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Dear Friends,
I think it was George Will who once expressed some anxiety to William F. Buckley, Jr., upon getting his first gig as an Op-Editorialist, “What am I going to write about every week?” Buckley told him he was sure to find one thing irritating every week. So write about that.
While I often feel Will’s anxiety, I really try to not take Buckley’s advice. A steady diet of curmudgeonly irritation is corrosive to the soul of both writer and reader. But sometimes something really is irritating and warrants a few words. This week it is provided by Douglas Wilson. In a recent blog post, “A Quick Christian Nationalism Walk Through,” he concludes:
These observations are all obvious enough that they must either be refuted, embraced, or suppressed.
Professing Christians who are nervous about Christian nationalism will see their options begin to narrow. They cannot refute these observations, or at least to date have shown no inclination to try. They cannot embrace them for that will cause them emotional distress, a thing not to be borne. This will leave one option remaining, which is that of joining with the persecutors, and declaring the newly minted state church to be the one faithful representative of the ‘way of the Master.’
The more epistemologically self-conscious our unbelieving society becomes, the more they act out their foundational principles, the more clear and evident these observations will become. To any Christian who is thinking clearly and biblically, the surrounding cultural apostasy will make it plain that these observations cannot be refuted, and no one is trying to, and that the persecutors must therefore try to suppress them, which is what they are doing. The only honest Christian alternative therefore will be to embrace them.
You can read the whole thing, if you wish.
The condescension is akin to those older folks who used to look at my three daughters and smugly say, “Just wait ‘til they’re teenagers.” Ah, yes, the wise, Enlightened One is just certain that, given time, I will inevitably come to see things his way. Never mind that having teenagers has been the very best time of parenting I’ve experienced. Wilson is simply projecting and doing his typical framing that leads up to the conclusion that I cannot be refuted, you will not even try, and you will all inevitably have to either side with the enemy or with me.
I am not going to linger on or write some kind of full-fledged response to this facile bit of hubris. I would simply point out that Doug knows full well that many, many people—yours truly included—have shown more than an “inclination” to try to refute the premises of Christian Nationalism. We’ve actually done it. He is engaged in tribal fan service a la The Wizard of Oz (“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”), pretending that his critics are—how does he put it?—“emotionally distressed,” not “thinking clearly and biblically,” and on the cusp of “joining with the persecutors.”
Poppycock (I’d use a different word, but this is a family-friendly newsletter). Of course, the money quote in the essay is one that didn’t make the eventual Tweet that kicked off a minor dust storm. After establishing that every nation needs a “god” of some kind, and asking, “Who, then?” What is his name? He writes:
Lest I keep you in suspense, the answer is the Christian God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. Jehovah, He is the Lord.
In a society made up of Christians, this would have to be our choice, of necessity. And it would exclude, also of necessity, Allah, Shiva the Destroyer, Molech, Mammon, and regulators from the EPA.
Let’s just linger over that almost-Freudian slip: In a society made up of Christians… Well, now. Does Wilson have any ideas how to bring that about? Because none of the Christian Nationalists I’ve read have any ideas. They have no actionable plan to bring about a society of made up of Christians. Step one, if the essays at American Reformer or that lousy book Wilson’s press published are to be believed, is to “obtain power.” Easy peasy. You just keep writing obnoxious Tweets and it just happens. Step two is “install a Christian Prince.” And this Saintly figure will lead us all to our earthly and heavenly ends. He’ll make us all Christians. Or something.
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