Christian Nationalism

[joshuabgood]

Perhaps I'm explaining myself poorly but I agree with what you wrote. I don't deny Christian complicity, Christians in the ranks or the coopting of Christian language/culture. I simply think it's a gross error to describe the Nazis as being animated by Christianity.

I don't think PT or I are making that claim.

I am trying to say that Christians who look to the state for succor, protection, security or prosperity are vulnerable to nationalisms that will pose as the solution.

When you stop and think about it, really their faith for their salvation is in the state. All the words you used are components of salvation. Being safe. Being saved.

[barnhart]

Perhaps I'm explaining myself poorly but I agree with what you wrote. I don't deny Christian complicity, Christians in the ranks or the coopting of Christian language/culture. I simply think it's a gross error to describe the Nazis as being animated by Christianity.

I don't think PT or I are making that claim.

I am trying to say that Christians who look to the state for succor, protection, security or prosperity are vulnerable to nationalisms that will pose as the solution.

When you stop and think about it, really their faith for their salvation is in the state. All the words you used are components of salvation. Being safe. Being saved.

Augustine spent his life delineating between the city of God and the city of men, praising the former for its redemptive power and universal nature. But in the end he asked for the emperor to clear away his theological opponents with state violence. No matter the century theology and ethics bend to accept state enfranchisement.

[JohnL]

It’s a lot to sort out for sure. I’m not sure I’m communicating my thoughts adequately but to put a big summary on it I see the labeling of groups as a part of the power-seeking problem that seeks to divide and conquer.

So if someone self-identifies as a Christian Nationalist, what do you propose?
Tell them that they should not be giving themselves labels?
Just call them Christians instead and disregard their own label?

What about the Baptist label? How do you feel about it?

Well in that case I think if that’s what a person calls him or herself I’d bring up the fact that the label means nothing to me. It’s the fruit of their actions that matters. I’d call them by their first and last name.
The Free Will Baptist label indicates which branch of that tree our church community is connected to. We aren’t associating it with a political agenda so it has no political meaning any more than Pentecostal Holiness or even Mennonite has a political meaning. I genuinely think that the problem with labels like CN is the fact that they are connected to a political movement seeking political control and power. Like Hitler or any other party.

[barnhart]

Christian themed Nationalism

I like this new way of describing this. It gives me a sense that it’s Nationalism that’s been deliberately PR-packaged to appeal to Christians which I have seen happen both in history (like the crusades and the nazis) and in real time.

My view is very similar. My interest is not in evaluating how "Christian" a nationalist movement is at the core, the scriptures tell us all kingdoms of this world are either destined to perish or to turn against God. It is more compelling for me to guard the kingdom of Heaven, the precious church of Jesus, from alliance that will contaminate or dull it's witness. History is not favorable to those who have gone down this road.

[barnhart]

It’s a lot to sort out for sure. I’m not sure I’m communicating my thoughts adequately but to put a big summary on it I see the labeling of groups as a part of the power-seeking problem that seeks to divide and conquer.

So if someone self-identifies as a Christian Nationalist, what do you propose?
Tell them that they should not be giving themselves labels?
Just call them Christians instead and disregard their own label?

What about the Baptist label? How do you feel about it?

Well in that case I think if that’s what a person calls him or herself I’d bring up the fact that the label means nothing to me. It’s the fruit of their actions that matters. I’d call them by their first and last name.
The Free Will Baptist label indicates which branch of that tree our church community is connected to. We aren’t associating it with a political agenda so it has no political meaning any more than Pentecostal Holiness or even Mennonite has a political meaning. I genuinely think that the problem with labels like CN is the fact that they are connected to a political movement seeking political control and power. Like Hitler or any other party.

I don't mind labels as long as they aren't used to divide what Jesus does not divide. Otherwise they can be quite useful.

[JohnL]

I don't mind labels as long as they aren't used to divide what Jesus does not divide. Otherwise they can be quite useful.

Same here. But I’m always getting a red alert when some politician or political organization uses those labels.

In Mark 9 Jesus does seem to be saying that when it comes down to ministry that sectarian bias (not related to politics) is not a good thing. One of the disciples was complaining (I notice that those disciples were a bit whiny and jealous at times). In the verses below how do you see it?

Mark 9
38 Now John answered Him, saying, “Teacher, we saw someone who does not follow us casting out demons in Your name, and we forbade him because he does not follow us.”
39 But Jesus said, “Do not forbid him, for no one who works a miracle in My name can soon afterward speak evil of Me. 40 For he who is not against us is on our side. 41 For whoever gives you a cup of water to drink in My name, because you belong to Christ, assuredly, I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward.

When I see politicians use labels

[HondurasKeiser]

We may have moved on from this but I decided to finish a book I started a year ago (and then set down). Turns out I only had one chapter and a conclusion left in Rene Girard's I See Satan Fall Like Lightning and it was the one that was most pertinent to this discussion from a week ago. Girard's theory of 'mimesis' and scapegoating is terribly interesting and lends itself to all sorts of conclusions that touch on sundry theological concepts. For example, I was just reading a critique by a Reformed theologian of a critique by a non-Reformed fellow, of Penal Substitutionary Atonement in which the Reformed guy makes a snide remark about "Girardian Atonement theory". Needless, to say it made me like Girard all the more. The final chapter is worth quoting in full but I'll quote some of the most interesting paragraphs about Nazis, Nietzsche and Christianity. In sum though: Nietzsche is the philosophy behind Nazism and Nietzsche (and the Nazis hate Christianity for its concern for the 'victim'). The story since the failure of the Nazis is even more interesting and implicates all of us as well. There's really quite a bit to talk about here if anyone is up for it:

As I see it, of all the disasters of the last two centuries the most horrible is the systematic destruction of the Jewish people by German National Socialism. Of course massacres are common in human history, but they are generally conceived in the heat of action and are immediate acts of vengeance, a ferocious spontaneity. When they are premeditated, we usually have little trouble identifying their objectives.

Hitler's genocide of the Jews is another matter. Certainly it's part of a long history of anti-Semitic persecutions in Christian Europe, but this evil tradition does not explain everything. Something escapes the usual criteria in this project of annihilation, so meticulously conceived and executed. It didn't serve the German war objectives but worked to their disservice.

Hitler's genocide flagrantly contradicts the thesis argued in the preceding chapter that the Western world, and now effectively the entire planet, is dominated by the concern for victims. This contra-diction should compel me to change my views or to make it the basis of my entire interpretation of the genocide. The second solution is the good one, I believe. The spiritual goal of Hitler's ideology was to root out of Germany, then all of Europe, that calling that the Christian tradition places upon all of us: the concern for victims.

For evident tactical reasons, Nazism at war attempted to conceal the genocide. I think that if it had won out, it would have announced it publicly in order to show that Nazism had ended the concern for victims as the supposedly irrevocable sense of our history. But to suppose, as I do, that the Nazis clearly found in the concern for victims the dominant value of our world, isn't this to over-estimate their moral and spiritual insight? I believe not. They found support in the thinker who discovered the anthropological key to Christianity: its vocation of concern for victims. I refer, of course, to Friedrich Nietzsche.

…This is exactly what I have said and keep on saying: myths are based on a unanimous persecution. Judaism and Christianity destroy this unanimity in order to defend the victims unjustly condemned and to condemn the executioners unjustly legitimated.

As incredible as it may seem, no one made this simple but fundamental discovery before Nietzsche, no one, not even a Christian! So on this particular point we must give Nietzsche his just due. But beyond this point, sad to say, the philosopher becomes delirious. Rather than recognizing the reversal of the mythic scheme as an indisputable truth that only Judaism and Christianity proclaim, Nietzsche does all he can to discredit the Christian awareness that this type of victim is innocent.

He sees perfectly well that one is dealing with the same violence in both cases ("there is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom"), but he doesn't see or want to see the injustice of the violence. He doesn't see or want to admit that the unanimity always prevailing in the myths has to be based on mimetic contagion, which possesses the participants and which they don't recognize, whereas the Gospels recognize and denounce violent contagion, as do the story of Joseph and the other great biblical texts.

Nietzsche, to discredit the Jewish-Christian revelation, tries to show that its commitment to the side of victims stems from a pal-try, miserable resentment. Observing that the earliest Christians belonged primarily to the lower classes, he accuses them of sympathizing with victims so as to satisfy their resentment of the pagan aristocrats. This is the famous "slave morality." So this is how Nietzsche understands the "genealogy" of Christianity! He opposes, so he believes, the crowd mentality, but he does not recognize his Dionysian stance as the supreme expression of the mob in its most brutal and its most stupid tendencies.

Christianity does not yield to ulterior motives of resentment in its concern to rehabilitate victims. It is not seduced by a contaminated charity of resentment. What it does is to rectify the illusion of myths; it exposes the lie of the "satanic accusation."

Since Nietzsche is blind to mimetic rivalry and its contagion, he doesn't see that the Gospel stance toward victims does not come from prejudice in favor of the weak against the strong but is heroic resistance to violent contagion. Indeed, the Gospels embody the discernment of a small minority that dares to oppose the monstrous mimetic contagion of a Dionysian lynching.

Nietzsche had to trick himself to avoid clearly seeing this. To escape the consequences of his own discovery and persist in a desperate negation of the biblical truth of the victim, Nietzsche resorts to an evasion so gross, so unworthy of his best thinking, that his mind could not hold out against it. For it is not by accident, in my view, that the explicit discovery of what Dionysos and the Crucified have in common and what separates them occurs so shortly before his final breakdown. Nietzsche's devotees try to empty his insanity of all meaning. We can understand perfectly why. The nonsense of madness plays a protective role in their thought just as madness itself functions for Nietzsche. Nietzsche the philosopher was unable to sit back comfortably in the monstrosities into which the need to minimize his discovery was driving him. And so he took refuge in madness.

Christian truth has been making an unrelenting historical advance in our world. Paradoxically, it goes hand in hand with the apparent decline of Christianity. The more Christianity besieges our world, in the sense that it besieged Nietzsche before his collapse, the more difficult it becomes to escape it by means of innocuous painkillers and tranquilizers such as the "humanistic" compromises of our dear old positivist predecessors.

To elude his own discovery and to defend mythological violence, Nietzsche is obliged to justify human sacrifice, and he doesn't hesitate to do so, resorting to horrifying arguments. He raises the stakes even on the worst social Darwinism. He suggests that to avoid degenerating, societies must get rid of humans who are waste, who hinder and weigh them down:

“Through Christianity, the individual was made so important, so absolute, that he could no longer be sacrificed: but the species endures only through human sacrifice.... Genuine charity demands sacrifice for the good of the species it is hard, it is full of self-overcoming, because it needs human sacrifice. And this pseudo-humaneness called Christianity wants it established that no one should be sacrificed.”

The Gospel defense of victims is certainly more humane than Nietzsche's thought, but we should not see in this a distortion of some "hard truth." It is Christianity that holds on to the truth against Nietzschean madness.

By insanely condemning the real greatness of our world, not only did Nietzsche destroy himself, but he suggested the terrible destruction that was later done by National Socialism. The Nazis perceived acutely that the grotesque "genealogy" of Nietzsche would not be enough to vanquish the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Nazis could not wait for the superior human, Nietzsche's Overman, to emerge through peaceful historical events. After their conquest of power, they disposed of resources much superior to those of an unhappy philosopher gone mad.

To bury the modern concern for victims under millions and millions of corpses there you have the National Socialist way of being Nietzschean. But some will say, "This interpretation would have horrified poor Nietzsche." Probably, yes. Nietzsche shared with many intellectuals of his time and our own a passion for irresponsible rhetoric in the attempt to get one up on opponents. But philosophers, for their misfortune, are not the only people in the world. Genuinely mad and frantic people are all around them and do them the worst turn of all: they take them at their word.

Up to and including Nazism, Judaism was the preferential victim of this scapegoat system. Christianity came only in second place. Since the Holocaust, however, it is no longer possible to blame Jews. The intellectuals and other cultural elites have promoted Christianity to the role of number one scapegoat. Everyone goes into ecstasy over the airy, wholesome, athletic character of Greek civilization, as against the supposedly closed, suspicious, dull, and repressive atmosphere of the Jewish and Christian world. This is the ABCs of the universities as well as the link between the Nietzscheism of National Socialism and the Nietzscheism of Heidegger and his followers. Both share this deep hostility to our religious traditions.
If our world were really to escape the influence of Christianity, it would have to renounce the concern for victims. Nietzsche and Nazism understood this well. They hoped to relativize Christianity, expose it as a religion like all the others, just a little worse. As such it could be replaced either by atheism or by a quite new religion, completely foreign to the biblical legacy. Heidegger had not abandoned all hope of a complete extinction of Christian influence and a new start at zero, which would begin a new mimetic cycle. This is the sense, I think, of the most celebrated line in Heidegger's "last testament" interview, published in Der Spiegel after his death: "Only a god can save us."

The attempt by Nietzsche and Hitler to make humankind forget the concern for victims has ended in a failure that seems definitive, at least for the moment. But it is not Christianity that profits from the victory of the concern for victims in our world. It is rather what I think must be called the other totalitarianism…

[barnhart]

I guess we could call it post Christian Nationalism. I think most looking back agree German nationalism in the 30's was headed in a un-Christian direction but the question that haunts me is how many Christians could see it at the time.

[HondurasKeiser]

I guess we could call it post Christian Nationalism. I think most looking back agree German nationalism in the 30's was headed in a un-Christian direction but the question that haunts me is how many Christians could see it at the time.

That’s a good question to ponder, especially now.

[JohnH]

I guess we could call it post Christian Nationalism. I think most looking back agree German nationalism in the 30's was headed in a un-Christian direction but the question that haunts me is how many Christians could see it at the time.

Quite a few did - who found themselves imprisoned or silenced.