The Case for Christian Nationalism

5. The Good of Cultural Christianity | III. The End of Cultural Christianity

Previously:

The Case for Christian Nationalism

Eternal life is the ultimate end of cultural Christianity… Its chief object is church attendance, where the ordinary means of grace are administered for eternal life.¹

One can make a case that Wolfe’s means and ends of cultural Christianity would ultimately lead many, if not more, people to damnation than eternal life. If a nation exerts purposeful pressure on its citizens to “at least outwardly” appear Christian or face the potential of “social separation”² - if people go to prison for antagonism towards the state religion - it stands to reason that a large number of people will simply pretend to be Christian. Feeling the need to attend Sunday services or else give away the ruse and relegate themselves to the underclass of conscience, they will also participate in the ordinary means of grace of the Lord’s Supper. The Apostle Paul’s warning, which is often repeated before the sacrament in Presbyterian churches, details the result:

Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. (1 Corinthians 11:27-29)

That Wolfe gives one paragraph to his subsection on Eternal Life and nearly four full pages to the next subsection on Commodious Life shows how little thought he has given to the soteriological effects of his government. This is the utopian ends of a political theory devoid of social science and a “Christianity” with little genuine concern for evangelism; to be so convinced that the masses will fall in line with your state religion if you only exert enough social and civil pressure is sociopathic.

In this way [of mutual expectations], the individual does not collapse into the collective, nor does the collective erode on account of excessive self-interest.³

This initial description of “commodious life” would sound perfectly reasonable to Christian and non-Christian alike. Mutual expectations between society and individual are the foundation of any civilization; Romans 13 told its original readers to obey the mutual expectations of the pagan empire they lived under, because it was an authority from God that would give approval to good conduct. Wolfe presents another false dilemma in an attempt to convince his reader that a civilly enforced Christian orthodoxy is the only way to achieve this type of commodious life. This is shown most clearly in his near-immediate invoking of the arch-enemy of authoritarian rightism, authoritarian leftism - in this case the obsession of theological liberalism with restorative social justice.⁴ He employs a common political trick of misdirecting the reader away from his more extreme measures by pitting his enemy’s extremities against middle-of-the-bell-curve policies. Wolfe would have you forget that both he and his ideological enemy would enforce their personal visions of Christianity from behind the barrel of a gun.

Secondly, his appeal to tradition/authority claim of how charity-work was conducted in “medieval and early modern periods” is not entirely accurate, at least within the Reformed tradition of the 16th century. Calvin broke with several Swiss reformers, including Huldrych Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger, on the role of the deaconate in relief for the poor. The first believed it to be an official office and responsibility to remain in the church, while the other two believed that such responsibility should be yielded to civil government.⁵ While I agree with Wolfe, in principle, that Christian charity should flow from the love of one image-bearer to another, he disfigures such love by shoving it back into his limiting framework of pre-rational love for ethnic and cultural similarity.⁶ This is especially egregious in regard to charity towards the downtrodden, because looking beyond this dissimilarity is the exact parameter of the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). Though the way leftist Westerners discuss and organize their charity work often otherizes the poor, the “‘radical’ command of poverty relief” demanded by them is usually for people within their own countries. Again, we are not in a binary dilemma of choosing between outsourcing our charity work to bureaucratic organizations (government or private) and only doing personal charity work among people we are similar to and familiar with. Did any of the people in Samaria who came to believe in Jesus know Him beforehand as anything more than a wandering Jewish rabbi who had reportedly prophesied to a sexually immoral woman (John 4:40-42)? Did they recognize Him as someone with whom they had “organic unity… similarity… a shared and particular civil project”⁷, or did they initially view Him as a citizen of an unfriendly nation (John 4:9)? Yet He stayed with them for two days and opened the doors of heaven to them. Whom are we to emulate in our charity?

Wolfe’s invocation of John Winthrop’s speech at Massachusetts Bay provides an excellent example of how a theocratic government’s call to “abridge ourselves of our superfluities” limits itself in a way that does not meet Christ’s full demands.⁸ I do not believe it was a coincidence that, in the Sermon on the Mount, He so closely paired “Do not resist the one who is evil,” with “Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you” (Matthew 5:38-42). These two things regularly coincide; people often resort to begging, because an antisocial lifestyle has led them to poverty. In this same vein, our charity should not be limited to those who are ethnically or culturally similar; 21st century Western Christians have no excuse to do this, as nearly every medium- and large-scale city has significant ethnic and ideological diversity. Wolfe’s conscious limiting of beneficience to a “community of ‘regenerates’” exposes the dark side of his poor theology of a “restored image”, in that it creates a false, secondary in-group distinction.

Overall, dedicating the majority of this section to a Manichaeistic false dilemma shows the ultimate extremity and frailty of his position. His utopian final assertion, that his proposed government would be a “complete image of eternal life on earth” and would “provide a foretaste of heaven”⁹ should be outright rejected by the people of God. In reality, his government would use collectivist social pressures and, should that fail, the threat of violent “social separation” through prison or banishment¹⁰ to enforce an unscriptural dogma of the work of Jesus Christ limited by the preeminent forces of nature, while calling it “promoting cultural Christianity”.

Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.” (John 18:36)

Do not envy a man of violence and do not choose any of his ways, for the devious person is an abomination to the Lord, but the upright are in his confidence. (Proverbs 3:31-32)

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The Case for Christian Nationalism

1. Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), 218.

2. Ibid., 216.

3. Ibid., 219.

4. Ibid., 219-220.

5. Matthew J. Tuininga, Calvin’s Political Theology and the Public Engagement of the Church: Christ’s Two Kingdoms, Cambridge Studies in Law and Christianity (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 68-69.

6. Stephen Wolfe, 220.

7. Ibid., 220.

8. Ibid., 221.

9. Ibid., 223.

10. Ibid., 391.