The Wannabe Warlord Leading the US Into Christendom + Bonus Content
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Brad goes into a deep dive into Charles Haywood, the self-proclaimed "warlord" who is using his fortune to lead the United States into a medieval Christian oligarchy. Haywood started the Society for American Civic Renewal, which Brad and Dan talked about last Friday. SACR, as it is known, is a secretive male-only group of White Christian men who want to renew American society by returning it to a medieval form of virtue and governance. These are men of influence - with millions to spend and a raging resentment about having their country taken from them by those "who don't deserve it."
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Axis Mundi Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Thanks for being here today, y'all.
On Friday, on the Weekly Roundup, we talked all about the Society for American Civic Renewal, which a lot of you asked us to talk about and had been making the rounds in social media and other places.
The Society for American Civic Renewal has been around for a couple years now, and it's something that I think is worth paying attention to.
I promised that I would come back to it today and talk about its founder, Charles Haywood, who is quite the character.
I'm going to talk about Charles Haywood.
I'm going to talk about who he is and why his vision for the United States is quite dangerous.
Why he is somebody who would start something like Sacker.
And then I want to spend a few minutes just connecting Haywood to someone that you might not expect, but the similarities are just uncanny.
And that is Robert Welch of the John Birch Society.
And it's a really great segue because next week I'm going to be Talking with Dr. Matt Dalek, who wrote a book called Birchers, and Birchers is all about how the John Birch Society radicalized the American right and how the John Birch Society and its Christian nationalism, its conspiracy theories, its racial resentment.
He hovered around the fringes of the American right and the GOP for half a century and then eventually was able to conquer the GOP and the American right in the 2010s and eventually with Donald Trump.
So, in today's bonus content, I'll be talking about the kind of comparison between Heywood and Robert Welch of the John Birch Society, showing that Heywood is not new.
Is not nothing novel, but is nonetheless incredibly dangerous and someone and his society something to take seriously in this current political moment.
So that's the plan for today.
Appreciate y'all.
Let's jump in.
Alright, so who is Charles Haywood?
Charles Haywood describes himself as a warlord of sorts, and I'll talk more about that in a minute.
As I mentioned on Friday, he's enormously wealthy.
He has a lot of money.
He started a shampoo company and eventually sold it a couple years ago.
And when he did that, he became a very, very wealthy man.
And he has not disclosed how much money exactly it was sold for, but he did sell the company and describes himself as having more money than he could have ever imagined and being somebody who likes to fight.
So that's kind of who he is.
Here's The Guardian talking about Charles Haywood.
The founder and sponsor of a far-right network of secretive, men-only, invitation-only fraternal lodges in the U.S.
is a former industrialist who has frequently speculated about his future as a warlord after the collapse of America.
As we mentioned on Friday, Haywood is not someone that you should think of as Stuart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers.
This is not somebody with an eyepatch wearing a biker vest who just got off his motorcycle and is walking into the biker bar and so on.
He was educated at the University of Chicago Law School and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and he's somebody just who has Elite education.
Again, his wealth is enormous.
And he's somebody that I think if you saw him on the street, you would think, oh, there goes a wealthy businessman.
There goes a man in Dockers.
There goes a man who looks like he is going to a board meeting rather than somebody who's going to a biker bar.
So one of the things that we talked about with the Society of American Civic Renewal is that these are upper crust elite people who have money, who have influence, who have status.
And they still feel a sense of resentment and a sense of apocalypse.
And I think that's something I want to get into here in a minute.
He's somebody, Charles Haywood, who really thinks that we are close to the end of the United States as we know it.
So he calls himself, as we talked about on Friday, and Had various commentary about.
He calls himself Maximum Leader.
So let me just read from his website, The Worthy House, and tell you why he calls himself Maximum Leader in his own words.
Charles Haywood is the maximum leader of the magazine and the founder of the applied political philosophy of foundationalism.
He's a member of Generation X. His views are right-wing with a future-oriented, post-liberal bent.
He does not belong to any existing political party.
Like Maneeva Chivy, he was born too late.
Maneeva Chivy is a character from a poem in an E.A.
Robinson work.
And wishes he could be a night hospitaler but with a railgun and warp drive.
He desires comity but realizes despite being a practicing and believing Christian that ultimately no final question can be solved without conflict, usually involving violence.
Thus his style tends to be megalomaniac and, excuse me, megalomaniacal and apocalyptic.
He likes to fight.
So I'm not sure that this description actually justifies why he's called Maximum Leader, but it does tell us a lot about Charles Haywood.
So let's let's go through some of these things.
The first thing I want to get into is this.
His views are right wing with a future oriented post liberal bent.
We talked about this on Friday, but I want to jump in a little bit further today and.
So his views are right-wing.
Okay, we're going to get into the fact that Charles Haywood does not believe in independence and liberty in the classic American sense.
He thinks that the Enlightenment is the period that led humanity astray.
So the belief in individual freedoms is not something he ascribes to.
So when he talks about being right-wing, we're talking about very right-wing, to the point that he doesn't believe in independence and liberty and freedom in the ways that you would imagine in a very basic American way.
Hey, everyone has the right to choose.
Everybody is an autonomous free agent who can decide how their life goes.
Yes, there's limits on that.
You can't hurt others or So on and so forth, but for the most part, that's kind of how we we think about freedom, right?
Well, he doesn't he doesn't agree.
So he is right-wing with a future-oriented post-liberal bent.
That's really important.
One of the things about Charles Haywood that I think is true of many of the people who are imagining a post-constitutional America Is that they're really in this mode of thinking of a kind of return to national, excuse me, they're thinking of national renewal in terms of a rebirth, okay?
This is what scholars often call phylogenetic fascism.
Okay, and the idea here is that you would have rebirth through violence, through bloodshed, through discontent, and that it would lead back to something that's new, something that is better.
And I think Heywood is interesting.
And he's not alone here in the sense that Heywood is someone who is looking backward and he looks back to the medieval period.
He looks back to the pre-modern period a lot in order to look forward.
Okay.
Now I want you to, I want you just to stop for a minute and think about that.
We're used to this friends.
This is not something that we're unfamiliar with.
So many MAGA people look backward to the 1950s in order to look forward.
They say, Hey, we want to go back to the 1950s.
We want a future that looks like that.
We look backwards with nostalgia to an America that never really existed, but we imagine it so that we can create one in the future.
That's a fantasy that will never really exist, but we can fantasize about it nonetheless.
We're used to MAGA people doing that.
What's different about Heywood and people like him is that they're not looking back to, like, the 1950s.
He's not even looking back to, like, the American Revolution, so to speak.
He's looking back to, like, medieval Christendom.
To a time when the ideas of like freedom and liberty and equality that seem to be built into the American DNA, the right of individual choice, the right of equality, that everyone gets a vote.
There's no social hierarchy built into the political spectrum.
There's no sense of like some people get to be on top and others don't.
I mean, we all know that those American ideas have never been practiced in full or in ways that they have been promised.
But still, that's the way we speak.
That's the way we're used to politicians.
Trying to get our vote.
That's the way that we are used to hearing about what should be next for America.
What Heywood, what the men that I covered in my series on fascism, going back a couple of months, they all look back prior to the United States.
In order to offer a future that doesn't look like the United States.
Let me say that again.
They all look prior to the United States so they can offer you a future that is not American but is post-American.
He calls it here post-liberal.
So he's trying to take us back not to some golden age of the United States, but to a time that was before the United States, before modernity.
That's what to me makes this radical, even more radical than some of the more typical MAGA speech that we're used to hearing.
It's scary because when people tell me they want to go back to the 1950s, I think that's bad enough.
That's the time before the Civil Rights Movement, before the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, immigration reform, so many things.
The Loving Case, Stonewall, the Feminine Mystique.
I could go on for hours.
But when you say you want to go back to like the medieval period when there's a built-in social hierarchy, when there's an oligarchy of leadership that is making decisions for everybody and so on and so on and so on, then it gets really scary.
And we're going to see how that works out in his philosophy of foundationalism here in a second.
All right, let's just touch on one more thing in his Maximum Leader biography here on his website.
He desires comity but realizes, despite being a practicing and believing Christian, that ultimately no final question can be solved without conflict, usually involving violence.
Thus his style tends to be megalomaniacal and apocalyptic he likes to fight.
So he's telling you right here no final question can be solved without conflict.
Again, scary, because this is somebody who's saying to you, democracy is not the answer for me.
It's more like the problem.
And that when you tell me that I think we can solve things through voting, that we can solve things through sharing power, that we can solve things through majority rules, I'm going to tell you, actually, I don't think any final question can be solved without conflict, usually involving violence.
That's what makes the Society for American Civic Renewal so dangerous in my mind.
We talked about this Friday and how certain people, including the president of the Claremont Institute and others who are part of this society, are like, what's the big deal?
It's just a club for men.
We're trying to renew America.
It's been done before.
It's nothing radical.
And I guess the response for me is like, but the guy who started this whole thing is saying he doesn't think things can be solved without violence.
He's telling you he wants to go back to a time before American democracy, before the Enlightenment and the idea of individual freedom.
He's trying to take us back to medieval Christendom.
That is scary.
I'm sorry.
I'm not going to just buy that this is some men's group who's out there, you know, doing CrossFit and getting a latte afterward.
That's not what this is.
And if we check into his, his philosophy of foundationalism, then we will get an even sort of more clear picture of why that is.
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Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a prophet in the new novel American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic.
And that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country, and meet some really interesting people, and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
Heywood's website, The Worthy House, contains a description of foundationalism, this philosophy that he espouses in great, great detail.
There's no way I'm going to be able to cover it all today.
I'm not going to try.
I'm going to try to give you some highlights and give you an idea of what it is.
The opening lines of the way he describes this philosophy is this: "I am here to give you back your future.
Like Yates' golden bird, I will tell you of what is past and passing and to come.
Here I offer an exposition of my and what should be our political program, both philosophy and movement foundationalism." So once again, I think you should just notice: "I'm here to give you back your future." I want to tell you what was and what is to come.
This is somebody who's giving us a vision of the past in order to give us a program for the future.
We're used to this.
What makes it radical is the past that he's looking to and therefore the future that he is forecasting.
Heywood goes on to say foundationalism is a reflection of reality, and through recognizing reality it aims to maximize the chances of both individual and collective flourishing.
All right, nothing too groundbreaking here.
I think most philosophies claim to reflect reality or what is, and yet what we get a couple of paragraphs later is worth noting, I think, and it's kind of grounded in this idea of reality.
Here's what he says.
Foundationalism is grounded in what is universally known to be true or what was once universally known to be true.
It does not invent new truths.
So this is just... I have to stop here.
The philosophy teacher, the person who's done way too much of his life studying Christian history and other things, Foundationalism is grounded in what is universally known to be true or what was once universally known to be true.
There is nothing that has ever been universally known to be true.
Nothing.
Nothing.
We can go back to this period that Heywood seems to like.
Pre-modern period.
And you can pick any century.
You can pick any moment.
You can pick any place.
You can pick the moment where Thomas Aquinas is debating his interlocutors in Paris.
You can go back to a time when Augustine is in North Africa and he is attacking the Pelagians.
You can look to the writings of Tertullian or Jerome and what they are outlining about Christ and His redemption and the relationship between Christians and government.
You can go back to the Apostle Paul Why did the Apostle Paul write his epistles?
Because people disagreed.
He needed to set the record straight.
He even says in Galatians and many other times how he and Peter, the other foundational figure in apostolic Christianity, disagreed about certain things.
About diet, about circumcision, so on.
There's nothing that's ever been universally known to be true.
I'm not going to sit here and argue that.
Not a thing I'm going to try to like prove to you for the next three hours.
I'm going to tell you that if you are a historian, if you are a philosopher, if you are anybody who has studied human history, you know that humans have never universally agreed to anything.
But the problem is this.
If Heywood is trying to return us to a time that is pre-modern, if he's trying to create a future that is more medieval than it is modern, that is more Christendom than it is America, then he's trying to convince you that there are things that could be universally true and that everyone would agree to.
Do you know the only places where that seemed to be the case?
Now, it was not the case, but it seemed to be the case?
Totalitarian regimes.
In totalitarian regimes, it seems like everybody knows all the same truths and agrees.
You know why?
Because if they don't, if you express disagreement or dissidence, you would be sent to a camp, you would be killed, you would be imprisoned, and so on.
If we think about totalitarian regimes in history, if we think about Stalin, if we think about Pol Pot, if we think about Hitler, we can go on down the line.
That is the place Where somebody might say, yeah, that is universally known to be true about the human condition.
And they would say that because any disagreement with that publicly would lead to severe punishment.
So my interest here is not the like sophomoric claim that there used to be something that was universally known.
It is what it does.
What is the mechanics of that and what is the purpose of it?
It seems to me that if he wants a society where everyone knows universal truths, He wants a totalitarian society.
Because even in medieval Europe, even in Christendom, even in the halls of Paris, when Thomas Aquinas was disputing the work in some small way of Albert the Great, Even when Meister Eckhart was interpreting in his German sermons and his Latin works the theologies of Thomas Aquinas, there was disagreement.
We could talk about, yeah, we all agree, gravity, sure.
I'm talking about human condition interpreting reality in a philosophical sense.
That's not there, except for in totalitarian societies.
Here's what he says a paragraph later.
The aim of offering an interlocking coherent program is to inspire men of destiny to help those of like mind recognize another and to allow us to see when our leaders are on the right path.
If enough of us make foundationalism the touchstone of our political action, we will maximize all of our chances for civilizational success." This is an elitist oligarchic philosophy.
What's the point of it?
Offering a program to inspire men of destiny.
If you're a man of destiny, if you're a man worthy of talking to Charles Haywood, if you're one of the people that's worth your salt, if you're an elite, then this is for you.
Because we're going to create society and we're going to dictate it for everybody else.
That's what I'm reading.
That's my interpretation.
And it goes along with this idea of universally known truths.
Now he says here, and I promised that I'd go over this because I mentioned it earlier, that the source of our society's problems is singular, autonomic liberalism, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which offers a supremely seductive vision.
The dream is false.
Look around.
Yet Western man has tied himself to this millstone even as it pulls him down to the depths.
Now, I'm happy to debate the problems with the Enlightenment.
I'm happy to debate the issues involved with individualist conceptions of freedom.
I'm happy to debate why that leads to certain problems.
And there's so much there I'm happy to talk about.
But what he's doing is reducing that to just an ill, to poison, and then saying, I have the antidote, right?
I have something that we will be able to universally agree on.
I have the thing that will save you.
Whenever anyone promises you that, that's, he already told you he's a megalomaniac.
This is entirely frightening.
But the thing that I just want to stop for a minute and go over here is this sentence.
The source of our society's problems is singular autonomic liberalism.
So again, happy to talk about the Enlightenment brings so much that is problematic.
It brings an individualism that is oftentimes lonely, oftentimes really bad for a social fabric.
I mean there's so much to talk about here and I have been in seminars and classrooms where we've had a chance to discuss these things and it's rich and it's helpful and it's interesting.
But here he's saying we have one problem, autonomic liberalism.
Okay, let's break down autonomic and then we'll move on.
Auto means self, right?
Auto, autonomic.
What does nomic mean?
Well, nomos means law or governance.
So this is self rule.
In other words, it's freedom.
In other words, it is the ability for you as an individual to choose.
What to do with your life, what to do with your body.
What he's saying is that's the problem, that everybody's been promised individual freedom to choose what to do with their body, to make their own choices in terms of how to spend their time, how to engage the world, how to, you know, spend their money, what to do with leisure, how to direct their family.
That's the problem.
This is, this is why this philosophy is oligarchic.
It's for the few, and it's about imposing itself on others.
This is not about taking you to a time of great American freedom.
It's about a time before American freedom, before the promises of the American constitution, when a few ruled everyone and the possibilities for individual freedoms were severely restricted.
Okay.
Heywood's foundationalism has 12 pillars and those pillars are outlined in detail on his website.
Again, I can't go over all of them today.
This would be way too long of an episode.
I want to go over just a few passages that seem important to me.
So one of the pillars is a mixed government of limited ends and unlimited means.
Here's what one paragraph says.
In pursuit of its limited ends, it will have unlimited means.
The modern administrative state has erased the crucial distinction in the minds of people between an intrusive government and a strong government.
Modernists failed to understand that sovereigns were, before the modern era, constrained in a web of custom, which was law.
In order for foundationalism to succeed, this premodern understanding of sovereignty is essential.
But properly viewed, the state is not constrained externally.
It contains within itself, as an organic outgrowth of a virtuous society, its own constraints.
A lot of big words here and a lot of confusing sentences.
What I take though from this is that what Heywood wants, if you read the entire pillar, is a government built for economic maximization.
A government that is practical and is built for a kind of economic maximization.
But it's not meant to be libertarian or minimalist.
And what that means is it's not going to be out of your life.
This is not a laissez-faire Adam Smith situation.
This is not a libertarian, yeah, government, get out of my life.
No, this is a government that will be very much in your life whenever it wants to be.
It's a government that will be in your life as it feels because the government here is sovereign.
I mean, think about what he's saying.
We need to get away of individual freedom, but the government itself is a strong government.
That it might be what people in the modern era call an intrusive government.
This is not a government where you have rights that could never be violated because they're sacred.
This is a government where whatever needs to be done in the government's mind will be done.
I'm hoping that I'm making clear that this is not a philosophy.
This is not a movement.
It's not a human being in Charles Haywood who's envisioning great American sacred freedoms of democracy.
Preventing rights of search and seizure, preventing having to house soldiers, preventing anyone from saying you can't practice your religion.
Nope.
This is something much, much different than that.
It's a government that is less interested in individual freedom as it is in governmental sovereignty by a few.
The fourth pillar is sex role realism.
The family, man, woman, and children is the bedrock of all human societies.
Restoring a realistic understanding of the role of men and women in society is necessary for any society to flourish.
The crucial fact about men and women in society is that they are, and must be, partners.
That women cannot do everything that men can do, and men cannot do everything women can do.
That even when each can do what the other can do, usually cannot do it as well.
Does not make one sex subordinate, but without recognizing and honoring this basic fact of different competencies, no society can operate for long.
So, if you're familiar with complementary and marriage theologies, if you're familiar with Christian patriarchy, this all sounds very similar.
Hey, I'm not saying women are less than men.
I'm just saying, like, men should have the role of being in charge and women should not.
That just means they do different stuff.
It doesn't mean that they're, like, less equal.
Here's the next paragraph.
Foundationalism is explicitly anti-feminist.
It regards the feminine as one of the two essentials of humanity.
It regards feminism as destructive distortion.
A return to traditional sex roles is desirable and necessary.
The crucial truth is that men drive a society forward while women bind a society together.
It will always be in any successful society and any society that attempts to contradict truth will only find its own destruction.
Pretending that men and women are interchangeable destroys not only the family but achievement.
So I think if the first paragraph is sort of skirting around the topic the second one is pretty clear.
Women have a place to bind society together but men are the leaders and there's no questioning those roles.
He continues.
Men seek glory, power, and dominance.
This is why almost everything great in human history has been achieved by men.
Well, now we're really doing it?
I don't even think I need to comment.
Just, there it is.
Almost everything great in human history has been achieved by men.
What women do is, in some ways, more important, but will never be as visible.
There it is, ladies.
Just...
What you do is really important, but it's just, you're not going to be in front, and everything that has been done in human history that's great has not been done by you, and you really can't be leaders, or drive society forward.
But nonetheless, what you do, very, very important.
So thank you for not giving up on this just yet.
Women do not, unless given advantages, advance in a hierarchy through competition, because the vast majority of women lack the drives necessary.
So there it is.
I don't think I even need to analyze this.
I just wanted you all to hear it so it's very clear of how this will work.
He talks about how this is all a problem of the left and how everything from the 1960s to modernism has ruined sex roles and gender roles and that's why we live in this terrible idea of what's happening.
All right, I want to close today with his understanding of order and then of Christianity.
The eighth pillar is hierarchy and order.
The foundationalist society will be one of order, but not because it is a police state.
Quite the contrary, order will result from a combination of the political structures and the reborn virtue of the populace.
If enforcement must be widespread, the society, or at least a part of the society, is failing.
So there's this fantasy here of, I think, some sort of pre-modern country, pre-modern society, pre-modern state, pre-modern kingdom.
Where a couple things were happening.
There was a political structure that was in place such that there was order in society.
And whenever people like Haywood talk like this, what I hear them saying is like, look, if you have a kingdom with a monarch who is sovereign and can do whatever he wants, then when there are criminals, when there are people who step out of line, you can do whatever you want to them.
If someone shoplifts, you can hang them.
So that's a society of order, right?
So a lot of people won't step out of line because you don't want to get hung for shoplifting or whatever it may be.
What he's talking about here is a society of order because of realization that you don't have individual rights.
Yes, I might have stolen candy from the shop, but I have rights.
You have to read me my rights.
I need a lawyer.
You can't just beat me or you're not supposed to be able to.
Because I shoplifted.
You can't call the cops and have them hold me hostage.
These are all things we sort of used to in the United States.
Now, the police brutality and the problems with our carceral state and our policing, totally, totally recognize all that as I'm speaking.
What I'm trying to get across here is there's a sense in which rights mean we demand rights.
We demand that you recognize what we're supposed to be given.
You can have a society of order if people don't have rights.
Now this will also come, he says, from the reborn virtue of the populace.
So the kind of fantasy is, yes, I have a king and I have people who gladly obey that king through virtue and a sense of pride.
And when people talk like this, I always imagine them thinking about like Putin's Russia.
That there's like, you know, this incredibly homogeneous society where a strong man rules and most people just stay in line.
Isn't that great?
They're doing that out of virtue and love for Mother Russia.
Why can't we be like that?
There's so much order.
Hey, I'm Tucker Carlson.
I'm interviewing you.
I'm interviewing Vladimir Putin.
Look at me.
I'm on the subway in Russia.
I'm going to the grocery store.
It's clean.
Right?
Like that's what they're trying to tell you is, yeah, there's order here.
People obey the rules.
I'd love to live here.
This is great.
There's no difference.
There's no women clamoring for independence and freedom and equality.
There's no people of color who want to be treated as human beings.
There's no one demanding that the government recognize that their foundational human rights.
Nah.
Order, order, order.
All right.
The next one is the ninth pillar and that's the Christian religion.
I'll finish on this today.
Haywood says about Christianity, foundationalism does not offer an ideology.
Transcendence is not offered through the state.
But every sound society must have an impeller to virtue and to achievement, and a mechanism for transcendence.
Religion, though itself an ideology of sorts, can be one of those impellers, achieving virtue in the people, both the ruling classes and the masses.
though especially the former, along with driving accomplishments that will echo down the ages of man, are among the ends of foundationalism, and right religion is a key component of both.
One of the things I really appreciate about this awful paragraph is that it really lays bare something that I think a lot of people get wrong about Christian nationalism, and And I want to just close today on this because I think it really helps us understand Christian nationalism and how a lot of Christian nationalists view religion.
I get asked all the time, do these people really believe this stuff, this Christianity they're always talking about?
And the answer, I think, is that's the wrong question.
Like, if you want me to just go down the line, and I've done this on this show so many times, does Mike Johnson really believe it?
Yes.
Does Marjorie Taylor Greene really believe it?
Yes.
Does Kevin McCarthy really believe it?
Kind of.
But the belief question is not the big question.
The question is, what does religion do in the mind of the Christian nationalist?
Like, what does it do?
What does it achieve?
And Heywood is very, very upfront about that.
He says that religion is an impeller.
It is an impetus for virtue and driving accomplishment.
And Christianity is the one that has been associated with success in both areas.
So, that's the favored religion.
Do you notice what he's saying here?
It's not that Christianity is the true religion.
It's not that he's done the metaphysical study and concluded that when it comes to belief in one God, that is better than belief in many.
He's not gone into a room, studied every religion possible, and come out and said, I've recognized that I believe in Christianity.
No!
He's saying Christianity is a motor.
It's a mechanism to get somewhere.
Christian nationalism uses the idea of Christianity.
It uses religion as an impetus to achieve what it takes to be accomplishments and virtue.
It wants to go somewhere.
It wants a certain structure, a certain order of society.
The silver lining of studying Heywood's whole shtick today is that it's very clear that he sees religion as a way to get something.
A society that is structured with a few on top who are men that control everyone else, women and all the masses.
That it's a way to get to a society where individual freedoms are not prized but the sovereignty of the state and the men who control it are.
Religion is a way to move that forward.
It's a sense of transcendence, a sense of a bigger purpose as a ruler, a sense of a bigger fight to win, a sense of why you're doing what you're doing.
Yes!
So, when people talk about Christian nationalism, I'm less inclined to talk about do they actually believe it and I'm more inclined to think what are they using Christianity for?
Religion always does things.
I talk to my students about this all the time.
Sometimes religion is a way to bind us together in terms of generations.
Sometimes it's a way to make a home in a new place.
Sometimes religion is a way to cross a boundary that seems fearful.
Going from mainland China to the United States, going from one part of the world to the other, taking, right, your rituals, taking your symbols, taking your gods or your divinities with you.
Religion can be a way to, as Tom Tweed says, make homes, to cross boundaries, can be a way to bind us to the past in a chain of memory, right, can be a way for us to think about the future.
There's so many things religion does.
Tradition, family, heritage, ethnicity, Custom.
What he's saying is religion is a way to order.
It's a way to the rule of the few.
It's a way to a rightly ordered society.
Religion is a way for those who belong on bottom to be on bottom.
For those who deserve to be on top to be on top.
That's Christian nationalism.
When white Christian nationalists talk about the 1950s, that's what they're telling you.
That's when the people who should have been on top were on top.
That's when the people who should have been in their place were in their place.
When he talks about Christian nationalism, it lays bare what it does, and I think that's so, so important.
All right.
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