You may have noticed that Christian Nationalism, who used to be a sensible, well-mannered kid, has lately been coming home smelling like Marlboros and cheap bourbon. Over the past year we’ve seen a not-so-subtle shift from “There’s no such thing as a neutral government,” to — well, whatever this is:
What cursed rabbit hole did we fall into where such takes are granted a shred of legitimacy?
I guess the first thing to say is that social media is a heck of a drug. People seem to have picked up on the fact that cool, measured content gets instantly buried alive while the spicy, unhinged content gets a goldfish and a lollipop.
Such people quickly learn the art of “hot-taking” and are able to amass a large following in a short amount of time. Pretty soon they start to resemble garbage incinerators, with the ability to convert any and all interactions into influence fuel. Positive feedback affirms their delusions of grandeur while negative feedback only reinforces the conviction that they’re a voice crying in the wilderness. Balanced followers, if there were any, soon head for the door, leaving only a “congregation” of isolated, angry, anonymous young men, who eventually go on to become hosts of error in their own spheres.
Race a gift, not a goal
The fire is big and complex, and my intent isn’t to try and put it all out with one bucket. What I want to address specifically is what we might call the fetishizing of race. For example Corey Mahler, one of the lead voices in the Nazi revoice movement, frequently makes reference to the “paramount importance of race” and alludes to the fact that “Our race ranks among our most precious possessions.”
I don’t actually have a problem with Mahler’s concentric circles of loyalty — “We love our parents as our closest family, then siblings, then cousins, then kinsmen.” I do have a problem with his Nazism, obviously. And I do have a problem seeing young men weaponized into reactionary nationalists as opposed to steady, discerning churchmen. But all of this bad fruit is ultimately downstream from the first heresy, which happened when a legitimate gift (race) started taking on ultimate weight. Take any verse, or idea, in isolation and elevate it to a position of supreme importance and you’ll eventually find yourself down some sketchy back road, where Hitler is a Christian prince.
The obsession with race is partly due to unhealthy emphasis. But it’s also due to bad study habits. Kinists will frequently point to passages like Exodus 20:8 or 1 Timothy 5:8 as a defense for their ethnocentrism. But this is bias informing exegesis, not exegesis informing principle.
In Exodus 20:8 we have the fourth commandment, which is clearly addressing children and parents. 1 Timothy 5 is also clearly addressing children and parents, specifically widowed mothers. The Scriptures unanimously affirm that children owe a duty of care to their parents and that to deny such a duty is to functionally reject the faith. Mahler is correct in that nature also teaches some measure of preference to those in proximity around us — i.e., “siblings, then cousins, then kinsmen.” Paul himself identifies his deep love for “My brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.”
So kinsmenship isn’t nothing. But nor is it the absolute category Mahler wishes it to be. An error which leads him to gross equivocations:
We are Christians because that is our duty to God; we are racists because that is our duty to nation . . . We can no more yield on this matter than we could yield on the truth that Christ is both fully man and fully God.1
He then goes on to condemn those who refuse to adopt his extreme categories as abhorrent to God. Such language more resembles the ministry of the pharisees, who love to burden people with extrabiblical commands, than anything else.
As Christians, while we must be “wise about what is good, and innocent about what is evil.” we must also guard against simplistic categories. Sure it’s easier to say “Blood is nothing,” as the globalists do, or “Blood is everything,” as the Kinists do. But both are wrong. In the kingdom of God, the ties of blood exist, but they are not ultimate. Rather, it is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit that unites us. Here [in the kingdom] there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all. Colossians 3:11
Doug Wilson helpfully captures this tension:
In the glow of natural affection, you have a duty to prefer hanging out with your own people (as Augustine would define it) over against hanging out with some random Anglican Nigerian Christian. Be like that bishop in 1 Timothy who manages his own household well. You also have a duty to hide that Anglican Nigerian Christian from your own persecuting cousin, a secularist who works enthusiastically for the deep state. In such a case, be like Rahab, and betray your own people for the sake of the faith.
Jesus affirms the fundamental identity the kingdom should take over allegiance to kinsmen at several points, such as Matthew 12: 48-50:
While Jesus was still talking to the crowd, his mother and brothers stood outside, wanting to speak to him. Someone told him, “Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.” He replied to him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.
Here we see Jesus already playing with the strictness of boundaries between blood relatives and disciples. If you’re a Christian, you’ve probably observed this very thing over the past few years. When your family and kinsman rejected you for not getting vaccinated, or for going to church, where did you find comfort? With your Christian brothers and sisters.
And also in Luke 14:26:
If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.
And let’s not forget Revelation 7:9-10
After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, and palm branches were in their hands; and they cry out with a loud voice, saying, “Salvation to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.
The fundamental division we see throughout Scripture isn’t racial or tribal, but spiritual. We belong either to the kingdom of God or the kingdom of this world. It’s the seed of the redeemer or the seed of the serpent. It’s Cain or Able. It’s Issac or Ishmael. It’s Jacob or Esau. In the New Testament, it’s Jews or Gentiles — not as ethnic categories but as eternal, cruciform categories.
There is nothing in our melanin, or the melanin of our ancestors, that makes us any more or less preferable to God, or deserving of his blessings. If God had not left us a remnant, we would have all become like Sodom and Gomorrah. There is nothing genetic that causes us to search for God on our own. There’s a reason to preserve Western borders, but it’s certainly not because of any inherent purity in our blood. The only reason the West is what it is, is because of its historical biblical moorings.
Hear me — the ONLY reason.
If crime rates differ, it’s because of Scripture. If the amount of single-parent families differ, it’s because of Scripture. If the West is better off than the East in any way — and it is — it’s because of Scripture. That’s it. The further away we get from Scripture, the more we will find ourselves indistinguishable from the rest of the world. As you may have noticed, the death cult is humming away just fine in the West. And we did that all by our little white selves.
All of this to say that although the Gospel doesn’t eliminate the wisdom of national/ethnic boundaries in this world, it certainly prevents them from remaining omnipotent metrics. Our ethnic relationship to one another is not our most precious possession. Our relationship to Jesus — and by extension, those united to him — is our most precious possession. He has achieved, through his blood, a greater unity than familial blood ever could.
Rejecting Tribalism
It’s worth noting that while the rallying cries to “find your tribe” are meant to sound stirring and heroic, retreating to one’s tribe is actually one of the least heroic things in the world. Natural man is inherently tribal — you don’t need to rally him towards it. We all want to find the people who look like us, who do the same things we do, and who believe the same things we do. The slope towards tribalism, whether it’s your biker church or your white nationalist knitting circle, takes no special power to slide down. It’s about as heroic as falling off a roof.
What takes actual power is taking two incompatible entities (i.e., Jews and Gentiles) and uniting them as one tribe of priests under Christ. This is an entirely different enterprise. Tribalism attempts to create fundamental unity around superficial commodities — like skin color or common ancestry. In this, the Kinists are working from the same bankrupt cash drawer as the Marxists: power. This is the bizarre irony at the heart of ethnocentric logic. It wants to position itself as the antithesis of the Left, but at the end of the day it’s just the same dude in a different dress. Although the latter is calling it a kilt.
The entire pretense of the kingdom of God is that it doesn’t move forward on power. From the trembling little band of disciples in Acts, the church has always been a persecuted minority. It has always rejected power plays in wherever form they come. At its heart, the church is a praying, preaching entity, and her victory is sure whether there are three or three million of us.
A Christian Response
The sudden influx of “post-war consensus” experts, white nationalists, and Nazi fanboys isn’t the result of a sudden scholarly breakthrough. They are the warning lights on the dashboard telling us that living memory is rapidly passing into history — and that a bunch of people are on the verge of doing something very stupid again.
Christians must respond, and we must do so with careful distinctions and definitions. We are not excused from responding sober-mindedly just because everyone else is firing arrows into the air like career drunks. On the ground, this looks like rejecting the self-appointed shepherds whose “ministries” are an amalgum of non-sequiturs. The guys who can go from “Churchill had flaws” to “Churchill and Hitler are in the same category of evil” are not the guys we should want leading an amateur brass band, let alone any kind of serious Christian movement.
The way forward will happen as it’s always happened — through humble, prayerful, skillful application of the Word to the issues at hand. Your rule, my rule, our rule, as Christians, is is not whatever devolution Christian Nationalism is experiencing this week. It is the Scriptures. It is Christ. And if you’re doing it right, both sides will probably be angry at you.
A final word to those who are tired of the horns of a dilemma riding up their backside: reject all-or-nothingism. You can affirm the goodness and wisdom of borders and reject the totalizing narrative of race. You can affirm the rightness of preferring your immediate neighbors without despising your foreign neighbors. You can welcome different ethnicities into your church without being a globalist swine.
Reject, with a 30-foot pole, the humorless, grandiose voices equating their tribalist sensibilities with Luther’s defense at Worms.
God help us to this end.
Thank you for putting it exactly like that!