Brad links last's week's episode on Christianity as the original American purity culture to the argument made in a new book by Stephen Wolfe - "The Case for Christian Nationalism." In the book and in his public comments, Wolfe makes an argument like this:
God created humans on earth
Those humans were always going to gather in separate communities
Christianity therefore assumes nations
Christians should institutionalize Christianity in order to rightly order the public sphere
You should love those who are like you more than others
Nations should defend their people's identity and freedom from others
In Brad's mind, this is a stone's throw from ethno-nationalism - and it creates an impulse to see those who are not White, Christian, straight, patriarchal, and native-born as less than - as deserving less love - and as potentially the threats against which real Americans would defend themselves in the name of God and country. Despite the high theological language, it's White ethno-nationalism - at a time when Kanye West and Donald Tr*mp are making anti-Semitic remarks.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
Last week, I did a solo episode and talked about Christian nationalism as the United States' original purity culture.
And I just want to follow up today on that by commenting on some things that I think are related and kind of extend that argument and that are also kind of part of our current events, things that are happening in our ether this week and as we speak.
So let me just talk about something first that I think is actually quite important.
There's a new book out.
Well, it actually comes out November 1st, and it's called The Case for Christian Nationalism.
It's by Stephen Wolf, who's a theologian and scholar, and it's already a bestseller.
So if you look at the Amazon rankings, it's in the top 2,000 books on Amazon, which if you've ever looked at those rankings, there are millions of books on Amazon.
So to be in the top 2,000 means You're selling a lot of books.
It's the number one book in the nationalisms category, the number one book in the church and state religious history category, so on and so forth, okay?
A lot of people are buying this book, which honestly is sad and...
It's depressing if you ask me, but nonetheless, there's a lot of interest.
Well, I want to kind of just touch on the argument that I see Wolf gesturing toward, and this is based on just some excerpts I've seen and some things that Wolf has tweeted.
And so, full disclosure, I have not read the whole book, but you can read parts online, and there are tweets that Wolf has put out that really kind of give you an understanding of what he's trying to say with Christian nationalism.
The parts of the book I have read, he talks about how Christian nationalism is not a bad thing, and that going back, you know, he uses an argument from history and says going back for a long time, there have been people who've thought of Christian nationalism as a good thing.
He also retweeted the other day, somebody who claims, someone who's named Philip Derrida on Twitter, and Wolf retweeted this.
Philip Derrida says, "Christian nationalism isn't that meta or ambitious.
It makes no promises of experiencing the beatific vision.
It is more about preserving and rightly ordering creation until Christ returns via Christians asserting themselves into the public square." And I think this is really what connects last week to this week.
It's not about the beatific vision.
It's not about, you know, bringing heaven to earth.
Okay, that's one.
But two, it's about preserving and rightly ordering creation until Christ returns.
So let's think about that.
Rightly ordering creation.
It's exactly what I talked about last week.
If Christian nationalism is America's original purity culture, it wants to rightly order the country and all of creation in a way that lines up supposedly with God's vision.
And God's vision just happens to be, if you are, you know, somebody who's familiar with Conservative Christian theology in general, other forms, whether that's Reformed theology or Reconstructionist theology, those all share, despite their differences, an understanding of God's vision for creation as one in which men lead.
And so Wolf, in the book, Has a chapter called Gynocracy, meaning that the rule like female rule, in essence, and how this is bad.
And if you look at his Twitter feed, there's there's a lot of tweets about how this is bad and the gynocratic state is ruining things and blah, blah, blah.
OK, so the vision, the rightly ordered creation, the rightly ordered nation is one in which men are in charge in a patriarchal way.
And in which Christians are asserting themselves in the public square by institutionalizing Christianity.
And this is what Wolfe does say in the very first pages of the book.
Now in a series of tweets on September 30th in response to somebody who had been on his feed, Wolfe talks about how And this is in some ways a peculiar argument in my mind, but it really does get to the heart of kind of Christian nationalism as an ideal.
He talks about how even if Christians had not, let me back up, even if Adam and Eve had not sinned in the Garden of Eden, that there would be different human communities and different ways that people would live.
And they would separate, they would create nations, they would create communities, okay?
And so the idea, and I think some of you wonder how you can justify Christian nationalism.
Well, one way is to use the Bible to say that even if there was no fall, no original sin, human beings would have separated and put themselves in groups.
They would have created different cultures and therefore different nations.
So nations are not sinful, and to defend your own nation is not sinful.
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