Please note that this thread has been split off and is, for now, not in Politics. Partisan posts will get it relocated; please avoid them.
HondurasKeiser wrote: ↑Tue Oct 07, 2025 3:45 pm
I’d forgotten about the term White Nationalism. It seems like such a quaint debate. Lately the 5-alarm fire has been about Christian Nationalism. Some really edgey folks at Anabaptist World Review sometimes worry about White Christian Nationalism which is I guess is extra scary.
It's just Anabaptist World these days. But they are not the only ones discussing Christian Nationalism. Here's an event some might find to be of interest.
Two Nations Under God?
Comparing the Competing Claims of Christian Nationalism versus the Kingdom of God
October 14, 2025, 7 pm Eastern Time
Well of Life invites Strength to Strength listeners to join them as they host Matthew Milioni to discuss the American political landscape from a radically Christian perspective.
As the United States continues to divide into increasingly polarized factions, there is a war raging to control the identity and meaning of words like: God, Nation, Christian, Freedom, and even Good and Evil.
How can we find our way to live out our values and identity without reinforcing and taking part in the polarization and division that threatens to rip our whole social structure apart?
Join us for a talk on these important issues with Matthew Milioni.
HondurasKeiser wrote: ↑Fri Oct 10, 2025 11:49 am
It seems to be the term of the moment. David French writes about it almost as frequently as Bro. Schrag does.
Are they describing something that’s actually happening, or do you think it’s just made up or hysteria?
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"Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless."
HondurasKeiser wrote: ↑Fri Oct 10, 2025 11:49 am
It seems to be the term of the moment. David French writes about it almost as frequently as Bro. Schrag does.
Are they describing something that’s actually happening, or do you think it’s just made up or hysteria?
I think I answered that question upstream in my response to Barnhart.
Just a side note. I encourage everyone I meet to never use the word fascist. It truly has no actual meaning so it conveys nothing outside its use in historical settings of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or Phalangest Spain.
I am not defending “fascism”, I am saying it has no effective meaning aside from a sort of name calling.
Even the three historical governments that self identified as fascist were completely different in terms of legitimacy, economics, how the country worked in the mechanisms of government, indeed even foreign policy.
The point being the many assumed characteristics of fascism are equally, but mixed, found in other actual forms of government.
It is like the modern use of the word stupid. It does not truly mean a certain failing intellect but rather just a generic pejorative.
Christian nationalism is the conviction that secularism is a failed experiment, that societies require a transcendent grounding in order to be able to function at all. And as a Christian, I believe that that transcendent ground should be the living God and not an idol.
That would be my short-form definition of Christian nationalism. Even shorter would be: Christian nationalism is the conviction that we should stop making God angry.
An example of the quest for Christian symbolic dominance is passing laws to require posting of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms, which has been done in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. When I’ve talked to people about this, they try to come up with some sort of evangelistic rationale, but the real purpose is clearly symbolic. It’s to establish Christianity in a symbolically dominant position in a public space. This might have been fine when America was 98% Protestant - note that Catholics and Protestants have different Ten Commandment lists, and Jews a different one from those -- but it seems a stretch today.
Another example is Pete Hegseth hosting a “Secretary of Defense Christian Prayer and Worship Service” in the Pentagon auditorium in the middle of the day, broadcasting it through the department’s internal cable network, and posting a video of it on the department web site.
Having an office Bible study or prayer meeting in the morning or on lunch break is perfectly fine. I don’t think he would even have to take any steps to try to hide it or anything. But pointedly doing this in a way that makes it appear that it’s a quasi-official function is designed to assert symbolic dominance.
A good chunk of the Christian nationalist movement also seems concerned with the symbolic status of Christianity within society, rather than simply having Christianity inform laws and governance. Again, there’s no inherent theological problem with that in a predominantly Christian society, but we are far from that today. (And just as with, say, a monarchy, some of what might be theologically permissible may not be part of our American cultural and theological tradition).
These examples that Renn points out get at, I think, the difference between a decidedly Christian Nationalist mindset (watch the whole Wilson interview to see a fuller, more articulate expression of) and a typical American Christian understanding of the role of Christianity in the public sphere. Both of Renn's options might be right out for we Mennonites or the French secularists but there is a clear difference between the 2. One is firmly embedded in the American experience while the other seems to be an odd and more recent by-product of post modernity.
Christian nationalism is the conviction that secularism is a failed experiment, that societies require a transcendent grounding in order to be able to function at all. And as a Christian, I believe that that transcendent ground should be the living God and not an idol.
That would be my short-form definition of Christian nationalism. Even shorter would be: Christian nationalism is the conviction that we should stop making God angry.
Do you agree with this definition to a fair extent? (At any rate, this is what I think I have witnessed at various times in my lifetime. (As a HS classmate told me when I asked him if he was a Christian - "I'm an American, aren't I?")
JayP wrote: ↑Fri Oct 10, 2025 12:32 pm
Just a side note. I encourage everyone I meet to never use the word fascist. It truly has no actual meaning so it conveys nothing outside its use in historical settings of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or Phalangest Spain.
I am not defending “fascism”, I am saying it has no effective meaning aside from a sort of name calling.
Even the three historical governments that self identified as fascist were completely different in terms of legitimacy, economics, how the country worked in the mechanisms of government, indeed even foreign policy.
The point being the many assumed characteristics of fascism are equally, but mixed, found in other actual forms of government.
It is like the modern use of the word stupid. It does not truly mean a certain failing intellect but rather just a generic pejorative.
JayP wrote: ↑Fri Oct 10, 2025 12:32 pm
Just a side note. I encourage everyone I meet to never use the word fascist. It truly has no actual meaning so it conveys nothing outside its use in historical settings of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or Phalangest Spain.
I am not defending “fascism”, I am saying it has no effective meaning aside from a sort of name calling.
Even the three historical governments that self identified as fascist were completely different in terms of legitimacy, economics, how the country worked in the mechanisms of government, indeed even foreign policy.
The point being the many assumed characteristics of fascism are equally, but mixed, found in other actual forms of government.
It is like the modern use of the word stupid. It does not truly mean a certain failing intellect but rather just a generic pejorative.
Use words that have clear meaning.
I agree that “fascist” often gets tossed around as just an insult, which makes it feel meaningless.
At the same time, historians and political scientists use it with a very clear meaning. They use it to describe certain movements that share traits like ultranationalism, suppression of dissent, and a cult of power. And I think there is also a danger in discarding words that do have meaning, since we lose the ability to recognize real patterns. As Orwell said, “the hardest thing is to see what is right in front of your face.”
So I think the key is to be careful with the terms and careful with the facts.
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1. Are we discussing the topic? Good.
2. Are we going around and around in a fight? Let's stop doing that.
3. Is there some serious wrongdoing or relational injury? Let's address that, probably not in public and certainly not for show.
