The Case for Christian Nationalism

5. The Good of Cultural Christianity | V. Preparation and Hypocrisy

Previously:

The Case for Christian Nationalism

I readily admit that cultural Christianity cannot save souls and that it often produces hypocrisy. As I said above, it is not a means of salvific grace. It is a supplemental mode of religion.¹

If cultural Christianity often produces hypocrisy, then Wolfe has affirmed Moore’s statement that “Mayberry leads to hell just as surely as Gomorrah does,”² even if he thinks the benefits for his in-group outweigh the costs for the out-group. He again strawmans Moore as affirming “social power as a hostile force is a necessary condition for Christianity to thrive” (emphasis mine).³ What Moore wrote was that hostility is a better condition for revival than normalization of cultural “near-Christianity”.

Christianity isn’t normal anymore, and that’s good news. The Book of Acts, like the Gospels before it, shows us that the Christianity thrives when it is, as Kierkegaard put it, a sign of contradiction. Only a strange gospel can differentiate itself from the worlds we construct. But the strange, freakish, foolish old gospel is what God uses to save people and to resurrect churches (1 Corinthians 1:20-22).⁴

True discipleship will always be more concerned with heavenly good than earthly, and will always produce a peculiar people (1 Peter 2:9 KJV), especially when compared to nominal, performative Christians. Even in “Mayberry”, the average citizen is happy to to talk with his neighbor about nearly anything but that one thing; Wolfe has tacitly proven this in that, though we are over two hundred pages into his book on Christian nationalism, he has only given one measly paragraph to the actual good news. His greatest error, throughout this chapter, is to confuse the practice of church discipline with that of “the normalization of Christianity in society”.⁵ His brand of social power is not some collective looking down of the nose, by people reminiscent of Dana Carvey’s Church Lady character from Saturday Night Live - a relatively benign force that disapprovingly nudges recalcitrants into going to Sunday service to hear the word preached. His “nation perfected” would be made manifest through a violent revolution, expressly waged to end “our shame that we sheepishly tolerate assaults against our Christian heritage.”⁶ His “cultural Christianity” would tell dissidents to keep their heads down and shut up, lest one be denounced by his neighbor and have the organs of the state unleashed upon him. He wishes to institute a Christianized cancel culture, erroneously thinking that it will demonstrate the “plausibility of the Gospel”.⁷ The non-negotiable truth is this: Loving and forgiving those who openly hate us is how Christians demonstrate the plausibility of the gospel, because that is what Jesus Christ did when he gave his life for us while we were his enemies (Romans 5:10).

The preparation to believe something does not make the resulting belief inauthentic; indeed, it would seem to make the belief more authentic, for you feel its truth. Prejudice completes reason. At the very least, being against the world on some issue is not a necessary condition for authentic belief.⁸

Through an on-its-face fallacious, absolutist statement that prejudice completes reason (as if it cannot also equally subvert reason), Wolfe again favors a Nietzschian will to power worldview over Scripture and his own church’s doctrine. We are directly commanded to “not be conformed to this world” to such a degree that we should be seen “as a living sacrifice” to God (Romans 12:1-2). We are “wholly defiled in all the parts and faculties of soul and body” (WCF 6.2) and must perpetually repent and realign ourselves to the perfect example of Christ. These are not half-measures that we can hand-wave away and say, “This is all well and good, but here are a few areas where I am going to not filter the world through my relationship with Christ.” At some point in every Christian’s life, he will need to be “against the world on some issue” as a “necessary condition for authentic belief”. To refuse this is the very definition of idolatry. That Wolfe, on the one hand, is arguing for a totality of Christian state action, yet, on the other, attempts to sidestep the conditions of total faith in Christ, is strong evidence of rotten spiritual fruit.

He then, yet again, misrepresents his opposition with, “In other words [according to Moore], hostile social conditions lead fake Christians to abandon the faith, thereby making it easy to recognize who needs to hear encouragement in the faith and who needs conversion to the faith.”⁹ There is a monumental error in this statement, in that “fake Christians” do not have a faith to abandon, in the first place. Moore is absolutely right that allowing them to be open about their doubts give us the opportunity to minister to them in ways that would not be possible if they feared being honest with us. That Wolfe immediately moves from this into the theme of protecting Christian families from hostile social forces lays bare the self-centered sinfulness of his framework of pre-rational love. He would seemingly rather spend his life in a church full of people pretending to be Christian, letting countless people he fellowships with face the unfathomable horror of Christ telling them “I never knew you” (Matthew 7:23), than for him and his blood relations to have to live among people who are publicly unfriendly to his religion.

Though he is correct that the preaching of the word of God is an ordinary means of grace that is effectual for bringing someone to faith in Christ¹⁰, it is but one piece in a larger puzzle. Who is preaching the word, why they are preaching the word, and how they are preaching the word is monumentally important - exponentially more so when the person speaking holds institutional power over the hearer, something that would be common under Christian nationalism. On Easter Sunday, 2004, I was stationed at Camp Anaconda, just outside of Balad, Iraq. At this point in my life, I had walked away from a weak, nascent faith in Christ and had embraced Buddhism, a religion far more congruous to my Southern California upbringing; non-Christians in major cities often only interact with Christianity through street preachers who hold annoyingly large signs and bludgeon passers-by with threats of fire and brimstone through a megaphone. The charismatic Christianity of the only people who shared the genuine gospel with me - people whom I love and am grateful for - placed such heavy emphasis on emotional experience over doctrine that I was very much the “seed in rocky ground” (Matthew 13:1-9).

That Easter morning, someone in my chain of command forced everyone to go to the battalion service, regardless of their religion. I was livid, as this was a violation of Army policy, but I knew better than to make an issue of it and face assured administrative backlash. Since I was forced to go, the word of God was not effectual for me. My anger got the better of me, and I decided after the service to grill the chaplain on all the supposed contradictions I thought disproved the Bible, such as who actually bought the field of blood, and why it was named as such. Rather than see someone who needed empathy and engagement in honest apologetic discourse, the chaplain gave a terse answer, then walked away, and Christians in my platoon chastised me for challenging him. I responded, “You made me come here when I didn’t want to.” Back at Fort Bragg, when I was later made to speak to that same, conservative Protestant chaplain, because I was having a severe moral crisis after killing people in Iraq, instead of using that opportunity to lead me towards the gospel of forgiveness, he gave me a pick yourself up by your bootstraps speech that left me feeling he was more concerned with avoiding conscientious objector proceedings than with my well-being. Another time, a Christian platoon sergeant, during inspection, saw “Buddhist” on my dog tags and, while holding on to them, got in my face and said, “What’s the matter, don’t you like Jesus?” He was about to further berate me about my religion, or worse, when he was stopped by my first sergeant who, knowing of my status, had earlier confided in me that he had been adopted and raised around Buddhists, though he was not a practitioner. This is the regular experience of non-Christians when cultural Christianity is mixed with even minimal civil, bureaucratic power.

I do not hold anything against these people; they were a part of God’s providential hand in my life, giving me first-hand experience in what it feels like to be on the wrong end of aggressive cultural Christianity, ultimately strengthening my own witness. This is one reason I disagree that our current climate where, as Wolfe puts it, “Priestesses now have regular columns in national newspapers, and ‘religion reporters’ generate buzz around regime-friendly churches and leaders and disparage those deemed hostile,”¹¹ is the existential threat to evangelism he makes it out to be. In the end, 2015’s Russell Moore was correct that such a climate gives us the opportunity to share the gospel as the counter-cultural truth it is, even if 2023’s Russell Moore is the Editor-In-Chief of the largest, regime-friendly Christian news outlet.

While the costliness of faith in times of persecution can reveal the authenticity of faith, it does not clearly reveal the authenticity of belief… Persecution challenges one’s faith, not his assent to propositions, for one can outwardly deny what he inwardly assents to. Persecution, if directed at those who affirm orthodox beliefs, will reveal true and false faith. I acknowledge this. But this speaks only to the direct effects of the less frequent overt form of persecution.¹²

As our Lord said, “One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much” (Luke 16:10). If a member of the elect outwardly denies the propositions of Christianity when ridiculed by peers, in his heart he knows he has failed more than a mild challenge of faith. It may be the greatest spiritual test he ever faces; it has real metaphysical significance, and we should not diminish what passing such a test may say about the authenticity of someone’s belief. For many in the 21st century West, not denying Scriptural truths when under public social pressure can result in severe economic punishment; ask a conservative Christian working for Google or Facebook, with a family to support and a mortgage on a multi-million dollar home, if “assent to propositions” can not be a full test of the authenticity of his belief, one that rises to the level of refusing to sprinkle salt on Caesar’s altar. As much as Wolfe derides those who admonish right-wing excess, being willing to be shunned as a liberal, or worse, by the growing number of Christians who see the test of true faith as adherence to a set of narrow political propositions, is also a test of authenticity of belief for theological conservatives. We are not secularists, left with only our interpretation of general revelation to judge something’s “authenticity”. If a fellow Christian is facing any level of social, economic, or physical persecution for affirming a plain reading of Scripture, then we can consider such a trial to reveal the authenticity of his belief.

He is not wrong when he says that “social hostility eliminates a necessary condition of faith,” but he points it in the wrong direction. Social hostility eliminates a necessary condition of faith in that which is being hostilely pushed. One need only look at the many people who parrot Critical Theory talking points, out of fear of not being seen as a “good ally”, to know hostile ideologies create fake believers, many of whom get caught up in the sadistic power they can wield through purity tests. He is wrong that “even in it’s abuse, cultural Christianity prepares people to receive Christ.”¹³ Its abuse pushes people away from true faith in Christ towards performative, fake Christianity; he opened this section admitting that. Thankfully, it can later serve as an example for the believer of how he should not behave, after he has received and accepted the gospel from people who actually make it their daily priority to emulate the Savior, even if it should put them at odds with “socially acceptable” Christians and secularists alike.

Next:

The Case for Christian Nationalism

1. Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), 228.

2. Russell Moore, “Is Christianity Dying?,” Russell Moore, May 12, 2015, https://www.russellmoore.com/2015/05/12/is-christianity-dying/.

3. Stephen Wolfe, 228.

4. Russell Moore, “Is Christianity Dying?”.

5. Stephen Wolfe, 228.

6. Ibid., 352.

7. Ibid., 229.

8. Ibid., 230.

9. Ibid., 230.

10. Ibid., 231.

11. Ibid., 231.

12. Ibid., 232.

13. Stephen Wolfe, 232, 233.