What IS a Christian Nationalist, Anyway?

Hey everybody, what is a Christian nationalist anyway? Well here is a man who calls himself a Christian nationalist. He's a thoughtful, brilliant thinker.

You got to check it out right now. His website christislord.com. It is Pastor Doug Wilson. Listen to this entire episode and text it to your friends, email it to your colleagues, and most importantly, send it to your pastors. Pastor Doug Wilson joins us.

His book Mere Christendom is out at christislord.com. Email me as always, freedom at charliekirk.com. Buckle up everybody. Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House folks. I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

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Go to noblegoldinvestments.com. You might have saw him on the Tucker Carlson program recently for a long-form interview, and I listened to it three times. An incredibly thoughtful man and thought leader, I should say, and they call him a Christian nationalist, and he's okay with that. Pastor Doug Wilson, author of Mere Christendom.

You guys can check it out at christislord.com. Pastor, thank you for taking the time and welcome to the program. Great to be with you. Thank you for the invitation. So Pastor, why don't you begin by introducing yourself, your work, and your views, and we'll go from there.

Sure. My name is Douglas Wilson. I'm the senior pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho.

We're up in the panhandle of Idaho, so we're in the northern part of the state. I've been here since the late 70s, pastoring in the same church, the long-suffering group of saints here, and I do that. That's my main vocation, my main calling, but I also write a good deal.

I've written books, and I blog frequently. So that's what I do, and what I am, I guess, the reason I'm here on your program has to do with the theme of the Tucker interview, and that has to do with Christian nationalism, which is sort of a bugbear that the left is using to scare everybody. Christian nationalism is, according to them, the thing that's going to introduce a sea of red dresses for all the women, and a Handmaid's Tale totalitarian situation where you have a bunch of Ayatollah weirdbeards, only with Reformed theology, Reformed Christian theology, imposing their morality on everybody and making this a grim place to live.

That's what they want to call it. Those of us who are tired of clown world are simply wanting to return to an earlier arrangement here in America, where we recognized that we were a Christian nation. We didn't have an established church the way England or Denmark do, so the Church of England is the Anglican Church, the Church of Denmark is the Lutheran Church. Our founders wisely said they didn't want to do that, so we didn't have a formal establishment, but we were informally very much a Christian nation and knew ourselves to be such. That gave us the central moral consensus that we needed to be a coherent nation, a nation that hangs together. If you have a bunch of people, millions of people as we do, and everybody has got their own worldview, and you've got 17 different worldviews, and those worldviews go down to the fundamental level, you don't have a nation. What you have is a mob.

It's just a big crowd. There has to be a shared consensus because no group of people can police everything, and if nobody has any shared assumptions, if we don't police ourselves through our shared consensus, through our shared assumptions, then it's just going to be anarchy, which we see headed toward us on the horizon. That anarchistic state is coming toward us because we don't have anything in common. Yeah, and it's anarcho-tyranny, so it's anarchy in the street, but the government will have total tyrannical control over our micro decisions, but if you want to go grocery shop with your kid, your car is going to get broken into.

But if you misgender the cashier when you check out at the grocery store, they'll throw you into a gulag. So much to unpack here, Pastor. I want to isolate one of the things you said, which I constantly battle with both pastors, Christians, and then the secular world. They'll say, what do you mean America as a Christian nation? Remind our audience about Holy Trinity versus the United States, the 1893 Brewer decision, which you educated me on in that podcast with Tucker, but also more broadly make the case and present the evidence that America was founded as a Christian nation. Yes, the thing that in the peace treaty that was signed with Great Britain at the conclusion of our war for independence, the words of the treaty begin, in the name of the Holy Trinity, amen. Which is not what you see in diplomatic communiques nowadays.

No, it would be in the name of BLM or trans or something nonsense. Right. So when the colonies were first established in the new world, the old Christendom, the old order Christendom was still functioning.

It was still running. Everybody was self-consciously Christian. Now that does not mean that they were entirely Christian or consistently Christian or that everybody had internalized the themes of the Sermon on the Mount and everything was fluffy clouds and unicorns.

No, but there was a shared consensus. And so when the colonies were established, they were very committed to a particular theological framework. And even as late as the time of the adoption of the constitution, when 13 colonies or states, by that time they were independent states, when the 13 states ratified the constitution, at that time, nine of the 13 had official relationships with Christian denominations. So for example, Connecticut was the official church of Connecticut was the congregational church.

And that remained the case. Tax dollars supporting the congregational church as the official mascot church of Connecticut, that lasted down into the 1830s. Now, I don't happen to think that establishment of a particular denomination is a great idea at the state level.

I like informal establishment at the federal level and informal establishment at the state level. I don't like that formal, this is the official church of Connecticut or Massachusetts, but whatever it is, even if it's a bad idea that I would disagree with, it's manifestly the case that it's not an unconstitutional idea. Because the founders, when they said, when they established the first amendment, the amendment begins, Congress shall make no law. So the first thing we should recognize is the only entity that could violate the first amendment would be Congress.

Congress shall make no law. Now, if Congress establishes a church of the United States, then Congress would be violating the first amendment. And if Congress declares war on Christians practicing their faith in the public sphere, they are violating the free exercise clause of the first amendment. They're not allowed to establish a formal church of the United States and they're not allowed to interfere with us as we are worshiping God and influencing the political order according to the lights of our conscience.

So at the very beginning, nine of the thirteen colonies were formally connected to the Christian faith. And in the 1892 Holy Trinity decision, and I just need to set this, the Congress had passed a law forbidding the importation of cheap labor for big businesses where the corporations paid their passage over and then used them on their project and then released them into the country after that. So there was a law against paying the passage of a foreign worker.

There was a church in New York, Holy Trinity, that called a British minister to be their minister and they paid for his passage over. An overzealous prosecutor went after them for that. And the Supreme Court in 1892 decided in favor of the church in a very common sense way. It was delightful to read that opinion because here you have Supreme Court jurists making sense.

It was a very, very fun experience. They handled it in a common sense way. And then Chief Justice Brewer basically said, and while we're here, while we're on the subject, let us remind everyone that the United States is a Christian nation. And he went through the whole history, the start of the fundamental orders of Connecticut, the original colonists, their faith, and all of the things that our nation had done to recognize the Christian God.

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Start your free course today at charlieforhillsdale.com. So pastor, I want to read of course from the Declaration that commonly gets quoted by some secularists but they say no you don't understand this is not the god of the Old Testament, this is not you know an omniscient omnipotent creator god this is just an unmoved mover like an Aristotelian god. Of course it goes one of the course human events becomes necessary one people to dissolve political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's god entitle them. What god was Thomas Jefferson and the founders referring to and literally signing on to? Sure, it is commonly said that the founders were deists that's that is the standard operating line that the founders were deists. Two of the founders Jefferson and Franklin were arguably deistic in their inclinations but they were very bad deists. A deist is someone who believes in a clockmaker god, a god who created everything and then walked away and doesn't interact with the world at all.

That's the deist god. Both Franklin and Jefferson believed in ongoing providence, they believed that god interfered with human affairs and so forth. They were not orthodox in their theology but they weren't orthodox deists either. They were far more influenced by the Christian Melu in in the colonies than they were by enlightenment deism on the continent.

So that's the first thing. At the constitutional convention 50 of the 55 men at the constitutional convention were orthodox trinitarian Christians, 50 of the 55. So when people say that the founders were deists it's simply not true.

It's not the case. In the constitution, I caused a stir here one time, there was a fracas in our newspaper and I offered a ten dollar reward to any high school student at the government school who could find me the reference to the Christian god in the constitution. And there was an uproar and a lot of people yelling and everything. And the constitution was ratified in the year of our lord 1789.

Now people are going to say well that they they didn't mean that that's just boilerplate that's just what you know they didn't mean it. Well the French in the French revolution which occurred just shortly after our war for independence is more proper to call our war a war for independence and not a revolution. The French revolution wanted to flatten the place, bulldoze and start over. They were true revolutionaries. They were impatient and they wanted to redo the calendar, they wanted a 10-day work week, they you know they they wanted to eradicate every trace of the Christian religion.

They started the year the counting the years over you know a new year won and then they started you know a new year one and two and three four and three and four and so on. Our our founding fathers did not do that. They were self-consciously Christian. They ratified the constitution in the year of our lord. They prohibited the federal government from establishing a church but they didn't prohibit the states from doing that and a number of them just continued merrily on with that. So we had a very informal arrangement and happy arrangement between different kinds of Christians and and the reason for this is if you if the United States adopts the national flower and then a state adopts a state flower that's not likely to be a cause of contention or civil unrest or any problem. But if you have an established church let's say the Episcopalian church as the national church and the Presbyterian church as a local state church you're setting the stage for conflict and and they didn't want that kind of conflict. They wanted the Baptists and the Presbyterians and the Methodists to be able to play nice together and and and that worked for an extended period of time. What they did not envision was colliding world views where they they did not envision 30 million Hindus and 20 million Muslims and 10 million Jews and 50 million Christians all trying to work it out together.

Because you get to a certain point where you don't have enough in common for the thing to cohere. Because some people believe that you please you please the almighty by flying airplanes into skyscrapers and other people believe that you don't please the almighty by doing that. And that is a fundamental religious conviction.

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That is noblegoldinvestments.com, noblegoldinvestments.com. So Pastor, I want to isolate one thing you mentioned here which included in that topic is immigration. And I think one of the great failures of modern Christianity has been the weakness and the unbiblical approach to the issue of immigration.

I've spoke at over 150 churches in the last couple of years. It's that topic that even the most on fire pastors are a little uneasy about. They say, well, the scriptures say we must let people in and that we must love the refugee and love the stranger and love the sojourner. Now, that's not technically correct, but I want you to address that, Pastor, because if there's a topic where the Christian gets weak at the knees and wobbly, it's on border and mass migration.

Pastor Wilson. Sure thing. So the illustration I use to answer the Christian who's concerned about, well, doesn't the Bible tell us to be generous to the alien and the stranger in the land? And the answer to that is yes. So the issue is not immigration. The issue is anarchy.

The issue is the out of control of it. So, for example, if you had a Christian family that had three foster children, let's say four children of their own, and then they take it in three foster children and they were doing a great job with their family and the kids were thriving and happy. And let's say that one day the state showed up with a busload of 28 new foster children that had not been requested or arranged for and just dropped them off and said, Okay, these additional 28 foster kids are now your responsibility.

The father, who was taking care of three foster kids and four of his own, could go out and argue with them, and he could rightly say something like this. I believe that I was being generous. I believe that I was being welcoming.

I believe that I was being hospitable, just like the Bible said. But with these 28 that you're dropping off here, after they are dropped off, I'm not going to be helping anybody. I'm not going to be good for anything with any of these people. What you're doing is you're taking away my ability to do good.

You're not making me do additional good. What you're doing is wrecking something that was working fine. So the issue is out of control immigration, chaos on the border, lawlessness on the border. That's the issue. And so consequently, you're having all these people flood in, and they are flooding the system in a way that the system cannot assimilate them.

There's no way to incorporate them in. And consequently, what you're doing is you're setting up the conditions for ethnic conflict, class conflict, crime. You're not helping anybody do anything. So yes and amen to all the Good Samaritan sentiments that are there. The issue, however, is law versus chaos. And also there is a very important teaching, Moses' farewell address in Deuteronomy, where there is a cautionary warning about if you allow too many foreigners into your land, they will become your masters and you will become their slaves.

And can you comment on that? Deuteronomy 28. They will become the head and you will be the tail. What's going to happen is you're going to lose your ability to do good to others. So yes, the Bible teaches that we're to be generous and willing to share. That doesn't mean that we rent a helicopter and fly over the neighborhoods throwing cash out the window. That's not generosity. Generosity is intelligent. It's local.

It's face to face. You know the people you're helping. And that really is a moral obligation for Christians. But what's happening now does not resemble that in the slightest. So I think that Christians ought to stop being embarrassed about, being nervous about, or opposed to the chaos that is being fomented on our southern border.

I totally agree. So let's now get into the day-to-day news cycle. As I mentioned, this published rubbish, the false white gospel, rejecting Christian nationalism, reclaiming true faith, and refounding democracy. I'm going to ask you to repeat sort of what you said earlier Pastor, but I think it's important. If you were to give a definition, and you're an author and a thinker, of what Christian nationalism is, not what it isn't, but what it is, what would you say? I would say that if there is no God above the state, then the state has become your God. If there is no transcendent authority that overarches everyone, if that is not the case, then something overarches everyone, and that has now become this humanistic state that wants to govern us all. So we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. If you exclude the Creator from your calculations, which the opponents of Christian nationalism want to do, they want us to simply have our rights to be handed us from Congress or the Supreme Court. But if that's the case, they're not rights, they're privileges, and they're rapidly declining privileges. So Christian nationalism is simply the recognition that secularism is a failed philosophy. Secularism doesn't work. We need to have an authority over our lives that Congress cannot reach, that the Supreme Court cannot touch, that the President has no authority to write an executive order canceling.

So I want a country where a man with an open Bible can say to the established authorities, you may not do this thing, right? And this is really important, going back to the Wallace book, where I'm wondering, how did the word white get in there? How did the white get in the title? I totally agree. That seems a little strange. That seems a little strange. Right. What he's wanting to do is he's wanting to tar us with an implied racism smear that, okay, we want a lily white America, and Christian nationalism is simply a dog whistle for getting rid of all the colored people, right? But that's not what it is.

This is what is so important about this. If there is no God above the state, then there is no problem with whatever we want to do. In other words, if there is no transcendent authority above a nation state, then there is no problem with a racist nation state.

Okay? Imagine there's no heaven, no heaven above us, no hell below us. The only thing that's above us above us is only sky. Imagine, right, as that Inane song puts it. If we imagine that, then we are imagining a situation where democracy can be three coyotes and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch. And if you have a majority in the country that is of one ethnic group, and they want to exile a minority ethnic group, or they want to make them hewers of wood and drawers of water, or they want to enslave them or exile them or commit genocide against them, if there is no God, what would be wrong with that? If there is no God, who could have a problem with what Stalin did to Ukraine? If there is no God, why is Pol Pot's behavior so wrong?

If there is no God, why is Mao's behavior so wrong? Well, people say, at that point, they start sputtering and saying, well, they go back. What about the Inquisition?

Like that's their, yeah, they say, okay, yeah, as you say in Tucker's interview, they've been drawn on that thing for quite a while. Again, not diminishing the evil of the Inquisition, but it's nowhere near the horror that people think it was over the period of time that people realize in comparison to the secular atrocities. Yes, Pastor, I'm cutting you off, yes.

Yeah, no, this is really important. The Spanish Inquisition was one of the worst things that happened in the course of Christendom. But over the course of a few centuries, a few thousand people lost their lives, and it was horrific.

It was really bad, really, really bad. But in a Christian framework, we have a book, we have a law, we have a transcendent authority, which enables us to protest against that inconsistency. When atrocities are committed in the name of Christ, true Christians can stand up and say, this is not consistent. This is not consistent with what we all profess to believe. But if a communist wanted to stand up against what Stalin was doing, or if a communist wanted to stand up against what Mao was doing, and remember that communists have killed 100 million people over the course of one century, 100 million people, and the Spanish Inquisition, a few thousand people over the course of a few centuries, not justifying it, but let's put it in perspective, that was Mao on a slow afternoon.

Right? And so why we should feel sheepish about the history of Christendom, when the secularists, the socialists, and the communists have, they don't have blood on their hands, they have blood up to their armpits. This is one of the most ludicrous comparisons that you could possibly make. Not only that, not only have these totalitarian states been hell holes, and genocidal hell holes, but there is no place to stand for a communist who doesn't like what Stalin is doing or Mao is doing. There's no place for him to stand to say what you are doing is inconsistent with true communism. There is no transcendent authority. There is no place to stand to rebuke it. The Christian does have that place to stand. So the Christian has a way of opposing atheistic atrocities, and the Christian has a place to stand when he's opposing Christian atrocities.

This is the most important point, yes. The atheist who doesn't like these atrocities and he wants to oppose them has no place to stand. He's got nothing to appeal to.

He's got nothing. Yes, and this is the critical point, that there really is no such thing as an atheist. You might be atheist in the sense of you don't believe in the God of the Bible and the God as the Creator, but you believe in something. There is a standard of which you appeal to, and that is one of the most important takeaways that you can have in a political and, of course, a religious context.

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I'm going to get to them both, so let's try to do this as quickly as possible. Number one, why do so few Christian leaders get this? Why do they run for the hills? Why do they refuse to articulate a biblical worldview when it is needed now more than ever? What is your diagnosis of American Christianity and why they refuse to engage on this? I think that we were victims of our own success.

In other words, it says in Deuteronomy, Jeshua waxed fat and kicked. What has happened is Christians have had it their way for several centuries. In terms of a relatively stable, very blessed, affluent society, we've had that society, and we recognized the general propriety of a Christian approach to life together down into the 20th century, well into the 20th century, and a lot of Christians went to sleep thinking, oh, this is just what it's like to be alive on planet Earth. We needed to get out more, and I'll put it this way. The prodigal son didn't run out of money his first weekend away from home, right?

He had a lot of capital that he inherited from his father, and he started to spend it on wild living, but he didn't run out of money right away. That's what happened to the United States. We accumulated a great deal of moral capital, moral social capital, and then we started to spend it on our own lusts, spend it on our own ideas, spend it on our own wild time, and we didn't run out of money right away. What's happening now is the checks are bouncing, and a lot of Christians a lot of Christians are waking up saying, wait, wait, wait, they can't do that.

This is America, right? And then the secularists look at us and say, why can't we not do that? Basically, what we're doing is we're in the position of the prodigal son staring at the pig food, wondering how we got into this position, right?

And so what I want to do as a preacher is I want to call people back to Christ. I want to say, look, you can't have it both ways. You can't refuse to return to your father's house and have your father's blessing. We need to return to our father's house. We need to say, you know, this was a bad idea. Father, I've sinned against you and against heaven.

This is a bad idea. We screwed up. And a lot of Christians were just on cruise control, and they were just caught flat-footed.

That's what I think has happened. A lot of them were living decent, middle-class lives. They thought, okay, all I need to do is believe in the Gospel and go to church and keep my own nose clean. And they were not aware of how much the Bible talks about social and political and cultural things.

One thing I do want you to talk about here is our audience, let's just say, is hearing a lot about a looming rapture and the end of the world, and for that they believe there is no reason to contest for political matters. You have a different theological view and approach. I believe what the Bible believes. I'm not a theologian. My best friends are pre-trib, pre-millennial, and, you know, I just want to say I'm, whatever the Bible believes what I believe, I'm not an expert on this. But I do want you to address this, because you kind of, a little bit with Tucker, talked about it, and I think it's important.

Sure thing. Just very quickly, most North American evangelicals hold to what's called dispensational theology, and this is sort of a caricature, but it's like this world is God's Vietnam, and then there's going to be a rapture where God helicopters a few people out of Saigon, and then the whole thing falls apart. And so you have this, God made the mistake of getting into a land war in Asia, and then God's going to snatch his people out. I'm what's called post-millennial, which means that I have a very optimistic view of the future. I believe the nations will be discipled. I don't believe that everything is headed for Helena Handbasket. Pastor, can you just lay out the biblical evidence for what you believe, and why that, let's just say, connects to the view of history that you have?

Because the view of history that many on our show that come on, friends of mine like Jack Hibbs, they will say that God has a plan, this is the end times, there is a rapture that is imminent, and so on and so forth. So your response or your view, because I think it's important for Christians to hear all perspectives on this. Sure. First, I really appreciate the charitable way you want to frame this. I am greatly indebted to our dispensationalist brothers and sisters. They've done a lot of good work in our country. This is not a slam on them.

I'm very grateful for what they've contributed, but I do disagree with them at this point. So that frames it. Many Christians, when someone becomes a Christian and they go and buy their Bible and they read through the Bible, they think, okay, where am I?

Where's the X on the map that says you are here? One of the reasons they think that we're in the end times is they read a passage like Matthew 24, where Jesus says the sun goes dark and the moon turns blood red and the stars fall from the heavens. And they believe the Bible, and they go out and look at the sky and the sun came up this morning and the moon's going to come up tonight and the stars are all still there. So they say, oh, this must be about the future, this because the Bible's true and they're all still there.

This is going to come to pass in the future. But if you look at that passage closely, you see that Jesus has told his disciples at the beginning of chapter 24 that this city, this temple, not one stone is going to be left on another one. And the disciples are astonished and say, when is this going to happen?

And Jesus starts answering their question. And in the course of answering their question, he quotes Isaiah 13, Isaiah 13 verse 10. And that's the sun going at, you know, what is called Decreation language, what I call Collapsing Solar System language. But if you back up in Isaiah 13 10, back up to verse one, Isaiah says, an oracle concerning the king of Babylon.

So this is not a prediction of the end of the space time continuum. This is a prediction of the end of Babylon. And then Isaiah does it again in chapter 34, where it's the end of Edom. And then the same thing happens in Ezekiel, where he predicts the end of Egypt, or in Amos, where he's predicting the end of the northern kingdom of Israel.

And it happens again in Joel chapter two. Every time the Old Testament uses this kind of Collapsing Solar System terminology, it's always about the judgment of a nation or a nation state, always. And remember that Jesus is answering the question about when the temple is going to be flattened.

Well, when's this going to happen? The disciples ask. And then Jesus takes the language of the Old Testament. And we know historically that all of that happened in 70 AD. So many of the passages that evangelical Christians take and apply to the end of the world are actually, I take it as applying to the end of the Judaic Aeon and the beginning of the Christian Aeon. So with regard to the course of the Christian Aeon, how that's going to go, Habakkuk prophesied that the earth is going to be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. Isaiah prophesized the same thing. Isaiah says that all the nations are going to stream to the root of Jesse, the rod of Jesse.

We have in Psalm 110, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool. So Christ is at the right hand of the Father until all the enemies of Christ are subdued to him. So post-millennialists, such as I am, believe that the gospel is going to succeed. The great commission is going to be fulfilled. The nations are going to come to Christ and the world will be successfully evangelized.

So we will long-term win. But the kingdom of God does not take off like the space shuttle. It's not like every day in every way, everything gets better and better because we see apostasy and declensions and fallings away and everything. It's more like walking from Nebraska through Colorado. You walk up and then down and down into a valley and then up a little bit and then down into a canyon and then up again.

It's three steps forward, one step back, five steps forward, four steps back, that sort of thing. So the kingdom of God advances very slowly, but it's like leaven that you put in the loaf, Jesus says, or like a mustard seed that grows into a great tree. So long term, over the course of thousands of years, I'm very optimistic. At the same time, I believe that we need to be hard-headed and clear-eyed about the apostasy and the rebellions. I just want to say, when you said that on Tucker's interview, I kind of had to take a step back. I said, I have not heard somebody say the words, I am optimistic. And so it was just kind of a category difference, right?

Yes. The late Gary North said there are only two basic eschatologies. There's optimillennialism and pessimillennialism, right? And of course, all Christians are optimistic with regard to the future life. We believe in the resurrection of the dead. Anybody who believes in heaven, but I'm talking about historically optimistic.

Yeah, no, I totally agree, and we're just short on time. But I just want to be clear, because I have seen amazing dispensationalists that use the urgency that they see the Bible as, they use that as urgency to do good. Then I see other dispensationalists that use it as apathy to flee and to do nothing. So the most important question that I have is, what does your eschatology inform you to do? Since you are an optimist and you see that the Scriptures are going to go west before it goes east, right?

It goes all the way around the world. What then do you do? In 1 Corinthians 15, 58, Paul tells to the Corinthians that your labor in the Lord is not in vain. What we do here and now matters, and what we do here and now matters eternally.

It's false to say it's all going to burn, man, and you know, throw up your hands and we can't do any good. What we do here matters, and that's what my eschatology encourages me in. I think that's beautiful, and that's the most important thing, is what do you do, and if you believe what you do matters, it's important.

Check out christislord.com, christislord.com, and the book Mere Christendom. Pastor, thank you so much. Great to be with you, thank you. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com. Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.