13)

When he says to not even eat with a brother who is unrepentantly living in sin, he is specifically dictating how the “ecclesial institution” of the communion of saints can provide “social direction to perform Christian practices in every area of life.” The key distinction is that this type of social pressure is to remain within the body of Christ. As for people outside of the body, as shown in the last section, we are not to exert the same totality of cultural pressure, but instead demonstrate the love of Christ through our exemplary behavior and kindness to all. While the former says to the believer, “You should know better than to do the wrong thing,” the latter says to the unbeliever, “Wouldn’t you like to know why I do the right things?”

Wolfe would seem to acknowledge this in the end to this subsection when he writes that social pressures, “provide the complete conditions that order Christians to perform good Christian practices and encourage them to embrace the Gospel unto eternal life” (emphasis mine).¹⁰ But, in order to genuinely be a Christian, one must have already embraced the gospel. This is a melding of the visible church into the body politic that he will now make a core component of his political theory.

Next:

The Case for Christian Nationalism

1. Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), 208-209.

2. I am aware that this statement will cause many to wonder what my eschatology is. I have yet to be fully convinced of any traditional view on the millennial reign and return of Christ. I believe pre-, post-, and amillennials all make excellent points, and I am wary to take a firm stance on such immensly symbolic prophesy.

3. Stephen Wolfe, 209-212.

4. Ibid., 241.

5. Ibid., 212.

6. Ibid., 213.

7. Giorgia Priorelli, Italian Fascism and Spanish Falangism in Comparison: Constructing the Nation, Palgrave Studies in Political History (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 39, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46056-3.

8. Ibid., 49.

9. Stephen Wolfe, 213-214.

10. Ibid., 215.