The views expressed in this article are of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
“The devil always sends errors into the world in pairs—pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one.”
“You need to pick your pronouns.” This was the mandate given to my youngest of three sons, Beckett. As a young Christian recently baptized the year before, he felt the tension of such a choice. He believed in creation and that the givenness of male and female is made by God, not a choice to be made by an eleven-year-old on a student profile. So he did what turns out a few fellow classmates did when given the choice, he made up pronouns for himself: Beckett Morlan (monster/truck). This seemed to me to be an appropriate but lighthearted protest to the gender craziness that was obvious to him and many of his non-Christian classmates. In the ensuing parent teacher conference, that act of protest seemed to only have one meaning—blatant unkindness to others.
Later that spring, the school was having an LGBTQ awareness day, which was communicated through its various avenues. While this sort of thing was commonplace, most kids, even many of the gay kids, ignored the well-meaning but zealous idealism of teachers as they endeavored to create an inclusive environment (by highlighting kids’ greatest insecurities and creating contexts to ruminate on said insecurities). This time around they upped the ante, every kid coming into the front doors of the school was issued a gay pride sticker. My kids were again put in a dilemma: refuse to take the sticker and be labeled homophobic or take the sticker and wear something that violates their conscience.
Progressivism Goes to School
Our school’s curriculum has long been taught and filtered by idealistic, progressive twenty-somethings. Matters like pronouns and pride stickers come as no surprise. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic we noticed a dramatic shift. Every class and every subject (even math!) began to communicate in multiple ways that to be a white, straight, Christian male was itself a kind of unholy union of unbridled oppression. All three of my white, straight, Christian sons got the message: they were a problem.
From pre-k to 12th grade, my sons have been educated by Denver Public Schools. Their school district is a microcosm of our progressive city, Denver, Colorado. For the past several years, our city’s policies mirrored in politics the same progressive ideals we saw rapidly take root in education. One of the results of these policies made our community a magnet for undocumented immigrants. In a two-month period earlier this year we received a stunning 40,000 Venezuelan immigrants in our city alone, which shocked and stressed our civic resources to the breaking point. Schools, hospitals, police and fire departments, among other social services, are languishing as a result. Already thin budgets are being slashed. Beautiful Denver, known for its parks and paths, was forced to cut its budget for flowers. As I ride my bike to work, empty patches of dirt line my path where once stood rows of blue flax and red lilies.
“In almost every institution where progressivism has taken hold, flourishing has diminished.”
Progressivism kills more than flowers. In almost every institution where progressivism has taken hold, flourishing has diminished. By almost every measure, people are more unhappy, more depressed, more frustrated with each other, less emotionally flexible, and more judgmental than I’ve seen before. Many Christian families and just as many non-Christian families who nevertheless have Judeo-Christian values (though they may or may not use that term) are left in the wreckage with an obvious and experiential knowledge that the promises of progressivism have been broken. It is a lie.
But lies come in pairs.
Enter Christian Nationalism
There is plenty of chatter, online debate, and catastrophizing about our broken state of affairs and what to do about it. A term that’s often used but poorly defined is Christian nationalism. Sometimes people call it White Christian Nationalism (never by people who adhere to it), sometimes just Nationalism. For me, as a pastor in a progressive city, folks who might naturally have such nationalist impulses have rarely made their home in my little slice of the world . . . until last month.
A broad ideology that I previously thought of as rural and perhaps suburban is now quite attractive to thoughtful, young, urban college students. Young people who, like my boys, have seen firsthand the brokenness of progressivism and who have had it taught to them as dogma not to be questioned, or face the consequences, are looking for a religious counter to the religious zeal of progressivism. They have experienced the unreality of progressivism and now have an allergic reaction to any hint of it.
Many of these young people have been institutionalized by progressivism and now having left it, are looking for its opposite. They are like the child in the folktale about the emperor’s new clothes. As the story goes, an emperor is duped into believing that his new clothes are so spectacular that they can only be seen by the wise and cannot be seen by the stupid. Everyone in the kingdom goes along with it until a little boy cries aloud that the emperor has no clothes on. Similarly, many of these young people feel like this little boy but they are saying things like boys who dress up as girls are, well, boys, and girls who dress up as boys are girls. Most even understand the rare but real psychological diagnosis of gender dysphoria but they know the social phenomenon that they are seeing with their eyes is different. They now have an abiding distrust of the ideology that has driven this normalization of unreality and, conversely, they are attracted to its opposite.
But, of course, it’s not just college students. Many thoughtful Christians and non-Christians disaffected with progressivism are now looking for a more ordered approach to civic life and longing for a more rooted way of social belonging. If progressivism was a de facto religious movement mediated via political and educational institutions, why not just exchange a bad and dishonest religious rule for a bona fide, historically-rooted one?
Christian nationalism is the soup du jour.
Defining Christian Nationalism
But what is Christian nationalism? I’ve understood it as a base form of religious tribalism self-oriented in nature that inevitably favors one group over non-group members. I read Jill Lepore’s little book, This America: The Case for the Nation, shortly after it was published in 2020 and her categories of Nationalism and Liberalism have shaped my thinking on this. Yet, as an historical Jesus scholar who has done research on early twentieth century German thought, I can’t help having that brand of nationalism in the back of my mind. In case you didn’t know, the Christian nationalists’ zeal in Germany did not turn out so well. So is this new version of nationalism the same breed as its evil predecessor? The college students I talked to don’t seem like Hitler, so I needed to do some more research to understand this movement better.
The Flag and the Cross
The first book I read was The Flag and The Cross by Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry. I started with this book because it was a textbook in a class on Christian Nationalism at the college where my oldest son attends and because it is published by a well-respected publisher. My high hopes were dashed by how bizarrely bad it was. Published in 2022, many of the confident assertions given as examples for how Christians Nationalists have gone astray—from the origin of COVID-19, to gender paranoia, to worries about immigration—have panned out to be correct! Moreover, their definition of White Christian Nationalism is so broad and oddly argued that nearly anyone who is white, a Christian, and patriotic fits into the description. If you think there are Christian principles at root in the founding of America, you too may be a Christian Nationalist. If you’re suspicious of mainstream national health narratives, guess what? You’re a Christian nationalist! If you have a “Christian worldview,” that is code for seeing through the lens of White Christian Nationalism . . . wait a minute, I have a Christian worldview and have taught dozens of classes on developing a Christian worldview! Am I a white Christian nationalist?! While perhaps well-meaning, this book makes the problem worse by underestimating or ignoring the very realities that Christian Americans actually experience firsthand.
Jesus and the Powers
The second book I read was N.T. Wright’s and Mike Bird’s recent collaboration Jesus and the Powers. Both authors are first-rate New Testament scholars and do an excellent job explaining the relation between Jesus and his church with/against the Roman Empire. Because I share their background as a New Testament scholar, I found their reasoning and historical/biblical analysis quite compelling and convincing. The role of the church is to be a witness of the kingdom of God here on earth and proclaim to earthly powers the truth of God’s word. Wright and Bird advocate for a sort of confident pluralism in which the truth can be valued in the context of a government of liberal democracy.
However, neither Wright nor Bird are American, nor do they live in America. This weakness comes to the fore when they address American Christian Nationalism in particular. While both have insight into American culture, and while it is true that simply being American doesn’t necessarily give great insight into American political dynamics, it was still hard to take them seriously when they strayed into details of American policy and nationalism, especially since they live under governments quite different from our own.
The Case for Christian Nationalism
Finally, I read Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism. This book was not the ravings of a mad man, but a reasoned argument from a Princeton-educated scholar on how an official Christian government might be established. With a style reminiscent of old school Puritan thinkers—a syllogistic string of logic flowing through the entire monograph—he makes the case against democratic liberalism and for a pan-Protestant cultural-ethnic rule.
Hitting on all the pressure points of progressivism, Wolfe shows how restricting decision-making power in civic leadership to qualified Protestant males will solve America’s social crisis. If progressivism insists that white, straight, Christian men are the problem, Wolfe’s vision of Christian Nationalism sees them as the answer. Wolfe is frustrated that he doesn’t have a voice in today’s politics, and he proposes a solution which guarantees that others will definitely never have a voice. In sum, the ruling liberal elite is the enemy of the human race, so let’s reassert the primacy of Christian peoplehood, with perhaps a mutually agreed-upon ethnic separation to make things easier.
This vision of a nation chooses itself over its neighbor and is led by the “Christian prince.” This idealized leader is a sort of Übermensch (Wolfe actually borrows from Nietzsche in his argument) who mediates God’s rule on earth directing people towards God’s will. In his political vision, the Christian prince could punish blasphemy, establish Sabbath laws, and even direct public architecture.
Wolfe’s Christian Nation is a vision arguing against the arc of history that leads to equality. Instead, he desires a future that reinforces a “natural hierarchy.” As an historical Jesus scholar, it was hard to imagine Jesus teaching his disciples to commit themselves to “natural hierarchy.” Instead, he taught that “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).
Wolfe’s vision of the nation prioritizes the particularity of land—fatherland—over creed or ideal. Yet, when Jesus was asked which piece of land he prioritized most, he said he looked neither to Jerusalem nor Gerizim. He was interested in a particular posture in people—the worship of the Father in spirit and truth—not their connection to a particular piece of land (John 4:20–24).
Wolfe’s vision of the Christian nation orients itself toward protecting “my family” over “your family.” Yet when Jesus was asked explicitly about his loyalty to his relatives, he said his true mother and brothers and sisters are those who do the will of his Father in heaven (Matthew 12:50). While I understand Wolfe’s argument, his main problem with casting a vision of a “Christian Nation” is that at every impulse his nation runs against the grain of what Jesus actually taught. The whole of Jesus’s teachings contradict the “natural order of things” that Wolfe argues for.
Wolfe chafes at the connection between his theory of nationalism and actual expressions of nationalism in the past 100 years. He’s like a football coach who draws up a play but refuses to look at the tape to see how similar plays have been run in previous situations. Marx had his theories—well-argued and reasonable—but in the hands of Stalin it became what it was. Führer ideology made a compelling case to restore German identity but in the hands of Hitler it became what it was.
While his arguments stay theoretical it doesn’t take too much imagination to see how it might be applied in the wrong hands. If everyone in charge is to be Anglo-Protestant males, or even better for Wolfe, the Christian Prince, all that is left to do is clear out the Jews, Catholics, Muslims, atheists, aberrant versions of Christianity (sorry Mormons, you had a good run), and, of course, the wrong kinds of Protestants who don’t go along with this vision (I think I’m out too). Wipe the slate clean first, then you’ve got the makings of prelapsarian civic dreams come true.
Wolfe’s sort of reasoning might be discounted by some as absurd and an obvious path to vast social and religious oppression. But they shouldn’t. With every “woke” move to the left, his vision gains strength and resolve towards its revolutionary zeal. Wolfe’s greatest fear of his political movement is its lack of will and fortitude to see it become a reality. I hope he’s right.
A Better Way to Engage
When we were in our parent teacher conference, and listened to the teacher respond to Beckett’s protest, we were nervous. Here we go, I thought, time for the Morlan’s to get tarred and feathered and canceled right out of public school. But that’s not what happened. When we explained the meaning of pronouns, it was simply a perspective his teacher had never really considered. It didn’t change the world, but it did change how pronouns are talked about and made life more welcoming to kids from traditional families (Jews, Christians, and Muslims).
When the curriculum changed rapidly, we were nervous. Is it time we change schools? Before doing that, we first engaged with the teachers assigning the readings. “Where are the classics?” we asked. “These are crap books you’re making our kids read.” Then we showed them why the books were subpar. Amazingly, when the next reading list came out, Orwell, Lewis, and Steinbeck, among others, were back on the menu.
“Natural law shows itself in the wild.”
When Beckett showed us the gender unicorn that was taught in science class, I thought this might mark the end of public education. But as we talked it became clear that the silliness of it was obvious not just to Beckett but nearly his entire class. “But dad,” he said, “we were all laughing because unicorns don’t exist.”
That’s the thing with natural law, it makes itself obvious to Christians and non-Christians alike. Natural law shows itself in the wild. Or as Proverbs 14:33 puts it, “Wisdom rests in the heart of a man of understanding, but it makes itself known even in the midst of fools.”
This past Monday as I was biking to work I saw something remarkable. Flowers were being planted—later than normal, but being planted nevertheless. Recent common-sense decisions have helped stabilize our city’s budget. Beauty isn’t that far away from our fair city.
Wolfe believes our choice in American civic life today is either pagan nationalism or Christian nationalism. This isn’t true—the whole point of natural law is that pagans can both understand and orient themselves around it based on what they’ve experienced. It allows for self-correction. That’s the thing with common grace, it is found among common, everyday people. As Jesus said to the Roman centurion, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith” (Luke 7:9).
The lives of teachers and families that have bought into the progressive dream are a mess. The kids see this. They know it doesn’t work. All they need is some light to help show the way forward and some salt to preserve the truth they see.
Dave Morlan (PhD, Durham Univeristy) is a co-founder and Teaching Pastor at Fellowship Denver Church in Denver, CO. He is an adjunct professor of New Testament at Denver Seminary and a member of the St. Anselm Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
