Stephen Wolfe argues Christian nationalism isn’t a return to paganism but a revival of the Founders’ virtue-based vision, citing state church histories (Connecticut, Massachusetts) and Washington’s outreach to Jewish/Catholic communities. He frames it as a local-state strategy—replacing secular policies like CRT with faith-driven governance—while allowing exemptions for non-Christians, mirroring 19th-century pluralism. Wolfe dismisses religious conflict fears by invoking Protestant mutual recognition but warns gynocratic trends (HR-driven workplaces, liberal women’s voting blocs) threaten institutions, though he stops short of policy solutions. The core claim: Christian nationalism isn’t exclusionary but a pragmatic inversion of secularism, where Christian norms set the default. [Automatically generated summary]
So I'm really excited about my guest today because there's this big debate on the right about how we move forward when things seem to be falling apart.
And as I spoke about before, it seems like we are entering what they call a post-Christian world, but was really a pre-Christian pagan world.
And a lot of people are wondering how we can get back the ideas of virtue and the practice of virtue that the founders knew was so essential to our freedom.
Stephen Wolfe has written a really provocative book called The Case for Christian Nationalism.
You'll remember that we were being condemned.
Everybody on the right was being condemned for being Christian nationalists.
Stephen Wolfe says, yeah.
He is a country scholar at Wolfshire in central North Carolina, where he lives with his wife and four children.
And he recently finished a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton, Princeton University's James Madison program.
He co-hosts the podcast, Ours Politica.
Stephen, thank you so much for coming on.
Yeah, thank you for having me on.
So since Christian nationalism has become virtually a slur on the left, maybe you could start by just giving us something of your definition of what Christian nationalism even means.
Yeah, I mean, the simplest definition is that it's simply a nation or a Christian nation that has chosen to arrange itself and act for its good.
And that good is both earthly and heavenly good.
So that's the simplest kind of definition.
And I think that's something Christians should desire and seek after.
So it's just, it's our earthly and temporal good, which would be, you know, just earthly comforts, that sort of thing.
But at the same time, have that the nation think, well, there's something higher and greater than just the mash we eat all day.
There's something higher, and we should order ourselves to that.
Would that affect the way, for instance, lawmakers debate laws and the way laws are made?
I think that it would.
I think it would.
But I think the main point is that there would be this sense in which we as a people, as a Christian people, ought to think of things higher than not only our intergenerational way, thinking in terms of future generations, but also the present generation as well and their ultimate end.
So what is the chief end of man is to glorify God.
And to glorify God is to worship God, and that's what we'll do in heaven.
So I think the nation, the lawmakers, if they had that in mind, I think we would have laws that would point people to that.
Okay, so now the obvious question, does this in any way get in the is it obstructed by the founders' commitment to not having a government establishment of religion and to having free expression of religion, which in the Constitution at least doesn't exclude Judaism and Islam and other religions?
Yeah, I think it certainly at the founding era at the federal level, the First Amendment, of course, only at first and I think still only applies to the federal government.
So yeah, there was, you could not establish religion at the federal system, the federal level.
That would impose some kind of denominational church across the entire nation.
But at the time of the founding, there were still several establishments in different states.
You had establishments in Connecticut and Massachusetts and other states.
And these lasted for decades after the founding.
I believe the last one, the last disestablishment was, I think, in early 1830s.
I forget the day exactly.
But for decades, there were actually church establishments.
But at the same time, there was wide religious liberty.
So there's the famous letters that George Washington sent to Jewish synagogue and Roman Catholics and Baptists and said that we as a country are not a persecuting country despite whatever happened in the 17th century.
So there's wide toleration, but there still was a, and this is expressed in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, that there was a widespread self-understanding of American self-conception as a Christian nation that was at the same time highly tolerant of other, of, you know, of non-Christian religions.
So I think it is compatible.
So when we're thinking Christian nationalism, we shouldn't necessarily think of Europe in the 16th century, but there is a form we can think of that's very American that I think we can pull from our own tradition to seek to restore it.
There's no question that at the time of the founding, this was a Christian nation in the cultural sense of those words.
Now, it seems to me we're almost the opposite of that.
What does a realistic path to this Christian nation look like?
Yeah.
I mean, that is kind of the big question.
And some of the criticisms I've received about the book has been that I don't give enough discussion of that.
My excuse is that I'm a political theorist trying to do political theory and I'm not a politician or whatever practitioner.
But I think that the way forward is going to be at the local and state level, because there are Christian majorities in many states.
And I think if we as Christians were to see ourselves as kind of a Christian voting bloc, I think we could be very effective at the state and local levels.
And this would potentially clash with the federal level as well.
But I think at this time with the kind of moral insanity we're seeing in this country, it's time for Christians to not just think about kind of pushing back against critical race theory or pushing back against critical theory or a lot of the anti-Christian sentiment you see among elites, but actually try to replace those as well.
So to have a Christian society and a self-confident and explicit Christian society.
So not just go back to the old secularism of the 90s or the 80s, but have a kind of a broader, kind of more robust vision of kind of a restoring this Christian self-conception that's reflected in laws and the way we relate to each other as Christians.
But yeah, I think that's going to have to be at the local and state level.
And I think civil leaders are going to have to be very assertive in that regard and face a lot of heat to bring it about.
Do you think, I mean, we didn't just kind of tumble to this place.
We got here through a process of history.
And part of that history were the bloody years of the Reformation where all of Europe was at each other's throats and people were burning each other over their translations of the Bible and over theological points that today, two people can sit down and have a beer and argue about the perpetual virginity of Mary, but then you were being basically put to death if you didn't get the answer right.
And I don't think anybody wants to go back to that, and yet it does seem to be part of monotheism.
There does seem to be this strain in monotheism that makes it very difficult to disagree.
Is that antithetical to the American mindset, even the true American mindset, let alone the one we're steeped in today?
I think among, I don't think it is.
It's antithetical because I think it was, if you look at like the 19th century America, there was very extremely religious, but at the same time, you had disestablishment and you had a lot of conversations and people weren't killing each other, at least very regularly, at least certainly not like in the 16th and 17th centuries.
So I think there is America, there's a very kind of deep American tradition of having a diversity of faiths that at the same time could recognize their country as being a Christian country.
And I actually think this is kind of principled Protestantism.
Because in Protestantism, your faith is not necessarily aligned to one to sort of institution.
It's not like in the Roman Catholic Church where you're the kind of inner-out.
I know this is kind of complicated and Roman Catholics might disagree and all that, but at least it used to be that kind of if you're either under the Pope or not, and that's kind of your inner out of the church.
The one true church is this.
Whereas Presbyterians can look at Baptists and say, okay, we differ on the issue of baptism, but we can still recognize each other's mutual faith because it's not a matter of institutional alignment.
And so I think what happened in American history up into the 1800s was this recognition of mutual Protestantism and this ability to affirm each other's faith.
And so there's a very principled Protestant way of extending religious liberty.
And this is true for even people who may not recognize the principle.
So Roman Catholics, whatever their view is today or then, whether they think it's in and out based upon the papacy, Protestants can still extend the religious liberty because of a mutual recognition of Christianity or Trinitarian baptism or something like that.
And so I think that the point being that you can have this sort of pan, what I call a pan-Protestant order, where Protestants recognize following a Protestant principle, that faith is an inward thing and faith is something that's not an institutional alignment.
And so you can affirm each other's mutual faith and extend liberty and charity, Christian charity along those lines.
And I think that, again, again, I think that's what happened in the 19th century.
And it's kind of a culmination of a lot of religious history.
Like you mentioned, some of the, you know, the religious wars and conflicts.
I think that was Protestantism working itself out and being able to recognize the mutual faiths of fellow Christians.
You know, I totally respect what you said about not being, you're not a policy guy.
I'm not a policy guy.
It's very hard to sometimes get to places, but I am having a somewhat difficult time imagining this world.
Maybe it's because we're so far from it that my imagination doesn't reach that far.
I mean, part of the reason I think we came to the secular, the idea of secular government is Jesus himself says, render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar and unto God the things that are God.
And seems to indicate that, you know, the government has certain rights that actually are outside of the religious sphere, the right to tax and things like that, whether or not there's Caesar on the coin.
Jesus doesn't seem to care because he's not dealing with those things.
And so I'm having a hard time seeing, well, how does a Jew feel in this world, in this Christian nation?
How does an Islamic guy feel or an atheist feel?
Does he feel that he is being compressed in some way, that his actual, his actual liberty, not his liberty to sleep around, but his liberty to express and live by his conscience is not being hemmed in by your particular religiosity?
Well, I think that, yeah, I mean, if it was a Christian nation, this would mean that public institutions are Christian.
This would mean that Christian, that public schools are Christian.
And so there'd be Bible learning and you'd learn English from the Bible.
And so there'd be a general expectation that you'd learn religious instruction that would be biblical.
But at the same time, given what I just said, there would be the possibilities for exceptions, exemptions based upon if someone doesn't believe, or maybe they're Jehovah's Witness, or maybe they're Jewish.
And so they can be kind of, you know, they can be an exception to the rule.
Kind of like, I mean, today, this is kind of what Christians are actually faced this all the time.
And that would be that they are seeking exemptions from normal.
And so what's happening, so, I mean, it's essentially what I'm saying is instead of secularism, it should be Christianity.
And then anything that's not Christian can be subject to an exemption.
I have to, I've only got two minutes left.
I have to ask you this question.
Toward the end of the book, you talk about the gynocracy.
And this is something, the rule of women, the rule by women.
And this is something that religious people are talking about a lot, that it seems to be A, making women miserable, but B, going against certain ideas.
What is it?
How do you stop it?
And as I say, I only have two minutes here.
Yeah, so gynocracy is just trying to understand how kind of the feminine, certain feminine traits operate within institutions.
And this could be everything from government to non-government institutions.
And I think a lot of guys experience this when they're kind of like walking on eggshells within the corporate room.
They're not sure if what they say is going to get them in trouble or what.
And they're at the same, so there's like this sort of like HR mindset that women can easily appeal to the third party that is the HR to kind of get at people and use retribution.
You use the system to gear it around their interests.
At the same time, there is a sense in which the voting block of women, particularly liberal women, well, liberal women, is so skewed towards this empathetic attitude that can actually be very destructive.
And I don't know the exact solution to it.
Obviously, unless we're going to take out kind of these the ability for civil rights cases to be adjudicated at the expense of the institutions.
But that's the general idea, yeah, like I said, is that there's certain feminine traits are exhibiting within these institutions that are destructive upon the institutions themselves and those need to be resisted as best they can.
But it seems that the whole system is designed to actually amplify them.
I have to stop there, unfortunately.
Really provocative ideas.
No, a real genuine contribution to the debate that's going on.
Stephen Wolf is the author's name, S-T-E-P-H-E-N.
The book is called The Case for Christian Nationalism.