Pastor Doug Wilson is the author of several books, including a book called Mere Christendom: The Case for Bringing Christianity Back into Modern Culture, and Pastor Wilson is one of the rare American Christian pastors who is willing to engage on questions of culture and politics. In this episode, Pastor Wilson explains what Christian nationalism is and why it s a threat to Christianity, and how it s been used by the left to delegitimize Christianity and its influence in American culture. He also explains why the phrase Christian nationalism is actually an attack on Christianity and what it means to be a Christian nationalist, and why Christians should not be offended by it. Guest: Pastor Doug Wilson, author of The Case For Christian Nationalism: How To Reunite With God and America, a book about Christian nationalism written by Stephen Wolf, an expert on Christian nationalism, and the history of Christian nationalism and its impact on American culture, written by David Frum, a professor at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and the founder of the Christian Nationalist Movement, and host of the podcast Christian nationalism: A Christian Nation, a podcast on the rise and fall, hosted by the Christian nationalist movement, The Christian Nation podcast, and hosts of Christian nationalist podcast, Canon Plus, a show on the Christian Nationist Podcast, a production of Canon, a new podcast produced by Canon Press, produced in collaboration with The Christian Nationality Project, and hosted by Christian National, a church based in Moscow, Idaho, Idaho and the Church of Christ, Washington, Washington and the New York, D.C., and New York City, and based in St.D., and in the U.S., and St.S.A., among other places around the country, and a friend of the world, Doug Wilson joins the show to defend the Christian nationalism as a force for the cause of the culture and against the culture. . He's also a writer, speaker, and writer, and author, author, and speaker, as well as a pastor, and he's a friend, and an avid reader of books and author of many other things, including Christian nationalists, including The Case Against Christian nationalism. Christian nationalistism, and Christian nationalists and Christian nationalist in this episode of The Case, The case for Christian nationalism . and he joins us to explain why Christian nationalism isn t a threat, it s not, and it's not.
00:03:00.880And with the phrase Christian nationalism, even the part of it that's coming from the left,
00:03:06.040trying to wrap that around our necks, that's something I think I can explain.
00:03:11.140I can say, yeah, yes, but—and then explain it inside of two minutes.
00:03:15.460May I just ask before you—and thank you for doing that, and I will listen rapidly because I really want to know.
00:03:19.900But just to clarify the terms, is that a phrase that you or people with your beliefs came up with, or was that a phrase that was leveled against you?
00:16:15.860How long have they been dining out on the Salem Witch Trials or on the Spanish Inquisition or the Fourth Crusade or, you know, different things like that?
00:16:25.900Yeah, those were horrific, evil, bad things.
00:16:29.900But the Christian theologian, the Christian preacher, has a book of God's revelation with which to condemn these things.
00:17:03.760Or a reduction in the rights of non-Christians.
00:17:06.560No, it's an expansion of the rights of non-Christians.
00:17:09.580I believe an average—my standard joke picked up somewhere is if I were president, and what a glorious three days that would be, we would get a lot done in those days.
00:17:22.480But if I were in control of this, I believe the average non-believer would not know what to do with all the additional liberty he would have.
00:17:43.980So one of the common things that the people who are trying to scare people with Christian nationalism, like we're going to go back to the handmaid's tale type of thing, are trying to spook us with that sort of thing.
00:17:57.220And they say, we need to keep the government out of our bedrooms.
00:18:00.140Keep the government out of the bedroom.
00:18:01.260Well, I had the privilege a number of years ago building my own house, and I know exactly how many screws the government required to be in the sheetrock in my bedroom, how big the windows had to be for egress in my bedroom, how thick the sheetrock had to be in my bedroom.
00:18:16.440What do you mean keep the government out of my bedroom?
00:18:18.820I can't remove the mattress tag from the mattress because the government is in my bedroom.
00:18:25.900So one of the things that would happen is that you would have a great deal more practical liberty, as opposed to the kind of liberty that the leftists want you to have, the kind of liberties that you can exercise in a six-by-eight prison cell.
00:18:54.700But may I ask, though, I mean, there's no question that the right, as a general, broadly speaking, offers a vision of greater personal liberty than the left, which is totalitarian.
00:20:09.580It's sort of like a, I don't have a problem prosecuting rapists.
00:20:15.160Because I can show you in the Bible where that should be done.
00:20:18.520I don't have a problem prosecuting murderers.
00:20:21.080Because I can show you in the Bible that this is something that God entrusted to the magistrate to do.
00:20:27.260To keep order by punishing rape and murder and so on.
00:20:32.720But I don't, I can't find anything in the Bible that allows the government to dictate the temperature of the water that comes out of the showerhead in my bathroom.
00:20:44.440Consequently, the government has no business doing that.
00:20:51.600So we have gotten, they, William F. Buckley once joked that a liberal is someone who reaches into your shower and adjusts the temperature for you.
00:21:03.560Thomas Sowell's great book, The Vision of the Anointed, is, I think the subtitle is something like self-congratulation as the basis of public policy.
00:21:15.800They feel serenely above it all, and they want to boss everybody around.
00:21:20.020I don't want to boss anybody around unless I have authorization in the book from, from the Lord.
00:21:27.700And, and you, and you look at the Ten Commandments, it fits, you could fit the Ten Commandments on a postcard, and then you could fit the Old Testament in one volume on the shelf.
00:21:39.260Go to a local library and ask to look at the, the code for your state.
00:22:13.900In a, in a biblical law order, you have Ten Commandments, and then you have the commentary on those Ten Commandments, which would be the rest of the Old Testament and the New Testament.
00:22:22.620And if it's not there, right, if, if, if, if someone says, we need to prosecute this guy for hate crimes.
00:22:41.980You have no, you have no authorization for, you can, you can hit it, get it, you can get him for taking the guy's bicycle or smashing in his windows.
00:22:50.900You, you can, you've got authorization biblically to punish the wrongdoer.
00:23:44.760So we, we should have nothing to do with that.
00:23:46.880And, and you find that if you were strict with this, you're going to, you're going to find, um, in, there's a wonderful title of a book, The Emergence of, Emergence of Liberty in the Modern World.
00:23:58.200And it's a history of the Protestant Reformation and how a lot of our, uh, practical, substantive liberties grew out of certain theological assumptions that, uh, that were established and reaffirmed.
00:24:13.640Some inherited from the Middle Ages and some, uh, established a new, some, some established at that time.
00:24:20.000So people think that, uh, Christians are going to bring in this handmaid's tale hellhole sort of thing.
00:24:26.360But there was in 1892, there was a Supreme Court decision, uh, and it was exquisitely named Holy Trinity versus the United States of America.
00:24:37.920Um, and it was, Holy Trinity was the name of a church and Congress had passed a law forbidding, uh, uh, merchants, uh, contractors to import a bunch of foreign labor, uh, pay for their passage and then release them into the country.
00:24:54.540So it was, uh, there was, there was a law against paying for the passage of a foreign laborer and that was meant for these big construction projects.
00:25:02.720Uh, well, a church, I think in New York, named Holy Trinity, uh, called a British minister to be their new, uh, pastor and they paid for his passage over.
00:25:13.800And so, of course, some zealous prosecutor charged, you know, went after them, uh, over this affront to, to the laws of the United States.
00:25:25.060And the case went all the way up to the Supreme Court and it was Holy Trinity versus the United States of America.
00:25:30.780The chief justice was a man named Brewer at the time.
00:25:44.300And then Brewer said, and while we're on the subject, let's take this opportunity to remind everybody that the United States is a Christian country.
00:25:53.000And then he went through the history of the United States, the fundamental orders of Connecticut, the founding documents, just walk through.
00:26:00.120He was historically literate, and he said definitively, in this Supreme Court decision, the United States is a Christian country.
00:26:08.540Now, the thing I want is to be living in 1893.
00:26:13.460That's what, that's what I want, uh, in terms of the judicial setup.
00:26:17.480I don't want, um, to capture this, the, the bad guys' Orwellian apparatus that they're setting up and then turn it to Christian ends.
00:26:27.940Because I don't, I don't want to butt into their lives the way they want to butt into everybody's life.
00:26:42.060But, but for saying what you just said, you will be, and have already been, by Russell Moore most recently in Christianity Today, described as a theocrat.
00:26:50.520And what you just described will be called theocracy.
00:27:37.720They, they're thinking of a cabal of, uh, clerics and holy men and shamans and whatever, uh, issuing decrees on the basis of a religion that the populace doesn't accept.
00:27:49.340And, and we just jam it down their throats.
00:27:52.760Well, we don't jam things down people's throats.
00:28:28.740So, um, we are not wanting to, um, on the basis of some clerical decision, have the clerics rule and decide, like in Iran, only a Christian.
00:28:41.780We don't want the Christian ayatollahs doing that sort of thing.
00:28:46.580That's what most people think, what most people call a theocracy is actually an ecclesiocracy.
00:28:53.820Christian, Christian, the historic Christian doctrine is when people say, well, Pastor Wilson, you need to affirm the separation of church and state.
00:29:03.980Uh, this is the sort of thing that makes me want to dance in place because Christians invented the doctrine of separation of church and state.
00:29:37.540But what, when, when people say separation of church and state, and they mean separation of God and state, separation of morality and state, separation of ultimate truth claims and state, I would say, stop, wait, wait, just a minute.
00:29:52.440Are you really telling me that you want to live in a state that is utterly disconnected from morality?
00:30:00.120Where the, you, you protest and, and your protest is a moral one, uh, and they say, well, we, we believe in the separation of morality and state.
00:30:11.280But, but as you noted at the outset, that's, that's a nonsensical proposition that has never existed and can't exist.
00:30:16.080I know, because all moralities arise out of a moral consensus.
00:30:36.580They need to know where they came from.
00:30:38.340They need to know how we're supposed to behave on the way.
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00:31:22.000I don't think any honest, rational person would disagree with what you just said, that all laws are judgments about how people should live, and they're moral judgments, and that there's going to be a system for deciding what's right and wrong, because there always is.
00:31:38.840And it's going to be, if it's Marxism or Christianity, one's clearly superior.
00:31:42.440I guess the question, though, is how do you affect or bring back such a system in a country that has no working majority of anything?
00:31:52.280Yeah. So when you have a cacophony of laws, it reflects the cacophony of opinions among the people.
00:32:04.200And this is where unbridled immigration comes into the picture.
00:32:09.940You can't just import floods and floods of people with different assumptions about everything into one spot and say, play nice, children.
00:32:21.200Societies have to function on the basis of a shared moral consensus.
00:32:26.700Okay? If there isn't a shared moral consensus, then what you're going to get is anarchy and disruption and conflict.
00:32:33.460Wait a second. I have read many Episcopal bishops and Russell Moore, not to beat upon poor Russell Moore, who's living in agony already, but say, make the claim that it is anti-Christian if you don't let anyone who wants to move to your society move here.
00:32:49.000Right. That's like saying to a godly, sweet Christian couple who has three foster children, and they're taking good care.
00:32:56.540They have four kids of their own. They've taken in three foster children, and they're taking good care of them.
00:33:01.420And then you show up one day with a short bus with 28 new foster children, and you say, we're depositing them here.
00:33:07.840And we, wait, wait, the couple says, we didn't sign up for that many. What kind of a non-Christian attitude is that? Refusing to take these 28 new foster children.
00:33:19.900Well, the dad who was taking good care of three foster children should be able to say, look, I'm taking care of three, and I think I'm doing a good job taking care of three.
00:33:32.100But if you drop off 28 more, I'm not going to be taking good care of anybody. It's going to swamp the system. Right.
00:33:39.140You can't say we need to kick the doors open wide in the name of hospitality without the capacity to process them.
00:33:48.400You have to assimilate those. Right. And it's got to be orderly. So if people say, do I object to immigration? Of course not.
00:33:55.820I object to anarchy. I object to chaos. So I object to the lawlessness that's operating on the southern border.
00:34:04.840Orderly immigration, all about that. And that would be wonderful.
00:34:09.560So I'm sorry, I've sidetracked you. I had to ask you that. But you were in the process before I interrupted you of answering the question,
00:34:17.160how do you go back to a system based on Christian assumptions in a country that's no longer Christian?
00:34:22.480What you do, and this is, you invite a preacher onto your show, you're going to get some preaching.
00:37:20.160And the thing that we try to emphasize in our ministry is all of Christ for all of life.
00:37:27.200I'm fond of saying theology needs to come out your fingertips.
00:37:30.840Whatever it is you take in theologically needs to be enacted and done.
00:37:35.400And if theology comes at your fingertips, and if preachers are preaching the gospel, and there's a great religious reformation and revival, then—and I'm seeing some stirrings of this.
00:39:04.200Do you think we're headed towards something—I'm not saying French Revolution, but do you think we're headed towards some sort of real chaos?
00:39:11.680Yes, I believe that apart from repentance, deep repentance, I believe that we're headed for real chaos.
00:39:21.320I think that the future is not going to be evenly catastrophic all over, but I believe it's going to be bumpy and chaotic in places and violent and bloody in places.
00:39:32.420And I believe that the only thing that's going to head that off is preachers who stop being ashamed of their religion.
00:39:41.160But there are only like three of them in the whole country.
00:40:43.780Christian baptisms in the square, Tiananmen Square.
00:40:46.100And our media turned it into a great high-five moment for Jeffersonian democracy, and that element was there, but there was a hard Christian element right at the center of that.
00:41:42.440And second, you've made reference a couple of times to America's—America, not just Americans, but America as a nation, its need to repent of its sins.
00:42:05.100But maybe a lot of Protestants, or maybe just me, think of that as taking place just on an individual level.
00:42:11.500I think that there's a good book called The Civil War is Theological Crisis by Mark Noel, who said that the idea that God judges corporately is an idea that for Americans,
00:42:25.040Americans, died with the American Civil War, died with the American Civil War, because both sides were Christian, professed faith in the Christian God.
00:42:32.680Both sides were praying for victory, and both sides concluded after the war, well, that did a lot of good.
00:42:41.520So we became, in the aftermath of the war between the states, we became sort of agnostic on whether God ever takes sides or intervenes on behalf of righteousness or unrighteousness in a particular nation.
00:42:58.640So I believe that if our nation were destroyed for our arrogance and conceit by fireballs from heaven, you know, if God were to do that, it would be not unjust.
00:43:15.940And I would say the central arrogance, there's fruits of this arrogance downstream, the 60 million children who were aborted, the various things that we do, the going around the world, preaching at people how to get their life together.
00:44:24.840And more than that, they don't want to, because they want to move us around as though we are just pieces on the board that they, you know, to gratify their whims and their theories.
00:44:37.720So, secularism is the idea that we can establish agnosticism or atheism as the official faith of the country and govern ourselves decently without reference to God.
00:44:57.720And here's another mistake that, and you alluded to this, the crossover between individuals and countries.
00:45:03.920So, we all know, you know, there's an atheist friend or an atheist neighbor who is a sweet guy, and you wouldn't mind him taking in your mail when you go on vacation.
00:45:14.220And you don't think his atheism is going to make him run over and burn down your house as soon as you're around the corner, right?
00:45:22.640Anyway, there are nice guy atheists here and there throughout believing countries, but there has never been an atheist country that wasn't a hellhole, okay?
00:45:38.880That's because man is collectively consistent.
00:45:42.680Individually, we have the capacity to be inconsistent.
00:46:00.160He drives on the right side of the road.
00:46:02.180He does all those things because individuals have the ability to be inconsistent.
00:46:09.260But when godless types are running the show, and they are making all the decisions, and they don't answer to God at all, the countries that they rule are always hellholes.
00:47:16.400If I'm in charge, if I have political power, if I'm Mao, and I know that power grows out of the barrel of a gun, and there's no one above me that I'm ever going to answer to, if that's my framework, I have absolutely no reason not to do whatever I please.
00:47:38.300And this is why in the old order, in the Christian order, there used to be laws against taking testimony in court from people who wouldn't take an oath in the name of God.
00:47:49.940You couldn't testify in court if you didn't believe in a final judgment.
00:47:57.020Because there'd be no constraint on your lying.
00:48:39.700So why are you so hated by some, obviously by the left, but also by a lot of Christian leaders don't like you and are always attacking you?
00:49:31.160But if they're self-described Christians, again, I don't want to use his name once again, but the guy who edits Christianity Today is fixated on you.
00:49:38.140So, David French is a New York Times columnist who calls himself a Christian.
00:49:44.140And they really go out of their way to attack you.
00:51:10.900And the tools, the left breaks them and throws them away when they're done with them.
00:51:16.020And right now, but what is the use of the tool?
00:51:19.100The tool is to say, hey, we will give you respect.
00:51:23.380You're the kind of Christian who could write, get an article accepted by The Atlantic.
00:51:28.100You're the kind of Christian who could write for The New York Times.
00:51:30.740You're the kind of Christian who does that, as opposed to these extreme guys out here.
00:51:36.220But the extreme guys are saying things like, well, let's love God and love our neighbor and build a Christian community and worship God faithfully.
00:53:24.340And I'm asking this on the basis of the following assumption that people, particularly preachers, ought to have lives that reflect what they preach.
00:53:34.080You know, you can judge the tree by the fruits.
00:55:35.340PKs for a reason, and MKs, missionary kids, the same.
00:55:39.280So, but why isn't that—I don't know if enforced is the word, but even acknowledged as a really important principle.
00:55:45.100If I'm going to follow you, I have to see as the leader of my congregation or my spiritual guide, then I have to see that the people in your care, your family, have respect for you and love for you and are listening to you.
00:56:06.380Well, I think it's always been a challenging one.
00:56:08.960And I—but I suspect that one of the reasons why congregations give ministers a pass on this is it helps them to feel better about how their kids are doing.
00:57:04.240And we're in another denomination, C-R-E-C.
00:57:07.340Um, and we are—that means the Greek word for elder is Presbyteros.
00:57:12.800Uh, that's where Presbyterian comes from.
00:57:14.660And we have a body of elders that govern our local church.
00:57:19.100And we have this standard of family and order for the elders of the church.
00:57:24.160And—and one of the things we ask an elder who's coming on to serve is if, uh, one of your kids, if, if there's a wobble develops, um, will you bring it up to us so that we don't have to chase you?
00:57:37.820Uh, we have given leaves of absence, uh, to an elder.
00:57:43.000Why don't you take a leave of absence from eldering duties for six months so you can pay attention to your kids so you can—
00:58:00.640We have a body of elders whose kids walk with God, whose kids love God.
00:58:06.500And if, um, and if, you know, a child rebelled, um, and walked away, that elder would resign from the elder board because we hold—that's the teaching of the Bible.
00:58:19.860Yeah, if your own kids don't believe you, why should I?
00:58:22.000Now, at the same time, I, uh, I don't want to water this down.
00:58:25.620I want to say we believe that we're evaluating character, not counting rocks, right?
00:58:30.580So let's say, let's say you had an elder who had four kids of his own, and they're all walking with God, and then his brother, who was an atheist, got killed in a car wreck, and they adopted a 12-year-old girl.
00:59:00.180So, yes, that—I think that this matters, and I believe that it's, um, um, Christianity—when I said theology flows at your fingertips, it's supposed to flow out first to the people who know you best.
00:59:24.880Uh, so, I just want to end with your vision of where we're going, and I think you have probably disarmed your critics by saying, as you did very clearly, I'm not calling for a political solution to this.
00:59:37.600The country itself has to change and be worthy of living the way that you hope that it does.
00:59:42.860Um, what are the—and then you said, well, but I see signs of that happening.
01:07:10.960Because basically, that's—there's a great story where Chesterton was asked, along with a bunch of other men, to submit an essay on what's wrong with the world.
01:07:22.400You know, they were running a series in the newspaper, what's wrong with the world.
01:07:26.020And Chesterton wrote a two-word essay.