The Case for Christian Nationalism
3. Loving Your Nation | IV. Loving the Neighbor
Previously:
Christians will ask, “Aren’t we called to love all equally?” assuming the affirmative answer is obvious.1
It is not that we are constantly called to love all equally, but that at any given moment we may be called to love someone fully, as Christ loved us, though that person may be unfamiliar to us, or even if he hates us.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:43-48)
It is right that, after reading this, we should feel the bar is set higher than we can practically achieve, because this statement from Christ is not only to set an ideal behavior, but to remind us of the holiness of a perfect God and our inability to meet His standard by our own actions. But the standard is still there. Those who aim to follow Christ’s example cannot purposefully attempt to shape their physical world into a configuration that would ease their responsibility, in this regard. For “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).
No one questions that we ought to love our own children over other children and our own family over other families and our own church over churches. (emphasis mine)2
No one questions whether they are more duty-bound, under regular conditions, to materially provide for their own church more than others. Neither do they question whether they are called to share life more frequently, and with greater everyday intimacy, with their church more than others. Yet, Christ specifically prayed that all His disciples would share a universal love for each other, one that reaches beyond the bounds of familiarity.
“I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. (John 17:20-23)
Would anyone be considered a true disciple of Christ if, after hearing of the immediate and severe needs of another church, he held back some of his giving and personal sacrifices to save them for his own church, because he loves them more? Would he be truly following Christ if he reserved his love and care for those people, because they “believe in the gift of tongues”, “believe in apostolic succession”, or even because they “believe in justification by works”? Christ challenges us to be perfect in our love, just as our heavenly Father is perfect. We will fail, but we cannot accept failure or, even worse, embrace it as a “universal good”.
As I argued above, a community of similar people provides the best social conditions for the communication of gifts and achieving collective goals. Dissimilar people together can achieve the basic goods of humanity, but not the complete good. (emphasis mine)3
In sparkling clarity, Wolfe shows that he has his heart set on worldly things, in that he believes physical and ideological similarity is where “complete good” is found. In his view, can the missionary traveling in foreign lands, where Christ’s name has yet to be spoken, find complete good? Can a person in Taliban controlled Afghanistan who has discovered Christ through a Bible app on his phone, has given his life to Him, and now has to practice in secret, or be shot, find complete good? Can our brothers and sisters in communist China, locked away in prison for proclaiming Christ, find complete good?4 Complete good is in Jesus Christ alone and can be found by the disciple in any physical situation. Anyone who seeks to place another condition between the disciple and his complete good in Christ should be outright rejected.
Wolfe may protest that this is not the type of “complete good” he is referring to, but physical comfort and familiar relations are not what constitutes complete good to the disciple. It is when we are taken out of our comfortable, daily existence that Christ uses us to share the gospel with those who do not know Him. We 21st century Christians in the West have been born into a hostile mission field. As stated before, to retreat from it, to seek to exclude those who are belligerent towards us, in order to preserve a sense of personal peace and affluence, is to abandon Christ’s commandment of the Great Commission.
The Christian tradition recognized three types of love: benevolence, beneficence, and complacence.5
Before examining Wolfe’s description of these three loves it is worth pointing out that Scripture provides us a better understanding of differing types of love than “the Christian tradition”. The following examples are only from the Gospel of Matthew, to provide extra clarity on how a single author viewed different loves (emphases mine).
ἀγαπάω (agapaō), used 142 times in the New Testament.
But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, (Matthew 5:44)
And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. (Matthew 22:37-39)
φιλέω (phileō), used 25 times in the New Testament.
Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. (Matthew 10:37)
Now the betrayer had given them a sign, saying, “The one I will kiss is the man; seize him.” (Matthew 26:48)
The more frequently used ἀγαπάω is closest to what Wolfe describes as benevolence, though it is greater and more pure than “love for all people simply on account of shared humanity.”6 It is the higher, sacrificial love of Christ, the ideal which we should aim to exhibit in our every interaction. Wolfe correctly links benevolence to a requirement of self-love, but, in his narrow focus on worldly benefit, he fails to mention the potential negatives of self-love that Christians must always be wary of. This pitfall, that Wolfe falls into through his promotion of 13/52, is succinctly presented by Paul in the book of Romans:
Do you suppose, O man - you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself - that you will escape the judgment of God? (Romans 2:3)
What Wolfe goes on to describe as “complacent love” is closer to φιλέω, a horizontal, brotherly love based on personal experience with someone. Like his description of complacent love, φιλέω is the love the Father has for Jesus (John 5:20), but so is ἀγαπάω (John 3:35). While the former can meet the definition of “a kind of self-love in which one delights in the totality of himself - a totality that extends to people and place,”7 it can also describe the brotherly love that two men of completely different backgrounds share as brothers in Christ. As a Christian, I am not my (ethnic) relations, as Wolfe explicitly claims here.8 The person who primarily saw himself along those lines died years ago, and was raised with Christ to be adopted into His family. My ethnic relations are now a wholly secondary, or even tertiary, aspect of my self-identification, which begins with Christ. Similarly, a Christian’s “delight in [his] wife or children” also must first pass through his delight in Christ. To allow it to exist in the “background”, as he argues for9, is to want to hold it apart from Christ, to be unwilling to sacrifice it for Him, turning it into an idol.
The same goes for the next section on “action and extending the self”, which, like all appeals to nation yet in the book, has no differing phraseology or call-to-action from the philosophy of early-20th century authoritarian nationalists (whom Wolfe has requested we not compare him to). By themselves, these sorts of appeals may not seem disagreeable to the average, Reformed Christian reader, but to those who are studied in traditional fascist thought, the language and concepts conveyed by Wolfe are nearly identical to their century-old counterparts. As individual examples, these congruences do not point to a shared political theory, just as a single reference to “power dynamics” does not make someone a postmodernist. But, if a text continually refers to concepts such as “metanarratives”, “hegemony”, and “synthesis”, the overarching, postmodern worldview of the author can be reasonably ascertained. There has yet to be a section of Wolfe’s book, where he discusses his view of nation, that cannot be directly correlated to the political theory of Italian and Spanish fascists. In fact, his theory is more ethnocentric than theirs. The Falangists accounted for a wide genetic diversity among the citizens of the former Spanish empire, with the hope that they could be united under a new fascist empire, through a shared cultural Catholicism originally spread by the Conquistadors and Jesuits.10
Wolfe continues to give a Falangista/Fascista-like spiritual dimension to the fatherland in this subsection when he writes, “We have intense connection with the land on which we and our natural relations have labored... Out of [interaction with this land], we come to a sense of ownership - of owned space - and come to see the objects of our activity as images of ourselves…”11 Likewise, in a speech given in Madrid on May 19, 1935, Primo de Rivera said, “Property is the direct projection of man upon his goods; it is an elementary human attribute. Capitalism has been replacing this property of man by the property of capital, by the technical instrument of economic domination.”12 To criticize capitalism may seem like a major difference between Primo de Rivera and Wolfe, but what the former is describing is what 21st century man would call globalism. In the epilogue of the book, Wolfe describes a “globalist American empire” which serves to “advance international liberalism” through an “allure of liberal decadence”, and whose opponents are “marked for elimination”.13 The pattern is one in the same: the man of the nation who, along with his forefathers, has deposited his essence into the soil of the fatherland, faces the existential threat of bureaucratic, international elites.
Rightly anticipating the accusation of idolatry, Wolfe now moves to negate it, correctly stating that “the term is lazily deployed against those who love something ‘too much.’”14 This is why I have taken care to properly define idolatry as the desire to worship creature rather than Creator, to desire that your affection for something need not first be mitigated by your affection for Christ. This is exactly what Wolfe’s pre-rational love is, a “pre-reflective familiarity” that he claims is not a “product of the fall”15 or altered by the gospel. Anything in the Christian’s life not altered by the gospel of Jesus Christ is an idol, doubly so if he consciously advocates for such a distinction. As Bonhoeffer wrote during the height of European fascism:
But since we are bound to abhor any deception which hides the truth from our sight, we must of necessity repudiate any direct relationship with the things of this world – and that for the sake of Christ. Wherever a group, be it large or small, prevents us from standing alone before Christ, wherever such a group raises a claim of immediacy it must be hated for the sake of Christ. For every immediacy, whether we realize it or not, means hatred of Christ, and this is especially true where such relationships claim the sanction of Christian principles.16
Next:
Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), 149.
Ibid., 150.
Ibid., 151.
Olivia Enos, “Chinese Christians Face Intensifying Persecution Ahead Of Christmas,” Forbes, December 20, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliviaenos/2018/12/20/chinese-christians-face-intensifying-persecution-ahead-of-christmas/.
Stephen Wolfe, 151.
Ibid., 151.
Ibid., 155.
Ibid., 156.
Ibid., 157.
Giorgia Priorelli, Italian Fascism and Spanish Falangism in Comparison: Constructing the Nation, Palgrave Studies in Political History (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 144, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46056-3.
Stephen Wolfe, 159.
Nick W. Sinan Greger, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera: The Foundations of the Spanish Phalanx (o.A: Independently published, 2018), 62.
Since this is the first time I have referenced this book, I should note that it is a self-published, pro-fascist biography of Primo de Rivera, and a collection of various quotes, organized by topic. Objective sources on the Falangist leader are practically impossible to acquire in English; most books on him are printed by openly white nationalist publishers. This volume’s author bills himself as “Ambassador for the Arab & Muslim world of the Italian Fascist Party MFL-PSN.”
Stephen Wolfe, 440-441.
Stephen Wolfe, 161.
Ibid., 161, 163.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 1st Paperback ed (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 108.