Understanding the Term “Christian Nationalism”

What Christian Nationalism Means in Historical Context

Someone texted me last night and asked me about Christian nationalism, just kind of out of the blue. What is Christian nationalism, John? And I said, well, you know, about a hundred years ago, it would have been Fabian socialism for Americans because Americans didn't like socialism.

They associated it with atheism. They associated it with immoral behavior. And so people who wanted to bring Fabian socialism, otherwise known as progressivism, to the United States, some of them at least, thought marketing it as a Christian thing would, and a patriotic thing in some senses, would actually make it more popular.

So they marketed it as Christian nationalism. And you can go look up the Bellarmine clubs, that there were hundreds of them. I think there's over 500 across the country at the, around the turn of the century.

And you can see the kinds of things they advocated, a living wage, it was really socialism. And they called it Christian nationalism. If Christian nationalism was this way to try to introduce socialism over a hundred years ago, now it's not the same thing.

Nationalism, Patriotism, and the Nazi Association

If you have like a Google Ngram search, so it'll show you words, word usage over time, you'll see that nationalism wasn't as popular, patriotism, especially in the founding generation. But through, I'd say the 19, early 1900s would have been the popular word to use.

Nationalism, especially since the rise of the Nazis becomes a more popular term to use. And that's exactly why I think the mainstream media wants to use nationalism. They want to associate anyone who's Christian, who wants to have an impact in the civil realm or the cultural realm, as a Nazi somehow, and this is their way of doing it.

It's no different than, I think, Adorno's F-scale that he used in psychology, one of the Frankfurt School thinkers who thought, well, if you love your family too much, or if you love your country too much, you're kind of a little bit of a fascist in there.

And he would have a scale and you would score a certain number on the F-scale to see how much of a fascist you were. And this is kind of the same thing. They like to connect everything to their arch villain, in their minds, the Nazis since World.

War II.

Why the Right Is Embracing the Label

And so this is one way to do it. And using the term nationalism, I think, is very on purpose. It's very purposeful. However, the right has kind of embraced this.

This pejorative.

Christian nationalist countries also are a threat to the global regime.

We need to be the party of nationalism. And I'm a Christian and I say it proudly. We should be Christian nationalists.

Why the Term Remains Too New and Too Broad

It's an interesting thing that's going on because oftentimes the left will say something about the right politically, and it's just not accurate. It's maybe partially accurate, but it's lacking somewhere.

And the right reacts against it. And in this case, though, what seems to be happening is the left is actually accurately portraying in some senses, at least, what Christian conservatives want to do. They're accusing them of you want your religious views, your biblical principles to be applied in the civil realm or the cultural realm.

And the Christian conservatives are saying, yeah, that is what we want. We don't disagree with your analysis of us because that's an accurate portrayal. The end of the day, the real thing that probably is helpful for all of us is considering whether or not we should take on this label of Christian nationalist.

Is this a movement we want to get behind? And this is where I'm at with this. The dust hasn't really settled here yet. Is it Doug Wilson or is it going to be Al Mohler? Who is it that whose version of Christian nationalism is here?

And now that it's becoming more popular, you have people, I think, jumping into to take.

That term.

People who even were kind of pushing the social justice stuff are now saying there's Christian.

Nationalists.

I don't use that myself because it's such a new term and it's so, and not just because it's new, but because it's both new and it's all at the same time being used by so many different individuals in different kinds of ways.