Pastor Michael Foster has been showcasing the glories of fatherhood using #30DaysofFatherhood on X. He has posted a video of a father having a water balloon fight with his kids, demonstrating the importance of fathers being involved in the lives of their children. At a time when fathers, and masculinity overall, have been attacked from every high place in America, lifting up fatherhood as a good to which every man should aspire is a critical message. Alastair Roberts has rightly argued that in addition to God being our “Judge, Sovereign, Ruler, King, Avenger,” and “Lord,” Christians must see him also as our Father. He is not a cozy, “maternal figure” but “a fatherly authority that stands” over us whose commands we must obey. In fact, Foster writes, “Fatherhood is at the heart of the gospel.”

Is our institutions attempt to foist pride month on us again, the pushback from Christians against LGBTQ radicalism may already be having an effect. 
Though Raytheon still desires to drop rainbow-painted missiles on our regime’s many enemies, numerous Fortune 500 companies seem hesitant to feature pride symbols on their social media accounts this year. Due to last year’s backlash, Target will be featuring its pride collection online and only in select stores—and will not offer any LGBTQ-themed clothing for kids. Major League Baseball put up a rainbow on its X account only to quickly take it down, while other sports leagues that have previously platformed pride icons noticeably did not do so. 
From looking at recent trends, Americans seem to be having second thoughts about the latest stages in our ongoing sexual revolution. A recent Gallup poll shows that Americans’ acceptance of the morality of gay and lesbian relationships has actually decreased seven points between 2022 and 2023, from 71 to 64 percent approval. Even Americans’ overall support for same-sex marriage has slightly decreased, according to a recent Public Religion Research Institute survey. Among Gen Z-ers, a historic shift could be taking place. AEI’s Survey Center on American Life discovered that between 2021 and 2023, there’s been an astonishing 11-point drop in support of same-sex marriage among that cohort, especially among men.
But even with these setbacks, LGBTQ radicalism is still a powerful, dangerous wolf on the prowl. Sesame Street wished its viewers—which are mainly between the ages of 2 to 5—a “Happy #PrideMonth.” “Today and every day, we celebrate and uplift the LGBTQIA+ members of our community,” the kid’s show posted on X. “Together, let’s build a world where every person and family feels loved and welcomed for who they are.” 
In the popular Call of Duty video game franchise, players can now use guns and bullets decked out in a trans flag (which is notable in light of the recent spate of trans shooters). The series is created by a developer owned by Microsoft, a recipient of a perfect equality score from the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index (595 companies received that designation in 2023-24). 
Almost unknown on the Right save for some scattered pieces, CEI is the extremely potent, DEI-esque arm that powers LGBTQ radicalism. 
According to the Human Rights Campaign’s website, CEI is “the national benchmarking tool on corporate policies.” It ranks the corporations that took “concrete steps to establish and implement comprehensive policies, benefits and practices that ensure greater equity for LGBTQ+ workers and their families.” In other words, CEI is a social credit system that ensures corporations’ fealty to the LGBTQ agenda. 
At The American Conservative, James McElroy wrote that CEI “is one of the primary tools used to inject extreme gender ideology into corporate America.” It functions as the tip of the spear, prodding even seemingly traditional companies like Cracker Barrel to fall in line with the gay consensus. 
Pride month is the time of year in which the strength of LGBTQ radicalism especially shows itself.
Read More
Related Posts:

There is good reason that the Right—along with increasing numbers of Americans—is distrustful of our public institutions, some of which need to be razed and some of which need to be rejuvenated. For many Americans, bromides against the “tyrannical government” and talk of “creeping Marxism” is not simply a product of their own populist delusions but is an understandable reaction to the insanity they see every day on the news. Though the comprehensive solution to our current dilemma ventures beyond the political, a political response that is both far-reaching and prudential is absolutely essential.

Major financial institutions de-banking organizations or individuals for religious reasons probably strikes the average American as a conspiracy theory fit for a raving, right-wing lunatic. Last week, however, it was reported that there is good reason to think this has been happening for some time. 
Financial officials from 13 states wrote a letter to Bank of America, the second largest bank in the United States, calling them to task for a pattern of de-banking Christian ministries and individuals. They cited a handful of cases where this occurred without good cause. Bank accounts that were closed for vague and shifting reasons included those of Indigenous Advance Ministries, a Christian organization that cares for orphaned children in Uganda; a Memphis, Tennessee, church that donates to IAM; Indigenous Advance Customer Center, a separate business that also serves in Uganda; the Timothy Two Project International, which trains pastors in over 65 countries; and Christian author and podcaster Lance Wallnau. 
The bank closure letters claimed that BoA could no longer serve that “business type” and also that the organizations exceeded the “bank’s risk tolerance”; months later, BoA also maintained they don’t work with for-profit businesses that do debt collection. “Neither Indigenous Advance Ministries nor the church collect debts,” the letter notes, “nor was the bank able to point to any policy prohibiting account holders from engaging in such activities. In other words that rationale was a ruse, and even if legitimate, would only apply to one of the closed accounts.”
A similar letter sent in 2022, signed by 60 financial professionals, alleged that JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Capital One, and Morgan Stanley have engaged in similar patterns of behavior against other Christian ministries and individuals.
Right-wing dissidents began using the term “regime” to describe this exact problem: private corporations targeting the political and cultural enemies of those who always seem to occupy the seats of power, and whose interests are never fundamentally threatened during the brief times they’re out of power. Using regime in this way is imprecise—why not simply describe present-day America as an oligarchy?—and it has been overused, just as any political term of art will be. But it became popular nonetheless because it describes how power at scale actually functions in America today.
The baleful effects of our current governing authorities go far beyond simply adding reams of regulatory red tape to public works projects or stifling the entrepreneurial spirit of the individual. Instead, public and private institutions and actors are regularly engaged in coordinated efforts to unperson those who fall out of line with the approved moral consensus. 
Probably the most famous of these cancellation attempts is Brendan Eich, who was forced to resign as CEO of Mozilla for donating money to a campaign that opposed the imposition of same-sex marriage in California. As Andrew Beck noted in a recent profile of Eich at First Things, “A visionary technologist whose work had made the web a more accessible, free, and enjoyable experience for everyone was condemned as a hateful bigot and treated as a pariah by his company, the press, and on the internet that he was so instrumental in building.” 
Though Eich went on to found Brave, a search engine that’s been having recent success, not all have been so lucky. Remember Jack Phillips, the cake baker from Colorado who won his Supreme Court case against the Colorado Civil Rights Commission? He’s now caught up in yet another lawsuit for declining to make a cake for a gender transition—a lawsuit filed on the same day in 2017 when the Supreme Court announced it would hear the Masterpiece case.  
Defining the Regime
In the Politics, Aristotle described the regime as having four constituent elements—the ruling body, the ruling institutions, the way of life, and the ends at which the regime aims. But of these features, he reasoned that “the governing body is the regime,” because it “has authority in the city.” Continuing on, Aristotle noted that “whatever the authoritative element conceives to be honorable will necessarily be followed by the opinion of the other citizens.” 
In a two-part series on this topic, American Reformer’s Josh Abbotoy defined the modern use of regime thusly: “A set of public, quasi-public and private actors exercising coordinated power for the purposes of advancing a shared agenda for social and political control.” What Abbotoy summarizes is the governing body in modern America, which goes beyond merely political offices. As he notes, it is composed of a dense web of elected officials, the intelligence community, boards of Fortune 100 companies, hedge fund managers, non-profits, and NGOs. And what these institutions and individuals think is honorable (or what they need to say to do business), from LGBTQ and Black Lives Matter pieties to abortion and feminism, is what is in fact honored in every major public and private institution today.
Abbotoy discusses how through the imposition of regulations, the administrative state “commandeers quasi-public actors in order to further policy goals through expansive uses of existing statutory authority (e.g., higher education and Title IX, or DEI requirements amongst government contractors).” Even worse is the coordination between the national security sector and social media giants. The Twitter Files uncovered a vast operation between pre-Elon Twitter and the intelligence community, which worked in concert to deplatform unruly individuals and prevent stories from being shared that would have damaged Joe Biden’s electoral prospects in 2020.
With that being said, there are critics of using regime as a pejorative, catch-all term to describe who rules in America currently.
Read More
Related Posts:

In the Left’s twisted theology, transgenderism is a sacrament that promises rebirth and renewal but delivers only despair, pain, disfigurement, and death. It sells the lie of salvation through the mutilation of mostly the bodies of young children. While Christ’s body was crushed for our iniquities (Isaiah 53:5) for making atonement for sin, transgenderism leaves scarred bodies in its wake for a fruitless quest that will end with the just judgment of God.

It’s been clear for some time that Christianity’s relationship to American culture has changed dramatically in recent decades.
You may have rolled your eyes at “The War on Christmas” as the rants of out-of-touch, older generations. Maybe the culture warriors’ focus on stopping the removal of nativity scenes in town squares and Ten Commandment monuments in courthouses only briefly caught your attention. You might have thought their work was important but these changes were probably not the signs of a looming cultural disaster. Now, however, it is beyond doubt that these warnings were prophetic and have been nearly all vindicated.
What seemed like overweening nostalgia for better times was actually a perceptive sense of massive shifts away from America’s historic traditions, which were largely the product of an Anglo-Protestant culture. The past 70 years in America have shown that the slippery slope is very real indeed.
Over the past few years, this cultural downgrade has been captured on social media by a picture of three buildings along the Lower Manhattan skyline on Good Friday in 1956. Each features lighted-up office windows in the shape of a cross, depicting the crucifixions of Jesus and the two thieves. Measuring 150 feet tall, these crosses were “sent over the wire by United Press Telephoto and appeared in newspapers around the United States—often front page center,” as Fox News reported.
This a far cry from what you will likely observe in NYC today. Now, instead of seeing purely Christian symbols and themes, NYC skyscrapers light up in the colors of the LGBT flag and other emblems of our 21st-century public morality, which uses many of the outward trappings of Christianity as a skin suit.
This fundamental moral reorientation becomes very apparent when considering how Easter is treated by the spokesmen for the current moral consensus.
Our social media behemoths routinely ignore the day that celebrates Christ’s resurrection from the dead. Google has not put up an “Easter doodle” on its homepage since the year 2000. On Easter Sunday in 2013, Google instead featured a web designer’s rendering of Cesar Chavez, the activist labor titan.
When Easter isn’t being sidelined altogether, it’s being used as a prop to support the latest regime propaganda that strikes at the heart of orthodox Christianity.
The Biden administration issued a short statement on Easter Sunday that was overshadowed by an ebullient and lengthy proclamation that declared March 31 a “Transgender Day of Visibility.”  The now-highest holy day of modern liberalism was created by Michigan transgender activist Rachel Crandall-Crocker in 2009.
Biden’s proclamation affirms “the most fundamental freedom” of trans people “to be their true selves” against “extremists” who “are proposing hundreds of hateful laws that target and terrify transgender kids and their families.” Such supposedly horrific laws include “silencing teachers; banning books; and even threatening parents, doctors, and nurses with prison for helping parents get care for their children.” Contrary to Biden’s assertions, all these types of laws are ones that Christians should unequivocally support in principle. Students need to be protected from reading books filled with filth in public schools and from doctors and hospital systems that push them through the trans meat grinder. That Biden and his cronies think these things deserve to be praised and honored is a window into the soul of the modern Democratic Party.
Steve Sailer has aptly described the Democrats as a “coalition of the fringes,” one which has clearly molded the party into its own perverted image.
Read More
Related Posts:

Another tendency in the Reformed world is pastors using “expository” preaching as a tactic to avoid courting controversy, as Pastor Matt Marino discussed during the most recent episode of the Old Paths Podcast. In a piece Marino wrote that sparked excellent conversation on the podcast, he explained, “Sermons are not expositional unless and until they expose not only God’s meaning but our obstacles. God’s meaning must penetrate our whole heart and permeate our whole lives.” Explaining a passage’s context, history of interpretation—and even the passage’s connection to Christ—is essential, but it’s not enough.

Following up on my piece from last week, much more can be said about the general state of the modern Reformed movement. While there are certainly good aspects of it, from its general reverence in worship to its theological rigor, there are also shortcomings that need to be addressed. These problems include rhetorical traps, not always preaching the full counsel of God, and the prevalence of gatekeepers who seem more interested in condemning their Reformed enemies than promoting a historically based understanding of the Reformed tradition as a whole. 
One such rhetorical snare is hiding behind confessionalism to excuse questionable theology that parrots the pieties of our age. After being outraged that anyone would dare question their Reformed credentials, these types like to claim that they’re “confessional” and therefore beyond criticism.
Confessionalism is a good and necessary thing. Confessions bind us to the faith as delivered by the church throughout the ages. In the Reformed tradition, they 1) outline the key doctrines of orthodoxy as taught in Scripture (as well as being ecumenical about certain second- and third-order issues), 2) establish methods of discipline should the teachers of the church subvert those doctrines, and 3) catechize congregants and their children in patterns that should pervade all areas of life. 
Importantly, confessions do not overturn the principle that, in the language of Article Six of the Thirty-Nine Articles, “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation.” Confessions, along with the ecumenical creeds, are subordinate in authority to Scripture. They are derived from it and are held accountable to it. What the Southern Presbyterian theologian Robert Lewis Dabney has written about creeds applies just as much to confessions and other secondary statements of basic Christian doctrine: “He who would consistently banish creeds must silence all preaching and reduce the teaching of the church to the recital of the exact words of Holy Scripture without note or comment.” 
Confessions are also the answer to the problem of “Calvinism,” or making one theologian the standard of Reformed orthodoxy as I pointed out last week. As J.V. Fesko argues, doing this means diving headlong “into the pitfall of theological genius—defining doctrine by the cult of personality rather than through the church’s careful and prayerful deliberation on Scripture in dialogue with the church throughout the ages.” Reformed confessions are the products of the best theological minds of their eras. They carefully summarize the doctrines of the faith for the broader church, ensuring that the theological issues of their time are given due attention and correction.
As good as confessions are, however, they can be weaponized. Some individuals can hide behind a strict literalism that fails to engage with the underlying anthropological foundations on which those doctrines rest. One of the most famous memes from Philip Derrida’s collection of evangelical countersignaling memes shows a man saying that he affirms the ecumenical creeds but rejects the basic, commonsense truths of sex and gender. This is clearly occurring in the controversy over Side-B and Revoice. Like in a game of Jenga, followers of these movements subtly remove the foundational pillars of the created order, one by one, until the edifice suddenly collapses.
Some also fail to heed the straightforward teachings of their confessions. It would be interesting to see how many so-called strict subscriptionists who have later deconstructed ever assented to the Westminster Larger Catechism’s teaching on the duties that inferiors, superiors, and equals owe to each other as part of the Fifth Commandment. My guess is, they never did. And their pastors either neglected to discuss those points or actually helped undermine the teachings of their confessions.
Like the U.S. Constitution, confessions are functionally useless absent good men who will ensure that those under their care stay within its boundaries. What American Reformer’s own Timon Cline has written about the case of “strict subscriptionists” who blanch at their confession’s teaching on the civil magistrate holds true no matter the specific doctrine being jettisoned. 
Read More
Related Posts:

Christian hope isn’t some fake, sunny optimism that’s divorced from a clear-eyed view of reality. Christians can still see the manifold political and cultural problems around them and work to do something about them. Instead, it’s a recognition that Christ will triumph—and he will do so through every means at His disposal.

Why is there no concerted effort among evangelicals to reach out to the dissident Right? I’ve been thinking about that question after reading a recent post on the crisis at the Texas border (you can read my take here) at Conundrum Cluster’s Substack.
A “Harvard- and Cambridge-educated classical historian” according to a recent byline, Conundrum Cluster was one of the people behind the old Mystery Grove Twitter account, one of the more popular accounts on the dissident Right. It was known for its movie list—which featured films to watch, and in the order specified—as well as republishing long out-of-print autobiographies that punctured the pieties of our post-World War II order.
In any event, after Conundrum Cluster gave his somewhat contrarian take on the mess at the southern border, he sounded a crucial note that the Right desperately needs to hear today. “America is (or at least Americans are) going to make it through this,” he writes. “We’re not doomed. There’s still a shot of salvaging the situation, it’s even a pretty good shot right now.” This is welcome news.
Black-pill spiraling is popular in right-wing circles. And understandably so. Virtually every major cultural indicator is plummeting. The ruling gerontocracy have the country pointed straight toward a cliff as they head off to cushy nursing homes (or simply remain in office for the rest of their days). Prospects look bleak for rising generations. In response, members of the Right typically try to outdo each other with the worst possible predictions of what the future holds: Will the re-education camps only have two latrines or one?
For Christians, there’s much to be concerned about in our increasingly anti-Christian age.
Aaron Renn has made a convincing case in his new book, Life in the Negative World, that Christians face perilous times as we venture further into the murk of the negative world. Being forced to quit a job or getting fired due to holding orthodox beliefs will be happening at a more regular clip. The targeting of Christian businesses will increase. There will be heightened social pressure to apostatize from the faith.
Persecution of various kinds will increase, including the lawfare machine going “brrr.” In a recent example of that, the Biden Department of Justice targeted a group of pro-lifers for violating the FACE Act because they prayed and sang hymns in front of an abortion “clinic.” Six pro-life demonstrators were convicted of physically blocking access and now face up to ten-and-a-half years in prison and fines up to $260,000. Welcome to the world of two-tiered “justice.”
Read More
Related Posts:

As with Trump’s rise in 2015-16, evangelical elites and their aspirants—a group Stephen Wolfe has aptly called the “evangelical arm of the ruling class”—have evidently still learned nothing. And this year will be no different. Evangelicals will vote in overwhelming numbers for Trump in the general election after his inevitable victory in the Republican primaries. And evangelical elites will continue to reserve their harshest judgment for their own tribe, a relationship that looks more and more tenuous by the day.

Don’t make Donald Trump your idol.” “It’s not about Left vs. Right but about the Messiah who already came.” “Saving souls is more important than saving your country.” “Jesus isn’t running in 2024.”
Ever since the former president soundly defeated his opponents in the Iowa caucus last week (as polls had been predicting for quite some time, to the consternation of the political class), and then immediately repeating the victory in New Hampshire, the crush of evangelical elite rhetoric targeting Trump’s evangelical voters has been deafening.
Passive aggressive tweets from pastors and online theologians and op-eds from individuals in the midst of some form of deconstruction have flooded the zone. Accusations abound, and sweeping, ideological generalizations are rampant. Even the very salvation of Christian Trump supporters has been called into question yet again.
Ben Ziesloft has pointed out that the veritable cottage industry of anti-Trump books written by the self-proclaimed guardians of “our democracy” is only equaled by the pile penned by evangelical thought leaders who castigate the evangelical hoi polloi who don red MAGA hats. (Whether or not the term “evangelical” is simply a sociological label or captures orthodox, low-church Protestants who attend church weekly is a different question entirely.) As Miles Smith has trenchantly observed on X, “Is their [sic] any more boring type of self-loathing American than an ‘Evangelical intellectual’ who is still writing about Trump?”
Aaron Renn has already begun reviewing one of the latest entries in this genre, Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. Among other things, Alberta profiles the “well-organized, well-funded” network called “The After Party” that anti-Trump evangelicals Russell Moore, David French, and Curtis Chang, a liberal Silicon Valley consultant, created in the wake of the 2016 election. This group has been working hard ever since “to reduce Republican voting by evangelicals by providing doing so with a theological rationale.” Unsurprisingly, in original reporting at First Things, Megan Basham has shown that they’re bankrolled by a number of left-wing foundations.
In other words, Moore and French are doing the very same thing that Vote Common Good, a progressive Christian nonprofit, is doing: making sure that a Democrat stays in the White House for the foreseeable future. As Vote Common Good’s website notes, they too are looking to persuade “an additional 5-10% [of evangelicals] who are looking for an ‘exit ramp’ from supporting the Republicans who sacrifice the common good.”
In an election year, the spigot will undoubtedly be opened even more. Scott M. Coley’s forthcoming Ministers of Propaganda: Truth, Power, Ideology and the Religious Right (published by the increasingly heterodox Eerdmans Publishing Company in June), is a prime example. A talk he gave in August 2022, where he described the “ideology of the religious right” as including “creation science, illegitimate appeals to biblical authority or sufficiency, [and] Christian colorblindness,” is likely a preview of some of the arguments Coley will draw on in Ministers of Propaganda. Upholding orthodoxy, it seems, is not part of his project.
Books like Alberta’s and Coley’s, however, aren’t meant to be read. Rather, they are for signaling one’s own inclusivity, rejection of power, and care for the migrant—all elements that are consistent with regime-approved morality.
As with Trump’s rise in 2015-16, evangelical elites and their aspirants—a group Stephen Wolfe has aptly called the “evangelical arm of the ruling class”—have evidently still learned nothing. And this year will be no different. Evangelicals will vote in overwhelming numbers for Trump in the general election after his inevitable victory in the Republican primaries. And evangelical elites will continue to reserve their harshest judgment for their own tribe, a relationship that looks more and more tenuous by the day.
On the surface, this is akin to political consultants who consistently run losing campaigns featuring outdated and ineffective messaging but nevertheless remain extremely confident that next time, Americans will finally pick someone who can defeat the Soviets and balance the budget. But if it didn’t work last time, why would deploying the same strategies work this time? Instead, why not reach out to dissident figures on the Right? Or men who lift weights or work with their hands for a living?
Read More
Related Posts:

One major reason for optimism in the Christian nationalist fold is that they have evidently learned from the failures of the conservative movement and are working on developing a positive program, not merely a defensive strategy. And they have a convincing, historically-based case that highlights the deep imprint of America’s Protestant character that remains even today, however trampled upon and bruised. 

The subject of Christian nationalism generates little light but much heat.
Since at least the publication of Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in 2006, the ruling class has used the term as a club to bludgeon evangelicals—especially in the wake of their prodigious support for Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections.
Christian nationalists, the mainstream press tells us, are racist, QAnon-addled election deniers. They want to Make America Puritan Again (in the modern, badly misunderstood meaning of that word). And they believe that the Constitution should be set aside for a Christian divine-right king who will oversee forced religious conversions and impose draconian moral codes upon an unwilling populous.
The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin has called Christian nationalism “an authoritarian, racist, dogmatic message donning the cloak of Christianity,” asserting that the GOP is “dedicated to imposing White Christian nationalism” on the country. A coterie of chin-stroking panels hosted by D.C. think tanks, “democracy” experts and sociologists, and (former) Republican members of Congress have condemned it in the strongest possible terms.
Evangelicals who aspire to be accepted by the ruling elite make a point of agreeing in full with the received view. Christianity Today editor-in-chief Russell Moore described Christian nationalism as “liberation theology for white people.” David French, who never misses the chance to steamroll his fellow evangelicals in the New York Times, called it “a blueprint for corruption, brutality, and oppression.”
The riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 has been packaged as the perfect showcase of Christian nationalism’s devastating consequences for America. All Americans are required to say that Christian Trump supporters tried to overturn “our sacred democracy” and made an idol of Trumpism at the expense of their eternal souls. (Ethics Professor Daniel Strand has conclusively shown that critics flew to this ready-made narrative before any evidence was presented.)
Mainstream conservatives, for their part, generally argue that liberals indiscriminately and unfairly employ the label against all conservatives, who are for the most part not Christian nationalists but patriotic Americans. However, as that contrast implies, this defense of conservatism takes for granted that the ruling class portrait is an accurate one: Christian nationalism stamps out religious freedom and coerces people into false belief. As Hillsdale College’s D.G. Hart wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that was published close to Independence Day, Christian nationalists long to return the nation to “pre-1776 patterns of government, such as John Calvin’s Geneva or John Winthrop’s Boston,” where “the civil magistrate supported churches and cajoled citizens to practice faith.” Conservatives like Hart worry that Christian nationalists will drag us back, Handmaid’s Tale-style, to a benighted age that we worked very hard to leave behind.
Both the Left and a good portion of the Right then agree that Christian nationalism ought to be rejected by all good and decent Americans. But does it truly represent the ultimate threat to the American republic? Is it the dying gasp of a hidebound folk religion that signifies the closing stage of a less-refined epoch? Is this how Christian nationalists understand themselves?
While the Claremont Institute takes no institutional position on the question, we must take Christian nationalism seriously. The debate over it represents a new stage in the ongoing realignment of our politics and culture, touching directly on how Americans should regard and relate to ultimate questions of the human soul and the highest good. The rise of Christian nationalism, along with post-liberalism, Catholic integralism, and other overlapping yet distinct attempts to answer the deepest theological-political questions facing our nation, speaks to mounting levels of dissatisfaction with our current failing paradigm. Wishing away this obvious reality and holding fast to the dead consensus will only fuel greater levels of discontent with the status quo and heighten the chances of our nation’s disintegration.
Just as President Trump’s first presidential run offered the opportunity for a searching reconsideration of the post-Cold War political consensus, the rise of Christian nationalism likewise offers us the same opportunity in the realm of church and state.
Who Are You?
Critics like to suggest that the leaders of the Christian nationalist movement are universally members of an outlandish coalition: explicit pro-MAGA churches; pastors who hold star-spangled, “patriotic” services; Charismatic snake handlers; prosperity Gospel grifters; and Donald Trump’s less-than-orthodox circle of evangelists. Though these groups publicly promote a certain strain of Christianity, they are not supplying the leading theological and political arguments for Christian nationalism (even though they may reside somewhere in the fold).
Rather, the group leading the Christian nationalist movement is a small pan-Protestant coalition of Christians from multiple denominations (e.g., Presbyterians, Baptists, and Anglicans) who want to restore the political theology of the Magisterial Reformers. Works in this tradition include Martin Bucer’s De Regno Christi, Theodore Beza’s The Right of Magistrates, and Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex. And pivotal Protestant confessions that inculcate such views are the original Westminster Confession of Faith, the Belgic Confession, the Irish Articles, and the Thirty-Nine Articles.
The arguments that buttress this project are limited to a few books—with just one systematic treatment among them so far, Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism—a number of lengthy essays (some of whose authors do not even call themselves Christian nationalists), and assorted private group chats. There are no foundations or nonprofits solely dedicated to advancing Christian nationalism. Very few institutions would dare publish anything sympathetic with its aims.
Christian nationalists see themselves as leading a counterrevolution against the post-World War II order. In a bracing series of aphorisms in his book’s epilogue, Wolfe describes the Left as the managers of New America who have long since discarded the founders’ Constitution. They have captured virtually every major public institution and are working zealously to stamp out any vestige of Old America, with its heroes, traditions, and ways of life. The inheritance our forefathers left us has been rejected in favor of a toxic cocktail of oligarchy, feminism, transgenderism, and wokeism. Even the U.S. military, once thought unassailable, is in service to the Global American Empire—an online moniker given to America’s imperial project of exporting “universal principles” (in truth particularist claims that benefit certain “dispossessed classes”) to foreign lands. All told, Wolfe asserts, “Americans live under an implicit occupation; the American ruling class is the occupying force.”
Christian nationalists see the suppression of traditional Christian teachings and practices in public as a defining element of this occupation. This includes: a series of disastrous Supreme Court rulings on the First Amendment’s religion clauses; hoary clichés such as the “neutral” public square and the supposedly impregnable “wall of separation” between church and state; and “religious liberty” that allows Christian business owners to be sued into oblivion. As Kurt Hofer has noted at The American Mind, Christians “have accepted the terms of battle dictated to us by liberalism—we have, in effect, already conceded defeat.”
The pushback to our current regime has either been completely ineffective or nonexistent. The modern conservative movement’s often facile and uncritical embrace of open markets, open trade, and (in many cases) open borders has helped strip mine America of its once plentiful resources and contributed to our present disorders. Meanwhile, Wolfe argues that a group of Protestant regime theologians have been busy reconciling evangelicals to their dhimmitude status, ensuring that they will never pose a threat to unraveling the 21st-century moral consensus.
Longhouse Nation
According to Christian nationalists, America’s men inhabit the Longhouse. In First Things, the anonymous writer L0m3z described that now ubiquitous online term as the “overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.” Christian nationalists argue that modern feminism’s fatwa against “toxic” masculinity pathologizes healthy masculine virtues and renders men subservient and docile. Innumerable pits of quicksand are ready to engulf any man who makes a wayward step: kangaroo tribunals led by college administrators ready to prosecute the merest suspicion of sexual misconduct, heavily biased family courts, and phalanxes of white knights and doxxers on social media apps who seek to destroy the lives of those who run afoul of regime-approved orthodoxies.
Amidst this carnage, Zoomers and young Millennials are searching for a path by which they can achieve greatness, excellence, self-mastery, and vitality. This is why men in these circles have exhorted being in good shape, lifting weights, and eating right—not due to a base materialism but because preserving the physical body is an implication of the Sixth Commandment. And they champion other aims, including getting (and staying) married and having kids, building productive households, buying land and establishing anti-fragile homesteads, and being engaged in every facet of their local communities.
Above all, Christian nationalists reject the status to which Christians have been assigned: naïve patsies who believe that Christ’s teachings mandate the destruction of one’s nation and people. They want nothing to do with year-zero theology, the notion that Christianity best flourishes when Christians have no political power and face routine persecution and martyrdom.
Instead, they are looking to recover the collective will of Christians and confidently assert their interests in public. They would heartily agree with Kevin Slack’s cri de cœur made in this publication that Christianity “must once again become a fighting faith, the inheritance of the battles of Edington, Tours, and Lepanto.”
Defender of the Faith
How, exactly, can a nation be Christian? Crucially, according to Wolfe, the term does not imply that every citizen needs to be a believer. Instead, Christian nations exist when “everyday life is invested and adorned with Christianity (e.g., Christian manners and expectations) and when life orients around distinctly Christian practices such as the worship of God (e.g., sabbath observance).”
Read More
Related Posts: