The Case for Christian Nationalism: Loving your Nation to the Exclusion of All Others
Overview of Chapter Three of Stephen Wolfe's polemic in favour of Christian Nationalism
In Chapter three Wolfe pushes theology to the background, focusing now on the responsibility of individuals to love their nation, as we shall see, to the exclusion of all others. I should warn my readership that this chapter is, at its heart, xenophobic, though the author repeatedly mocks those who would apply that label to his thought - as I noted in the first piece, intellectual humility is not Wolfe’s strong suit.
Sections: Place and Space in the Nationalist Imagination / Comforting Familiarity and Terrifying Foreignness / Blood and Soil 2.0 / Onwards Christian Nationalism, Marching as to War / Western Egalitarian Universalism as National Suicide
The Role of Place and Space in the Nationalist Imagination
Before getting to discussions of ethnicity and nationhood, Wolfe's aims to show that there is something special about space and place. He argues that places and spaces gain their meaning when human beings live, act, and reproduce in those places, when, through living there and working the land, they begin to call that place ‘home.’ He writes, “My point is that the space we inhabit is invested with meaning that depends on the nature of the human being and on cultural particularity. … Thus, our world in experience is thoroughly placial; our world is one of many places, each place having meaning that exists only in our human or cultural relation to these spaces.”
Over time – several generations, in fact - humans begin to associate themselves and their kin through a sort of institutional memory, with the places and spaces where they live. Moreover, Wolfe thinks that human beings are naturally embedded in the particular physical places they call home. He doesn't see any space for nomadic lifestyles – instead human beings are place-oriented by nature, bound to the earth-space where they and their kin have lived for generations, a consequence of his commitment to the literal Genesis creation story and subsequent fall of man. Humans were expelled from the Garden of Eden, which was to be the home of Man, complete with all the attendant comfort and familiarity that correspond with home. This set-up is very important because it allows Wolfe to justify exclusionary approaches to place and space. For Wolfe, what's ours is ours, and what's yours is yours, and – most importantly - never the twain shall meet. He attempts to compare and contrast this vision with what he sees as a nefarious ‘culture of universality:’
“In the West, people-groups have become either concealed and suppressed or celebrated and purified by an ideology of universality, partly through the homogenizing forces of state capitalism and capitalist statecraft and through the ethnic privileging of woke capitalism - all in the interest of a cosmopolitan, super-rich elite of "no-wheres." This chapter critiques that ideology of universality by showing that each person has an ethnicity with a delimited people group and by insisting that each people-group ought to self-affirm and act for itself. This for-itself posture is necessary to combat globalism, homogenization, sanctified ethno-narcissism, and the weak collective will that prevails in our time. More importantly, it provides an important premise for my justification of Christian nationalism: a Christian people, whose (sic) good is found both in cultural particularity and in a universal religion, can and must be for itself as a distinct people in the interest of earthly and heavenly good, for itself and its posterity. … I use the terms ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nation’ almost synonymously, though I use the former to emphasize particular features that distinguish one people group from another. Since every people-group has internal differences, ‘nation’ is used to emphasize the unity of the whole, though no nation, properly speaking, is composed of two or more ethnicities.” (p. 135)
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