The Case for Christian Nationalism

5. The Good of Cultural Christianity | VII. Conclusion

Previously:

The Case for Christian Nationalism

Christians need to recover an assertive will for their good and have the spirit and resolve to exclude what is bad. We should use social power to oppose those who threaten them and who attempt to subvert our faith or exploit its moral demands. That means opposing, suppressing and excluding the very sort of people who run the American regime. A Christian society that is for itself will distrust atheists, decry blasphemy, correct any dishonoring of Christ… frown on and suppress moral deviancy… A Christian nation that is true to itself will unashamedly and confidently assert Christian supremacy over the land…

A people must have spirit, self-affirmation, self-regard, and confidence in themselves. They must, in other words, become the opposite of what Western Christianity has become. The spirit to live says, “This is ours for our good,” and it drives a people to endure the sacrifices to keep it.¹

In preparation for the remainder of the book, in which he describes the near-ubiquitous repression he would unleash against his ideological enemies, Wolfe brings his rhetoric to a climax, using the language of destiny to unite his audience around an emotional appeal to protect their dignity from, and assert their dominance over, the enemy forces of the liberal order. This is textbook, authoritarian-nationalist speech-craft, placing the call-to-action in absolutist, them versus us terms. Here are some samplings from the Falangist leader, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, and how they speak to the same means and ends:

The need for extra-legal measures: The destiny of the people is to shun the democratic process and assert their supremacy over an opposition that actively maligns them and abuses the system (i.e., “those who threaten them and who attempt to subvert our faith or exploit its moral demands”, atheists, blasphemers, moral deviants):

In obedience to our destiny we travel from place to place, enduring the shame of appareling like a public show; obliged to shout aloud things we have thought out in the austerest silence; suffering distortion at the hands of those who do not and those who will not understand us; breaking our backs in this ridiculous sham, this procedure of winning over “public opinion” as if the people, capable as it is of love or anger, were collectively susceptible of opinion.²

The purity of the fatherland threatened: The attempt to subvert the moral order is an existential threat from an irredeemable other; they should be suppressed by the true people of the nation, who must first regain their forgotten, ancestral qualities (i.e., “Christians need to recover an assertive will for their good”, and “A people must have spirit, self-affirmation, self-regard, and confidence in themselves”):

The “feeling” of the movement now coming to the fore is fundamentally anti-Spanish. It is hostile to the Patria. It scorns chastity by encouraging the collective prostitution of young working girls at those country festivals were [sic] every sort of impurity is practiced… Is this Spain? Is this people of Spain? You would think we were living in a nightmare, or that the ancient Spanish people - serene, courageous, generous - had been replaced by a frenzied and degenerate plebs, drugged with Communist propaganda pamplets.³

The only available option: Our current situation is a binary dilemma, with only a single, radical, all-or-nothing solution. The baby must be thrown out with the bath-water (i.e., “They must, in other words, become the opposite of what Western Christianity has become”). Through embracing this solution - the only one that was ever legitimate - the people will realize their destiny of national revival:

There are only two serious ways of life: the religious way and the military (or, if you like, there is only one, for there is no religion that is not a militia, and there is no militia that is not quickened by a religious feeling), and the hour has now come for us to realize that it is by this religious and military interpretation of life that Spain is destined to be restored.⁴

One thing can be said with absolute certainty: the last thing that someone who has wholly given himself to following the Son of God is interested in is asserting supremacy. The Creator of the universe, the most supreme Being, condescended Himself, suffered the most horrible revilement, and was brutally murdered, for our sake. “When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.” (1 Peter 2:21-23). This is the example he expressly left us to emulate; anything short of denying our worldly desires, picking up our cross, and following him is failure (Luke 9:23). Of course, we will all fail, but the difference is whether you feel remorse and repent for your failure or build a framework of rationalization around it.

Ultimately, I find Stephen Wolfe’s worldview to be one that lacks trust in the sovereignty of God. His hyper-concern for attaining what he sees as the complete material and spiritual good, in this life - his appeal to “the spirit to live” - is directly contradictory to the teachings of Christ, who said, “Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (John 12:25). So much of what I see from self-described Christian nationalists is little more than an inability to accept their status of sheep among wolves - or perhaps a fear of it. There is a seeming paradox on the surface level of the Christian experience; we are told that we will be hated by everyone and may even be murdered, for His name’s sake (Matthew 10:22, Matthew 24:9), yet, at the same time, His yoke is easy and his burden light (Matthew 11:30). But, below the surface - beyond nominal, cultural Christianity - this is not a paradox; once the disciple has wholly placed himself in the hands of God, once he has consciously committed to make all things in his heart subservient to Christ, then he is truly, in full, spiritual reality, raised with Him and has the confidence and joy that comes with seeking the things that are above (Colossians 3:1). He knows that fretting over an earthly utopia is nothing but “vanity and a striving after wind” (Ecclesiastes 1:14), and rejects emotional appeals for the active suppression of enemies, wholesale.

We are now at the turning point of the book. Wolfe has set his “theological” stage, and will now move into the realm of his expertise, political theory, but the play he has written is a fantasy adventure based in a world of grievance and conjecture. He has not presented a Christian worldview that supports nationalism, but has instead clumsily shoehorned a quasi-Christianity into his nationalist preconceptions. It is not Christian nationalism; it is Authoritarian Ethno-Nationalism with Western European Christianity as the cultural identity.⁵

Next:

The Case for Christian Nationalism

1. Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), 240-241.

2. Nick W. Sinan Greger, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera: The Foundations of the Spanish Phalanx (o.A: Independently published, 2018), 64,

3. Ibid., 141.

4. Ibid., 157.

5. I am certain that calling his theory ethno-nationalism will result in significant protest from Wolfe and his supporters. I would refer them back to chapter 3, where I noted multiple assertions by him, in the book and online, that directly promote white nationalist tropes or that only make sense in the context of White ethnocentrism. His driving question of the chapter, Which way, Western Man?, is the title of a well-known white nationalist book, which his podcast co-host used it in its full, white nationalist context on social media, at the time Wolfe was interacting with his anonymous account. I have also noted that his requirement of “blood-ties” in the identity of the nation is more ethnocentric than the political theory of Spanish and Italian fascists.