A friend recently sent me a link to Kevin DeYoung’s review of Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism. I read the review on a flight from Krakow to Amsterdam last week—and I had most of a reply written before I hit the ground. So I have some thoughts, though they are not likely to be very comprehensive. In short, I appreciate that DeYoung is trying to point people away from Christian nationalism, but his review itself still worries me.
The first thing that caught my attention is DeYoung’s critique of those who “seem to prefer a society hostile to Christianity.” He says, “I’ve seen pastors in my own denomination look wistfully at Christians losing power and becoming a minority in the country, as if Constantine ruined everything and our influence would be so much greater if we only we [sic] could lose power and become more marginalized.”
I think DeYoung is right to be wary of a kind of attitude like the one he’s describing, but I don’t like the way he has phrased it. It would probably be better described as an attitude that fails to appreciate the good things “Christendom” has produced—the things that some us (myself included) might often take for granted. That’s a true and noteworthy warning. (As Nathan warns Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter: To wish away all the things that have made you could be a more dreadful thing than we can know.) But the description he uses is far from helpful, since I don’t know anyone who would describe the decline of Christian culture—if such a thing is even occurring (more on that below)—as a means of increasing our “influence.” The closest thing might be the hope that a decline of influence—or, better, a decline of desire for influence—would result in a stronger Christian life/community. Less focus on influence should lead to better, more authentic practice. To the degree that the people DeYoung has in mind believe a more authentic Christian community would also have more influence, then sure, he could put it in those terms. But that would simply be to describe the paradox of Christian life and practice, and the paradox of Christ’s death on the cross. Again, the way DeYoung is framing his criticism seems very unhelpful to me, since I am sure that most of the people he’s speaking of, like myself, have little or no interest in making decisions about Christian life based on what might be most effective; we simply believe that it is not the role of Christianity—or any religion—to claim state power for itself.
(I think DeYoung is similarly unfair in his criticism of Russel Moore. I think Moore has been more thorough in his critique of Christian culture than either Wolfe or DeYoung give him credit for, at least in this article.)
DeYoung goes on to give a summary of a “mini-speech” which he says he has used often. In that argument he says “people are drawn to [popular defenders of Christian morality in the culture war] because they offer a confident assertion of truth. Our people can see the world being overrun by moral chaos, and they want help in mounting a courageous resistance; instead, they are getting a respectable retreat.” He has a point about sympathizing with the attraction to strong voices in the culture war, and I think that learning to first sympathize is crucial for all of us, no matter where you find yourself on any given divide. But, for me, everything in DeYoung’s mini-speech is useless unless we’ve answered a couple questions: What do we think constitutes a “courageous resistance”? And how exactly are we describing a “respectable retreat”? We only need “courageous resistance” over “respectable retreat” if those terms are properly defined, and for the Christ-follower, they will be particularly difficult and counterintuitive. The fact that those tempted by Christian nationalism continue to seek out the leaders that they do, whether they be politicians or the popular writers and speakers DeYoung mentions, suggests that many of us who grew up in the Evangelical world were not given good definitions—or were not shown a life consistent with the definitions we were given. (Is it not also a problem that, if I didn’t know any better, DeYoung’s mini-speech could just as easily be describing how the disciples of Jesus felt when their leader failed to mount a “courageous resistance” and instead chose a “respectable retreat” to a cross?)
Granted, as DeYoung says, “many Christians are tired of always being on the defensive,” and I truly, truly want to sympathize as much as I can. But, speaking very personally, as long as I have known anything of the evangelical community, local and national, that raised me and thrust me out into the world, being defensive in politics is almost all they have ever known or been taught how to do—whether they needed to or not. I am not saying that Christian concerns for the culture and its direction are never valid, nor am I denying that many of the Evangelicals I know live wonderfully praise-worthy lives, but their engagement in American politics is characteristically inflammatory and insecure. A Christianity that calls for boycotts of businesses that don’t sufficiently support their favorite religious holiday and then complains of being tired of always having to defend itself is a Christianity that is asking to be taken less seriously. Likewise, a Christianity that will not take the time to count their many and compiling legal victories, for themselves and for their Black brothers and sisters, is a Christianity that will and can never be anything but defensive in all the ways that it says it does not want to be.
Most of these things are critiques of Christian culture that I have held in general, and increasingly, for the last seven(ish) years, and even of DeYoung himself, at least ever since he threw his hat into the David Frenshism ring. The main feature of this Christian culture, the central problem as I see it, is the ability to make excuses for itself—or, rather, an inability to not make excuses for itself. As DeYoung himself admits in the review, for all our faults in the U.S., “you’d be hard-pressed to find a country where orthodox Protestants wield more political power, have more cultural influence, and have more freedom to practice their faith according to the dictates of their conscience.” And yet, he still goes on to praise Aaron Renn’s “negative world” thesis and to say that “a big sort is underway” to determine “which Christian institutions and individuals will remain faithful.” I won’t go down the rabbit hole of Renn’s negative world thesis (about which I have my doubts/completely disagree), but, as I’ve said before, maybe there is some big cosmic sorting going on in the culture wars of America in which God is seeking to prove his true church, and maybe there isn’t. But I sincerely doubt whether our Christian legitimacy will be based on our commitment to being strong, mighty, powerful cultural warriors—nor on our commitment to finding a warrior who will do the fighting for us. More likely, our faithfulness will be found in our ability to accept that true courageous resistance will often look like respectable retreat—and in learning not to mind that this is The Way.
While I have listened to Wolfe explain and defend his book, I have only read the introduction to it (and have no plans to read further, for now), and I’m not even a good layman historian, so it’s hard to know what to do with the references to early Protestant political thought. Assuming that DeYoung is correct that Wolfe has been faithful in his retrieval of that thought—so what? The argument being made by Wolfe (and others) is that a nation such as ours can and should be “Christianized”—he wants what he calls “nationalism modified by Christianity.” This way, all the people who call themselves Christians can have good and trustworthy neighbors, because of course it’s good that we should always prefer to be around others that are just like us. Is this not clearly, based on his own descriptions, a movement in the other direction: a Christianity that itself becomes nationalized (and ethnicized—he uses the terms “almost synonymously”). Honestly, I cannot see how Wolfe’s book is anything other than self-defeating. He can pull from early Protestant sources all he likes, history will only prove the point: it was a bad and bloody idea then and it is the same today. Besides what should be the obvious terror in Wolfe’s idea of state-sponsored religion and ethnicity, the reason this seems worth pointing out is that, behind the question of whether Christian nationalism is a good idea, there is a more essential question: is Christian nationalism, as a practice or even as an idea, anything other than a contradiction in terms? Is it even possible? I think not. And I think that something-called-Christianity has to be significantly distorted to even begin to go down that road. No matter how faithfully Wolfe has treated his 16th and 17th century sources (which I am sure is debatable), the fact that many early Protestants distorted the faith in exactly the same way is not a moving argument to me.
(It’s interesting that the topic of early Protestant support for state power also came up in the one book that I had with me while I was travelling for the last month, Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. I could not summarize it well, but suffice to say, I did not expect to find it there. DeYoung touches on Wolfe’s treatment of the subject, and while he happily points to the development of Protestant political thought away from state control, he does not offer a helpful critique of Wolfe’s reference to earlier practices. Of the horrors involved in Martin Luther’s support for merchant princes and the suppression of the Peasants’ rebellion, and much more, DeYoung only shrugs. Wolfe is apparently to be commended for having the courage of his convictions. Needless to say, Wolfe’s entire approach bothers me, and the fact that The Gospel Coalition is publishing a review that seems modestly to conclude “this is not the best way” is more worrisome still.)
I want to be grateful for DeYoung’s critique, since he is, ultimately, saying “no” to Wolfe’s argument. “‘The world is out to get you, and people out there hate you’ is not a message that will ultimately help white men or any other group that considers themselves oppressed.” This is exactly right, and I hope that DeYoung and others repeat it often and widely. Equally to the point, DeYoung says “we should hold to our political blueprints . . . loosely and charitably. I fear the practical payoff from this discussion will be very small, but the potential for division in the church will be great.” I hope I am wrong about this, but I am guessing that the only result will be more division. And I also worry that DeYoung’s (in my opinion) charitable review itself will only add to it.
Again, I do want to cheer on many things DeYoung preaches, particularly in his closing paragraphs, but I can’t get very far without tripping. Just when I think I’m reading a paragraph I can agree with wholeheartedly, he drops back again to “lament that America is much less Christian than it used to be.” Really? Whose America is “much less Christian” and in what way? There may be understandable reasons why many Christians feel this way, but, as a statement of historical fact, I would be hard-pressed to defend it as much more than a slightly subtler declaration of victimhood, which DeYoung has tried to denounce.
As I mentioned before, sympathy is crucial, absolutely crucial. To quote a very often used line from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an un-uprooted small corner of evil.”
More than anything else this passage should move us to have all the sympathy toward other people that we can muster and then some, and it is a sympathy that we should want from others, one that we should, in fact, be very afraid to live without.
That said, I want to point to a few things from the bookshelf that seem relevant and worth considering.
The first comes from one I’ve been picking at called Balkan Contextual Theology. In it, one of the authors quotes Branko Sekulić, who says, quite harshly, of “ethnoreligiosity” that it is a “cardinal facet of confessional desertion and perpetual treason, entrenched in the incessant denial of Jesus’ life and martyrdom, for the satisfying of superficial interests and worldly needs.” (Yikes.) Granted, not every proponent, or temptee, of Christian nationalism is deserving of quite so harsh a response, but, to his point, I have never heard a description of anything even close to Christian nationalism that did not seem entirely antithetical to the gospel of the crucified God. But, equally importantly but more practically, the author also goes on to describe the collection of essays that Sekulić was contributing to: “What emerged from this first step towards a ‘Balkan Theology’ was a prophetic type of judgement, a theology aware of and very critical towards the ‘sins’ of the church, as well as those in the church who are responsible for those transgressions.” If there is one thing that Christian nationalism, by any definition that I have ever heard, will certainly not produce, it is a confessional and sacrificial church which takes its own sins more seriously than the sins of others. What it will produce is pharisaical purification of the church in conjunction with strong and perpetual condemnation of the church’s many (perceived) enemies.
Second, both DeYoung and Wolfe would benefit from a piece of advice from the prelude of Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnnally-Linz’s recent book, The Home of God:
Narratives of crisis and decline do offer their own sickly sort of comfort, but pseudo-romantic nostalgia is a Siren’s song. Many things have always been amiss, and we gain nothing from a quantitative accounting of the degrees of amiss-ness at various times and places. In an important sense, everything is awry and has been awry, the primordial and indestructible goodness of the creation notwithstanding. There is an abiding out-of-jointness to things, witnessed (but not exhausted) by the abiding disquietude of human hearts. The pressing need isn’t that we accurately divine the overall trend line in the course of history but that we carefully discern how things are in fact awry—the texture of our dislocation—her and now.
Beneath or alongside or mingled with the disquietude, perhaps you have felt an amorphous but insistent longing—a yearning for truer modes of belonging, for fulsome forms of resonance that do not depend for their depth of intensity on the thrill of novelty, fascination with the forbidden, or the gravity of violence. In a word, a longing for home.
This is the message that those tempted by something-called-Christian-nationalism need to hear. DeYoung sometimes seems to get this, but what he gives with one hand he takes away with the other. To Wolfe and to those drawn to his argument, the desire for home, even a national home, is normal, but the means of finding or establishing it that they are seeking is not just wrong—it is historically naïve and it is entirely antithetical to Christianity itself.
Lastly, I’ll end with a quote from Karl Barth, which I consider one of the closest descriptions of my own theology:
“When he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion” (Mt. 9:36). And the fact that He was moved with compassion means originally that He could not and would not close His mind to the existence and situation of the multitude, nor hold Himself aloof from it, but that it affected Him, that it went right to His heart, that He made it His own, that He could not but identify Himself with them. Only He could do this with the breadth with which He did so. But His community cannot follow any other line. Solidarity with the world means that those who are genuinely pious approach the children of the world as such, that those who are genuinely righteous are not ashamed to sit down with the unrighteous as friends, that those who are genuinely wise do not hesitate to seem to be fools among fools, and that those who are genuinely holy are not too good or irreproachable to go down “into hell” in a very secular fashion.
The solidarity of the community with the world consists quite simply in the active recognition that it, too, since Jesus Christ is the Saviour of the world, can exist in worldly fashion, not unwillingly nor with bad conscience, but willingly and with good conscience. It consists in the recognition that its members also bear in themselves and in some way actualize all human possibilities. Hence it does not consist in a cunning masquerade, but rather in an unmasking in which it makes itself known to others as akin to them, rejoicing with them that do rejoice and weeping with them that weep (Rom. 12:15), not confirming and strengthening them in evil nor betraying and surrendering them for its own good, but confessing for its own good, and thereby contending against the evil of others, by accepting the fact that it must be honestly and unreservedly among them and with them, on the same level and footing, in the same boat and within the same limits as any or all of them. How can it boast of and rejoice in the Saviour of the world and men, or how can it win them—to use another Pauline expression—to know Him and to believe in Him, if it is not prepared first to be human and worldly like them and with them?
[The church] manifests a remarkable conformity to the world if concern for its purity and reputation forbid it to compromise itself with it. The world only too easily sees itself as a community which has no care but for its own life and rights and manner and which thus tries to separate itself from those around. The world itself constantly divides into individual cliques, interested groups, cultural movements, nations, religions, parties and sects of all kinds, each of which is sure of the goodness of its own cause and each anxious within the limits to maintain and assert itself in face of all the rest…. As distinct from all other circles and groups, the community of Jesus Christ cannot possibly allow itself to exist in this pharisaical conformity to the world. Coming from the table of the Lord, it cannot fail to follow His example and to sit down at table with the rest, with all sinners.
Not a cunning masquerade, but an incarnational unmasking in which we make ourselves known to others as akin to them, rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep. Truly, there is no other line for us to follow, no other kind of Christianity—no matter if it uses the name or not.