Christian Nationalism Is Biblical And America-First, But It’s Not White

Carina BentonAugust 11, 2022

If you want to know what the establishment’s all-seeing eye is maniacally fixated on, the amount of energy the corporate media orcs spend bludgeoning “Christian nationalists” provides a clue. Over the past 48 months, there have been dozens of hit jobs on the terror of “Christian nationalism”; there have been about a score of these smear pieces just this past month alone.

Their Pavlovian function is to condition Americans to associate the term with a bunch of extremists and racists who pose a Hitleresque threat to this country’s democratic institutions so that they will dutifully freak out. These articles rely on the same tactics: straw man arguments that misrepresent both Christianity and nationalism, and phony attempts to depict the movement as white.

“Christian Nationalism is an un-Christian concept,” opines the New York Times. The Christian right “is beginning to part with democratic norms,” laments NPR. “Christian nationalism has a long dark history … of white supremacy, bigotry and ties to the Nazi party,” warns MSNBC. “The movement uses Christian language to cloak sexism and hostility to Black people and non-White immigrants in its quest to create a White Christian America,” explains CNN.

The trusted media sources who sold you Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop Russian disinformation hoax, and “transitory” inflation, are at least this time right about one thing: Christian nationalism is real, and it’s gaining traction. It’s biblical, it’s America First, but it’s not “white.” It’s not about a white supremacist “Christian Taliban” installing a theocracy, idolizing the nation, or in any way rewriting this country’s great Republican constitutional model.

In fact, Christian nationalism is entirely consistent with that model. The Declaration of Independence vests the sovereign power with the people, on loan to the government, and entrusts the state with the responsibility of safeguarding the individual’s Creator-endowed rights. In asserting that “the United Colonies are and ought to be Free and Independent States,” the signers appealed to the “Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of [their] intentions” and committed themselves to “the protection of Divine Providence.” If nationalists believe that government should prioritize the interests of the country and the people, Christian nationalists believe, as did the Founders, they should do so under the banner of God.

The United States isn’t special because it’s a nation chosen by God; it’s special because it’s a nation that chose God. The implications are entirely biblical. Holy Scripture invites individuals from every race, tribe, nation, and language to freely enter into a personal relationship with the Savior, to live by His commandments, and worship Him as King.

It also envisages, from Genesis to Isaiah, from the Gospels to the Book of Revelation, the conversion of whole nations or peoples, and warns of the inevitable harm of instead embracing a culture of idolatry, depravity, and deceit. Hence, we read in Proverbs that “a nation without God’s guidance is a nation without order.”

The biblical message of rightly ordered praise, an objective standard of morality, and free will is a steadying hand, tempering the self-interest of nationalism and the reactionary tendencies of its close cousin populism. When, on the other hand, generic nationalism is shaped by the coercive and unobstructed power of a godless, behemoth administrative state, grave problems arise.

This was the story of early 20th-century Germany. Hitler was not a Christian nationalist but an illiberal, anti-capitalist, anti-religious national socialist. Hitler’s New Order was the culmination of a decades-long counter-Renaissance revolution in Germany. The enemy — one they shared with communists — was the essence of Western civilization: liberal democracy, the individual man qua man, and the majesty of God.

In his 1944 book “Road to Serfdom,” the Viennese Nobel Prize-winner Friedrich von Hayek warned not to repeat Germany’s fate by implementing the same policies of big government, central planning, collectivism, social engineering, and the subjugation of the individual to the will of the omnipotent state. Hayek’s concern was not Hitler’s nationalism per se, but his socialism.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Lippman similarly warned about the “cult of the Providential state.” He wrote that a generation no longer looking confidently to God for the regulation of human affairs is now realizing what happens “when men retreat from freedom to a coercive organization of their affairs.”

Today, Americans are reaching the same conclusion, with evidence indicating a collapse in support for the Democrats’ socialist, America-last agenda. Economically, Americans recognize that the manipulation of the energy sector in the name of the bogus Green New Deal is driving up gas prices. They’re also blaming Biden’s economic mismanagement for record high inflation, a crisis the administration is now exploiting to expand the IRS by more than six times its current annual budget. Voters are losing interest in spending billions to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty when the U.S.’s own southern border is being overrun by human and drug traffickers, sex offenders, and violent criminals.

Socially, Americans are trending toward family policies that reflect a conservative, Judeo-Christianworldview: honoring the nuclear family and parental rights, ensuring medical freedom, and fiercely protecting the innocence of children.

As much as the left fetishizes skin color, none of this is about race, although different racial groups are feeling the pain in various ways. The Biden administration’s war on fossil fuels is affecting both the Native Americans whose resource-rich tribal lands bring wealth and employment to Native communities, and the predominately white Americans employed in mining, oil, and gas extraction.

Hispanics, more than any other ethnic or racial group, want the southern border closed and are registering their disapproval by flipping former Democrat strongholds on the southern border red. And with an exponential increase in business ownership to approximately 12 percent of the 27.6 million total U.S. businesses, they’re understandably not impressed by Biden’s economic performance, an assessment 60 percent of black voters agree with. Parents across all racial groups overwhelmingly favor initiatives such as school vouchers and education savings accounts.

Not surprisingly then, elections in North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Arizona, and Michigan, reveal a gravitation toward populist candidates united not by their race or gender but by their Christian, America First principles. The message is one of decency, not degeneracy, prosperity, not pauperdom, and self-determination, not serfdom.

It’s this love of God, country, and freedom trifecta that has the enemy screeching like there’s no tomorrow. But it’s a winning formula, and the establishment fears it, which is why its hordes in the press keep militantly pounding away at those racist white supremacists every chance they get.

Carina Benton is a dual citizen of Australia and Italy and a permanent resident of the United States. A recent West Coast émigré, she is now helping to repopulate the country’s interior. She holds a master’s degree in education and has taught languages, literature, and writing for many years in Catholic and Christian, as well as secular institutions. She is a practicing Catholic and a mother of two young children.