Here are some helpful reflections on the phenomenon of Christian Nationalism from professor of history Richard M. Gamble (HT: Michael A.G. Haykin):
Judging from the attention given to Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism, one could be excused for thinking it is a significant work of scholarship. But Wolfe’s book matters more for the stir it has created than for any weight it carries. One of Wolfe’s first reviewers got it right when he said he felt compelled to review it, not because of its merits, but because so many people would take it seriously. That has turned out to be true. We must engage it even at the risk of increasing its significance. Other reviewers have pointed out Wolfe’s deficiencies in handling Cicero and the Reformers, for example, so I want to focus on his mishandling of historical and other sources that readers might be less likely to notice. Wolfe says he is not reasoning from Scripture or history, and yet he uses both when it suits his purposes. When he condemns the condition of modern culture, he appeals to experience, which is an appeal to history. Past experience ought to be at least as relevant to judge Christian nationalism.
Wolfe opens his book with a dramatic retelling of the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. He warns that “this day changed everything, and we live in its consequences.” I will let the hyperbole of “everything” pass (history is a matter of both continuity and change). The consequences of the Revolution have indeed damaged Europe and America, if not the world at large. He attributes to the Revolution a radically secularized politics, the birth of “political atheism.” Ominously, “The children of the French Revolution, both Christian and non-Christian, are still with us and continue the revolution” (2). (It is not clear who these Christian children of the Revolution are, but it seems likely that they are the advocates of a secular politics that Wolfe opposes, especially the political theology of so-called R2K, Radical Two Kingdom, not to be confused with Reformed Two Kingdom)
Granting for the moment the truth of this claim about the consequences of 1789, what it ignores reveals something important about Wolfe’s story. The irony is that nationalism, far from the solution to our present woes, was itself one of the principal consequences of the Revolution. To embrace nationalism is to embrace one of the most destructive ideologies of the last two centuries. To embrace nationalism is to “continue the revolution” just as much, if not more than, to embrace political atheism….
Wolfe and Christian nationalism more broadly promote a national gospel that has more in common with the social gospel than appears at first sight. Many who advanced an agenda for “Christianizing” America used a modernist theology and an earth-bound ecclesiology to remake their world. They were optimists who believed in inevitable human progress to the reign of Christ on earth. They mobilized pastors and parishioners to that end. Like Wolfe, they spoke the language of power, will, action, and discipline. They wanted to be at home in this world, despite all Christian teaching against such aspirations. Jesus told Pilate, one of those arrayed against the Lord and his Anointed, that his kingdom was not of this world, and if it were his disciples would fight. He warned his disciples that the world hated them because it first hated him. But Wolfe imagines a world populated by Christian warriors led by Christian Princes with pastors serving as the “chaplains” of Christian nationalism, as he said in a podcast interview. Sounding like Nietzsche, he warns Christians to reject their slave mentality. He feeds on resentment. If the minds and imaginations of young people, especially young men fretful about assaults on their masculinity and the rule of a “gynocracy,” are formed by the emerging vision of Christian nationalism, this generation will be disappointed and disaffected by churches committed to Word and sacrament and teaching how to live “peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness” (1 Tim. 2:2, NIV). The world does not belong to us, and we do not belong to it. It is not ours to “take back.” Christianity plus nationalism will only distract us from the genuine gospel, from preparation for a life of suffering for the name of Jesus, and from embracing the scandal of the Cross. The nod to Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism in my title is intentional. Christianity and Christian nationalism are separating as two theologies engaged in heated competition in our world a century after Machen. The stakes may be as high today as they were then.
Read the rest of the article here: “Christianity and Nationalism: A Review Article.”