Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This is a paid subscription feature with a preview before the paywall, so please consider subscribing to enjoy this weekly missive along with an occasional “Off The Shelf” feature about books, a frequent Pipe & Dram feature of little monologues/conversations in my study, and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.
Dear Friends,
I feel I should apologize for the amount of newsletter space the online Christian Nationalist/New Right/ “Theobros” have been taking up. It is a testament to a few things. First, the rabble does continue to grow and get louder and more obnoxious and it gets difficult to ignore, particularly because many in that ecosystem run in circles that are uncomfortably adjacent to my own. I feel some responsibility to distinguish or “disambiguate.” We all claim to be Christians and I am loathe to let the impression sit with the watching world that all right-leaning Christian conservatives are really just power-hungry statists in disguise or, worse, closet ethno-nationalists and white supremacists—as it is beyond clear many of them are.
Second, this is an example of just how easy it is to get sucked into a social media black hole. When one’s X feed is filled with these self-appointed (and woefully unqualified) “thought leaders” posting endless, self-aggrandizing provocations, the blinders get firmly attached to one’s head and you cannot take your eyes off of the spectacle. Everything then gets wonky and out of proportion. You see, I do not believe this “movement” is important, in the sense that they have anything serious or actionable to offer. But the decibel level makes it seem important. And I, like anyone else, can struggle to maintain perspective and equilibrium.
My quick recommendations with regard to that (even though I am bad at some of them) are: 1) Spend time with or talking to friends who know little about it. 2) Regularly leave your house and go somewhere or to some unrelated event where there are a lot of normal people (i.e., a concert, not a political rally). 3) Touch some grass or put a fishing line in the water. 4) Read serious magazines or journals outside of your “tribe” to see how others view the world. 4) Engage in some creative activity or project. 5) Pick up a big, serious book and read it—fiction, non-fiction, biography, history, doesn’t matter the genre. But it needs to be thought-provoking meat, not social media cotton candy.
All that is to say, I am going on hiatus for the foreseeable future writing about this phenomenon. Which is a bad business decision, of course. Hyping people up with yet another outrage of the day is apparently how you get people hooked on clicking and clicking and clicking. But nobody can say that I “sat it out” over the past two years. I will leave it with two thoughts: first on the danger of tolerating or coddling this brand of “Christian” Nationalism; second, on the brand itself.
The person reluctant to criticize and “punch right” (the NETTR principle) will soon find himself in more and more awkward positions, as the whole ethos and—really—business plan of this movement is to continue pushing the envelope, getting ever edgier, and attracting more attention and clicks. It does not take very long for a person to reach the point where there is nothing he will not defend. This is called salt losing its saltiness (Matt. 5:13).
I see little value to the movement at all. I do not believe these are important “allies” in the mission of creating and promoting Christian culture. They are very, very good at being provocateurs on X (formerly Twitter) and gaining legions of anonymous followers; in their spare time they are doing podcasts about Bigfoot and Nephilim and Faeries and why women shouldn’t have careers. For the most part I cannot tell whether any of these “leaders” have any qualifications or accomplishments whatsoever to play the role of public intellectual. [Cue the “elitist” epithets] I can’t tell if they even have college degrees, much less graduate ones. It is an open question to me whether any of them have ever read a serious book; their knowledge seems to come from podcasts and memes. They are “succeeding” simply because they are firmly engaged in the spirit of the age, the Zeitgeist. If you are good at social media, being a provocateur, questioning authority, raging against elites, overturning conventional wisdom (i.e., Churchill was the bad guy!), and being crass, there is a big audience for you just waiting. This is a far cry from real Christian discipleship and culture shaping. This is worldly culture aping. The moments of jackassery and immaturity are not bugs; they are the very defining features of the ecosystem.
So, on to other things.
One hundred thirty-three weeks ago I published a newsletter entitled “History Doesn’t Only Rhyme.” It was one week into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and I think it is worth revisiting, particularly for the latter-half commentary on Putin’s worldview. I was reminded of it because this week former President Trump took the opportunity to trash Ukrainian President Zelensky for not just giving Vladimir Putin his territory and “making a deal.” Then he trashed U.S. funding and arms for Ukraine. Then he parroted Putin’s view that there is no Ukraine and that it properly belongs to Russia. And, of course, bloviated that, if elected, he would end the war with his magic wand.
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