Review of Stephen Wolfe's The Case for Christian Nationalism
Part One
The first of a three-part review of Stephen Wolfe’s book on Christian Nationalism.
Imagine If Oliver Cromwell Ruled Apartheid South Africa
Imagine if your country was ruled by Oliver Cromwell, with the racial policies of 1970s South Africa, where Quakers are tried for heresy, ruling elders roam the streets to inspect women’s attire for propriety, armed guards are posted at the exits of churches to prevent anyone leaving the service before the benediction, there only restaurants permitted are Chick-Fil-A and Famous Dave’s BBQ . If you can imagine that, then you understand Stephen Wolfe’s vision for Christian Nationalism in America.
If it’s that bad, then why bother reviewing it? Well for two reasons. (1) According to YouTube, Wolfe’s videos get between 20-45K views at a time. So people are reading this book and watching him articulate it on screen. (2) Christian Nationalism is a threat to liberal democracy, to orthodox Christianity, in America and elsewhere in the world, and we need thoughtful and effective critiques of it. Sadly, many religiously and historically illiterate critiques of Christian Nationalism fail to hit the mark especially when they define it too broadly.
Is Anything True Here?
To begin with, in aid of engaging in a fair and forthright engagement with the book, let me explain the bits where I’m sympathetic or supportive of Wolfe.
First, love your place and your people.
I understand that Wolfe wants to be able to love the people on his street, in his suburb, his church, county, state or country without being made to feel like a rustic rube. Nobody should feel guilty because their family and friends are mostly like them. Wolfe wants people to love their hometown, support their alma mater, be patriotic, value their church, be devoted to their family, and why not? Being a good person should not mean having to be a cosmopolitan. I don’t need to have friends from every corner of the world and pretend that I like Pickled Chicken’s Feet from Hunan in order to be considered a respectable citizen.
One of my critiques of the European union is that “Eurocrats” want to make sure that people are loyal to Europe in general but to nowhere in particular. They want to foster a pan-European identity and eradicate connection to and affection for our home city and country. Anyone who loves their home too much is a either a racist or a fascist “Unwissender” (ignoramus). That’s how I became a pro-BREXIT convert!
Second, religion has a place in the public square.
Wolfe wants to resist an aggressive secularism that intends to drive religion from the civic discourse and deconstruct the permanent structures of human existence like family, marriage, and religion. I share this critique of the postmodern left who fantasize about a kind of Rainbow Orwellianism and aspires to replace the equality principal of our liberal democracy with a hierarchy of moral identities that divides everyone into the dichotomy of oppressor or oppressed. Christianity is an important part of the heritage of the West as it has been – all things being even – a force for immense good. We should remember and value that Christian heritage and resist those who seek to replace it with either a Caliphate or Communism. See my books Religious Freedom in a Secular Age and Jesus and the Powers.
Third, I understand Wolfe is responding to progressive elites with their condescending contempt for the white rural working class.
I like books such as Paul Embery Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class (UK) or Bata Unger-Sargon, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women (USA). It is a problem in much of the western world where the educated upper-middle class looks down glaringly on the working class for their pieties and past times. I’m a “working class man” to quote Jimmy Barnes and I don’t like rich elites regarding me as beneath them.
Fourth, there is a strand of the Protestant tradition that seeks to reform not only religion and morals, but the state as well.
Calvinism cannot be reduced to predestination or the banal abbreviation TULIP. Read book four of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion which is basically a manual on how to run a Protestant city. Even the Westminster Confession of Faith (peace be upon it!) has sections (XX-XXIV, XXXI) on civil order for a Christian society. The Reformed tradition often imagined a city or country governed by a synergy of councilors and clergy to keep the place authentically Christian. Wolfe wants to recover that tradition and apply it afresh today. So his views are not completely out of left field, they are not things nobody has heard of before or not done before, in some ways (but not all!) Wolfe is a normal 17th century Protestant when it comes to church-state relations (430-31).
Fifth, I agree with Wolfe, against Anabaptist and Hauewasian views that Christians can participate and contribute to the political order, by voting, serving in office, or working for the government.
The vocation of public service is a way to contribute to common goods, to offer Christian witness, as God wants his world to be wisely governed. In that sense, we are recovering our Adamic vocation to be stewards of creation, and we are exercising our Christian vocation to bring heavenly love and light to bear even on earthly institutions.
A False Christianity
That said, I regard Wolfe’s vision for a nation as a grotesque perversion of Christianity, xenophobic, prone to violence, almost cartoonish in its aspirations to take over America. Wolf envisages a Caesaropapist state headed by a strongman Christian Prince who rules through the apparatus of a Presbyterian Taliban, who I imagine to be bald and 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 people who gave us the Reformed Facebook group “The Gevenan Commons” and Douglas Wilson’s confederated Christendom.
Yes, there’s a bit of rhetoric in my description of Wolfe, but I’m only riffing off what Wolfe says rather than imputing foreign notions to him.
Tomorrow, I’ll get into the critique section more thoroughly.
Looking forward to the rest of the series.
Thanks Dr. Bird for doing a critique of the book. I haven’t read the book. It’s very popular in Reformed/ Calvinist circles in America 🇺🇸. You also definitely want to read A Case against Christian Nationalism by Blake Collins( have read but would like to), he critiques Steven Wolves book. I also think Christians ought to read the works of Roger Williams. I live in RI and the idea of Christian Nationalism is very unpopular in New England. His wisdom for church/state issues might be useful.