The Case for Christian Nationalism
The Case for Christian Nationalism
6. What Laws Can and Cannot Do | VI. Conclusion
Previously:
The conclusion of the chapter on civil law is not a summation of the chapter’s arguments, but a single paragraph describing the requirement of a civil magistrate, the “Christian prince”, to “mediate the national will for their good” and to be “the one to whom they look to see greatness, a love of country, and the best of men. He is their spirit.”1 Similarly, Mussolini once said, “The man of Fascism is an individual who is nation and fatherland.”2 There will be far more intense language in the next chapter, dedicated to this figure.
As for the content of the chapter just finished, we are left with the question: What exactly is “Christian” about Wolfe’s definition of civil law? With the exception of the examples of Mosaic laws regarding roofing and witnesses, used more for their practicality than their morality, Scripture is only eisegetically used to give him the excuse to disobey other governments’ civil laws. He has not given the indication that a single law in his “Christian commonwealth” would actually be based on scriptural directive; if the brief sections on how his nation would vaguely enforce aspects of “Christianity” were removed, a reader would probably not know this was a chapter from a book for “Christian nationalism”.
This sentence from the section on the Christian commonwealth is a fantastic example of this issue:
This is precisely why I’ve used the word totality in my definition of Christian nationalism; it allows us to say that all national actions - whether directed by custom or law - are Christian customs and laws, even if in themselves they are not distinctly Christian or religious and are merely human and mundane.3
You could swap “Christian” with the name of any other religion - really any word in the English language - and this sentence would convey the same core thought. The totality of Islamic nationalism makes all national actions Islamic customs and laws. The totality of cheeseburger nationalism makes all national actions cheeseburger customs and laws. This sentence is so plastic, because it does not come from a Christian worldview, it comes from authoritarian-nationalist political theory; “Christian” is being grafted in. Morgan describes Mussolini’s similar vision for a nation that “subordinated individuals to the state and imposed no limits on the activity of the state, which educated and moralised them in conformity with its values and purposes so as to achieve the unity of the two.” The dictator spoke of a “fascistisation” of the nation, which would see to it that “tomorrow Italian and Fascist, rather like Italian and Catholic, mean the same thing,” just as Wolfe would seek a “totality of action” that makes all things “Christian”. In the realm of state-enforced ideological homogeneity, Wolfe’s totality is perfectly inline with Mussolini’s definition of totalitarian, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”4
Now this nation will be given its Duce.
Next:
Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), 276.
Giorgia Priorelli, Italian Fascism and Spanish Falangism in Comparison: Constructing the Nation, Palgrave Studies in Political History (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 28, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46056-3.
Stephen Wolfe, 261.
Philip Morgan, Italian Fascism: 1919 - 1945, 1. publ, The Making of the 20th Century (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Pr, 1995), 79-80.
Italian fascism wan inextricably intertwined with its economic vision of productivism; thus, this sentiment of state-control from Mussolini carries both an ideological and economic significance, the latter of which does not apply to our subject.