Introduction
This was inevitable, I suppose. Rob Reiner financed and produced a movie called God & Country, a movie to warn us all about the impending threat called Christian nationalism. This somehow constituted a compelling invitation to erstwhile conservatives like David French and Russell Moore to clamber on board in order to help the secularists put the worst possible construction on whatever it is that is happening in the conservative Christian world. We will get to that in a little bit.
You notice that the clip below Reiner’s tweet has a disclaimer that says the clip has some “potentially sensitive content.” That content appears to consist of people disagreeing with Rob Reiner, which just by itself almost garnered the film an R-rating.
I appreciated Meg’s observation as well. She knows, as few others do, what sort of play is being run on us. As I have often said, the battle swirling around us is a battle for the editorial control of the dictionary. In this movie, the secularists have essayed to define for us, both through words and images, the true meaning of Christian nationalism. As Meg noted, that phrase, and those meanings, were going to be assigned to us regardless, come hell or high water. They were also going to be assigned to us come heck or ankle deep water. They were also going to be assigned to us come sunshine and a damp spot on the sidewalk. We, meaning all of us over here in Bibleland, were going to be called Christian nationalists whatever happened. You say that you didn’t want to call yourself a Christian nationalist? Yeah, well, Jews didn’t want to wear those Star of David Jude badges either. As the Stones taught us so well, you can’t always get what you want.
And so let me fill you in. According to the secularists, a Christian nationalist is someone who in any way opposes or seeks to interfere with the sexual revolution—provided that objection is grounded in any way on Christian conviction. A person is quite free (for the present at least) to not go along with the sexual revolution personally, but that reluctance has to be based on his own hang-ups, predilections, and druthers. But if your opposition has anything to do with Moses, or anything that rhymes with Moses, then you, my friend, are a budding authoritarian. This incipient authoritarianism would be evidenced by any pro-life work, opposition to those family-friendly drag queen grooming events, contempt for Obergefell, distaste for the pornification of the entertainment industry, and so on.
Now at the center of their sexual revolution is their blood sacrament, which would be abortion. The makers of this movie had made it very clear that the downfall of Roe was the doing of Christian nationalists, and anybody who supports those pro-lifers in their nefarious concern for the defenseless unborn must be all about that version of authoritarian control. And David French and Russell Moore (with some others) dove into this maelstrom of compromise and muddle, seeking to show the pro-aborts that not all evangelical Christians are as strident as . . . well, you know, the strident ones. This is the mentality that would try to start up a tract ministry geared to and focused on the guards at Buchenwald.
Making Merry
What I intend to do in this post is to spend my time in this middle section making merry over random bits from the trailer, but just for a little bit. Having gotten that out of my system, I will then furrow my brow and conclude with a serious defense for why we shouldn’t spend any energy trying to fight off the name Christian nationalism. This last section will be concerned solely with the practical rhetoric of the thing, and will not dig too deeply into why the idea itself is Such a Grand Thing. The case for Christian nationalism itself is already being made, far more effectively than I could ever make it, by Hunter Biden, Klaus Schwab, Anthony Fauci, Pope Francis, and Rachel Maddow.
I will simply be noting why we shouldn’t stress out over the name Christian nationalism. We were not put into this world for pleasure alone.
To help you get oriented, just below I have helpfully embedded two video clips. The first is the official trailer for the movie. The second is a Doug Reacts video, in which I provide some color commentary on the trailer for the movie.
As the conclusion of the trailer made clear (“what a country this would be”), what is being pitched here is an alternative version of Christian Nationalism. Not whether, but which. Not whether Christian Nationalism, but which Christian Nationalism. This is obviously not the long range plan of the globalist bug-eaters, who don’t want a Christian anything, but it is the goal of the evangelical patsies and chumps were were talking into shilling for this particular movie.
They are the kind of Christians who want happy protest marches, we-shall-overcome protest marches, protest marches that the spiritually superior can participate in. Note that they didn’t show a peaceful Tea Party rally in order to contrast it with a BLM riot. Why didn’t they do that? They didn’t do it because they are, as the prophet Amos might have put it, smug in Zion (Amos 6:1). They want a Christian nationalism, but with a Christianity that has no sharp edges, no sense of real righteousness, but which rides along to the swelling chorus of Jesus-words made palatable by self-congratulation.
It was really something to observe. They got all the characters for this movie, on both sides, right out of central casting. J6 footage, check. Confederate battle flag, check. Nazi-looking cross, check. Heavily armed dudes, check. Huge American flags, check. And then, on the other side . . . a happy little soup kitchen, check. The values of inclusion, check. Grown up theater kids, check. Teeny American flags, check. Tinkly inspirational music at the end, check.
David French tees off with the observation that we should be “blazing forth as a countercultural example,” but INSTEAD we are “leading the charge of malice and division.” It is clear that French has an idea in his head that unbelieving cultures like being challenged by countercultural examples, and that if we only did it right, they would eat our new countercultural way of doing things out of a can with a spoon. But actual countercultural movements collide with establishments. Genuine countercultural movements are never welcomed with polite golf applause, contra French.
Right before that was the placard that told us that “Jesus was a refugee.” Yes, yes, He was. The holy family fled to Egypt because Judea was being governed by a bloodthirsty maniac who thought nothing of slaughtering the little boys around Bethlehem. And when Joseph brought his family back from Egypt, he decided to settle them in Nazareth because Archelaus had succeeded Herod the Great. Joseph, Mary, and Jesus were refugees, all right, doing whatever they could to evade the government. Jesus was a refugee, certainly, and His family was hiding from the FBI.
Notice the footage of a man being arrested at a school board meeting. Was he being arrested because he showed up drunk and disorderly? No, it was because his daughter had been assaulted by a tranny in the restroom at school, and he wanted to tell the school board what he thought about their related policies. Such a confrontation was not to be tolerated, obviously.
“What happens to the people who don’t believe this stuff?” What stuff? Your stuff or our stuff? If we don’t believe your stuff, we get arrested like the gent in the previous paragraph. We get cancelled, deplatformed, harassed, doxxed, and remanded to North Vietnamese struggle sessions. But if you don’t believe our stuff, you don’t get to kill your babies anymore.
“Christianity at its best is committed to love, and truth, and justice.” Battle for control of the dictionary, remember? Define love. Define truth. Define justice. And let’s start with that last one. Was the repeal of Roe a step in the direction of said justice? Was the repeal of Roe an example of Christians working toward the justice of abolishing human abortion? If you think so, would you have been allowed to say so in this film? To which the answer comes back, don’t be silly. For Russell Moore, judging by his willingness to appear in this movie, successfully striking down Roe was apparently a step toward authoritarianism. In actual fact, it was the first step in turning away from the authoritarianism that believes that unborn citizens are disposable bits of carbon.
How Names Work
If you and your wife are expecting a child, here’s pro tip on how names and naming work. Before the baby is born, don’t tell anybody what the name is going to be. This is because, prior to that happy event, everybody feels free to share with you what a terrible choice your selected name would be. Murgatroyd? The deed is not yet done, and they feel like they might be used to fend off the disaster of what P.G. Wodehouse once called “dirty work at the font.” But after the baby is born, the ink on the birth certificate is dry, and the name is announced, everybody just sort of deals with it.
The name Puritan was originally a taunt, but one that the Puritans owned and repurposed for themselves. The name Methodist was originally a disparaging name, but it too was adapted and used. The same goes for Quaker. And don’t forget the Jesuits. In the political realm, the parties going by the names Whigs and Tories were examples of insulting names that simply became the name of the party. In the history of American politics, we have had the Bull Moose Party and, perhaps best of all, the faction called the Mugwumps. The controversy over the name is fleeting. Once the naming is over, everybody gets back to policy, which is where the action is. Remember that the Beatles is a name that contains a lame pun, and nobody thinks about that at all anymore. They are just the Beatles.
In other words, prior to the naming, and while the naming is going on, opinions run high, but afterwards everybody calms down. That is, they calm down about the name. While not saying anything one way or another about their policies, we should realize that there are Christian Democrat parties in over twenty countries.
So the voltage in our current dispute is not coming from the name. It is coming from the political confrontation between two alternative ways of looking at the world. The name is just the copper wire that is currently serving as the conductor of all that culture war electricity.
Significant resistance to the regime is taking shape in our country. If you don’t name that resistance, somebody else will. If you don’t name it successfully, somebody else will. So if I had been given the responsibility of branding this regime resistance, I am almost certain that I would not have picked out Christian nationalism. But I much prefer it to the alternatives that the other side would like to have assigned—terms like white supremacist, or theofascist. Christian nationalism is not positively wrong, the way those two terms are. I can work with it, in other words, and I can explain it to someone in under three minutes.
There are three basic ways for us to organize ourselves—tribalism, globalism, or nationalism. Whichever way we do it, I want it to be done in line with Christian principles. I want this because—and please follow me closely here—I am a Christian. And as a Christian, I don’t want tribalism, and I don’t want globalism. What does that leave me with?
So . . . if you are pro-life, if you believe the Bible speaks to our public life together in any way, if you reject the decrees of clown world, and if you go to church, this would be my advice to you. Stop introducing your tweets with “I am no fan of Christian nationalism but . . .” You only get 280 characters as it is, and you just used up 40 of them to express a view that nobody is going to pay any attention to.