The Case for Christian Nationalism
8. The Right to Revolution | I. Definition and Explication
Previously:
As a “forcible reclamation of civil power,” revolution uses force as the instrument to unseat civil rulers… The manner of unseating can be the ruler’s acquiescence or flight, effectively unseating himself, or by direct physical capture. Both modes of unseating could be “bloodless” or non-violent, though that is less likely in the latter case.1
The only notion more unrealistic than the possibility of a bloodless revolution or “national divorce” in today’s United States is that the common people could muster a large enough force to violently unseat civil rulers. As Stanley Milgram concluded in his famous 1963 experiment, two-thirds of people will go along with nearly any destructive action a person in a position of authority tells them to do.2 Our military is commanded by bureaucrats loyal to the “regime”, “oligarchy”, “military-industrial complex”, “global American empire” or whatever other term one thinks best describes the Washington power-structure. The average Apache helicopter pilot, under the orders of such bureaucrats, will have no issue using his M230 30mm chain-fed machine gun to turn an American insurgent into a pile of goo from a mile away (the weapon is accurate up 1500 meters and controlled by computers). The maximum effective range of the custom AR-15s that most militiamen go to the woods and play soldier with is 500 meters (but not in their hands). In Deh Rahwood, Afghanistan, while several kilometers away from a battle, I saw an AC-130H Spectre plane light up an entire square kilometer of land with infrared light, from so high up that it looked like a spotlight from heaven, and take out multiple targets with its M61 20mm Vulcan cannons. This was only visible through night-vision goggles; the enemy never even knew they were spotted. It was repugnant when President Joe Biden said of his political adversaries, “If you need to work about taking on the federal government, you need some F-15s. You don't need an AR-15,”3 but he was telling the truth.
The agents of force must be “the people,” for the act of revolution rescinds the people’s consent and aims to reclaim civil power for their good.4
Amplifying the ridiculousness of the notion of religious revolution is the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are not ready to put their lives on the line for any right-wing movement, let alone theocratic Caesarism. Wolfe would find himself in an extreme minority, even within the Protestant church. The 2022 Ligonier Ministries State of Theology survey concluded that 58% of self-described evangelicals believe that God accepts the worship of all religions, and 44% do not even believe in the divinity of Christ.5 Though half of Americans believe there will soon be a civil war6, the majority want nothing to do with it; any revolution would be waged by an extremely small minority. The best hope that Wolfe and his compatriots have would be to join a greater, right-wing insurgency and politic their way into a position of power or negotiate their way into an arrangement for their own micro-nation after the war, but this is still a pipe dream. The right-wing side of the Spanish Civil War was waged mainly by monarchist generals who had the loyalty of many troops and the monetary and military assistance of Germany and Italy, but it still took them three years of horrific, atrocity filled war to overcome the Soviet-backed republican forces. There are very few, if any, generals in the United States military who would be willing to break ranks; as bureaucrats who wage wars from tactical operations centers, they would also not command the type of loyalty from their troops that Franco did with his Legionnaires, whom he had personally taken into battle.7 The only real option that a Christian nationalist “revolution” would have would be to carry on a small scale, guerrilla insurgency, also known as a terror campaign.
One morning, in the spring of 2004, I was woken up by the largest explosive concussion I had ever felt, larger than when mortars and rockets had impacted near me. I was in my top bunk in a tent that held my platoon of roughly thirty men at Camp Anaconda, the largest air base in Iraq, just outside of the city of Balad. It was one of the most bombarded bases in the country during this time, and we were getting mortared multiple times a day, so it took quite a bit to startle me as much as that explosion did. Nobody had any clue what had just happened, but we put on our body armor and ran into the makeshift bunker dug into the ground just outside of the tent. We quickly learned, over the radio, that a car bomb had been detonated at the main entrance to the base; that was nearly three miles away.
As luck would have it, my squad was that day’s quick reaction force, which meant that we were on twenty-four hour duty to immediately respond to any emergency situation. After calling in on the radio, we were directed to use another gate and drive around to the crossroads three-quarters of a mile past the main entrance and pull guard until the area could be cleared. Afterwards, we were attached to FBI units and told that we were to assist them in searching for evidence of how the bomb was constructed. The scene of the explosion was awe-inducing. The vehicle that had been detonated was packed with so much C4 that the engine block had been blown over two hundred yards. Multiple shipping trucks had been mangled and bent in half, like plastic toys melted by fire, and the entire area was still smoking. But that was, by far, not the worst of it.
Body parts were everywhere. I was handed a pair of latex gloves and told to start going through the wreckage and show anything I thought of interest to an agent. Along with the mangled and broken pieces of vehicles and possessions, I had to pick up and move countless bones stripped of most of their flesh by the explosion (mostly vertebrae) looking for ball bearings, wires, and electronics boards, all while perpetually standing in, and sinking my hands into, an inch-deep puddle of blood mixed with motor fluid that rested at the base of each vehicle. There was an entire half of a bloody human rib cage laying on the side of the road, charred and dusted with gravel; my first thought was that it looked like what the Flintstones are handed in the intro to the cartoon. To this day, I will not eat ribs, and for years I could not even sit at a table with someone else eating them.
I was not rummaging through the ancient remains of an archaeological site; these were the body parts of people who, just hours ago, had left their homes, their families, and their children to come to our base to perform benign tasks, such as delivering supplies and performing manual labor. These were human beings, made in the image of God and of boundless worth, with loved ones still waiting for them at home, who had just been brutally murdered for political effect. Not a single American had been killed by the explosion and only a few, American-trained, Iraqi soldiers. I was told that day that over twenty civilians were murdered; the lucky ones were those who were instantly disintegrated by the blast.
This is what guerrilla insurgency in our nation would mean for our loved ones.
Next:
Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), 326-327.
Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience.,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67, no. 4 (October 1963): 371–78, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0040525.
Louis Casiano, “Biden Takes Swipe at Second Amendment Supporters: ‘You Need F-15s’ to Take on the Federal Government,” Text.Article, Fox News (Fox News, January 16, 2023), https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-swipe-second-amendment-supporters-you-need-f15-take-on-federal-government.
Stephen Wolfe, 327.
The State of Theology, https://thestateoftheology.com.
Garen J. Wintemute et al., “Views of American Democracy and Society and Support for Political Violence: First Report from a Nationwide Population-Representative Survey” (medRxiv, July 19, 2022), https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.15.22277693.
Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography (New York, NY: BasicBooks, a division of HarperCollins, 1994), 144–70.