Unfortunately, Christian Nationalism Is the Normal, Much More Longstanding Version of Christianity

Church and state unified lasted much longer than our American separation of the two.

Jan 29, 2023

Click here to check out the first 30 Installments - Volume I - in this series on Antisemitism and Culture. Among the most important pieces from this first wave:

This is the eighth installment in Volume II, intended as another 30 installments exploring the many manifestations of Jew Hatred and the issues surrounding it in America and globally. See the previous installments in this collection below.

These writings are part of my ongoing effort to overcome my PTSD by forcing myself to try to write and publish something every day commenting on and analyzing current cultural affairs and their impacts on politics, faith, and, well, everything. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the late Andrew Breitbart popularized among conservative bloggers while he was alive. I’d go a step further: Everything is downstream from culture. The cultures you embrace determine who you are and who you become. You become what you worship.

As I like to emphasize the Christian mystical tradition in my Sunday podcasts, so too I think I’m going to get into the habit of saving my Christianity-themed installments in the Antisemitism and Culture series for Sundays as well. The amount of antisemitism permeating the various sectors of Christianity still is deeply shameful. And I’ll make a point to identify, discuss, and virulently condemn some of these idolatrous heresies of the faith here.

In my podcast interview today with Sally I identified the overarching problem which yields antisemitic Christianity in its most extreme form, morally confused fundamentalist/Evangelical Christianity in its less destructive varieties, and the ideology of Christian Nationalism too. See the podcast for a more thorough discussion of why I regard some so-called Christians as actually “Xians” or “Crosstians” practicing a form of idolatry I describe as “Crosstianity.” They are so obsessed with Jesus and particularly the emotionally devastating power of the crucificxtion that they do not invest enough time in integrating the wisdom of the Old Testament and the centuries of Jewish wisdom stacked atop it into their own faith. They prefer Paul to Moses, the apostles to the prophets, literalist interpretations of Revelation to mystical interpretations of Job.

This isn’t a concept that I came up with - this term has been thrown around for years and the general critique I’m making of institutionalized Christianity has been made by various more independent-minded and iconoclastic Christian philosophers for centuries. I’m not being original in saying that significant numbers of Christians and so-called churches are actually Pagan in nature, merely masquerading as advocates for the philosophy and love of Jesus. I’m hardly the first or the only one to point out the obvious: that the weekly church-attending practice of Christians is hardly any resemblance to living like Christ or pursuing a Christlike daily life or genuinely embracing the radicalism of the Christian moral call.

And there are certainly others who have identified the deep antisemitism inherent in the writings of many key Christian theologians. I just recently cited Paul Johnson’s monumental take-down of Marx’s and broader left-wing antisemitism in Commentary, “Marxism vs the Jews.”

God of the Desert Books

RIP Paul Johnson, a Catholic Warrior in Defense of the Jewish People

This post is the twenty-eighth in an ongoing series on antisemitism and culture. See the previous installments here: What It Means When the Leader of the Republican Party Dines With THREE Antisemites What Causes Someone to Be an Antisemite? When & Why Conspiracy Theorists Sometimes Stumble Onto the Truth…

2 years ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · David Swindle

But he starts that essay by pointing out antisemitism’s presence in core Christian thinkers:

A third layer was contributed by Christian writers, including some of the greatest doctors of the church, such as Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory the Great. Some Christians taught that the deicidal Jews were in both local and universal conspiracies with Satan, a notion later explored in innumerable plots and sub-plots by the investigators of the Inquisition. The writings of Luther added yet another layer of anti-Semitic theory which became the pattern for prejudice in Protestant Europe.

It’s worth reminding ourselves of something obvious but often taken for granted or not fully considered: for most of the existence of Christianity, the religion was practiced and sometimes enforced hand-in-hand with government. Epic wars were fought across Europe over which form of Christianity was the right one and should influence the government. Jews were persecuted in all sorts of ways by Christian governments.

America’s own division of church from state and the personal spiritual religion of Christianity derived from it are a fairly recent invention, only a few centuries old now. In other words: those who today advocate “Christian nationalism” in America, the idea that Christians should rule and should use the government to promote Christian religious (generally fundamentalist) moral values is a longstanding Christian tradition, and its proponents can go deep into history to advocate for themselves.

And it’s worth stating bluntly: this Christian Nationalist tendency is inherently anti-Jewish, and in its most extreme forms openly antisemitic. The various political grifters and young college activists now glomming around the almost comedic “Ye 2024” “presidential campaign” who I have been studying lately for a potential upcoming investigative article, are almost exclusively loudly Christian Nationalist. They see Kanye as one of them and that his over-the-top Christian declarations indicate he would seek to preside over the country implementing Christian religious ideas as public policy.

Not all Christian Nationalists - often trying to brand themselves as “National Conservatives” are so extreme, though. A recent installment at

The UnPopulist

by Mustafa Aykol of

Rethinking Islam

brought up this mini "movement" which has arisen in recent years in an attempt to intellectualize Trump's variety of populist-nationalism into something philosophically coherent, or at least which pretends to appear so. Here's the piece:

The UnPopulist

New-Right Christians Would Repeat Islamist Government Failures

In recent years, a new intellectual school has appeared among America’s Christian conservatives: post-liberalism. Its pioneers include a few Catholic scholars called “integralists” and various public figures known as “national conservatives.” What unites t…

2 years ago · 29 likes · 8 comments · Mustafa Akyol

Aykol, a reform-minded Muslim who works at the libertarian Cato Institute, notes that this group of “national conservatives” is making the same mistake that Islamists made in the Middle East in Iran and Turkey. By blending government with the promotion of a religion the effect is to inspire large swaths of people to become secular. Trying to blend religious piety with government mandate produces the exact opposite of what its proponents claim to be wanting. Perhaps in some ways this is a reflection of one of the iron laws of government I’ve learned in observing politics the last two decades too closely: government is not good at doing much beyond destroying stuff.

Anyway, Aykol does a great job of summarizing “National Conservative” aka “Christian Nationalist” ideology:

In recent years, a new intellectual school has appeared among America’s Christian conservatives: post-liberalism. Its pioneers include a few Catholic scholars called “integralists” and various public figures known as “national conservatives.” What unites them is their rejection of liberalism. The latter term implies not the center-left “liberalism” in American politics, but the broader classical liberal tradition that constitutes the founding principles of the United States: individual liberty, religious freedom, free markets, separation of church and state.
Contrary to this liberal heritage, the post-liberals want a closer relationship between church and state. National conservatives believe, “Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state.” The integralists, in turn, want the state to “publicly recognize the truth of the Catholic religion” and act “as agent for the authority of the Church” to the extent that “the state legislates and punishes for purely religious ends.” In other words, as the liberal intellectual William Galston puts it, “Catholic integralists reject freedom of religion, and they are prepared to use government power in the name of public morality to control what liberals consider private and individual decisions.”
With such an ambitious project, the integralists apparently hope to reverse the tide of secularization in Western societies, which began to take hold even in the traditionally religious United States, where there is a growing “decline of Christianity.”

Aykol emphasizes how surprised he is by this discourse among Christian conservatives, because he is a Muslim immigrant who chose a liberal society and believes in liberalism himself. He looks around and this America based on classical liberal political and philosophical principles seems to be functioning much, much better than the theocratic Islamic societies which he left.

He then notes that these Christian nationalists are presenting their ideas as though they haven’t been tried before or aren’t being tried now, when in actuality there’s an obvious test case which has been taking place: the efforts to sacralize the states in Iran and Turkey. He offers these observations about Iran’s growing secularism as a result of Shiite Islam being so associated with an oppressive totalitarian regime:

In fact, these recent protests are only the latest outburst of an ongoing disenchantment with Iranian Islam, which, by being the ideology of a corrupt and authoritarian regime, has turned uninspiring, even repulsive. Visitors to Tehran often note that mosques are less popular and that the secular life banned by the regime thrives in private homes. A 2020 survey by The Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in IRAN (GAMAAN) even found out that approximately half of the population reported “losing their religion.” Only 32% identified as Shiite. This low percentage may be partly due to the survey’s being conducted online, where older and rural Iranians were less likely to participate, but regardless, 32% is an anemic figure given that Iran was once more than 90% Shiite.

The same thing would happen under the Christian Nationalists’ dream state of government. It would just make Christianity even more unpopular and fuel the rise of non-Christian religions and philosophies.

And it’s worth pointing out explicitly here: Christianity practiced as a form of political ideology may have fueled nation states for centuries but it is an entirely un-Biblical doctrine which goes against Jesus’ teachings and life example. Imitating Christ does not mean creating a government to enforce fundamentalist Christianity’s personal moral and sexual hang-ups. Jesus didn’t do that. He went around telling stories and preaching ideas, healing the sick, raising the dead, stopping executions, performing exorcisms, and conquering death itself. That’s what we’re supposed to do to fix the world - not pass fucking laws and campaign for congressional seats.

Now, there’s one final caveat I do feel compelled to make here regarding “National Conservatism,” a point which I will certainly concede in its favor: not all “Nat Cons” I’ve read and encountered qualify as outright Christian Nationalists or even anti-Jewish. You can find some Jews among “Nat Con” writers and advocates - and they certainly tend to be Zionist. They see the nationalists of Israel as they do the nationalists of many European states, their ideological allies each simply looking out for their own state’s interests and not trying to meddle in the affairs or economies of others. Some of the “National Conservatives” definitely fall more on the “Nationalist Populist” side of things rather than the outright “Christian Nationalist” or Catholic “Integralist” side of things. But there’s really so much cross-over between the two ideological tendencies that it seems generally fair to me to critique the “National Conservative” movement as a whole due to is friendliness with the post-liberal Christian Nationalist tendency.