Take a Bath in Bleach

No.229: September 20, 2024

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 normally a paid subscription feature with a preview before the paywall, but today is free. 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,

In August of last year I wrote and published “A Growing Menace.” It isn’t entirely necessary for you to click through to refresh your memory, but it might be helpful if, reading on, you find that you don’t really grasp what I am talking about. It concerns a very loud and increasingly influential mob of online right-wing trolls who play around with themes of white supremacy and Nazism. And a great many of them are professing Christians and wrap it in the language of Christianity. Some of them are even pastors.

This week a little conflagration was ignited by a clearly attention-seeking young video editor by the name of Samuel Holden, who published the following video on YouTube celebrating something called “White Boy Summer” or “WBS” for short. I encourage you to watch all five minutes of it, although I warn you that it might be disturbing.

I say “attention seeking” because not only did he include photos and video clips of some of his Christian Nationalist heroes in the video itself, but he then tagged them on X (formerly known as Twitter) to get their attention. Among them are pastors Eric Conn and Brian Sauve, Andrew Isker (author of The Boniface Option—more here and here), Andrew Torba, and, of course, Stephen Wolfe, author of The Case For Christian Nationalism. And there were plenty of others who hide behind anonymous profiles whom I don’t care enough about to dig around to try to identify.

At least two of these gentlemen, the “pastors”—Eric Conn and Brian Sauve—took the bait and responded with pure adulation at the video. Conn did so by rejoicing with a motto that comes from a white nationalist anthem: “By God we shall have our home again!” If you were to go to Holden’s original X post and start scrolling down through the hundreds of responses (which I do not recommend) you will see the “growing menace” emerge right before your eyes. A veritable sewer pipe of racist, antisemitic, holocaust-denying, Churchill-repudiating, Hitler-praising, all-the-while-Christ-professing excrement.

Then the obvious and predictable happened. Onlookers started noticing the brazen Nazi imagery scattered around this video, not that it was at all subtle. I mean, the video crescendos to the closing footage of a young, handsome, blonde-haired Hitlerjugend being saluted with Sig Heil! as he lights the torch for the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. How obtuse does one have to be? Well, Conn and Sauve appear to be exceedingly—unbelievably—dim because they had to walk back their endorsements of this video, claiming they didn’t really realize what they were fist-pumping. Sure. They are either liars or they are stupid, and there is no option three. Sauve, for his part, laughed the whole thing off by posting a handy “list” of things he denounces, mixing in “Hitler” along with Churchill and the “Post War Consensus” and seed oils and not wearing socks. Hardy-har. It’s all fun and games, you see.

This whole affair has caused quite a kerfuffle in certain corners of the social media ecosystem. You see, Conn and Sauve (along with others tagged—Torba, Isker, Wolfe, etc.), while not formally connected to more established institutions like Doug Wilson’s various ministries in Moscow, Idaho (Christ Church, CREC, CrossPolitic, Canon Press, etc.), are nevertheless closely associated and intertwined with them—often platformed by them. They are clearly friends. And when Doug Wilson thankfully took to social media to provide a gentle rebuke to this excitable crowd of Christian Nationalists for praising an openly white supremacist video, he got the full treatment from the sewer rats. Boomer! Sell-out! Fatso! You get the drift. As I put it elsewhere, the inmates are now running the asylum. Good for Wilson pushing back on this stuff, despite his platforming of some of these figures in the past. It is a start, anyway.

Stephen Wolfe, for his part, chimed in to chastise Wilson for not being nice to these well-meaning, if confused, youngsters (mind you, he certainly did not admit they are confused—remember, his longtime closest collaborator was outed for being one of these anonymous racists and his own disavowal of him was, on the most extravagantly charitable reading, unconvincing). Eric Conn pulled the same maneuver: what these young men need is affirmation and support and love! All you are doing by rebuking them is alienating them! For a bunch of fellows who fancy themselves incarnations of Nietzsche’s Superman—buff, weightlifting, macho men ready to save civilization and conquer the world—they sure are needy snowflakes craving a hug from Daddy.

I wish to focus in on a few things.

First, the video is appalling for its brazen celebration of white supremacy and its symbols. Blake Callens helpfully catalogues them here. (I had planned to do that as best I could, so thank you!)

Second—and this is something ignored by most—the video is appalling even without the explicit images and symbols of white supremacy. Take out the image of Hitler, the use of Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl’s films, the image of the founder of the American Nazi party confronting Martin Luther King, Jr., the beautiful Hitlerjugend at the end—all of it. The video remains a disgusting celebration of white supremacy. It is the purest of pure propaganda.

The framing is obvious from the start: find a few examples of truly radical Critical Theorists demeaning white people, an example or two of disparate treatment between whites and blacks, and then follow it up with four minutes and thirty seconds of “inspirational” footage of happy white people, backed by a soundtrack of an uplifting song popular in white supremacist circles (Bastille’s “Pompeii”). That’s pretty gross, but gets worse. Insert a lot of Christian imagery along with it, so that the impression is indelibly pressed that Christian=White.

Messrs Conn and Sauve aren’t to be blamed for liking and promoting the video because of its Nazi imagery; they are to be blamed for liking and promoting the video at all. The video is a montage designed to celebrate and glory in … skin color, an immutable characteristic they had absolutely nothing to do with.

Third, unlike some commentators, I do not instinctively impute the motives of this film to those who appear in it or were tagged by its creator. (I mean, if I’m not mistaken it even includes at 3:33 a video clip of an aged J.I. Packer walking up a church aisle—in which case, honestly, I don’t imagine hell is hot enough.) As I said, Holden was clearly seeking attention, and you can’t automatically assume that a person he tagged approves of its content.

However, it might just behoove somebody in that position or situation to ask of oneself: why does this nut job think I will like his Nazi video? In this case, he had every reason to think these gentlemen would like his video (lo and behold, some did, and hundreds if not thousands of their followers did!) and that is a very, very loud—deafening—commentary on the state of so-called “Christian Nationalism.” And, it should be observed, the response of others who didn’t fall for the overt trap has not been to repudiate this garbage, but to come to its defense against the criticisms of the likes of Doug Wilson. To coddle it, pat it on the head, and give it “affirmation” and encouragement. It’s the NETTR principle in action, you see.

Fourth, this version of “Christianity” is, I am more than willing to say on the basis of Matthew 28 and Galatians 3 and Ephesians 2 and much more, apostate. Antichrist. This is no vision of a new heavens and a new earth comprised of every people, tribe, tongue, and nation. Watch that video again. Is that what these people are longing for? In no possible way. It will not do to seek a “white” kingdom in the here-and-now while paying lip-service to a cosmopolitan kingdom in the hereafter. (Although, note: the anthem, “By God we shall have our home again!” seems to refer to an imagined ethnocentric heaven, on the “other side of misery” No icky brown people there, either.)

The Lord Jesus Christ died and rose again that all races may be made “one new man” after God’s image and likeness. It will not do to affirm that black and white may eat of the same bread and drink of the same cup in the kingdom of God yet must segregate while in the kingdoms of man. We are commanded to pray that his kingdom come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven. There are not two divergent programs, one for heaven and one for earth. It is worth remembering Stephen Wolfe’s since-deleted Tweet that with respect to interracial marriage “groups have a collective duty to be separate and marry among themselves.” This squares neatly with this claim in The Case For Christian Nationalism (148):

People of different ethnic groups can exercise respect for difference, conduct some routine business with each other, join in inter-ethnic alliances for mutual good, and exercise common humanity (e.g., the good Samaritan), but they cannot have a life together that goes beyond mutual alliance. What I am saying is that in-group solidarity and right of difference along ethnic lines are necessary for the complete good for each and all.

They cannot have a life together. He backs up this claim with appeals to Aristotle. Aristotle be damned. Wolfe claims that earthly institutions like family and state—and if my memory serves I think on X at one point he even suggested church—must be segregated along lines of ethnicity: man brazenly separating what God has joined together both at creation in Adam and redemption in Christ. I maintain there is an inverse relationship here: the more Christian someone or some institution is, the less racially conscious he or she or that institution will be; the more racially conscious someone or some institution is, the less Christian he or she or that institution will be.

Do not be distracted or deceived by the non-sequitur shiny objects they routinely use to change the subject. Oh, so you don’t believe in borders? Oh, so mass immigration is just fine? You must be a glooobalist. Stick with the issue at hand: celebrating whiteness.

This haughty and triumphalist ethnic superiority and chauvinism is Satanic. It reckons the curse at Babel a blessing to be preserved (Wolfe goes so far as to say it is the created design) and denies the reality of its reversal at Pentecost. And I will be “mean”—by which I mean loving: treating the Holy Spirit’s work at Pentecost as anything less than it is, the outpouring of the eschatological Spirit on “all flesh,” the in-breaking of the unifying power of reconciliation, real flesh-and-blood reconciliation and fellowship—with God, with neighbor, with tribes, peoples, ethnicities, and nations—is to blaspheme him. Jesus is very grave in his warnings about blaspheming the Holy Spirit. The time to repent is yesterday. But today, as long as it is called today and you are not dead, will do.

The “privileged” ethnic boundary marker of Paul’s day was circumcision and he said that if some wanted to glory in something that was “of no value” (Gal. 5:6) then he wished they’d go all the way and cut it all off (Gal. 5:12).

No more pats on the head. No affirmation. No encouragement. If you want to glory in your whiteness, go take a really long bath in bleach.

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