The Case for Christian Nationalism

Epilogue: Now What? | I. The New America (Part 2)

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The Case for Christian Nationalism

The conservative’s patriotic history is also fundamentally a story of progress. It goes something like this: The US was founded on principles of equality, freedom and individual rights, though we didn’t live up to them. But a promise was made by them, and over time through civil war, labor struggles, immigration, fighting fascists, more immigration, more noble foreign wars, civil rights for blacks, gay rights, more immigration, and so on it was finally realized.¹

Wolfe, like all Protestant Nativists before him, believes that immigrants are the primary threat to the peace and stability of his homeland, so much so that he mentions them three times in one sentence. This sentiment resonates with a large portion of Americans; two out of five respondents to a 2022 survey on the condition of American society strongly agreed with the statement that, “in America, native-born white people are being replaced by immigrants.”² It is important to make a distinction between those who want to curtail illegal immigration and those who want to prevent nearly anyone from legally immigrating, but the latter camp, to which Wolfe assuredly belongs, is far larger than most Americans realize.

Wolfe commits yet another genetic logical fallacy by framing progress as fundamentally bad (or good, in his opposition’s view). The civil war ended chattel slavery, 20th-century labor struggles curtailed child labor, fighting fascists ended the Holocaust, and civil rights are a legal recognition of the imago Dei. There are legitimate directions in which conservative Christians may not want to see their nations progress, but the work of the Holy Spirit in your life as a believer results in a progressive sanctification that should, more and more, cause you to “do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). In postmillennial and amillennial eschatologies, and even somewhat in the premillennial, the natural result of the Great Commission should be a progressive growth of these qualities in the world. Wolfe would have us deny our brothers and sisters in Christ access to a society of justice and mercy if they are not of the preferred ethnicity.

But what was the reward for your blood, sweat, and tears? To be called “racists” by the Squad, to be denounced as the source of all bad social outcomes, and to be passed over by the incompetent and neurotic. You fought the fascists abroad and then at home only became the fascists of the New America.³

Wolfe’s complaints about the current state of conservative American men are effeminate and childish. Our generation did not fight fascists abroad, we were born into the most peaceful and materially wealthy nation the earth has ever seen. We entered the world an entire generation, or more, after our grandparents and great-grandparents put their lives on the line to stop the last group of authoritarians who attempted to order their nations around “a common volksgeist.”⁴ Sacrificing “blood, sweat, and tears” while being reviled by secularists and pagans is exactly what we are called to do as Christians (Matthew 5:11, Luke 6:22, 1 Peter 2:21-23). It is unbecoming of Christian men to whine about such a state of affairs; we are to embrace the joy we have in Christ and literally bless those who curse us, so much so they they would be put to shame for their slander (Romans 12:14, Titus 2:7-8). This is the exact opposite of the actions Wolfe advocates for.

To be a good American - committed to one’s national story - one has to be progressively inclusive. This rhetoric has worked time and time again, and it will work again.⁵

What takes more bravery, to revile and threaten those who would have you affirm beliefs counter to the Law of God or to stand firm and say, “I will not do what you say, nor will I hurt you”? Wolfe is correct that the military has been ideologically captured; I will advise my children against enlisting, because it is true that they would be sent to fight endless wars for the monetary gain of a bureaucracy that shuns traditional mores. Patriotic young Americans are being “duped into fighting for causes that harm them.”⁶ But the Christian answer to our countrymen being persuaded by progressive rhetoric is to boldly proclaim the gospel, not to throw a collective tantrum. “For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds” (2 Corinthians 10:4).

You fight the fascists abroad only to be called a fascist at home. You fight Communists far from home to be spit on by Communists at home. It is invade the world, invite the world.⁷

Wolfe next delivers a lengthy, vitriolic diatribe on the new “American way of life”, in which you, the conservative American, are oh so good, while those on the other side are oh so bad. He must be reminded of the core, Christian principles that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost” (1 Timothy 1:15), and that “you, the judge, practice the very same things” (Romans 2:1). A man whose political theory is centered around using violent revolution to invert his nation from one that recognizes the inalienable rights of the individual to a “redundant web of obligation that orders everything ultimately to the national good”⁸ has no room to complain about being “called a fascist at home,” for that is the textbook definition of fascism.

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The Case for Christian Nationalism

1. Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), 436.

2. 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.

3. Stephen Wolfe, 347.

4. Ibid., 139.

5. Ibid., 438.

6. Ibid., 438.

7. Ibid., 439.

8. Ibid., 13.