A recent Politico piece profiled the so-called "Christian Nationalist" movement, in particular focusing on William Wolfe, a former Southern Baptist Theological Seminary student and Trump administration staffer.
What marks Christian Nationalism according to the reporters, and what are Wolfe's chief concerns? According to the piece, the key issues are overturning Obergefell, restricting abortion access, and, horror of horrors apparently, requiring fathers to support their children.
As if needing to double down, one of the authors went on MSNBC to say, in not so many words, that Thomas Jefferson is apparently a Christian Nationalist:
To her credit, the author, Heidi Przybyla, tried to walk the piece back and acknowledged the issues with the argument in a later column for the magazine.
That said, this has been a persistent problem in the Christian Nationalism discourse virtually since it started. There are really two types of "Christian Nationalist": When the term is used by basically anyone to the left of The Gospel Coalition, it is being used as a scary sounding word for "non-libertarian socially conservative Christians." And that's not a great definition, not least because there's very little that today's non-libertarian socially conservative Christians are saying that we haven't been saying for decades. What's more, using the label in that way represents utterly normal Christian beliefs you find across church history as being somehow uniquely pernicious and dangerous in some brand new way.
That said, when many people more to the right use the term, they have something specific in mind. Stephen Wolfe's (no relation to William Wolfe) The Case for Christian Nationalism isn't arguing for a pro-life, pro-natural marriage Christian liberalism. He is, rather, echoing interwar European right ideas about natural greatness, hierarchy, and political power. Consider this excerpt from Wolfe on the necessity of a Christian Prince to usher in a new era of Christian Nationalism:
The civil magistrate, or what I'll call the 'Christian prince,' mediates the people's national will for their good, providing them the necessary and specific civil actions for that end. More than that, however, the magistrate is also the head of the people—the one to whom they look to see greatness, a love of country, and the best of men. He is their spirit. Civil law is the life of the commonwealth in relation to its activities and operations, but the magistrate is the heart and spirit of the people. He is, or ought to be, the quintessential great man. ...
The prince is the first of his people—one whom the people can look upon as father or protectorate of the country. I am not calling for a monarchical regime over every civil polity, and certainly not an autocracy, though I envision a measured and theocratic Caesarism—the prince as a world-shaker for our time, who brings a Christian people to self-consciousness and who, in his rise, restores their will for their good. 'Prince' is a fitting title for a man of dignity and greatness of soul who will lead a people to liberty, virtue, and godliness—to greatness.
Wolfe's Christian Nationalism is about a Christian Nation bound together by common practices, culture, and customs which are exemplified and embodied by a Christian strong man who really becomes the nation. It has strong resonances with the European far right of the 1930s. Consider how one student of Carl Schmitt, who was himself a Nazi, wrote of the Fuhrer:
Nazi political theorist Ernst Rudolf Huber in Constitutional Law of the Third Reich stated that the Führer is the “bearer of the collective will of the people.” In the will of the leader, Huber said, the “will of the people is realized.” Hitler’s will was not the “subjective will of a single man.”
Rather, the “collective national will” was embodied within the leader. A people’s collective will, Huber explained, is rooted in the “political idea which is given to a people.” The political idea is present in the people, but the Führer “raises it to consciousness and discloses it.”
The role of the leader according to Huber is to “disclose” a people’s political idea—to bring into consciousness that which had been unconscious. The leader brings forth—makes manifest—ideas and desires that are latent within a people. His ideology reveals and crystallizes a people’s shared fantasies.
The leader invents images, metaphors and phrases to convey these fantasies. He processes his own fantasies and those of his people—and “returns” information to his audience in the form of a societal discourse.
If that sounds like Wolfe's Christian Prince, well, yes. Precisely. You understand. This is Christian Nationalism as articulated by the author of the most popular book arguing for it.
Unsurprisingly, such an understanding of "nations" quickly veers into racial directions, as Wolfe has done in his own work. Consider this excerpt from an essay he wrote on the concept of "anarcho-tyranny," which he is taking from the noted white supremacist essayist Sam Francis.
In the United States, this anarchic element is composed largely of black Americans. For complex reasons, blacks in America, considered as a group, are reliable sources for criminality, and their criminality increases when constraints diminish. Despite being around 13% of the US population, blacks have consistently committed over 50% of the homicides for decades, and it is getting worse. In 2020, according to the FBI stats, blacks committed nearly 57% of all known murders. Even the left admitted that the “Ferguson Effect” — the theory that negativity toward police reduces “proactive policing” and, in effect, increases crime — is likely true. Less constraint means more crime.
It should not be hard to read between the lines here: Wolfe wants a Christian Prince who becomes the nation, and he thinks that Afro-Americans need to be "constrained" in order to reduce crime.
Wolfe's former podcast cohost, Thomas Achord, is of much the same mind, seemingly. He was caught running multiple pseudonymous social media accounts largely dedicated to posting anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and anti-Black content.
Here are some of his posts regarding Afro-Americans:
Here is one that particularly echoes Wolfe's point about "constraint":
Here is one tweet of his commenting on what he clearly believes to be a photo of Justice Amy Coney Barrett with her adopted children, though the photo is actually of Justice Barrett's sister and her family. Even so, Barrett and her husband have also adopted Black children and, therefore, are clearly "going against the grain," as Achord would describe it:
So that is the Stephen Wolfe account of Christian Nationalism—a far cry, I think, from your standard issue normal Christian pro-lifer who volunteers at pregnancy resource centers, likely gives a substantial amount of money annually to the poor or otherwise disadvantaged, and who happens to express socially conservative views through democratic means, such as voting, political donations, public advocacy, and so on.
Another figure to understand for what is meant by "Christian Nationalism" on the Christian right is Andrew Isker, a Minnesota pastor who co-authored Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide for Taking Dominion and Discipling Nations with Gab co-founder Andrew Torba. Torba is notable because he is one of the most obvious anti-Semites in the broader Christian Nationalist network:
Alongside his close association with this obvious anti-Semite, Isker also co-hosts a podcast with C. Jay Engel. Engel's own political beliefs are clear from a review of his own Twitter activity.
Engel is now running a service called Based Audio Books, which provides audiobooks of far right books by Confederacy defenders and Nazis:
The book in the top left, Burning Souls, is by a Belgian SS officer who would later become a noted Holocaust denier. Engel does not deny that he is a Nazi:
He plans to publish audiobooks from Antelope Hill as well as books from Imperium Press and Passage Press.
Antelope Hill currently sells titles by Joseph Goebbels, chief propagandist of the Nazis, another title from Leon Degrelle, the Belgian SS officer turned Holocaust denier, the "essential" speeches of Adolf Hitler, a book by the once chief of the SS Race and Settlement Office titled The New Nobility of Blood and Soil, and The Eggs Benedict Option, a title by Raw Egg Nationalist, a pseudonymous internet Nazi and pornography publisher whose work I have previously documented:
Imperium Press, meanwhile, is a publisher dedicated to recovering "the Aryan worldview" and Passage Press not only publishes Raw Egg Nationalist's Man's World, but also titles like Noticing (itself a common anti-Semitic trope) by the purveyor of scientific racism Steve Sailer.
Wolfe and Achord actually hosted Raw Egg Nationalist on their podcast in early November of 2022 (which was 404'd following the Achord affair). More recently, Engel and Isker have also hosted Raw Egg Nationalist on their podcast:
So: The Christian Nationalist political project, as defined by Stephen Wolfe, Andrew Isker, and Andrew Torba and their close associates is a) Nazi-adjacent, b) seeks to retrieve such political tradition as the Confederacy and the interwar European right, and c) routinely engages in anti-Semitic and anti-Black racial speech. These are the core ideas and practices that define the movement.
Now, to return back to William Wolfe for a moment, he himself fits quite comfortably in this project. For example, after a Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor shared an encouraging post about his church's public worship service with a local African congregation, Wolfe replied this way:
On another occasion, Wolfe responded to the Black evangelical academic Anthony Bradley with a crack pipe, a very clear racist trope:
Wolfe's new political project is a partnership organization he is working with under the auspices of American Reformer. Wolfe is running a Baptist advocacy org with them, as they announced just this week:
American Reformer is a key media presence in the broader Christian Nationalist space. They have, for example, published Stephen Wolfe regularly, including one piece in which he argued that the correct application of Christian hospitality as it relates to immigration is mass deportations. They also ran a rave review of Isker's The Boniface Option. Additionally, they have run a piece from Jon Harris, a noted Confederacy apologist, on why you shouldn't take "conservative Nazi hunters" seriously.
Aside from these publishing choices, the leadership of American Reformer also is closely aligned with the far-right ethno-nationalist movement on the Christian right. The leadership behind American Reformer includes chairman Nate Fischer, a member of Charles Haywood's multi-city fraternal order Society for American Civic Renewal, an organization advocating for violent revolution in America, as Josh Buice, the founder of a right-wing evangelical organization called G3, has documented:
(It's worth noting that Buice is obviously on the evangelical right, but he sees quite clearly the dangers in Haywood's philosophy.)
Just this week Haywood published a review of the widely known racist novel Camp of the Saints. Here is Haywood commenting on racial politics:
You can imagine a society where every racial, ethnic, and religious group advocates for its own interests. That’s called “the vast majority of human history,” in Christendom and everywhere else. You can imagine, if much more aspirationally, because there are zero examples, a society where no group advocates for its interests, but rather works exclusively for the common good, where the common good includes the whole nation, or even, without distinction, all mankind. You can also imagine a society where every group, except white Christians, is allowed to advocate for themselves. But it’s not a stable imagining, because inevitably the white Christians will be demonized, as the universal outgroup, and then become subject to expropriation, followed by extermination (as the society fails, because it was, always, primarily built by those white people). We even have a live, real-world example of this “imagining”: South Africa, soon to be a completely failed state, where the likely future prime minister openly calls for white genocide to follow his election. So it will always end. The logic is inevitable, which is no doubt why it is forbidden to speak of it.
Later in the same review, Haywood says,
I note that when whites were the de facto ruling class, there needed be no organized “white” movement, or even recognition of whites as a group, for white interests to be protected. (It was a bit anomalous there was not, given that in every non-Western nation, the ruling class always organizes around ethnic grounds, and makes no bones about it. But America has always been more aspirational.) Why, however, when they are no longer the ruling class (or, more precisely, when those who are white and in the ruling class espouse and practice vicious anti-white hatred for all but themselves), should not whites organize as whites? I don’t have a good answer why not, especially as whites become an absolute minority. And I have been predicting for some years that eventually some political figure will rise who will promise to protect whites and advance their interests. “Why not?”, as more than one figure in The Lord of the Rings says about a choice to put on the One Ring. It feels like we should resist it, but it also seems like it only feels that way because we have been propagandized we must feel that way, because our enemies fear an awakening. We will see.
So that is with whom Nate Fischer enjoys "a brotherhood of faith and solidarity," as it is articulated on the Society website.
Another American Reformer leader, executive director Josh Abbotoy, has written for First Things about why America needs a "Protestant Franco."
Elsewhere, Abbotoy has endorsed another right-wing totalitarian, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
In another tweet he granted that both Pinochet and Franco's regimes were "less than ideal" but said such a leader is still necessary in America:
Here it might be helpful to note that Franco's regime was responsible for the murder of around 150,000 people and that Pinochet's regime was known for its use of torture.
Here is one account of the actions of his government:
One commonly used torture method was the "grill" or "La Parrilla." In this method, electricity was supplied from a standard wall outlet through a control box into two wires, each terminating in electrodes. The control box allowed the torturers to adjust the voltage administered to the prisoner. The naked prisoner would be stretched out, strapped onto a metal bedframe or a set of bedsprings, and securely fastened. They were then subjected to electrical shocks on various parts of the body, particularly sensitive areas like the genitals and open wounds.
The Valech Report includes the testimony of a Chilean man who was interrogated by prison captors. They removed his clothes and attached electrodes to his chest and testicles. They also placed something in his mouth to prevent him from biting his tongue while they administered shocks.[32] In another variation of this method, one wire would be attached to the prisoner, typically to the victim's genitalia, while another wire could be applied to different parts of the body. This created an electric current passing through the victim's body, with the strength inversely proportional to the distance between the two electrodes. A smaller distance between the electrodes resulted in a stronger current and therefore more intense pain for the prisoner.
A particularly brutal version of the "grill" involved the use of a metal bunk bed; the victim would be placed on the bottom bunk while a relative or friend was simultaneously tortured on the top bunk. Most prisoners endured severe beatings, and some had their limbs broken or amputated.
"Less than ideal" indeed.
What difference does all this make? Why am I writing this? Why have I taken such pains to try and expose that which lurks in corners of conservative American Christianity, particularly amongst people in my own Reformed theological tribe?
Simply this: I am a son of America. My life is unimaginable without her—I am the grandson of a second generation Swedish Lutheran immigrant farmer who grew up in a town of 1000 in northeast Nebraska and a second generation Greek Orthodox city girl from Boston. The life they made together, the family they raised, would have been virtually unthinkable anywhere in the world before America. Last week I spoke at a conference in Washington DC that was sponsored by a Presbyterian organization, an ecumenical Christian organization whose president is a Methodist, and we were hosted in an Anglican church—and multiple of our speakers were educated by Catholics. That too would have been virtually unthinkable anywhere in the world before the United States.
I think that both of those things are now possible is good. I think there is joy to be had in a democratic life, though not because democracy is infallible or handed down from heaven via celestial skyhook. I merely feel gratitude to the tradition I received by birth, quite literally in my case, and for the fact that the life I have lived is a life lived among neighbors who come from distinct places and cultures and that we have learned, over time in America, to make these relationships mostly hold together and work. I think it's good and even remarkable that someone like me, a person whose entire family on all sides has been working class for the entirety of our time in America, was able to go to college and study the Reformation and 19th century British literature and post-colonial African politics with exemplary scholars who found a place on the plains of Nebraska thanks to the existence of land grant colleges. And I think it's wonderful that my children's childhood has been indelibly marked by the experience of living next door to a Black family and knowing that family's children as their best friends, as friends who have been part of their lives for as far back as they can remember. It all strikes me as quite remarkable and quite beautiful.
Before last week's conference began, my oldest son and I toured the Capitol. We saw a massive portrait commemorating General Washington's choice to resign his commission as the leader of the American military, an act which effectively extinguished any possibility of a military strong man emerging as the new American leader. We saw and heard about stories of a nation large enough and capacious enough to receive the desires and ambitions and hopes of all comers.
After seeing all these things and also visiting the National Archives, where we saw the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, my son and I were walking outside of the Capitol when we saw a crowd of protestors. "So, dad," he began. "That's freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, isn't it?" I smiled and told him he was right.
A democratic life is not the highest thing or the best thing. But as a way of living amongst our neighbors and seeking to live a life of conscience under the law, it is a very good thing. The Christian Nationalists, with their strong man politics, support for revolutionary violence, and obsession with racial solidarity would destroy all of that.
What worries me now, though, is not the Christian Nationalists themselves. Frankly, many of them are too reckless, undisciplined, and reactive to be able to accomplish the revolutionary change they seek. What worries me is that there are a great many socially conservative evangelical voters who love the democratic life who are constantly being called "Christian Nationalists" by the likes of Heidi Przybyla for believing things that are utterly unremarkable in Christian history. If our secular media outlets continue to tell them that "Christian Nationalism" is the belief in things virtually all Christians across history have believed, I fear they will listen. And they will find these ethno-nationalist totalitarian aspirants and, not realizing what they are doing, they will make common cause with them.
After all, they've already been told that they are 'Christian Nationalists,' haven't they? They've been told that protecting the unborn makes them a Christian nationalist, that wishing to promote natural marriage makes them a Christian nationalist, that wanting men to support their children makes them a Christian nationalist. They've even been told that believing our rights come from God makes one a Christian nationalist.
Eventually they will start to believe it.
Here is my request: If you are a secular person who wants Christian Nationalism to lose, you should stop helping the Christian Nationalists win.
Edit: An earlier version of this piece failed to note that the picture Thomas Achord commented on of Justice Barrett is actually showing Justice Barrett's sister. The broader point still stands, as Achord plainly thought the photo was of Justice Barrett when he commented. But we did wish to note the error on our part.
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