Christianity & Nationalism: Michael Knowles Interviews Theologian Douglas Wilson
Michael Knowles and theologian Douglas Wilson dissect Christian nationalism, defining it as the belief that Americans must stop making God angry by merging faith with patriotism. They analyze Wilson's book No Such Thing as Bad Words, arguing that biblical obscenity is vital for prophetic confrontation against a dishonest culture of euphemisms. While distinguishing Protestant views from Catholic integralism regarding state restrictions on religious processions, they condemn secular progressivism as a threat to moral order. Ultimately, the dialogue posits that anger at injustice is a virtue and that societies inevitably impose moral standards, whether through established churches or secular liturgies, to preserve relationship with God. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Secular Nationalism and Christian Republics00:15:04
She had taken purity rings, melted them down, and made a little bowling trophy model of female genitalia.
And she then presented this trophy to Gloria Steinem as an award.
And I said, basically, in a piece, I said, look, these two women have reduced women to that.
So all they are saying is that they are a couple of C words.
What I've seen is that people will gather, they'll go through all my write-and-write a lot, and they will gather up the few instances where I've used a jalapeno.
They gather them all up and put them on one cracker and then make a meme out of it and say, look at this bad person.
Well, I'm not going to apologize for any of that.
To hear the media talk about my guest is to think that this man is Darth Vader.
He is actually scarier than Darth Vader and a greater threat to the Republic and our whole political order.
I just know him as Doug Wilson.
Doug Wilson, who is one of the leading proponents of Christian nationalism.
A pastor in Idaho and the author of a new book, No Such Thing as Bad Words, which I want to get to as well, because I'm very, very taken with language and how speech relates to our identity and our salvation and everything in between.
First, though, Mr. Vader, Pastor Wilson, thank you for coming on the show.
It's great to come with you, to you from the Death Star.
Yes.
You know, I've wanted to have you on the show for a long time to hear about you in the media.
You're maybe not public enemy number one, but you're certainly up there.
And it's because you advocate Christian nationalism, which seems to mean everything to every person.
But whatever it is, the liberals don't like it.
Right.
You seem like an amiable fella.
What is Christian nationalism and why do these guys hate you so much?
Yeah.
My short form, I've got several short definitions.
One is I'm a Christian and I love my country.
And those two.
Realities occupy the same space in my head.
I don't want to be schizophrenic about it.
So I don't want to have my Christianity in one compartment and my patriotism in another compartment.
I believe that, and that leads to the second short form definition, which is Christian nationalism is the belief that Americans should stop making God angry.
Simple enough.
That's some things we're doing.
Yeah, that kind of gets it.
So, some argue that America was founded without an established church.
And they'll even go so far as to quote a private letter of Thomas Jefferson that we have a firm separation of church and state, which most reasonable people know is not true.
You know, we had established churches in the various states at the time of the ratification of the Constitution.
But nevertheless, they find this scary.
They think it's like a kind of creeping theocracy.
So, I'm with you.
When this term came around, I said, well, hold on.
I'm Christian.
And I love, I'm not exactly a nationalist, but I love my nation.
I give two cheers for nationalism.
I'm not saying it's the be all end all form of world order, but it's pretty good.
It's worked out well.
So I guess I'm a Christian nationalist.
What does that mean practically?
Well, practically, it means even if you have a nuanced definition and I'm two thirds of the way there, if you oppose the secular jihad in any way, if you say the sexual revolution was a bad deal, if you oppose, Surgeries for children, top and bottom surgeries for children.
If you oppose a Bergefell, same sex mirage, and you're a Christian, you will be categorized as a Christian nationalist.
There's just no escaping it.
They've got this box that they want everybody to put everybody in if we are Christians and we oppose their agenda.
If you're the occasional one off atheist or agnostic who read a little bit too much of Ayn Rand and you oppose some of the Some of their stuff, they will oppose you and they won't like you, but they won't call you a Christian nationalist.
But believers, Christians, who say, my Christianity is not a private, this is not a mystery religion.
It's not a private thing.
I'm allowed to be a Christian in the public square, right?
And to speak and think that way.
And if the authorities didn't want Christianity to be functioning in the public square, they should have thought of that before they crucified Jesus there.
Checks out.
For most of our nation's history, we were allowed to celebrate and have Christian services and images in the public square.
And then in recent decades, the courts have said, well, there have been challenges.
And they say, you're not allowed to do that.
You're not allowed to have a creche, for instance, at Christmas or a Christmas tree, even.
That would be bringing too much religion into the public square.
But the courts have gotten around this by saying, no, you can have some Christian displays because they serve a secular purpose, too.
And I'm really annoyed by this because I like the decision.
Yes, obviously, I want my creches and the public square and the trees and all that.
But that's not why.
That reasoning is ridiculous.
It doesn't have to be secular.
It isn't secular, first of all.
And our nation was founded broadly on Christianity.
Now, there is a wrinkle there, which is when some of my puritanical forebears came here on the Mayflower, they also banned displays at Christmas because they thought that Christmas was too popish, it was too Anglican, and the Anglican church was too Catholic.
And so they got rid of it.
Governor Bradford famously on Christmas Day made everyone go work.
And the few people he let stay home, when he came back at lunch and saw they were playing with Christmas toys, he took their toys away.
And he said, You will either sit and pray or you will get in the fields.
So funny enough, there were bans of displays.
And then we had them for a long time.
And now the atheists and non Christians want to get rid of them.
But all of that to say, What kind of Christianity are we talking about here?
Because you got in a lot of hot water when you said, Well, look, in a Christian nationalist view, We would be banning all sorts of nonsense and the gay stuff and pride and all this, and Catholic processions, you know, a Eucharistic procession or a Marian procession.
I said, Well, hold on, wait, I'm out.
I love Christian nationalism.
I'm generally for it, but I'm Catholic and I love my Eucharistic processions.
To me, this would be part and parcel of it.
So, is it, I get why Protestants would not like that, but basically, how sectarian is Christian nationalism?
How broad is it, or how broad can it be?
So that depends on what happens, actually.
So when I was talking to, when those comments came out on Dad Saves America and then got some traction, I was very pleased that Michael Brendan Doherty wrote a Catholic piece defending me.
And Peter Williams also did the same.
He said, this is, look, the guy's a Protestant and he actually thinks it, right?
Now, what I was doing was imagining an ideal republic 500 years down the road.
And I was conceptually talking about what would you do in a Protestant republic?
How do you balance, how do you maximize religious liberty and liberty of conscience, which I believe in, with the public order, the consensus that that society has grown up around?
Dougherty talked about how when the restrictions on Catholics were being lifted in the United Kingdom, the Catholics wanted to celebrate with the Eucharistic.
Procession and a liberal prime minister begged them not to.
Please, please, please don't do this.
So basically, politics is the art of the possible.
So, in the current moment, I want to stand with Catholics shoulder to shoulder against the secular Klingons.
I think we've got bigger fish to fry.
At the same time, when someone talks to me about, well, how do you conceptualize this?
Where is this all going?
I believe that simple honesty.
requires me to answer the question and not to be coy.
So if I were to conceptualize an integralist Catholic country, I wouldn't expect to get a parade permit for my sausage parade in Lent.
Right?
Of course.
I didn't, when you made those comments, obviously I didn't agree with them, but I sort of respected them.
And I didn't, I know some people kind of freaked out about it.
And I said, well, no, hold on.
He's just being honest and he's sort of advancing this particular Protestant view.
I thought Michael, Brendan Doherty's comments are pretty good on this as well.
But that is the question then, because as a practical matter, if you want to bring Catholics along, you know, to say, look, here we've got this battle right now.
In the long run, where I'd like to go is this.
Actually, reminiscent of the very early American colonial era, like early 17th century kind of Protestantism.
That's where we want to go.
And they'll say, well, I don't want to go there.
However, it does seem to me we do have an established national religion.
It is liberal progressivism.
We have a liturgical calendar with all the secular saints, whether we're talking about Martin Luther King or Harvey Milk.
We've got liturgical seasons, even.
I think pride used to be a week and then a month.
Now it's roughly half a year and growing.
We have, you know, we have.
We have prayers and hymns, the Black National Anthem that they're trying to add to the NFL.
That's part of the liturgy of liberalism.
So we have all of these things.
And if you contradict it, you will be faced with far greater punishment than any medieval inquisition.
So I totally agree with you.
You know, there is a common enemy here, and we have to band together against it.
This is what we call an inescapable concept.
It's not whether, but which.
It's not whether you're going to impose a morality.
It's which morality you're going to impose.
It's not whether you have a theocracy.
It's which Theo is the God of the system.
It's not whether, but which.
So you're exactly right.
We have an established church.
I could go downtown in any major American city and get arrested within 15 minutes on the basis of what I was saying alone.
Okay.
And they wouldn't call it blasphemy laws, but they'd call it hate crimes or.
You know, whatever.
But it functions as a blasphemy law.
All societies that cohere have restrictions on things you can say or not say.
And because of a shared consensus, nobody thinks of it as censorship.
Everybody just agrees that that's not done, right?
That's not done.
And then if an outlier does it, they know how to crack down on you.
So then when someone comes along and envisions a Christian republic where the standards for the imposition are different standards, but you're doing the same thing.
You're protecting a different center, but all societies protect their center.
I agree with that.
I guess my only prediction, my difference in prediction in the long run is that America will trend Catholic.
And the reason I say this is not just as a partisan or, you know, from my personal biases, but Alexei de Tocqueville predicted this in Democracy in America in 1830.
He said, it's a funny thing in America because the Catholics give up their religion, they become kind of atheistic.
He said, but a lot of Protestants become Catholic.
And he said, this doesn't even totally have to do with religion, it has to do with democracy.
that Catholicism being universal has this real democratizing element to it.
So I don't know.
I mean, we'll see.
Tocqueville had two predictions.
He said America is ironically either going to trend in the Catholic direction or they're going to become atheists.
And the atheist side has won for a long time, though there is a turnaround in religion now.
I am so, I'm totally with you on the point about norms and speech.
And I mean, I have been yelling this for years, all the while even conservatives will say, we don't need standards.
We don't need norms.
We just need free speech absolutism, whatever.
I said, You guys, this is so sophomoric.
You know, that's not just not how societies work.
So I'm very interested in your book, No Such Thing as Bad Words.
What is the thesis?
Unfortunately, I don't have a copy yet, but I've just kind of read the review of it.
But what is the thesis?
So the thesis is one of the things that has gotten me into trouble is that I've spoken with a less than perfect tenderness towards some of our secular pieties, right?
And sometimes the language I've used has been pretty rough.
All right.
And that language is for pious evangelical Christians.
Some of the language I've used is outside the pale.
It's okay, Christians don't talk that way.
Well, now, what kind of, if you can give an example for people who haven't been following, are we talking about four letter words or are we talking about just harsh diction?
Okay, so both.
I wrote a number of years ago, I wrote a book called The Serrated Edge, a serrated edge, which had to do with satire, lampooning, polemics, that kind of language.
And I defended that.
And then, no such thing as bad words is occasionally, and just very occasionally, in the midst of one of these polemical serving up the hors d'oeuvres, I will put an occasional jalapeno on one of the crackers.
All right.
And some people have said, well, okay, I agree with the.
People you're targeting, but yeah, an obscenity or something that you don't usually hear a preacher say.
And so, one of the things I do at the very beginning of the book is I break down in English, there are four categories of words there's obscenity, there's cursing, there's vulgarity, and there's swearing.
Okay, swearing, different order swearing, cursing, obscenity, and vulgarity.
And the Bible prohibits all four.
Okay, you can find a passage where their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.
Defining Vulgarity, Cursing, and Swearing00:02:09
Jesus is saying, swear not at all, neither by heaven nor in vulgarity.
Paul says in Ephesians, not to be given to crass joking.
Colossians too.
Jesting.
Yeah, Colossians as well.
And then obscenity would be it's shameful to mention what the Gentiles even do in secret.
But then you can go through the Bible and find.
Examples of all four, right?
So when Jesus quotes Deuteronomy in his exchange with the devil, he says, You should serve the Lord your God and serve him only.
Well, in Deuteronomy, the verse finishes and take your oaths in his name.
You should swear.
Cursing.
Paul says in Galatians, If we are an angel from heaven preached to you a different gospel, let him be accursed.
God damn that guy.
Vulgarity.
When Isaiah says, All our righteousness is as filthy rags.
The Hebrew, it's referring to a used menstrual cloth.
Okay, it's vulgar and religiously taboo on top of that.
So, highly offensive language.
And then obscenity, when Ezekiel goes after the idolatry of the Israelites and he compares them lusting after the Assyrians whose genitals are like donkeys and who ejaculate like horses.
That's not something that's going to be read in the scripture reading Sunday morning.
Likely.
It probably doesn't come up in Sunday school lessons, but it is in the Bible.
And so, what I want to be, and this is me being a good Protestant, I want to be a Bible guy.
And so, if I have prohibitions of all four categories and I have examples of all four categories, there must be a principle that enables me to discern when this would be sinful and when it would not be sinful.
When it would be righteous, when it would be unrighteous.
I freely grant that Christians ought not to be cussing like.
Sailors.
Our language is to be pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is pure, whatever is noble.
When Anger Is Appropriate00:02:10
I don't think Christians should.
There's a t shirt that says, I love Jesus, but I cuss a little.
I don't think that that's appropriate.
But I also believe that there are occasions when prophetic language is what I call it.
Prophetic language is absolutely called for in a firefight, in a verbal firefight.
So when Elijah is confronting the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel and the showdown where he calls down fire from heaven, when he taunts the priests of Baal when they're dancing around their altar, and literally he says, maybe your God's in the bathroom, pound on the door louder.
You know, he's being kind of crass there and taunting their deity.
There are times when that's appropriate.
And not only so, there are times when it's inappropriate to not be that way.
A lot of Christians feel like we have to be winsome and polite 24 7, nonstop, around the calendar.
And it never occurs to us to realize that Jesus was one of the most impolite people.
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Sin as Character Deficiency00:04:00
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This reminds me of St. Thomas Aquinas, who, contrary to the spirit of our age, which says, you know, I think they believe that never go to bed angry is the 11th commandment or something.
You know, you just always have to be smiley, smiley all the time.
But St. Thomas takes on this question and he says, you know, should you ever be angry?
And he says, not only should you be angry, not only is anger called for in certain circumstances, but not to feel anger.
At injustice actually represents a defect.
It represents a deficiency in your character.
Something's gone wrong with you.
If you see a grave injustice and it doesn't anger you, you're missing something, man.
You can't have a smile on your face all the time.
And it reminds me, too, your whole discussion of this, which is that I love rules.
I like rules, they're good.
I like laws.
But I don't love legalism.
You know, that's the difference.
And the difference is this human component.
You know, I had a priest give an excellent homily one time where he said, you know, people, maybe just because of how we're catechized as little kids, in Sunday school, we learn these are the rules, whatever.
We think of sin as breaking a rule.
Sin is not breaking a rule, sin is a violation of a relationship of grace.
And our Lord gives us rules, but the rules are there kind of as guardrails.
You know, they're there as a way to guide us on this relationship of grace.
The distinction between mortal and venial sin, even.
Which scripturally comes from the Johannine epistles.
But it describes how there's all sin is unrighteousness, obviously, but some sin is mortal and some sin is not.
And what's the distinction?
The church's traditional distinction is mortal sin has to be grave matter, so not trivial matter, but grave matter.
It has to be done with full knowledge and it has to be done with full consent of the will.
You can't accidentally commit a mortal sin.
And the reason for this is.
When you're what sin really is, is not just like oopsie daisy, you know, I broke a rule.
Sin is turning on God, it's disobeying God.
And the reason that we should repent of our sins is not primarily because we want to go to heaven or because we dread hell, but because we have offended God, who is deserving of our love.
You know, it's a lack of charity for God to whom we owe everything.
And I don't know.
I mean, I think everybody kind of views sin that way often, but maybe it's just because we learn about it when we're kids.
But obviously, it.
You're not going to go to hell on a technicality.
I think God is greater than sending you to hell on a technicality.
A lot of people think that the day of judgment is the day when God loses all sense of proportion.
And what it actually is, is when people are condemned, it's because they refuse to let go of their lack of a sense of proportion.
It's lack of repentance.
So the issue is why are some people lost?
It's they won't let go of their sin.
And the person who humbles himself and looks to Christ on the cross and calls out to God, he is delivered.
He is saved.
And you're exactly right.
Sin is, we can describe the relationship and put house rules, describe what this looks like.
But there are some people that want to post the rules on the fridge or they want to carve them in stone and say they want to have a relationship with the rules instead of a relationship with the God who gave us these rules.
To help us define what that relationship should look like.
And so, consequently, and it's really funny going back to the bad words thing, is there are people who say there's no justification ever for using this kind of language.
Rules vs Relationship with God00:07:57
One of the famous ones was I was talking about Nadia Bowles Weber, who's a Lutheran theologian, heretic lady, and radical left.
And she had taken gathered up purity rings from a bunch of Ex evangelicals, you know, she gathered the purity, melted them down, and made a model, a little bowling trophy model of female genitalia.
And then, and she then presented this trophy of female genitalia to Gloria Steinem and as an award.
And so there was a you couldn't make it up, you couldn't script it any better in Hollywood.
I mean, these people are children, and it just whatever the crassest, most absurd thing to do, they will do it.
And if I wrote a novel with that scene in it, the editor would send it back and say, too far-fetched.
C.S. Lewis and Malcolm Muggeridge and others said, we live in a time when satire is becoming really difficult.
Yes.
Because trying to overstate it, well, somebody's there ahead of you doing it for real.
Yeah.
Well, she presented this trophy to Gloria Steinem and it was an award saying, everybody's yay.
Look at this empowerment and everything.
And then there were some respected theological types in the Protestant world who were giving this the softball treatment.
Yes, I have my differences with Nadia Bowles Weber, but I share some of her concerns with purity culture, that kind of anemic reaction.
And I said, basically, in a piece, I said, look, this is not my language.
This is not how I talk, but these two women have reduced women.
To that, right?
They've reduced women to that.
So all they are saying is that they are a couple of C words.
Okay.
And I said, this is not me saying this.
This is what I'm translating for you.
I'm telling you what they are claiming.
They're radically reductionist, right?
And so then, so I was, I used that word consciously, decidedly, because I was opposing something that was horrific.
Yeah.
Well, then a bunch of people who object to my language picked up my language and quoted me extensively.
They see what Wilson said.
But they were doing the same thing.
They were quoting this word in order to oppose someone they thought needed to be opposed, that is me, when I was using that language to oppose what they were doing.
So, this is what I've seen is that people will gather, they'll go through all my write a lot, and they will gather up the few instances where I've used a jalapeno.
They gather them all up and put them on one cracker and then make a meme out of it and say, look at this bad person.
Well, I'm not going to apologize for any of that.
Of course, sometimes, by the way, clear language can be very helpful because clarity is charity.
And so, even people will use language that is softer, not even euphemistic or not even neutral, language that still has a negative connotation, but they don't want to use the really tough term.
And one of the distinctions for language nerds, one of the distinctions between the two, George Orwell wrote about this beautifully in Politics in the English Language.
He said Latinate terms, terms that come from Latin, are softer, they're less evocative.
And terms that come from Saxon, Germanic terms, those are much more evocative.
So I can say, the female was pulchritudinous.
And, or I can say, the girl's hot.
The girl's a babe.
You know, and those phrases have semantically precisely the same value, they have exactly the same meaning, but one is just much more evocative.
And so you could have said, you know, that these women have reduced womanhood generally to a labia.
Or so you could have said that.
Yes.
Or you could use the word you used, which you don't even want to use now because it would be inappropriate in this context.
But you use the word you used and it reveals what that woman actually did.
There's no, you didn't change her meaning.
You revealed her meaning.
And this reminds me of something Chesterton said Chesterton being my favorite papist.
Yeah.
He's the number one.
Am I number two?
Can I get number two?
At least I'm never going to be Chesterton.
All right.
Well, Chesterton once said when you have a longer word, a euphemistic word, And a short, pithy word.
It's the short, pithy word that condemns the sin and the euphemism that excuses it or papers over it.
So beautifully put.
I think it's right on the money because people don't want sin exposed, especially the sin of clown world that we're going through.
So the other illustration I used is when 20 years.
From now, unless God grants us a great reformation and revival, but 20 years from now, when there's a big halftime show at the Super Bowl and everybody's parading through a gigantic vulva, and that's the halftime show.
And somebody says, What is this?
And then uses that word.
Someone's got a wheel on him and says, I'll have you, sir.
Remember that there are ladies present.
Yeah.
And we are in the depths of folly.
This is what the Lord pointed out when he said, you strain at a gnat and you swallow a camel.
You have no sense of proportion at all.
And so the Christians who oppose and fight and do so effectively are considered the problematic ones and the ones who dab around the edges and say, you know, I'll grant that what Nadia Bowles-Weber did was not conducive with human flourishing.
That's one of my favorite euphemisms.
I actually use it frequently because of how funny it is.
It's such a circumlocution.
I say, well, you know, I mean, this sort of thing, it's not exactly conducive to human flourishing.
And this is how our culture speaks all the time.
Not ironically, they do it earnestly, actually.
Yeah, I want preachers to get up in the pulpit and say, Thus saith the Lord, hear the word of God, ye sinners, and give it to me straight.
We are fundamentally a dishonest.
People.
We don't want to call things by their proper names.
We don't want vocabulary to reveal what's going on.
You know, my great priest friend of mine, Father George Ruttler, wonderful writer too, very Chestertonian in his writing, though it's so particular, you might call it Ruttlerian.
He makes this point.
We use all these soft words.
And he said, you know, our Lord doesn't use soft words.
The evangelists don't use soft words.
You know, when Lazarus is in the tomb, And Christ shows up, and the sisters are weeping.
They don't say, you know, he has been, he has passed away several days hence.
They say, the body stinketh.
Okay, that kind of language tells you something.
It shows you the reality as it is.
Totally, totally agree.
Now I'm even more excited than I previously was to get the book No Such Thing as Bad Words, a manifesto on taming the tongue, paradoxically about when one can use these words, but also about disciplining the tongue.
Why Our Lord Uses Hard Words00:00:22
Pastor Wilson, you're not.
You're not Darth Vader.
It's very strange.
No, I work very hard, but I fail.
Listen, hope is a theological virtue.
We can all hope, you know, at some point to fulfill this mission.