In Which Heidi Przybyla Shows Us the Way

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Introduction

The world of Christian X was all in a doodah over something that Heidi Przybyla said last week. Now this was fully appropriate, but Christian worldview thinking demands that we take care that it be the right kind of doodah. If we get into any weird kind of doodah, this reveals more about us than we would perhaps like to be revealed. And what that would reveal is that we don’t really know who we are in the story, or where we are in the story.

In other words, James Lindsay will have a legitimate point if everybody goes chasing after the wrong squirrel here. Christian nationalism is not our op, but aspects of it are their op, and so we ought not to run down to central casting to get the outfits that George Soros bought for us.

So allow me to respond to all of this a little differently, if I may. Allow me to take it in a different direction, if I might. Let’s go four-wheeling.

Cultural Revolutions Tear the Cover Off

When Mao’s cultural revolution was being inflicted on the Chinese people, the one advantage they had was found in the fact that they at least knew that it was happening. It was, shall we say, overt. But the Christian populace of the United States is in the midst of our cultural revolution, one aimed squarely at us, and we blithely and serenely go on our way, as though the foundations have not been destroyed. We are still acting as though, if we just get involved for a little bit, one more election will fix things. But . . .

And this is what I mean. Heidi Przybyla has said her piece, and the Christian world reacted with a “Duh! The venerable Declaration said that our rights come from God. Are you going to reject that as Christian nationalism too?”

We are woefully unprepared for the answer that is going to be rolled out over the top of us very shortly, which is this: “Well, yes, the Declaration actually was Christian nationalism, and it is high time we all repudiated this relic of our racist, misogynistic, and slave-owning past. You do know that those words you Christians are appealing to were drafted by a slave-owner, do you not?”

How many statues have to be toppled before we catch a clue about what is going on? Do we really think that the progressive left wants to make any distinction whatever between Robert E. Lee, already melted, and Thomas Jefferson, soon to be? And George Washington right after that? And the Declaration? And the Constitution?

The Party is always right. The Agenda is how the left evaluates the constitutionality of anything, and the fitness of every player. She says Martin Luther King appealed to God, sure, but this was okay because he did not challenge the Party. She adds that natural law has “been used for good in social justice campaigns,” for another example. In other words, natural law is fine just so long as it does not contradict the Party. Natural law is fine, just so long as no one starts to treat it as, you know, natural law. Because if it really is a transcendent law, then there is a possibility that it could contradict the left’s program, and this would not be tolerated. That’s when they would have to brand you as a dangerous Christian nationalist and ship you off to the salt mines.

We are in the midst of a cultural revolution right this minute, and Heidi Przybyla is part of the vanguard. We are not in some seminar classroom, where we will have our discussion and lively debate among the students, at the end of which time the instructor will say, “Yes, the conservatives here have the better argument. Our rights do come from God.” This is not a seminar; it is a struggle session, and there are armed guards at all the exits. We are not in a formal debate, where the moderator will be judicious and wise, fielding questions during the Q & A from both directions, and then concluding the evening with a paean to freedom of expression. That is not where we are at all. This is not a lively exchange of views. This is all part of the dedicated roll-out of the totalitarian solution.

Pay attention, man.

And a big part of this means that you cannot defend America without, at some point, defending Americans, sins and all. But for years now, we have been chased across the tundra by wolves, and we have thrown so many Americans off the sled in our vain and stupid efforts to appease that we have come to believe that our cowardice is some kind of stand-out evangelical virtue.

Pay closer attention, man.

Her State Is a Jealous God

The thing I admire about Heidi Przybyla’s comments is that she clearly knows that she serves a jealous god. She is up against a bunch of Christians who serve the living God, but who don’t really know that He too is a jealous God (Ex. 34:14). She is serving her dead idol more faithfully, more consistently, than many Christians are willing to serve the true God. She knows that her false god demands more of her than many Christians assume is demanded of them by the true God.

In pursuit of this, she carefully distinguishes “Christians” from “Christian nationalists.” Christian nationalists, according to her, are the ones who believe that our rights come from God—not from Congress, not from the Supreme Court, but from God. And my take is that Christians, as defined by her and as opposed to Christian nationalists, are the kennel-fed Christians, the lap-dog Christians, a pinch-of-incense-for-the-emperor-is-no-big-deal Christians. Przybyla has pronounced these house-broken Christians to be the true ones, and they will even be allowed to use natural law jargon. This is their reward for always using the litter box.

But the renegade Christian nationalists are the ones who maintain that the definition of justice must have a transcendental basis, and that in the name of that justice we may oppose and condemn, for example, the mutilations they are conducting on mixed-up dysphoric kids. We believe the definition of justice should never be grounded in the determinations made by a parliament of sinners and other miscreants.

The late Francis Schaeffer taught us that if there is no absolute above the state, then the state is absolute. If there is no God over the state, then the state is god. The humanist state is not really an atheist state strictly speaking; the humanist state is one which aspires to take the place of the banished Jehovah. The one problem with their program is that whenever Jehovah is banished by these men with cracked and seething brains, by these sons of Robespierre, He never goes anywhere. He continues to run the cosmos, and continues to pull the mighty down from their seats. Just you watch.

This state of affairs—the state as god—is one that Przybyla clearly assumes to be the only sensible way to go. But to me it seems like a hellhole, a dark political pit, with hordes of snakes and spiders down there, and scorpions the size of lobsters, and just enough light to be able to see them coming toward you. But she at least knows that if there is a God outside the world who bequeaths rights to people who live inside the world, then her game is over. It would follow that the absolute despotism lusted after by a humanist state is no longer a possibility. The kind of state she desires cannot coexist with a robust Christian faith that knows, as Nebuchadnezzar once learned, that “none can stay his hand, or say unto him, What doest thou?” (Dan. 4:35).

And this is why Christians will be outlawed by those who aspire to create such a place, and these Christians will be banished along with every vestige of their Christian history. They will be exiled as enemies of all humanity. A time is coming when the progressive left will grant everything David Barton ever said about America’s Christian history, and condemn both him and America on that basis, and then outlaw his books alongside the writings of the Founding Fathers who, as we all know by now, were racists in every way imaginable.

My Rights or Our Rights?

And now a brief word to those Christians who were affronted by these comments because, they would say, “of course” our rights come from God. But when it comes to being a Christian nationalist, they would also say, with a slightly panicked look, “of course not.” My word to all such Christians is that Heidi Przybyla is thinking about this more consistently than you are. She serves a jealous god, and you don’t yet.

She is thinking about the principles involved, and not about the spooky label. If God is God, follow Him. If the state is god, then sit down and eat your bugs. In the meantime, she is happy to attach the spooky label to you, in order to make people remember that the Nazis had “national” in their party name. Yeah, but they also had socialist in their party name, and that doesn’t even slow Bernie down. Nazism was pagan nationalism, not Christian nationalism, and pagan globalism is what these people are after. And the toxin is in the paganism, not in the vestiges of Christianity. They want you to be good with godless government, and I for one am not subscribing. Once you have signed up for that, you will discover in the fine print that they have decided to occupy the place recently vacated by the Deity.

And so this brings us to an issue that so many conservative Christians, even those active in conservative Christian politics, have failed to think through.

God is the source of rights, true enough. Now I would be prepared to defend the entire Bill of Rights under this heading, but let us not get distracted. So let’s just stick with the Declaration’s “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as the rights we are talking about. No one, including the government, has the right to deprive you of any of these without due process, as defined by laws that are grounded in the transcendent character of the Creator. That proposition cannot be defended long term unless we are prepared to identify the name of that Creator. We cannot get any rights from a place-holder-deity, however you conceive him-her-it to be. Such an entity cannot bestow rights because—follow me closely here—he doesn’t exist. He is an idol. He is a construct, an evanescent vapor. Actual rights come from the living God, and the living God has a name, and a Son, and a people.

Here is the question for those Christians who believe that rights are God-given, but who want no follow-up questions. Here are some follow-up questions anyway. Is this God the source of my rights, or the source of our rights? Privatized Christianity says that this God has given these rights to me, as the one who believes it, which means that I may feel oppressed when they are taken away from me by the government, and I may pray to God for comfort and deliverance. I may pray as though the persecutors are doing me wrong, because I believe sincerely in my heart (correctly) that what they are doing to me is sinful. But at the end of the day, this is a personal matter between me and O’Brian.

The claim of (spooky label trigger warning!) Christian nationalists is that God grants our rights. The people of a nation, all of them, have these rights. They have these rights whether or not they believe in this Christian theory of rights. They have them anyway. This means that in order to argue for this, you have to be prepared to talk about the relationship of God, the living God, to particular political arrangements, to corporate social units. To nations. Your society must have a God. If it is an idol, you have a god. If it is not an idol, then you have God, and are a Christian nationalist.

The alternative is that each citizen only has such rights as are deducible from the propositions which he personally holds, and that the state should somehow respect these as our individual selections. But why should they? What god do they serve? The state is going to treat you in accordance with the god of their system, and not in accordance with the God that you have tucked away in your heart. They will obey the voice of their god. They have no reason to respect the voice of your God.

This is because they can’t hear the voice of your God. Whenever a preacher somewhere starts to preach as though the living God has views on the behavior of Damascus (Amos 1:3), or Gaza (Amos 1:6), or Tyre (Amos 1:9), or Edom (Amos 1:11), or Ammon (Amos 1:13), or Moab (Amos 2 ), the evangelical establishment wheels on that guy and shuts him down. “Are you a Christian nationalist?” they hiss at him.

But if you will not be governed by the voice of God, then you will in fact be governed by Whitman’s barbaric yawp, in solemn congress assembled. If you summon the gods of chaos, they will descend, as they are doing now.

Is James Lindsey an Op?

James Lindsey presents us with a true oddity in all of these discussions. In the past, he has done valuable work in exposing the pretensions of the woke left. But he has not yet done any valuable work at all when it comes to exposing the pretensions of his own atheism. In this spirit, he has been beating one particular drum for a while, and here it is. “Christian nationalism is a total and complete op.”

So let us parse some possible meanings of this. If he means to say that the globohomo elites are very aware of this rising Christian nationalism, and are going to try to steer it or use it in any way they can by various means, then he is of course correct. But trying to maneuver your enemy into a place that would be difficult for him to defend is not to say that you and your enemy are one. That is just how every battle goes. When Wellington sought to put Napoleon on his heels, which he did at Waterloo, this did not make the French Armée du Nord a British op.

So sure. Various op aspects that swirl around Christian nationalism could take various forms. Say that someone organized a CN rally, and a group of about twenty-five men show up, masked and decked out in FBI-style khakis. They call themselves Sons of Adolf, and they want to march in your parade, and they have lots of attention-grabbing flags. That would be an overt false flag op. Or let us imagine—if you will—whether or not the intelligence agencies have the capacity to flood the Internet with anti-Jew bots. Can bots be programmed to use the n-word with abandon? Well, yes, they do have that capacity. And so I have no doubt that there are some edgier spokesmen for CN who feed their families, at least in part, on Soros money. These sorts of tactics have been effective enough that nobody wants to speak up in defense of Zionist dispensationalists. But this is simply the nature of all battles, at least when your adversary has some measure of intelligence.

But if Lindsey means that the very idea of an explicitly Christian political arrangement is an op, from beginning to end, then the whole thing would have to be characterized as a vast conspiracy, spanning centuries. Althusius would need to have been in on it, along with Calvin and Knox, and A.A. Hodge, and Francis Schaeffer, and Abraham Kuyper, and Patrick Henry, and Stephen Wolfe, and the Supreme Court of the United States in 1892.

Suppose King Josiah were just about ready to give the order to have the groves destroyed and all the Baal-gear burned in the field of Kidron (2 Kings 23:6), and he is told by one of his courtiers that there was an atheist outside who was craving an audience. He had come to warn the king about something he called “an op.” The king decides to see him, simply out of curiosity. James Lindsey comes in and tries to convince the king that to destroy the groves of Baal would actually be to play into the hands of those who would betray the ideal of a secular Judah, one in which all faiths would be free to practice their religion, or even to turn away from all religion, just as he had done. You could worship Yahweh, or Molech, or Chemosh, just as had been done by the fathers in the golden age of Solomon. If you didn’t want to cause your children to pass through the fire, then you just wouldn’t have to. Simple as that. To each his own.

In response to this King Josiah just looked at him with a fat face for a couple of minutes. Then he said, “But the prophet wrote that Solomon did evil in the sight of the Lord (1 Kings 11:6).

“Yes,” Lindsey said, “that is certainly one perspective. But it has to be remembered that Franklin and Jefferson were Deists.”

“Jefferson?” the king said, puzzled.

A courtier leaned in and whispered to the king. The king smiled, and nodded at the guards to escort the gentleman out.