The Case for Christian Nationalism

by Stephen Wolfe

The Westminster Confession of Faith states that the “visible church” is “catholic or universal under the gospel (not confined to one nation, as before under the law) . . . and is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ.”51

This distinction helps us avoid the claim that the church that Christ founded, which is one church both visible and invisible, has in and from itself a worldly mission and focus; it was, after all, founded in grace principally for heavenly life.

While all members of the visible church are also the people of God (with regard to the extension of these terms), these people have their mission of dominion not from the visible church but on account of their status as restored humanity.

The church is a kingdom of grace for eternal life, but in consequence of grace, man is restored to nature and thus is restored to the original mission of Adam with regard to dom...

The instituted church, therefore, does not replace, undermine, or create necessary tension with civil order. It does not form an alternative polis or civil community. It complements civil administration by ministering to the soul.

[Christians] are considerable under a twofold respect answerable to the twofold man . . . the inward and the outward man. Whereunto the only wise God has fitted and appointed two sorts of administrations, ecclesiastical and civil. Hence they are capable of a twofold relation, and of action and power suitable to them both; viz. civil and spiritual, and accordingly must be exercised about both in their seasons, without confounding those two different states, or destroying either of them, while what they transact in civil affairs, is done by virtue of their civil relation, their church-state only fitting them to do it according to God.54

The instituted church is not a nation in a nation or a heavenly embassy for an alternative political order. It is not even the primary place in which Christians learn about citizenship. It is an institution that serves the spiritual, heavenward needs of the people of God.

God has appointed to his children alone the whole world and all that is in the world. For this reason, they are also called the heirs of the world; for at the beginning Adam was appointed to be lord of all, on this condition, that he should continue in obedience to God. Accordingly, his rebellion against God deprived of the right, which had been bestowed on him, not only himself but his posterity. And since all things are subject to Christ, we are fully restored by His mediation, and that through faith; and therefore all that unbelievers enjoy may be regarded as the property of others, which they rob or steal.58

Now, this may seem to contradict Turretin and Willard, but Calvin elsewhere distinguishes the “use” of good things and the “right to them.” Unbelievers, by the mercy and providence of God, can use the good things of this world. As for believers, Calvin writes, “Christ, by whom we are admitted into this family, at the same time admits us into a participation of this right, so that we may enjoy the whole world, together with the favor of God.”59 We can enjoy the things of this world with a true and good conscience, for they are truly ours in Christ.

Neither grace nor the unity of faith, nor the spiritual kingdom of God, nor the instituted church undermines or subverts the nation.

“I think love for one’s country means chiefly love for people who have a good deal in common with oneself (language, clothes, institutions) and is in that way like love of one’s family or school: or like love (in a strange place) for anyone who once lived in one’s home town.” —C.S. Lewis1

The fall introduced the abuse of social relations and malice towards ethnic difference. Grace corrects this abuse and malice, but it does not introduce new principles of human relations.

“Which way, Western Man—the suicide of the West or its revitalization?”3

The intimate connection of people and place as described here undermines the so-called creedal nation concept, which is popular in the United States among neo-conservatives, mainstream Republicans, and left-liberals.

The creedal nation is a nation united around a set of propositions that creedalists consider universally true or at least practically advantageous for all and so readily acceptable by all. Creedal statements usually include egalitarian themes and rights-talk: human and civil rights, equal protection under the law, equal opportunity, etc. These propositions sufficiently transcend cultural p...

The most striking creedal statement is found in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992): “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of mean...

This statement is the inevitable conclusion of a liberal ...

But, as I hope to show in this chapter, neutrality between contrary conceptions of existence in t...

Our sense of familiarity with a particular place and the people in it—the sense of we—is rooted not in abstractions or judicial norms (e.g., equal protection) or truth-statements.

Rather, the nation is rooted in a pre-reflective, pre-propositional love for one’s own, generated from intergenerational affections, daily life, and productive activity that link a society of the dead, living, and unborn.

life-world,

story-world

enlivened

en-storied

Parenting consists largely of socializing children into the meaning already invested in spaces.

paidea

We want them to feel something in relation to it, to have a sort of habitual, pre-rational response of caution.

we are building the child’s world—a

The stability of community requires that the people have a common relation to the space they inhabit.

I created in her world a new sort of place and began socializing her into the appropriate posture and rules for such places.

Cicero once said that “[w]e are somehow moved by the places in which the signs of those we love or admire are present.”7

Dante was right when he said in De Monarchia that “[a]ll men on whom the Higher Nature has stamped the love of truth should especially concern themselves in laboring for posterity, in order that future generations may be enriched by their efforts, as they themselves were made rich by the efforts of generations past.”8

The trees are mediums of affection for the unborn.

At the most basic level, familiarity is the background condition for action—you

The familiarity of place as a public home transcends utility; it is our homeland, a place worthy of our sacrifice.

A people’s will to live comes too late. Like

So long as you go and come in your native land, you imagine that those streets are a matter of indifference to you; that those windows, those roofs, and those doors are nothing to you; that those walls are strangers to you; that those trees are merely the first encountered haphazard; that those houses, which you do not enter, are useless to you; that the pavements which you tread are merely stones. Later on, when you are no longer there, you perceive that the streets are dear to you; that you miss those roofs, those doors; and that those walls are necessary to you, those trees are well beloved by you; that you entered those houses which you never entered, every day, and that you have left a part of your heart, of your blood, of your soul, in those pavements. All those places which you no longer behold, which you may never behold again, perchance, and whose memory you have cherished, take on a melancholy charm, recur to your mind with the melancholy of an apparition, make the holy land visible to you, and are, so to speak, the very form of France, and you love them; and you call them up as they are, as they were, and you persist in this, and you will submit to no change: for you are attached to the figure of your fatherland as to the face of your mother.16

phenomenological topography

I do not argue here for the sort of 19th-century nationalism that homogenized the socio-economic classes of peoples.

Ethnicity, as something experienced, is familiarity with others based in common language, manners, customs, stories, taboos, rituals, calendars, social expectations, duties, loves, and religion.

Put differently, the members of a people-group have the same world—sharing the same or very similar topography of experience—which makes possible the full range of human cooperation, activities, and achievements, and a collective sense of homeland.

Think of the people with whom you feel at ease conducting your daily life; with whom you share similar expectations of conduct, aesthetic judgments (viz., beauty, taste, decorum), and recreational activities; whom you can effectively rebuke or offer sufficient justification for your actions to; and with whom you can join in a common life that achieves the highest ends of man.

Such places are enjoyable only because you can leave them and return to what is familiar.

You can enjoy foreignness because you have a plan to leave it and return to what is familiar. More

To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform still more, these are the essential preconditions for being a people.

Of course, such people typically denounce this “evil” when found among Westerners,

while celebrating the ethno-centrism of others.

Hence, the preference for those who are similar is natural and arises

not necessarily from maliciousness toward those who are dissimilar.

so that a man would more readily hold intercourse with his dog than with a foreigner.

As Aristotle said, “[A] city [polis] is not a community sharing a location and for the sake of not committing injustice against each other and conducting trade. . . . [T]he city is the community [κοινωνία] in living well both of households and families for the sake of a complete and self-sufficient life.”

the intensity of love varies by degree according to similarity and the extent that another is bound to

you.