Why We Won’t Stay Silent About Christian Nationalists in Our Own Churches

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IN 1935, U.S. AMBASSADOR TO GERMANY William Dodd warned the State Department of the “virtually dictatorial powers over Protestant Church matters” the new Nazi Minister of Church Affairs possessed. Describing the ecclesiastical resistance to Adolf Hitler’s desperate grasp for the keys to the kingdom, Dodd added that “the brunt of battle has been borne chiefly by the Reformed, or Calvinist, wing of the Church whose members find National Socialist totalitarian claims incompatible with their belief in sole responsibility to individual conscience.”

Hitler’s “Thousand Year Reich” and its heretical Deutsche Christen movement were defeated, of course, in a victory for Christians who believe in a future for all nations.

But eight decades later, a new National Christianity is being debated right here in our own country and in the Reformed Protestant tradition that Dodd once praised for holding the line against the Nazis. Ominously, some of those involved in establishing this new movement aren’t even certain the score was settled correctly last time.

The latest real-world skirmish over the ever-amorphous Christian nationalism erupted this June at a conference in Ogden, Utah, titled “The War for Normal” and organized by fledgling religious publisher New Christendom Press.

The world quickly learned from various posts on X what exactly passes for “normal” in these circles when a self-described Nazi employee of Antelope Hill, a small publishing house infamous as the preeminent North American publisher of fascist texts, was caught hawking pro-Hitler materials, including books published by the Nazi Party’s paramilitary Schutzstaffel, better known as the SS.

Blake Callens, a writer and early public critic of Christian nationalism, has noted that “one can consider authoritarian Christian Nationalism to be fringe enough that it will never gain traction within the broader American system while being keenly aware that it is a growing movement within the conservative church.”

As Christians, we find that Callens’s warning speaks to us directly. One of the presenters at the conference, Zachary Garris, is a minister in our denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, and we feel a pressing duty to speak out about this malignant ideology. Because if the Nazi materials on the Antelope Hill table can teach us anything about history, it’s the danger of what a fringe movement can do if reasonable people remain silent.

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After some of the flags, banners, and rhetoric used during the January 6th riots highlighted the place of Christian iconography in far-right resistance to democratic norms, critical interest in the concept of Christian nationalism ballooned. There’s an irony here: Mainstream media accusations of the menace of Christian nationalism encouraged the hard right to own the moniker for themselves.

Advocates of the term range from evangelicals to Orthodox Christians, who never seem able to agree on an exact definition, leaving alarmed pundits struggling to hit a perpetually moving target. Gen-Z shock influencers like Nick Fuentes, a Catholic, have called themselves Christian nationalists as well. Hop online and ask ten people what Christian nationalism means, you’ll get eleven answers, and maybe a death threat or two.

Though percolating for a while, the movement really crystallized late in 2022, when the political philosopher and Presbyterian Stephen Wolfe published The Case for Christian Nationalism in the same month that Gab CEO Andrew Torba and co-writer Andrew Isker released a bestselling, though less authoritative, volume with a similar name. Wolfe began to systematize the term, and his book has become something of a manifesto for disaffected Protestants looking to restore, in their view, biblical forms of nation, patriarchy, and, in its most scurrilous forms, race relations.

Since then, Christian nationalism has become a clickbait gold rush. The movement, heavily online but simultaneously entrenched in small groups and churches, has developed its own media ecosystem of influencers, podcasts, films, merchandise. It also has its own style of performative aesthetics. Beards, demonstrating patriarchal authority and hiding poor “physiognomy,” are omnipresent. Christian nationalism has sometimes overlapped, in terms of adherents and imagery, with other rapidly evolving movements and subcultures, such as “tradwives,” “redpilled” online spaces, and the “manosphere.” For example, it’s not unusual in Christian nationalist circles to encounter the slang term “soy” as a pejorative for unmanliness, extrapolating from a semiserious belief that soy-based foods are a testosterone-lowering marker of coastal liberalism. You can even compete in Christian nationalist athletic events.

Though much can be gleaned from books like Wolfe’s and Torba and Isker’s, this far-right movement is best understood by witnessing their behavior in the wild.

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WHICH BRINGS US back to Ogden.

Conference headliner Brian Sauvé is perhaps best known for his podcast “Haunted Cosmos,” which explores cryptids and the paranormal from an alleged scriptural perspective, offering debatable conclusions such as, maybe, “Mermaids are real.” He’s also a chart-topping Christian musician and the pastor of Refuge Church, which also hosted the approximately 1,500 people interested in hearing from Christian nationalist influencers like Wolfe and Isker about the battle for normality.

The conference, which was extreme enough in its own ways, was dwarfed by attention in Christian and then secular spaces on Antelope Hill, which was not only a vendor but a sponsor of the event. In addition to the SS material, the Antelope Hill table also featured The Sword of Christ, a volume Sauvé and his copastor and podcast cohost Eric Conn admitted to owning and praised as “anti-Zionist” in their hour-long response video. The book contains the bizarre assertion that Christianity explicitly condemns interracial relationships. Nowhere in the response did the pastors condemn Antelope Hill; instead, they affirmed the importance of publishing “historical” sources. (Clearly not committed to historical accuracy, Antelope Hill has been caught editing anti-Christian passages out of at least one of its volumes.)

The debacle has turned many potentially sympathetic conservatives against the most ardent Christian nationalists. Daily Wire cofounder Jeremy Boreing fired back at the crowd during his weekly show, drawing attention to the “hype video” with pro-Hitler iconography shared by Refuge Church’s Eric Conn. Meanwhile Erick Erickson tweeted that “Watching the racists run from the Nazis to maintain their credibility within the church is funny. They’d be saying nothing had others not put up the pictures.”

But the scandal doesn’t seem to have hurt New Christendom in far-right circles. In fact, they seem unrepentant. Wolfe responded to the controversy stating he was looking forward to next year’s conference. The following week, JD Hall, a disgraced journalist popular in Christian nationalist circles praised New Christendom Press to Tucker Carlson’s viewers.

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IT’S TEMPTING TO DISMISS shocking occurrences like Ogdengate as the excesses of a few fringe Protestants. But let’s step back and put this story in a wider historical context. Protestants helped shape this country in definitive ways from before its birth, with seemingly minor religious sects at times decisively informing the United States’ political institutions and culture. Within just our Reformed tradition, Presbyterians founded Princeton University in 1746; three decades later, some loyalists to the British crown would decry the American Revolution as a fundamentally “Presbyterian Rebellion.”

While often a force for good and social reform, American Protestantism has a mixed record with white supremacy. Abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy and civil rights minister John M. Perkins testified to how Christ’s people can, in the words of the prophet Amos, “let justice roll down like waters.” But, sadly, many of their contemporaries rejected this call, either participating in atrocities like slavery and segregation or looking the other way when their coreligionists did. This tendency to sanctify or at least excuse racism scarred Baptist, Presbyterian and other denominations with regional divorces. There are tragic historical linkages between conservative Protestant theology in the United States and racism, as Christians have read their political preferences and racial prejudices into scripture.

In the past half century, a new faith militant has emerged in American politics. Often mocked, belittled, and underestimated, the Religious Right became a powerful force in conservative politics. Baptist minister Jerry Falwell Sr., who once declared from the pulpit that integration “will destroy our race eventually,” cofounded the Moral Majority, its name an implicit claim that politically divisive (if not outright intolerant) fundamentalism was, in fact, ‘normal.’ This at-times Righteous Gemstones, type movement, just consider the mess Falwell inherited when he took over his disgraced peer Jim Bakker’s TV and family resort ministry, helped elect President Ronald Reagan in 1980. Thirty-six years later, Jerry Falwell Jr. bestowed then-candidate Donald Trump with his blessing. His endorsement in the 2016 primary marked a turning point for evangelicals, who ultimately rejected other Republican candidates whose beliefs and values more closely resembled their own to embrace instead an adulterer, con artist, and slum lord with an established history of racial discrimination.

In some ways, Christian nationalism is a reaction to Trump. While his success seems to suggest an electoral pathway for culturally conservative, authoritarianish politicians, his (at best) cultural Christianity has provoked the ire of Reformed and restless radicals who don’t like a president who participates in Diwali celebrations or uses AI to compare himself to Jesus Christ. This new religious faction longs for a national figurehead with personal discipline, for a religious-political movement that feels more “intellectually” dignified, for a vision of American family life plucked from a 1950s advertisement. And so, like a cancerous cell metastasizing into an unwitting patient’s blood, Christian nationalism has begun to spread.

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POLITICAL MOVEMENTS LIKE THESE require careful diagnosis.

Many conversations around Christian nationalism frame it as an evangelical Taliban seeking to legislate its narrow interpretation of the faith into a secular American society. This evokes images of Gilead, the hyperpatriarchal theocracy from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale that has in the last decade become the subject of increasingly cringey political cosplays. The comparison can be overdrawn; critics of this framing may dismiss attempts to connect the contemporary United States to Gilead as fictional fearmongering, and in turn, they may rightly argue that there’s really nothing wrong with Christians voting their consciences in a true democracy. But those critics would do well to consider that Christian nationalism does not simply mean passing laws informed by Christian values, even if its proponents frequently depict it that way.

“Nationalism” is the operative part of the term. As Stephen Wolfe himself admits, “Christian nationalism is a Christianized form of nationalism or, put differently, a species of nationalism.” It’s in this definition, this shifting of emphasis away from Christ and toward the nation, that the insurmountable gulf between nationalism and Christianity becomes clear.

As an ideology, nationalism was born in the turmoil of the French Revolution, where for the first time in European history the state was explicitly designed as an instrument of a nation (or ethnie). The eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder defined a nation by its pre-existing cultural and linguistic bonds. Only five years after Herder’s death, Johann Fichte presented a more radical proposition: “It is only by means of the common characteristic of being German that we can avert the downfall of our nation which is threatened by its fusion with foreign peoples.” These were existential terms that treated the nation as an organic whole under threat by alien bodies. Like a certain yet-to-be born Austrian painter, Fichte believed that “love of fatherland” must take precedence over any traditional objectives of the state, including peace, property, personal freedom, and “the life and well-being of all.”

In his book Nationalism, the late British historian Elie Kedourie argues that nationalism must be distinguished from patriotism (the love of one’s country) and even from xenophobia (the fear or dislike of the outsider), since “Neither sentiment depends on a particular anthropology and neither asserts a particular doctrine of the state or of the individual’s relation to it.” Nationalism does; it offers “a comprehensive doctrine which leads to a distinctive style of politics.”

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What does this mean for Christianity? In such divisive times, it may be best to consult the source material.

The Apostle Paul clearly instructs: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Paul affirms Christianity as an evangelical faith that seeks to graft all believers on to the Tree of Life. John of Patmos depicts this very tree in the book of Revelation, explaining that “the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” The words of Christ himself leave no room for national vanity. He does not elevate the nation or, perhaps more meaningful for a first-century Jew, kin-networks, above the well-being of all. Instead, he preached, “For whoever does the will of My Father who is in heaven, he is My brother and sister, and mother.”

This theme is repeated in On Christian Doctrine, where the great bishop and theologian Augustine argues that “every man is to be considered our neighbour, because we are to work no ill to any man.” When faced with these verses and arguments, contemporary Christian nationalists often argue that Paul’s admonition to the Galatians applies only to the Church. But such a cramped notion contradicts the Gospel answer to the age-old question: Who is my neighbor? As John Calvin elaborates in Institutes of the Christian Religion, “Our Saviour having shown, in the parable of the Samaritan, that the term neighbour comprehends the most remote stranger, there is no reason for limiting the precept of love to our own connections.” In short, the Kingdom of Heaven has no Favoritvolk.

Stephen Wolfe even admits his ideas are outside the bounds of purely scriptural reasoning: “Whether ethno-nationalism is good or bad is a question of political philosophy, not a question of theology,” he recently wrote on X.

When they are being coy, some Christian nationalists suggest that by “Nationalism” they simply mean “the existence of nations.” But this attempt to simplify only smuggles in the very thing at issue: what constitutes a nation? Is it some primordial, pre-existing group of people, defined by ties of blood and soil and culture, which is the dominant view of the bearded Christian nationalists? Or is it a constructed, fluid, changing thing, which to them sounds unmoored and postmodern? The Christian nationalists who use the mealy-mouthed term “Heritage American” believe it is the former, and, like Fichte, that a nation must restrict or bar immigrants who supposedly cannot assimilate.

This racialism, if not outright racism, has always been just below the surface of Christian nationalist discourse. Addressing the 2024 New Christendom Press conference, Wolfe bemoaned the harms brought to America by immigrants who “make their living in the United States . . . but whose hearts remain in Mexico or Africa or the Vatican or the Levant.” And further claimed “hyphenated Americans” are treated as more human than Heritage Americans, who are denied a place to call their own.

Today’s Christian nationalists are desperate to recover a mythical Protestant past. But they are also back-reading recent political developments into Christian history. Their movement has more in common with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European nationalism than, say, the type of people-group with whom God made his covenant in the Book of Exodus. As Kedourie writes, “the very word nation has been endowed by nationalism with a meaning and a resonance which until the end of the eighteenth century it was far from having.”

Even for conservative believers, there remain many paths besides Christian nationalism; a variety of views on political theology that preceded this movement and will outlast it, and faithful Christians would do well to seek them while avoiding the errors of Christian nationalism’s current prominent proponents.

Our own denomination, the conservative Presbyterian Church in America, has given us much hope: A study committee within the denomination released a report that scholar Matthew D. Taylor characterizes as setting “theological boundaries against Christian nationalism using the denomination’s own confessional standards.” It includes a defense of the values of liberal democracy, which, the report states, have “secured genuine goods, including protections for religious liberty, limitations on arbitrary political power, recognition of human dignity, and the expansion of certain civil and political rights.” The report also makes explicit denunciations of ethnonationalism and Kinism, the fringe belief in some Reformed circles that God has ordained the separation of the races and commands segregation.

There is no need to discard other explicitly Christian political philosophies, such as the Reformed tradition that informs this PCA report, for eighteenth-century European nationalism. That wolf may arrive dressed up in sheep’s clothing, or, indeed, the Lamb of God’s.

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Philip D. Bunn is an assistant professor of political science at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. His research has been published in Political Research Quarterly and American Political Thought, and his reviews and essays have appeared in Plough Quarterly, Comment Magazine, and the University Bookman, among other publications.

Eli McGowan is a Presbyterian Christian who grew up around the world in a large military homeschooling family. He holds a BS in government from Liberty University and an MFA in film and television from the Savannah College of Art and Design. He currently freelances as a producer, cinematographer, and lighting director in the motion picture industry. He also serves as an adjunct professor of Visual Art at Covenant College. He has broken a number of stories about Christian nationalism on X. He and his family live in rural Appalachia and are second-generation homeschoolers.

Emily McGowan is an Army brat who grew up to study 1960s protest music and write dystopian fiction. After earning a BS in government from Liberty University and an MFA in writing from the Savannah College of Art and Design, she became an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Bryan College, where she also serves as an administrator, journal sponsor, moot court coach, and literary contest organizer/emcee. When not nursing her Diet Coke addiction, she enjoys travel abroad, thrifting, and spending time with her family.