Indicted by Jake Meador

On the Ethnicity Question and Christian Nationalism, so-called.

Jake Meador at Mere Orthodoxy, who is perpetually concerned about the new Christian Right, referred to me multiple times in a recent piece on “Christian Nationalism.” But he never used my name. I was always relegated to being “Isker’s cohost.” Which is basically like a sidekick in an under-budget heist movie. And just like in the movie, Isker isn’t cutting me into his spoils. Sad!

As I’ve said numerous times, I think it amusing, in self-reflection, that I find myself within the circles of the “Christian Nationalist” ambit. After all, I always just thought of myself as articulating basic pre-Americanist (defined as the postwar Western ideological consensus, often divided between “liberal” and “conservative”) political ideas. My historical sympathies even lie with the work of Richard Hooker, read through the tremendous labors of Brad Littlejohn.

I’ve called myself, from time to time, a traditionalist, a reactionary rightist, and a paleo-conservative. We don’t live in Hooker’s world, and if there was anything we ought to learn from Hooker—and which underlies the true right-wing tradition—it is the need for flexibility and the recognition of particularities in the exercise of power.

Disconnected as we are from the old prewar political paradigms, and in search of a rallying phrase from which we can express our dissent from both Americanist liberalism and the New Left, Christian Nationalism seems to be phrase that is to be used. Why is this?

It seems to me that there are two predominant features of our political age: one is the metaphysics of secularism (which once feigned religious neutrality, and now collapses into an anti-Christianity); and the other is the universalism of political agenda (where there are no particular ‘peoples’ or nations, only a mass of individuals that, for reasons related to efficiency and managerial practicality, can be geographically divided into trading zones).

It is precisely against these two predominant features (and certainly there are others) that one can understand the self-consciousness of the Christian Nationalist instinct: on the one hand, there is no metaphysical neutrality, religion (which combines metaphysical presuppositions with cultural or human elements) is architectonic or hegemonic to the soul of a people, and that post-Rome Western culture’s bed soil is the catholic faith. To abandon the idea that the West is a Christian civilization, which we have, is to wave farewell to our civilization, which we did.

On the other hand, universalism—the denial of the reality of a people as a people, distinct from other peoples and with their own way of life and shared memory or heritage—has proven itself culturally disastrous, politically revolutionary, and individually emptying; to the point of despair.

Now, all that being prefatory in nature, I’ll have to comment on Meador’s actual article. Meador makes a case similar to what I’ve said for quite sometime: the Christian Nationalism of Stephen Wolfe and those who are self-consciously both illiberal (at least in our historical epoch) and right-wing, such as my cohost (gottem), must be understood as an approach to political theory and praxis that is unique vis-a-vis the overall world of politically interested evangelicals within the “conservative movement.” If one is to adopt the overall thrust and approach of Wolfe’s framework, one is at once distinguishing himself from the 1970s religious right, Reaganism, the Regimevangelicalism of George Bush, and post-Civil Rights Act managerial priorities. And he is distinguishing himself not only from those things he is not, but also in alignment with the political doctrines, broadly, of the magisterial reformation. We are far from innovators, preferring to undermine the novelties of late-stage modernity such as Meador’s liberal sacred cows like the administrative state’s Civil Rights paradigm.

But not only that—and this is where Meador is especially correct—our view of political action rests on the needs and dilemmas of particular peoples, not adherence to unrooted propositions. That is, the propositions related to our view of principled political commitments and priorities are, in fact, tremendously rooted. They are rooted in culture, in the dynamics of historical struggle, and in the making of our heritage. And what is causing the outrage is that— and we will get to this in a moment—they are rooted in elements of ethnic relevance.

This point is important, because not only are we setting up camp outside of the confines of neoconservatism and postwar liberalism, but we are also setting up a different camp from the instincts of Doug Wilson’s theonomic libertarianism, and various types of theocracy and theonomy more generally. The point of Christian Nationalism, so-called, is not that we are replacing “Propositional Nationhood” with nationhood built on universal Christian propositions, but that we are embracing that old Burkean instinct of preferring the politically empirical to the politically idealistic.

What I mean by this is something to this effect: whereas Propositional Nationhood seeks to define the nation in terms of individual assent to certain principles (like equality or individual liberty or democracy or whatever), there are certain well-intentioned Christians who, rejecting secularism and moral neutrality, arrive at a sort of Christianized Propositional Nationhood: as long as one submits to basic Christian principles (and behaviors) that define our nation, such as defined by the divinely-given laws in the Scripture, one can indeed be a part of this nation.

But as Meador recognizes, this isn’t really Wolfe’s model of things. This is more Wilson’s. And, more or less, and with exceptions, it belongs to many online theonomists. On this basis, Meador states that Christian Nationalism should remain the label under which people like Wolfe operate, and people like Wilson should pick a different label.

So then, the questions remain: 1, what do I personally think of all this; 2, am I a Christian Nationalist; 3, what should I say about Meador’s accusation that ethnic purity is the sine qua non of true Christian Nationalism?

Points 1 and 2 are brief: 1, I agree that Wolfe’s framework should remain distinctly understood from theonomic libertarianism and Christian propositionalism.

2, inasmuch as we want to label historic particularism within the empirical context of modern European history “Christian Nationalism,” okay I’ll take it. But this does seem a little odd, does it not? This is a crucial way of putting it, because I don’t believe I hold very many novel ideas, and basically follow Burke, Hooker, Luther, Scruton, and other… but applied to particular and novel situations (this is important!). Constantine’s problems are not Boniface’s are not Benedict’s are not Luther’s are not Hooker’s are not Burke’s are not Robert E. Lee’s are not ours. Hooker made the same point about Calvin against the Puritans: Calvin’s ecclesiological prudence was praiseworthy and genius, given his political situation, but there was no reason Calvin’s model needed to be foisted on England. Particularity is everything for me.

But I do mostly agree with Wolfe’s political-theological points (though I’m perhaps slightly more Richard Hooker than Samuel Rutherford compared to Wolfe, which is irrelevant for most these topics).

Now, for question 3. This is a big one because it’s going to be the topic of the future and I’ve not talked about it in detail— only in passing.

First of all, Meador writes that

“‘Christian nationalism,’ then refers to a specific political project that views the dominant ethnicity in a nation as the source of that nation's cultural and communal life and views the state's responsibility as being the protection of that common ethnically constituted community and culture.”

This is, to be quite frank, typical of Meador (and why many don’t engage much with him)— he doesn’t operate in good faith. I’m going to speak for myself in what follows, though I understand Wolfe to have similar views. Defining my political views by their ethnic components is bizarre. Even if it were true that I believed that the dominant ethnicity is “the” [singular] source of cultural/communal life (which I don’t, because I think about many other things outside ethnicity, as you can tell by just following me on Substack or Twitter), my understanding of ethnos is not the summary and driving force of my “political project.”

I’m also an anti-Finance Capitalism guy, essentially a Distributist— why is that not our summary position?

Again, bizarre.

But to reiterate: not only is one element of my overall view socio-political views not the extent of these views, but he didn’t even characterize them right. A nation’s cultural and communal life derives from a good many things, and ethnicity (being that ethnicity is defined in part by its culture) is only one aspect of a people. It is never THE source.

And even more ridiculous and distorted is the claim that we view “the state’s responsibility as being the protection of common ethnically constituted community and culture.” Wolfe’s several chapters on the heaven-orientedness of social ordering within the political state, includes topics like life and labor, family norms, cultural holidays, music and architecture, the institutional church, warfare, and so much more. And somehow this is summarized as the protection of ethnical commonality.

Bizarre.

Alright then, so what role does ethnicity play for us? The answer lies in the fact that man is not spiritually a blank slate. Man is the product of a cultural context and he does not merely inherit materialistic “genetic code,” but also the immaterial spirit of his parents, impressed as they were with instincts, cultural memories, sentiments, attitudes, and other pre-rational elements that predispose him in unique ways toward the world.

Not only does this create for us a situation in which various ethnic groups around the world produce such diverse sets of cultures and cultural artifacts—given that there is a constant mixing of inherited spiritual aspects of man, with cultural elements that man finds himself born into—but it also means that in reality, to swap out one ethnic demographic with another, is to transform the culture. I’ll reassert what I’ve stated previous about all this:

A culture is an organized way of life based on commonality of traditions and conditioned by environment (Christopher Dawson). A culture begins with the cult, the joining together in worship of the sacred, and permeates through the empirical expression of that worship over generations.

It involves identity with ancestors and a shared memory that unites a community with itself, giving it forward-looking purpose based on an historically-derived lens. Ethnic solidarity therefore is part of a culture's meaning; without commonality of past, without the ingrained sentiment of cultural inheritance that joins the living with the dead, there is no culture.

Thus, to drive a wedge between culture and ethnicity is not only to revolt against the very meaning of ethnos (which definitionally includes culture) but it is also to participate in the nominalizing, the individualizing, project of modernity which is characterized, in part, by redrawing communal things along lines like economics, coincidence of consumptive preferences, and managerial efficiency; all of which, in our time, are downstream from the administrative state and its quest toward the socially engineered nation.

To drive a wedge between culture and ethnicity is to pretend that individual minds around the world all have the same disposition; it is to pretend that any individual can be swapped for any other; it is to pretend that man has not inherited something within his soul that is the product of those who came before. The materialist racialists of the nineteenth century declared that all things related to man is material, genetic; they denied that the soul of the individual is derived from the souls of his ancestors. This old modernist view, ironically, is shared implicitly by present modernists who also deny (or ignore) that there are pre-rational aspects of man that orient him to certain cultural elements.

Moreover, aside from questions relating to the inheritance of immaterial characteristics, the empirical fact of the world is that living men are the product of their living context. To import millions of people from other cultural settings is to import foreign cultures. The immigration phenomenon is a culture war; it is the political strategy of bringing one cultural spirit into intense confrontation with the other. It is a denial of the political tradition of realism to focus on the theoretical aspects of the Platonic Individual’s possible assimilation with a given culture, rather than act in light of real world groups of actual human beings, who are, in fact, bringing culture (defined above) into new worlds.

We needn’t be ethnic absolutists to understand and submit to the empirical realities of ethnic relevance. Ethnic absolutism is the view that each person of a specific ethnicity is either constituent of the spirit of the nation, or excluded from the nation. But I’m not an individualist, or a nominalist.

Thus, to speak in ethnic generalities—or more to the point, ethnic archetypes—is so caught up in discussions of historic cultures that to pretend otherwise is to expose oneself as a mere ideologue. To change the demographic base of a people is to transform their culture into something else. The deeply conservative impulse to preserve a culture betrays itself if it refuses (as the Conservative Movement has done) to engage in the charged topic of ethnicity; something that would have seemed far less controversial to the American founders.

I cannot imagine disagreeing with Kirk here from his America’s British Culture:

“if somehow the British elements could be eliminated from all the cultural patterns of the United States… why, Americans would be left with no coherent culture in public or in private life.”

And in what way do Southeast Asians or Haitians seek the preservation of America’s British culture? And why should we expect them to?

(I suspect I’ll have to do a follow up on this, and get deeper into the ethnicity question, to elaborate my nuanced views).