The Case for Christian Nationalism
9. Liberty of Conscience | III. Prudence (Part 2)
Previously:
Wolfe uses Aaron Renn’s framework of positive/neutral/negative worlds to make the case that current Reformed thinking on public engagement is mostly based upon treatises written during the period where being a Christian was seen as a culturally neutral stance.1 Though this is a reasonable starting point, he quickly jumps to the unnatural conclusion that, “Now that we’re in the negative world, political theology is predictably moving in neo-Anabaptist directions in an attempt to recover neutrality by neutralizing true religion as a threat to the secularist establishment.”2 Much of contemporary political theology, including Renn’s, advocates for Christians to form their own economic and social structures within the greater, secular society. Their position is not one of retreat, but one of creating alternatives; this is hardly a “neo-Anabaptist” position. Ironically, seeking to form your own micro-nation, where outward expressions of religion are judged and regulated by societal authorities, is far more traditionally Anabaptist.
Though Renn has previously taken a non-aggressive approach to cultural engagement (at least compared to Wolfe), in 2022 he co-founded an online journal, American Reformer, with several people who are known for championing Christian Nationalism and/or authoritarian worldviews, including Josh Abbotoy, Nate Fischer, and Timon Cline. On May 22, 2023, Abbotoy tweeted, “Basically, America is going to need a Protestant Franco.”3 The next day, Cline described Charles Haywood’s “positively glowing” review of Franco - where he claimed that accounts of Franco’s mass murders are exaggerated4 - as a “Good piece!”5 Cline has written praise for Wolfe’s vision of theocratic Caesarism in American Reformer, with an essay entitled Hail Caesar?6
Experience over the last decades has made evident that there are two options: Christian nationalism or pagan nationalism. The totality of national action will be either Christian, and thus ordered to the complete good, or pagan…7
The false dichotomy of the authoritarian proposition is once again presented. Our descent into open postmodernism as a state-sanctioned, secular religion is less than a half-century old and, despite this, America is still generally known worldwide as a beacon of freedom and hope. We need not wholly upend our society, in either direction, to solve our current predicament. Wolfe’s insistence that the only option to combat paganism is that “Christians should assert the godly direction” of Christian nationalism does not pass the slightest muster of critical reasoning. In his assessment, we must bring about a “great renewal” of the benefits of previous Christian culture in the West; the “early American republic” had it right (except for the First Amendment8), yet this culture also worked well enough in the 20th-century Bible Belt that Russell Moore should be chastised for taking any issue with it; the way to bring about this renewal is to wage violent revolution to place an autocratic ruler over the nation and allow him to use the “totality of national action” - a concept that fits in the mold of Italian fascism - to suppress all non-Protestant religion.
What Wolfe presents is the same authoritarian policies advocated for in growing numbers on the secular left, with the key difference being that his has the label of “Christian” grafted on. He confirms this when he writes, “Furthermore, the left is correct that disagreement in public discourse must be bounded within an acceptable range of acceptable opinion.”9 In this, Wolfe affirms the Horseshoe Theory, that the far-left and far-right have more in common with each other than the majority of society. To consciously choose either “Christian nationalism or pagan nationalism” is to place yourself in ideological and, eventually, physical chains.
Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), 379-380.
Ibid., 381.
Charles Haywood, “On Francisco Franco • The Worthy House,” The Worthy House (blog), April 16, 2019, https://theworthyhouse.com/2019/04/16/on-francisco-franco/.
Timon Cline, “Hail Caesar? | Timon Cline,” American Reformer (blog), December 8, 2022, https://americanreformer.org/2022/12/hail-caesar/.
Stephen Wolfe, 381.
On Twitter, Wolfe will often refer to the First Amendment’s restriction of Congress alone in determining a state religion, and discuss how multiple states initially had official churches (https://twitter.com/PerfInjust/status/1661733228682592256). This is true, but no state went as far in their restriction of religion as he is proposing, and he would not allow regional magistrates under the prince to choose other religions, so the point is mute.
Ibid., 383.