Written by John D. Wilsey |
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Coming to grips with American nationality is hard work, but it is the work of the American citizen. Christian American citizens have a special responsibility in this work, because we believe that the tension between dignity and fallenness in human nature has been resolved through the Incarnation of the Lord Jesus, and his substitutionary work in redemption on the cross and the resurrection.

It seems everyone has an opinion about nationalism these days. Something called “Christian nationalism” emerged once Donald Trump came on the political scene a decade ago, and especially after January 6, 2021. Since the publication of Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry’s 2020 book, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, Christian nationalism has become a veritable cottage industry. Scores of authors, particularly on the left, have sought to get in on the action, publishing title after title excoriating the concept as racist, fascist, patriarchal, violent, and “neither American nor Christian” (in the words of a recently released book by Michael W. Austin).
Others, mainly on the right, have embraced the moniker of Christian nationalism with relish. Stephen Wolfe’s 2021 book, The Case for Christian Nationalism, serves as a manifesto for a magisterial, Erastian polity headed by a Christian prince who serves in the capacity of a king-priest. Whereas the leftist critique of Christian nationalism has developed into a theory of everything progressives hate about conservatives, Wolfe’s book serves as a thumb thrust directly into the eye of the progressive left.
Prior to 2016, the cultural masthead for religious national identity was American exceptionalism—the idea that America was special, unique, and praiseworthy among the nations of the world. A fickle American culture exchanged “exceptionalism” for “nationalism” with little understanding or reflection on the meaning of either term. Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, both “exceptionalism” and “nationalism” have been deployed by the left to describe all that is wrong with America. The left prefers open borders, multiculturalism, multilingualism, and globalism to anything that speaks of American particularity as a nation with a language, culture, governing philosophy, tradition, or heroes of its own. Herein, I hope to briefly explain why this leftist ideology of cosmopolitanism is faulty, and that the better way is not a nationalism, but the conservation of a patriotic nationality that serves as a faithful stewardship of the best of American tradition. This conservative patriotism is in fact a means of loving our neighbor. 
Cosmopolitanism
Political theorist Steven B. Smith’s book, Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes, helpfully provides a contrast between nationalism, patriotism, and what he calls cosmopolitanism. He writes, “nationalism is not patriotism’s exact opposite but a deformation of the patriotic spirit.” On the other hand, Smith understands cosmopolitanism as a world citizenship—it is universal, not particular. Tracing the history of cosmopolitanism in the West from Plato, to the Stoics, to the Roman Empire, and to the Enlightenment in the modern period, Smith rightly argued the cosmopolitanism is an abstraction, a chimera, utopian, without “passion and intensity” and “a joyless disposition.”
Most compellingly, Smith describes cosmopolitanism by using the term “cool.” He writes, “Cool is above all an aesthetic pose, expressed in dress, cuisine, language, and shopping. It is a stance of detached irony, a withholding of emotional commitment.” Cool became mainstream after World War II, particular during the liberation movements of the 1960s. Cool transcends good and evil and “has an unmistakenly urban vibe, designating hipness and an indifference to conventional norms, with a slightly outlaw flavor.” Cosmopolitanism—a form of globalism that prizes international diversity in the West for the sake of diversity—is the epitome of cool, because to be cosmopolitan is to transcend national distinctives, borders, citizenship, and politics. Cosmopolitanism is thoroughly postmodern, in that it rejects the normative in favor of the sentimental and experiential.
Thus, it is difficult to make a rational case against cosmopolitanism, because it is by definition irrational. There is no concrete example of cosmopolitanism in history. Even multi-national states and empires like the Roman Empire of antiquity, the Holy Roman Empire of medieval and early modern Europe, or the Austro-Hungarian Empire of late modernity took their shapes around contours defined by practice, statecraft, tradition, religion, and physical boundaries over time. Cosmopolitanism is, as Smith lucidly describes it, not much more than a “vibe.”
Read More

Related Posts:

.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-column-wrap{align-content:start;}:where(.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-column-wrap) > .wp-block-kadence-column{justify-content:start;}.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-column-wrap{column-gap:var(–global-kb-gap-md, 2rem);row-gap:var(–global-kb-gap-md, 2rem);padding-top:var(–global-kb-spacing-sm, 1.5rem);padding-bottom:var(–global-kb-spacing-sm, 1.5rem);grid-template-columns:minmax(0, 1fr);}.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd{background-color:#dddddd;}.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-layout-overlay{opacity:0.30;}@media all and (max-width: 1024px){.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-column-wrap{grid-template-columns:minmax(0, 1fr);}}@media all and (max-width: 767px){.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-column-wrap{grid-template-columns:minmax(0, 1fr);}}
.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col,.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col:before{border-top-left-radius:0px;border-top-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-left-radius:0px;}.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col{column-gap:var(–global-kb-gap-sm, 1rem);}.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col{flex-direction:column;}.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col > .aligncenter{width:100%;}.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col:before{opacity:0.3;}.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18{position:relative;}@media all and (max-width: 1024px){.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col{flex-direction:column;}}@media all and (max-width: 767px){.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col{flex-direction:column;}}

Subscribe to Free “Top 10 Stories” Email
Get the top 10 stories from The Aquila Report in your inbox every Tuesday morning.

Written by John D. Wilsey |
Thursday, September 26, 2024
We bring courage to historical study because it takes courage to confront the realities of human sin as it manifested itself in the past. And we need the courage to avoid simple explanations about past events and personalities. History also requires that we exercise justice to the dead. We avoid cherry-picking from the past for political purposes, and we eschew the temptation to use the past in contemporary power games. 

People are touchy about the topic of history these days. They get worked up about statues in public places, history education in middle and high school classrooms, and whether America was or was not founded as a Christian nation. Academic historians are famous for disparaging beloved authors like Barbara Tuchman and David McCullough for writing nothing more than “popular” history, and for them, anyone who casts himself as a historian must be able to produce a doctorate in history from an acceptable institution.
Most recently, Tucker Carlson interviewed a podcaster named Darryl Cooper on a range of topics including World War II. Carlson introduced Cooper, host of the Martyr Made Podcast, as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” It turns out that Cooper, the most important popular historian today (if we accept Carlson’s endorsement), believes that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain of the Second World War.”
Carlson’s interview with Cooper exploded with controversy. As of this writing, the interview on YouTube has close to 1 million views in a week and a half. That is an enviable statistic. To put that into perspective, leading Civil War historian Allen C. Guelzo struggled to get just a little more than 150,000 views of his lecture titled “Did Robert E. Lee commit treason?”
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by John D. Wilsey |
Tuesday, February 22, 2022
Du Mez’s work reads less as history and more as ideology, and an ideology with little in the way of faith, hope, or charity. All we have before us as we reach the end of the book is a cliff edge, with no path forward to forgiveness and reconciliation. There is no apparent hope. But hope is central to a Christian historical method.

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez (New York: Liveright, 2020), 386 pages, $18.95 (Hardback).
As I begin, please indulge me as I make a few personal prefatory remarks. I have reviewed dozens of books in my professional life, but this review will be different. Consider this review a cri de coeur over a book written as a cri de coeur. I am deeply invested in more than one element of Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne. For one, I know Professor Du Mez professionally and I have a deep and abiding respect and admiration for her. I also am a white, conservative evangelical Christian, so I read the pages of this book with the realization that my people are the subject of this book (although I do question how valid the way DuMez normativizes the concept of “white evangelical” is). And lastly, I am a Christian historian myself, and am constantly thinking about how to be a worthy student and teacher of history, as well as a creditable teller of past stories for present audiences. In short, I do not read Du Mez’s book from the standpoint of total objectivity, nor do I approach her subject matter as a set of pure abstractions in which I have no part.
Furthermore, I bring my own experiences as an evangelical to the narrative that Du Mez has produced in her book. I was not born into an evangelical family. In fact, I am the first evangelical Christian in my family’s history, as far as I know. I was raised in a family of mainline Presbyterians and Episcopalians, and did not go to church except on holidays during my childhood and teenage years. I came to Christ after I went to college, and initially joined a Southern Baptist church because the person who led me to Christ was a Southern Baptist. Thus, the history of evangelicalism in the 1970s and 1980s was a history I learned about in books, and had no direct experience thereof.
Still, since coming to Christ in 1988, I have partaken in the recent history of evangelicalism. I have studied it, but I have also witnessed it unfold as a seminary student, as a member of a pastoral staff in a Southern Baptist church, as a Christian school teacher, as a seminary professor, and as a husband and father. Predominately white conservative evangelicals, of the Southern Baptist kind, are my people. My wife and I homeschool our children—we often laugh at ourselves as “weird homeschoolers.” I have a profound love for evangelicals and a loyalty to them based in personal identity, but also in thirty years of full-time service to them and alongside them. Still, I am not blind to their flaws, and I am not their unconditional defender. White conservative evangelicals are what they are for a host of reasons. They have a complex history, and their story is a story that is thrilling, fascinating, heartbreaking, and everything in between.
Du Mez has given us a history of evangelicalism going back to the early twentieth century. Her history is troubling. She lives and teaches in Grand Rapids, Michigan, one of the most significant centers of evangelicalism in America, and her book reads as an anguished and prophetic cry of the heart to her own people. I would guess that my own awareness of a personal stake in this history is multiplied exponentially for Du Mez, who, I suspect, claims white evangelical Christians as her own people, too.
Du Mez’s overall argument is that white, conservative, evangelical Christians in America since the early twentieth century have been at least as influenced by culture as they have by theology. For her, John Wayne serves as a paradigmatic figure illustrating this enduring dynamic. A militant, masculine, Ameri-centric ethos, inspired by mythical and gendered ideals of American exceptionalism, white supremacy, the nuclear family, and law and order came to define white evangelicalism from Theodore Roosevelt (d. 1919) to Donald Trump. Combined with this ethos, evangelicals adopted and cultivated a continuous attitude of embattlement and a sense of suffering persecution. What resulted time and again in the world of evangelicalism was the calculated production of a cosmic conflict between light and darkness, between purity and threats to purity—with evangelicals always being on the side of righteousness, and any opponents being on the side of wickedness. Evangelicals cast themselves on the side of America, and so by extension their detractors were either in league with, or were even themselves, enemies of America. The effect has been that conservative white evangelicals have consistently and increasingly betrayed the faith that they purportedly claimed by embracing anti-Christian standards such as oppressive patriarchy, racism, nationalism, and militarism, both explicitly and implicitly. In Du Mez’s words, “Like [John] Wayne, the heroes who best embodied militant Christian masculinity were those unencumbered by traditional Christian virtues. . . . For many evangelicals, these militant heroes would come to define not only Christian manhood but Christianity itself” (11).
Du Mez bases her thesis on a narrative that begins with Theodore Roosevelt’s move to become a cattle rancher in Dakota Territory in 1884 and ends in the middle of the Trump Administration with its correspondent reckonings among evangelicals with the consequences of #MeToo and #ChurchToo. She unweaves an ugly tapestry of evangelical complicity in the creation of “Christian nationalism” (a conflicted term at present), disregard for the plight of African Americans, uncritical glorification of war (especially in Vietnam and the War on Terror), creation of a unique subjugating sexism that resulted in widespread trauma, celebration of abuse of power in church and secular contexts (e.g. Bill Gothard and Oliver North), and tears over perceived threats to religious freedom. Du Mez concludes her book by arguing that evangelicals created a culture that culminated in the rise of Donald Trump. While she acknowledges that such a culmination was not inevitable, the inescapable, logical end point of her history is Trump’s election to the presidency, in which he rode a wave of immensely enthusiastic support from a broad evangelical base.
Any honest appraisal of a book like this must reckon with the ugly details of the narrative. At times, I was embarrassed. At other times, I was angered. Frequently, I felt defensive—and I admit, at times I wanted to find ways to argue that she was objectively wrong. And of course, many of my reactions were defined by simple sadness and regret.
Abuse is an enduring theme of this book. I was never a victim of sexual abuse, but I did suffer physical and verbal abuse as a child and as a teenager. It took me years to realize that the things that happened to me in my youth were not my fault, that they were not normal, and that forgiveness did not mean that I had to maintain relationships with people who abused me, as if nothing had happened. As a historian who studies the history of the intersection between nationalism and theology in the context of war, diplomacy, and political thought—and as a person with painful memories of abuse, who recognizes that abuse is deep and widespread in our communities—Du Mez’s book is often compelling. To say that this book is important, that it should be widely read, that it should be taken seriously, is obvious.
It is a supreme tragedy that American evangelicals have, for generations, replaced the authority of Scripture with that of what I have spent years characterizing as our own “evangelical magisterium.” This magisterium is religiously and culturally authoritative, and often even compels Scripture to submit to it. It consists of three dynamics: pragmatism, experience, and sentimentality. Du Mez is at her best when she demonstrates how these dynamics have played out in various historical contexts, especially from the early years of the Cold War through to Trump’s presidency. The results of the application of this evangelical magisterium are tragic, and Du Mez narrates those tragedies on every page of her book. For example, evangelicals have been, in significant ways, excessively interested in political power. But political power is fleeting and usually comes with a cost not worth paying. Alexis de Tocqueville, writing the first volume of Democracy in America in 1835, foresaw the results of an overly-politicized religion. In de Tocqueville’s estimation, when church and state remain separate, religion can remain in a state of splendid isolation from political squabbling. In such a state of affairs, church leaders can enjoy the respect of the whole populace, regardless of political or religious conviction. But when church leaders begin to engage in political maneuvering, the Christian faith becomes ensnared in politics and gets associated with the factions in which religious leaders bring the church into alignment. Religion, Tocqueville said, “does not need [political powers’] assistance to live, and in serving them it can die.” We are seeing this occur before our very eyes today.
Read More