Transcription
Imagine for a moment if your country was ruled by Oliver Cromwell, with the racial policies of apartheid South Africa in the 1970s. Methodist preachers are arrested and tried for heresy; Presbyterian ruling elders roam the streets inspecting women's attire. Armed guards are posted at church exits on Sunday to prevent anyone from leaving before the final benediction. The only permitted restaurants are Chick-fil-A and Famous Dave's Barbecue.
If you can imagine that, then you can imagine the world Steven Wolf would like to create in his book, *The Case for Christian Nationalism*. That's what the book argues for; it's not simply arguing for a close relationship between church and state. It's arguing for a type of Christianity focused above all on the hegemony of white people. It is a version of white Christian nationalism, and I regard it as deviant, heretical, and pernicious in the extreme.
People might say, "Mike, if the book is really that bad, why bother reviewing it or responding to it? You're just feeding the frenzy about Christian nationalism and giving it more airtime than it deserves." I'm doing a lengthy and concerted critique for a few reasons.
First, according to YouTube, Wolf's videos advocating for Christian nationalism get 20,000 to 45,000 views. This is garnering attention in America and around the world. He is advocating for a particular type of white Protestant nationalism, and I think this is infecting people. I think it's important to put out a thoughtful critique as a response to his variety of Christian nationalism.
Second, Christian nationalism is a threat to liberal democracy, orthodox Christianity, and evangelical Christianity, both in America and elsewhere. It's not just limited to the United States. We must take this seriously because people want to implement this vision, requiring a series of anti-democratic measures.
Third, sadly, many journalists and commentators critiquing Christian nationalism are historically and religiously illiterate. It seems that any Christian who is politically conservative gets labeled a Christian nationalist. That's not the case; being conservative and Christian does not make someone a Christian nationalist. We need a thoughtful critique from people who understand what Christian nationalism truly is. We need to avoid simply saying, "That guy has a Bible on his desk; he must be a Christian nationalist." A real critique is needed to counteract its dangerous impulses and its threat to Western democracies and Christian witness.
That's what I'll be doing in this video. This will be a long video—maybe 40 or 50 minutes—but stay with me. The critiques expose real elements of the book's vision for America and Christianity that I think you'll find alarming. You'll see why I'm offering this impassioned response.
However, we'll begin with a surprisingly sympathetic approach. I want to show I'm doing a fair and honest critique. I'm not some ultra-leftwing, tree-hugging liberal from Yale just throwing rocks. I want to show I understand and appreciate the book, even affirming some elements. I'll start with what I think is right, then move to the critique.
Wolf is correct that it's good and natural to love your people and your place. He wants to love his neighbors, church, county, state, and country without feeling like a rustic rube. Nobody should feel guilty because their family and friends don't look like a diversity, equity, and inclusion seminar. He wants to love his hometown, even if many are like him. It's okay to love your alma mater, be patriotic, and be devoted to your family. Not everyone lives in a multicultural metropolis; it's okay to be from a small town where 80% of the people are just like you. I understand that.
Second, religion does have a place in the public square. Wolf wants to resist aggressive secularism that seeks to drive religion from civic discourse and deconstruct permanent fixtures of human existence like community, family, and church. I share that critique of progressivism that aspires to replace the equality principle of our liberal democracies with a hierarchy of moral identities, dividing everyone into oppressor or oppressed. Our Christian heritage in Western societies is a good thing, and Christianity has been a force for immense good. We should remember that and resist those who seek to replace it with a caliphate or communism.
Third, Wolf is responding to progressive elites' condescending contempt for the white rural working class. I have a working-class background and appreciate books like Paul Embery's *Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class*. Books like Sargon's *Second Class: How the Elites Portrayed America's Working Men and Women* and Rob Henderson's *The Luxury Belief*, discussing how elite beliefs confer status while ruining the lives of the lower classes, resonate with me. I'm up for a critique of upper-middle-class progressives and their contempt for the working class.
Fourth, a strand of Protestant tradition seeks reform of religion, morals, and the state. Calvinism is more than predestination; read Book Four of Calvin's *Institutes*, a manual on running a Protestant city. The Westminster Confession of Faith has sections on civil order for a Christian society. The reformed tradition imagined a city governed by a synergy of counselors and clergy. Wolf wants to recover and reapply that tradition, and his views aren't completely out of sync with some aspects of the reformed tradition.
Fifth, I agree with Wolf against some Anabaptist perspectives that Christians can participate in the political order by voting, serving in office, or working for the government. Public service is a way of contributing to the common good and offering Christian witness. God wants this world to be wisely governed; we are stewards of creation, exercising our Christian vocation to bring heavenly love and light to earthly institutions.
But on the whole, I regard his vision for Christianity as a grotesque perversion—xenophobic, prone to violence, and almost cartoonish in its aspirations to take over America. Wolf envisions a Caesar papist state headed by a strongman Christian prince ruling through a Presbyterian Taliban—bald, bearded men with thick glasses who like cigars, submissive wives, heresy trials, and reading Protestant scholastics in the original Dutch. A fantasy world from the same sort of people who created the Geneva Commons Facebook group. There's a little rhetoric in my description, but only a little; I'm riffing off what he says.
When it comes to the critical response, my biggest gripe is that Wolf complains that Christianity has become servile, effeminate, and powerless. He says Christians take pleasure in their oppression and use Christianity as a coping device, even under tyranny and slavery. At its worst, theology is wielded to find pleasure in one's humiliation. Harsh words. He’s upset that Christians have been excluded from public institutions and forced to affirm universal dignity, tolerance, human rights, anti-nationalism, anti-nativism, social justice, and equality. It’s terrible for him.
He protests that Christianity has been ousted from its Constantinian heights, cast out of the public square, and lacks the courage to seize the throne back. It's been forced to tolerate people he seems to regard as intolerable. In response, I point out that servile, effeminate, and powerless is what Christians were proudly known for. To be crucified was to be made powerless, pierced—which had sexual connotations. The Romans portrayed victims as womanish and violated. To be crucified was to be made feminine. Far from shrinking away, Christians embraced the cross and all it symbolized. They embraced it as the locus of their identity and mission. Christians cherished power in weakness, greatness in civility, honor in humiliation, equality in Christ. Love conquers hate; better to be abused than to abuse others. The values of tolerance, justice, and equality that Wolf despises are products of the Christian tradition. We should not despise them but point out their Christian roots.
The Romans despised Christianity because it was a religion of the lowly, the weak, the impoverished, the unmanly, those lacking status and power. The pagan philosopher Celsus derided Christianity as full of foolish and lonely persons, slaves, women, and children. Wolf would agree with Celsus; he thinks Celsus was right. Instead of being the religion of women, slaves, and children, Christianity should be the religion of senators and gladiators—masculine, mighty, and magnificent. The irony is that what Wolf finds appalling about modern Christianity is how much it resembles ancient Christianity, with its belief that God is on the side of the poor, oppressed, and disempowered. That's my first critique: he critiques modern Christianity for being too much like ancient Christianity.
My second critique is that Wolf is explicitly and perniciously kininistic in his account of a Christian nation. This is the dark element of the book. It’s about keeping white people in charge of America and segregating and disempowering ethnic minorities. For Wolf, nation and ethnicity are synonyms; a nation is an ethnically homogeneous group. A nation, a *Volk*, is a German word describing like-minded people who look alike, speak a common tongue, and share history. For Wolf, solidarity needs similarity, requiring the exclusion of an out-group to fulfill a natural right to be different from other groups. He's open to amicable alliances with other ethnic groups, but he doesn't want adoption, inclusion, or acculturation. He doesn't want to rescind the citizenship of ethnic minorities, but he wants amicable ethnic separation along political lines—segregation or the resettlement of some ethnic groups abroad. He's clear: non-Christians might be entitled to justice, peace, and safety, but not political equality. That's not Christian; it sounds like the Islamic concept of *dhimmi*. He sounds like a Marvel villain when he says Christians should view the earth as theirs, not theirs, for we are co-heirs with Christ.
For Wolf, the bonds between people in his Christian nation are not credal; he explicitly rejects that. The bonds are primarily ethnogeographic. The natural inclination to dwell among similar people is good and necessary. Civil unity cannot be built on spiritual unity but needs a common language and cultural similarity. The confession that Jesus is Lord can unite people, but for Wolf, it's too abstract to be the basis for civil society. Spiritual unity is superseded by love of one's own people. Love of God and neighbor is replaced by love of one's own kind. Spiritual unity in Christ doesn't warrant civic union; cultural diversity harms civil unity. He rejects immigration, even from fellow white Christian nations. He argues that during the Reformation, reformed cities shouldn't have received Protestant refugees because of overcrowding. He doesn't want African and Latino Christians, or even white Christians, coming to his country. This is weird. Even Viktor Orbán, a quasi-Christian nationalist, welcomed Christian Syrian refugees. Orbán is open to confessional unity with different ethnic groups, but Wolf disagrees. Wolf claims it's natural to love the familiar rather than the foreign—true only for people who never read the parable of the Good Samaritan or about the unity of the church in Antioch. Moses married an Ethiopian woman; the gospel has always compelled people to break down ethnoracial barriers. Jesus performed miracles on both the Jewish and Gentile sides of the Sea of Galilee. Peter ate with a Gentile centurion. Paul says ethnic, class, and gender divisions are broken down by the cross. In Acts 17:26, Paul says God "hath made of one blood all nations of men," a verse used by abolitionists. All human beings are connected by one blood.
No ethnic group is completely static and insulated; all cultures hybridize. We move around, interact, and marry people from other countries. Imagine an All-American boy who joins the army, gets stationed in Germany, marries a Turkish Pentecostal girl, moves back to Idaho, opens a Turkish coffee house, and their kids are a wonderful mix of Turkish, American, and German cultures. I say, "Hallelujah!" Wolf would say, "Oh, hell no." His rejection is about protecting ethnic purity from impurity. Unless you live in a fortress, prison, or concentration camp, we'll all be influenced by interacting with and falling in love with people of different ethnic groups. I understand his concern about open borders and mass migration, but he's interested in maintaining ethnic and racial purity, which is disturbing. He psychologizes the political left as having a suicidal need to self-abuse and disinherit itself because of white guilt. There's no doubt he has prejudice toward foreigners and a strong desire to maintain the purity of his kin, keeping them unadulterated from contact with foreigners. He'd be a big no to interracial marriages. It's more than ethn-narcissism; it's white supremacy, aiming to keep white people separate from and supreme over other ethnic groups. It's sad because Wolf's Christianity isn't restraining or curing his ethnic prejudice; it's amplifying it.
Third, Wolf proposes a pan-Protestant alliance as the theological basis for his white Christian nation. He's Presbyterian, but open to co-belligerents, even some Baptists. However, he's suspicious of Baptists because of their tradition of dissent and advocacy for religious liberty, anathema to him. He repudiates neo-Anabaptists for subverting the durable Christian order. Presbyterians would be first among equals, probably more equal than others. The state would direct people toward the true Christian religion, but which denomination's definition of "true religion" gets to be hegemonic? He never mentions Greek Orthodox or Catholics; they're either banned or in re-education camps. He wouldn't want Anglicans forcing him to worship using the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, but if Anglicans were in ascendency, his theology would give them no reason not to. Many congregationalists, Baptists, and Anglicans fled England for America to get away from Anglican Christian nationalism. Wolf thinks magistrates and municipal leaders, theologically trained, can decide matters of public order and solve theological disputes without infringing on the spiritual authority of ministers. The prince, king, or great Christian leader and the magistrate can fund the ministry, call synods, moderate proceedings, and impose uniformity of worship and mandatory church attendance. He straddles peculiar inconsistencies. He says the prince can't force people to receive the Lord's Supper while kneeling, but he can insist on the elevation of the pulpit above the Lord's table. Sometimes he wants Christian liberty; other times, Presbyterian traditions can be enforced. This presages legal and ecclesiastical chaos. Presbyterian church governance is highly litigious; there would be constant lawsuits about six-day creationism, paedocommunion, postmillennialism, theonomy, watching Netflix on the Sabbath, and confusing law and gospel. Orthodoxy would be stringently narrowed or defined so broadly as to make heresy impossible. In a religiously diverse state, the state must be neutral in religious affairs and incompetent to adjudicate on religious disputes; otherwise, it's heresy trials. The comic irony is that if this Presbyterian Christian nation were set up, Presbyterians in the OPC and PCA would probably put Wolf on trial for heresy, proving that all revolutions eat their own children.
The other danger is that a state that can impose orthodoxy can also impose heresy. Wolf grieves that America is dominated by a regime-enforced moral ideology. I agree that government imposing its moral vision on people of faith is bad, but the solution isn't a brutal and repressive Christian regime enforcing its values. The solution is to limit the moral authority and coercive powers of any government. We don't want to be in control so no one can control us; we need a separation of powers and church and state. The government can't run roughshod over the religious convictions of the faithful. Wolf forgets that the first American colonists were fleeing the Christian nationalism of England and wanted religious freedom. The separation of church and state was intended to protect one group of Christians from another.
Wolf's account of the Christian prince sounds like a job description for Donald Trump. He rejects administrators and regulators, hailing the prince as the first of his people, father or protector of the country—a cross between Augustus and Cromwell. He's not head of the church, but his rule has a spiritual quality. He's a mediator of God, a national God in the tradition of Psalm 45. His task is to dismantle the gynocracy, with its obsession about equality and victimhood and wimpy notions of therapy and self-care, replacing it with a Spartan sense of masculinity married to a Nietzschean will to power scaffolded along a hierarchy of nature. If you believe in total depravity, a prince armed with the rhetoric of divine office and without checks and balances can go very bad. That's why the Virginia state motto is *sic semper tyrannis*—death to tyrants. I have no doubt Wolf's pan-Protestant apparatus would fray into civil conflict or lead to a single tyrant imposing a single form through violence.
Fourth, Wolf doesn't engage with or acknowledge the liberal political tradition. He doesn't understand why Cromwell's England, Calvin's Geneva, John Knox's Scotland, or Hendrik Verwoerd's South Africa were quickly abandoned. A Christian state run by magistrates and ministers didn't last because it sucked; it ran over people's liberties. Instead of fighting over religious differences, people preferred a state neutral on religious matters, with religious freedom and even secularity. Instead of burning Catholics, drowning Baptists, and locking up Methodists, people decided the state should be neutral and incompetent to adjudicate on religious disputes. Wolf is allergic to a neutral public square or state apparatus; he rejects universal notions of fairness and equality, seeing it as a Trojan horse for aggressive secularism. I object that this needn't and normally hasn't been the case. In the US, most religious freedom cases before the Supreme Court win, long before the current conservative-dominated judiciary. Strangely, Wolf thinks the First Amendment should only apply to the federal government, not state governments. In Australia, Section 116 of the Constitution is like the First Amendment, but only applies to the federal government, creating problems about religious freedom. You're much better off having a law that protects religious freedom from federal, state, and local governments. His rejection of liberalism—the idea that government should guarantee maximal liberty—is ironic because missional Protestantism birthed the liberal tradition, with its emphasis on liberty, freedoms, and rights. Tom Holland's *Dominion* and James Simpson's *The Permanent Revolution* point out how political freedoms are rooted in missional Protestantism. People needed to be free to choose a relationship with Christ. The missional Protestant tradition was always big on religious liberty because every soul should have freedom to bind itself to Christ. We should affirm liberty of conscience. Paul said, "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." Wolf completely dismisses the liberal tradition, created out of missional Protestantism.
Fifth, Wolf's Christian nationalism leads to a shallow and cultural Christianity—what Bonhoeffer called "cheap discipleship." Wolf thinks Christian nationalism makes Christianity plausible because it socializes people into religious practices where one hears the gospel and sets social conditions aiding the reception of the gospel. But people receive just enough Christianity to be inoculated against it. They see Christian values, ethics, beliefs, and authority imposed on them, making them resistant to real Christianity. It becomes a culture of conformity leading to superficial Christianity. People are more likely to reject Christianity for those reasons. Some of the worst atheists I've met are products of Catholic schools. Expectations of mandatory religious conformity won't facilitate the free decision to commit one's life to Christ; it will turn people off. James Madison wrote that the disestablishment of the church in Virginia was the greatest thing that ever happened to religion; piety increased. This is bolstered by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, who showed that church involvement grew stronger in the US as disestablishment progressed (see *The Churching of America*). Wolf doesn't understand why people celebrate the decline of cultural Christianity in America; cultural Christianity leads to shallow faith and creates hypocrites, legalists, and atheists. The disestablishment of religion from the state heightens the depth and breadth of religious devotion when done voluntarily. There's only one mention of evangelism in Wolf's book; his Christian nation isn't achieved by proclamation but by the power of imposition. It's not about evangelism, persuasion, or "Come, see, and taste that the Lord is good"; it's more like, "The Lord is good, and if you don't say so, he'll get vengeance on you through us."
Sixth, the explicit Americanness of the book is nauseating. I love America, but Wolf says things that irk me. He says the American flag implicitly symbolizes the Christian flag. No, it does not. Such remarks would be incomprehensible to Calvin, Beza, Cranmer, Edwards, Whitfield, or almost any Reformed person before or even after 1776. America is not an elect nation; it's not in the Bible. America is not the custodian or best version of global or historical Christianity. Don't think of yourselves more highly than you ought. Nicholas Walter Storr said, "The church is not only American and does not include all Americans." The church is not American, and America is not the church. Attempts to turn America into a Puritan heaven ended up making it a Protestant hell.
Colonists like Roger Williams of Rhode Island and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia argued for the separation of church and state. It was good for the state and better for the churches and the civil and religious freedom of all the people. Seventh Wolf argues for the right to revolution, especially regarding religion. He's big on this; he likes his right to revolution.
Now, I believe Christians can be called to civil and uncivil disobedience. But the Christian tradition has always been wary, even allergic, to regicide—killing the king or president. In my reading of the history of political theology, one passage that comes up a lot is 1 Samuel 24, where David refused to kill Saul, even when he had the chance. Even John Calvin said, "If you're stuck with a slothful or wicked monarch or prince, pray hard and hope for the best." That was pretty much his advice.
It's not until the English Revolution, the English Civil War, the American War of Independence, and the American Civil War that Protestant interpreters had to start thinking of a workaround for Romans 13 and Paul's call for Christians to obey civil authority. William Wolf believes Christians should obey governing authority, but he thinks there's a point where you have to throw off the shackles of tyranny. To his credit, he recognizes that Christian rulers have true power, and resisting them would be resisting God. He argues that even non-Christian rulers, having been put in place by God, deserve a certain degree of respect.
It's alarming that Wolf believes revolution is permitted when the government acts detrimentally to true religion or attacks true religion. It depends on what you mean by "detrimental," doesn't it? Banning public worship or the preaching of the Gospel would be detrimental. Though I don't know whether it would automatically send me into a flight of revolutionary rage; I'd try other options first. Does the government holding, sponsoring, or allowing gay pride parades qualify as detrimental to true religion? Not my thing, but it doesn't fill me with revolutionary zeal. Citizens in a liberal democracy must have the freedom to be other than me; they must follow their own conscience.
Wolf is very critical of "regime evangelicals"—people who ingratiate themselves to progressive governments. His view is that every aspect of private, personal, civic, and political life is under God's ordained system of order; anything not that he regards as tyranny. He goes so far as to say the entire American regime—from Hollywood to health officials to HR departments—is one big anti-Christian regime, the regime being the tyrant. At this stage, he seems more interested in resistance than revolution.
The book ends with a super-ranty epilogue about restoring America to its religious principles. It's a denouncement of Reaganite and Bush conservatism. It sees American institutions as secretly taken over by secular subversives and turned into a gynocracy—ruled by soft, effeminate men and their women. Wolf believes the antidote isn't persuasion to a better ideal, but a purge of the whole order itself. He envisages Trump as an instrument for doing that. For Wolf, Putin is a morality tale because he thinks secular progressives would do to Christian nationalists what they're doing to Russia—spreading misinformation, punishing it with sanctions, and other punitive actions. Wolf complains that Christian nationalists are perceived as the Taliban of the West, a threat to liberalism and authoritarianism. To which I'd say, "Well, yeah, because you kind of are, and you're sort of proud of it." They regard us as a threat to their liberal democracy, rights, and beliefs. But you kind of are.
What Wolf wants is a masculine society because it harmonizes the individual and hierarchy for the common good. The common good for whom? For men and by men who have God-like power over women, which never ends well for women. Wolf likes the cross, but only when painted on a Roman shield or a Tomahawk cruise missile. It doesn't dawn on him that the necessity to be in charge doesn't occur to most Christians in most of the world for most of history. Christians in India aren't saying this country belongs to us and these Hindus have stolen it. That's not how the story goes for Christians in other parts of the world. He wants people weaned off compassion and equality. It reminds me of Hitler: "I want people capable of violence, relentless and cruel." Wolf is not a Nazi, but that rhetoric—to be weaned off compassion and geared up to take power—is sinister. He's got other weird bits, too: buy a homestead, boys should get blue-collar jobs, men should lift weights, make more babies—things that have nothing to do with the New Testament or Christian ethics.
It's more like a Christianized version of Nietzsche than the religion of the crucified Nazarene. I'd sum up Steven Wolf's Christian nationalism this way: "Man shall be trained for religious war, and the woman for the recreation of the cultural warrior; all else is f--- you." That's what *The Case for Christian Nationalism* is about. It's a bad idea for America and global Christianity. There are better ways for churches and Christians to relate to the state. This constant need to be in power by any means necessary leads you down a dark road. You won't find the risen and exalted Christ reigning; you'll find you've made a pact with the Devil himself. That's why I'm not a big fan of Christian nationalism. And there, my friends, endeth the lesson. [Music] Priest. I never know what's going on.