Introduction
Darryl Hart wrote an article about Christian nationalism, and it is replete with true observations about this and that, and yet somehow assumed a stance that sought to remain well above the fray. Because we live in a time when this is clearly impossible, he was forced to conclude by saying nothing much in particular. There is no real spot above the fray.
A lot of these true observations were historical in nature, and so I found myself nodding along as I read. Yes, so-and-so did that. And I quite agree that another personage did another thing. And the first thing was before the second thing. But what does it mean? What are we supposed to do about it now?
What he was seeking to do was place the rise of Christian nationalism within its historical setting, thus explaining why it was happening at all and why it was happening now. Okay, but if you do not want this reaction to be happening now, what should be happening now?
Hart throws a bunch of stuff out there, which has resulted in my responses taking the form of an erudite . . . sprawl. Just stick with me. It should all make sense by the end.
A Very Short Section
Hart objects to the appeal that Christian nationalists are making to our Protestant political heritage. In the course of that, he says . . .
“As sensible as a plea for a return to older playbooks might seem, the favorite era chosen by Christian nationalists for inspiration comes across like the awkwardness of the autistic kid in class who knows way more than his classmates but has no sense of how he comes across in classroom banter.”
Hart, WCHAWN?
I will address the Protestant point a bit later on. This is the place where I want to remind people that Hart says things like this: “Nero did not violate God’s law if he executed Christians who obeyed God rather than man. If Paul continued to preach after the emperor said he may not, then Nero was doing what God ordained government to do.” No kidding, he really said that.
So this brief section is going to be short because I simply want to make the point that Hart really ought to avoid writing about “the autistic kid who has no sense of how he comes across in classroom banter.” You know, glass houses.
The Basic Question Before the House
“The short answer is that conservative Christians (especially Protestants in the United States) have understood secularization and moral relativism as the consequences of the nation abandoning its Christian heritage and founding.”
Hart, Why Christian Nationalism, and Why Now?
I believe this is a very fair statement of what has happened. But what Hart is doing here is simply describing, and as far as it goes I think it is an accurate description of what conservative Protestants have been thinking. We think that the nation has abandoned its Christian heritage and founding. We do think that. And we also think that secularization and moral relativism is the result of that abandonment. We think that too. The only question remaining—and it is staring us right in the face—is why Hart doesn’t think it.
So there is this remaining question, and it seems to me to be an important one. The question is this one: is that assessment correct? You know, like, true?
Hart touches on the importance of Francis Schaeffer’s contribution to all of this. Schaeffer regularly argued that our freedoms, found within a system of structured liberty, were freedoms that depended upon a widespread Christian consensus. Hart mentions three historians who pushed back somewhat on Schaeffer’s historical claims (Marsden, Noll, and Hatch), but Hart then goes on to chide them (mildly) for leaving the Christian nationalists some wiggle room.
“That message may not have necessarily included approval of the Moral Majority’s politics, but it still added legitimacy to Christians who wanted American society to reflect Christian ideals.”
Hart, WCHAWN?
But what does it mean to reflect Christian ideals? Why can’t Protestants contribute what we have to offer? I mean, Hart likes Catholic and Jewish contributions, sort of . . . I think.
“At the same time, how could anyone who did know of and appreciated the contributions Roman Catholics and Jews have made to American society, from stand-up comedy to intellectual conservatism, consider Protestant politics a realistic proposal for contemporary America?”
Hart, WCHAWN?
Wait. Stand up comedy?
Our Christian Nationalist Origin Story
“The likeliest explanation for the 2022 origins of Christian nationalism was the remarkable cultural chaos that started in 2020 amid protests over George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police, the restrictions on ordinary life during the COVID lockdowns, the aggressive activism for transrights, and the sometime hysteria over climate apocalypse.”
Hart, WCHAWN?
Except for the George Floyd part, who actually died at the hands of a drug overdose, this is fine. As a historical observation, this is exactly right. If a prophetic Christian voice declared in the late 1950’s that it was “Christ or chaos,” we might have wished that more people would listen to him, but we can hardly be surprised when they didn’t. As Schaeffer constantly warned, “personal peace and affluence” tend to keep us on the sidelines. The “Christ or chaos” message doesn’t really resonate when you look out at a Christless world, but Eisenhower is president, and everybody out there is still driving on the right side of the road, the sky is still blue, and the clouds are still fluffy.
It is different when the chaos actually hits. When the lock downs come, the riots start, and doctors are performing double mastectomies on healthy teen girls, and the climate hysterics are in full bloom, and all of this to the applause of the Establishment Johnnies, a lot of normies and grillers look around at their vanishing way of life and mutter to themselves, “What happened?” And then the authorities, in the name of science, top it all off by telling you that the deadly virus cannot do its lethal work at BLM rallies, but that it remains really hazardous at church. They tell you this with a solemn look on their faces, sober as a row of robed judges. Science, they say. And then you remember how your dad used to talk about that crazy guy who tried to warn us about this—he tried to warn us for decades. He seemed like a jenn-u-wine nutcase back then, but you looked some of his old newsletters up. Now he seems like the last sane man standing.
You say you want an example? How about this banger from 1898?
“Finally Modernism, which denies and abolishes every difference, cannot rest until it has made woman man and man woman, and, putting every distinction on a common level, kills life by placing it under the ban of uniformity.”
Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism
So all our established authorities disgraced and discredited themselves. This included effete figures that the evangelical elite used to point to as representing the best of us, real paragons of virtue. You know, men like Francis Collins . . . who then turned out to have a soul like the underside of a flat rock in the garden. In October.
So why did Christian nationalism get a hearing? Well, because all their warnings came true, and because all the standard warnings from the wowswer library ladies . . . got old.
The Ecumenical Point
In this article, Hart looks back with apparent admiration at the days when the conservative Christian political resurgence was far more ecumenical—Chuck Colson, Richard John Neuhaus, James Davison Hunter, et al. Colson was an evangelical married to a Catholic, Neuhaus was a Lutheran who became a Catholic, and Hunter is an evangelical Protestant.
“Unlike the faith-based politics proposed by Roman Catholics and evangelicals in the 1980s and 1990s, today’s turn to religion shows little ecumenical instincts. The current version of Christian nationalism is interdenominational (mainly Presbyterian, Baptist, with a few Anglicans) but aggressively Protestant.”
Hart, WCHAWN?
Okay, but. Hart may now be looking wistfully at the good old days when Protestants and Catholics together were warning about our cultural deterioration, but back when he published his book A Secular Faith in 2006, he was not exactly shaking any pom poms. Long before the rise of what is now called Christian nationalism, Hart was arguing—contra Colson and Neuhaus—that a naked public square was just fine with him.
He chides Colson, for example, for fighting the “bogey” of secular humanism (A Secular Faith, p. 240). He does grudgingly respect Neuhaus’s desire to keep the phrase “under God” in the Pledge, but that effort still “raises more questions than it apparently answers” (A Secular Faith, p. 123). So if we went back to that older approach, Hart would still be wagging his finger at us.
The funniest part of this discussion has to do with Hart’s conflicted views of Protestantism in all of it. For example, in his book he credits Protestantism with laying the groundwork for his version of secularism.
“Protestantism implicitly heralded the kind of confinement of religion to a private or a nonpublic sphere that would develop after the American and French revolutions, which formally disestablished Christianity”
Hart, A Secular Faith, p. 243
Leave aside his misunderstanding of the American War of Independence, not because it is unimportant, but because we don’t have time. Just leave it aside. You can check this out if you have a moment.
But here is the current point. He sneers at the young buck Christian nationalists who are arguing for a return to our historic Protestant political theology. What this means is Hart doesn’t believe that what centuries of Protestants taught about the public square is genuinely Protestant. The correct understanding of genuine Protestant political theory had to wait until the Empire was in its Late Stage Decline, and the Reformed Curators of the Big Thinks started explaining how this decline was actually a good thing. This is retreatist quietism with a Reformed veneer.
“Christian nationalism discourages the peaceful and quiet life that the Apostle Paul recommended to early Christians when their society was ruled not by Protestants but by pagans.”
Hart, WCHAWN?
Ah, for the halcyon days of Nero, Domitian, Marcus Aurelius, Decius, Valerian, and Diocletian!
De Facto Realities
Hart acknowledges that the rise of Christian nationalism had something to do with the arrival of the gods of chaos. All right, so let’s us suppose we didn’t do the Christian nationalism thing, but naturally, we still have the chaos. What are we supposed to do in this moment? I would invite everyone in this Bible study of ours to look over to Darryl Hart and wait expectantly for an answer. What is the church supposed to do and say about the abortions, about the drag queens, about the pornification of everything, about the grotesque surgeries, about . . . the chaos?
Now here is a concluding qualification. We all know how terms can be devalued through overuse, and it works the same way inflation of the currency does. Too many dollars chasing the same amount of goods, and there you are. We have seen this happen with terms like racist—a racist turned out to be anybody who was winning an argument with a liberal. So the left has done this a lot—racist, misogynist, fascist, all the dime-a-dozen outrages. But some of the based bros on the right have taken to the same strategy—anything they don’t like, including pistachio ice cream, is part of the post-war consensus.
But just as with “racist,” the real thing remains. There are real bigots out there. They do exist. And by the same token, there really are conservative boomers stuck in the post-war consensus. They do exist, and Darryl Hart is one of them. And what that consensus amounts to is a cut-flower commitment to classical liberalism. This is the idea that the ideals of personal responsibility and liberty can somehow survive away from the soil of a Christian consensus. But that is not going to happen. And so it is only a matter of time before the cut-flower classical liberals are replaced by the plastic-flower classical liberals.
If you want the real thing—real classical liberalism, I mean, and I think David Bahnsen will like this— then we must return to Christ. So no, we don’t want a Protestant Franco. We need a Protestant Hayek.