Review of Stephen Wolfe's The Case for Christian Nationalimsm
Part Three
Here is the third part of my review of Stephen Wolfe’s book about Christian Nationalism.
Cheap Discipleship in Cultural Christianity
Fifth, Christian Nationalism leads to shallow and cultural Christianity, what Bonhoeffer called “cheap discipleship.”
Wolfe thinks that Christian nationalism makes Christianity “plausible” because it “socializes people into religious practices in which one hears the Gospel” and “sets social conditions that aid in the reception of the Gospel and people coming to faith” (28). That is to a degree true, but there is the problem that people receive just enough Christianity to be inoculated against it. They see Christian authority imposed, and that makes them increasingly resistant. It is the culture of conformity with superficial Christianity that led to many people rejecting Christianity. Some of the worst atheists are the product of Catholic schools I’m sad to say. Expectations of mandatory religious conformity are not going to facilitate the free decision to commit one’s life to Christ, quite the reverse, they will turn people off it!
It is also possible to argue for the opposite of what Wolfe says should happen. James Madison wrote that disestablishment in Virginia was the greatest thing that ever happened to religion there, piety increased as a direct result. It made the clergy sharper, more active, less indolent. That observation is bolstered by the sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark who showed that church involvement actually grew stronger in the United States as disestablishment progressed (see The Churching of America).
Wolfe doesn’t understand why people celebrate the decline of cultural Christianity in America (223-27). But as I’ve explained, cultural Christianity leads to shallow and superficial faith, it is a recipe for creating hypocrites, legalists, and atheists. Further, the destablishment of religion from the state has proved to heighten the depth and breadth of religious devotion when it is voluntary.
Too American
Sixth, the explicit American-ness of the book is nauseating.
Wolfe writes that “The American flag implicitly symbolizes the Christian flag” (175). Read my lips, “No, it does not.” Such remarks would be completely incomprehensible to Calvin, Beza, Cranmer, Edwards, Warfield, or almost any Reformed person prior to 1776 or maybe even after.
America is not an elect nation. America is not in the Bible. America is not the custodian or best version of global or historical Christianity.
If I can riff off Nicholas Wolterstorff. The Church is not only American and does not include all Americans, ergo, the church is not American and America is not the church!
I won’t pontificate about American history - not my monkey not my circus - but from what I can tell, the attempts to turn America into a Puritan Heaven made it a Protestant Hell. Which is why many colonists, like Roger Williams of Rhode Island, and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, argued for the separation of church and state.
Raise a Glass to the Revolution
Seventh, Wolfe argues for the right to revolution, especially when it comes to religion.
Wolfe is big on the right to revolution. Me, I do believe that Christians can be called to civil and uncivil disobedience (see Jesus and the Powers), but the Christian tradition has always been allergic to the notion of regicide. It’s amazing how authors frequently mentioned 1 Samuel 24 and noted that even David refused to kill Saul when he had the chance. It’s interesting too that John Calvin was very sanguine on this point, if you are stuck with a slothful or wicked monarch, pray hard and hope for the best was pretty much what he said. It was really with the English revolution and American war of independence that Protestant interpreters decided on a work-around the call to obey governing authority in Romans 13:1-7.
Stephen Wolfe may at least be better than William Wolfe who has been touting the view that Christians in America are approaching a time when they need to take-up arms, if not, they are cowards. Stephen Wolfe is mildly preferable because he sets a reasonably high bar for tyranny (324) and recognizes that non-Christian rulers still have true civil power and resisting them is resisting God (327-29).
But it is alarming that Stephen Wolfe believes revolution is permitted when the government acts in ways “detrimental to true religion” or “attacks true religion” (338). The problem here what you mean by “detrimental.” Sure, banning public worship and preaching of the gospel would be detrimental – though it wouldn’t send me automatically flying into a revolutionary rage, I’d like to try other options first. But do gay pride parades qualify as detrimental to true religion? Not my thing, but again, they don’t fill me with revolutionary zeal either. Christians who do not share his outrage at the current order, those who accept the neutral public square, he labels as “regime evangelicals” (344), a parody of John Fea’s “court evangelicals” to describe Christian sycophants of Trump. The fact that each domain of life is not operating in its own God-ordained way of order for Wolfe is a form of tyranny and he sees the whole edifice of America as a tyrant, from Hollywood, to health officials, to HR departments, for him, “The regime is the tyrant” (345). Though at this stage, he seems to call for resistance rather than revolution (345).
Crazy Old Guy Rant
The book ends with a ranty epilogue about restoring America to its religious principles. It is a denouncement of the optimism of Reaganite and Bush conservatism. It sees the institutions of America as having been secretly taken over by secular subversives and turned into a gynocracy. Wolfe believes the antidote is not persuasion to a better ideal, but a purge of the whole order itself, Trump is merely the instrument for doing that. What is more, Putin is a morality tale for Wolfe, because secular progressives would do to Christian Nationalists what they are currently doing to Russia: spreading misinformation and punishing it with sanctions. Wolfe complains that Christian Nationalists are perceived as “the Taliban of the West,” they “threaten liberalism” and are perceived as “authoritarian” (444). But the thing is, they kind of are, and seem proud of it! Bolstered by the fact that he wants a “masculine society … because it harmonizes the individuals and hierarchy for the common good” (453). To which I would reply, the common good of men and for men, who have god-like power over women, which never ends well for women.
Wolfe also wants to ween people off their sense of compassion and impulse for equality that has been brainwashed into them. He says, “We might feel, for example, that it is wrong for public space to be exclusively Christian, but it still ought to be” (455). He is adamant that Christians, his type of Christians, must be reigning, anything other than that is a disaster. This isn’t power in weakness or power through the Holy Spirit, or the power through the word. It is power through the capacity to bend others to your will. The bad guys do it, so why not us, seems to be the motto.
Wolfe likes the cross, but only when painted on a Roman shield or on 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. There’s other weird stuff too. Buy a homestead, boys should get blue collar jobs, men should lift weights, make more babies, and others things that have nothing to do with New Testament ethics.
At the end of the day, the book seems more like a Christianized version of Nietzsche than the religion of the crucified Nazarene. I could sum up the book with a gloss on one of Nietzsche’s famous quotes:
“Man shall be trained for religious war, and the women for the recreation of the culture warrior, all else is folly.”
The Nietzsche quote is quite precise of much of the theonomic, postmill, Christian nationalist ends up for the benefit of one group at the expense of many. What upsets me is that Wolfe thinks that ethno-spatial boundaries are a Gospel good. I'm Filipino and an immigrant who is naturalized as an American who is married to my beautiful bride who is white. If Wolfe truly believed in what he believes (and he does) then my marriage is largely sinful. I never thought I would see the day that American Christianity would have bad apples like Wolfe and Wilson who advocate for this non-sense.
I came here to comment on your quote, "There is the problem that people receive just enough Christianity to be inoculated against it,” and see that Stan beat me to it, lol. This quote sounds very Lewisian! But my observation has been that, not only does cheap, plausible “Christianity” lead to deconstruction for many, but it also leads to going along to get along. This creates a “Christian” club or even cult, where the social group is more important than the true gospel, although the members would never allow for that. There is enough Christian jargon bandied about that they can convince themselves they really are growing in the Lord, and serving Him, and making good Christians of themselves. They are the “good kids” who obey their “authorities” in the Lord, although of course their authorities have abdicated their true authority, but would never admit to that. This happens even when Christian nationalism is not present, but follows many of the same errors. Thanks for your excellent review!