I would recommend this discussion by Jon Harris on Christian Nationalism. Because Harris is in transition and so is moving on this issue I don’t agree with everything he has to say but I think it is a serious attempt to discuss what has become one of the most hot-topic buttons out there.
https://podcastaddict.com/episode/132255196?fbclid=IwAR2FGV3joyGu8YaZFGTbqSBxSWUXvcasVylx06G-lpffrxfx8ldG1oI3FEA
Just a few random observations;
1.) Harris indicates that it is his conviction that it is a common faith that is the glue that holds a people together. He notes that shared ethnicity cannot be the prime glue that holds people together, observing that even though people like Sunnis and Shia can have the same ethnicity, their lack of a common faith puts them at one another’s throats.
However, we could just as easily make this observation about religion. In Acts 6 we have people who have a shared faith but who are in friction it can be argued because they don’t have a shared ethnicity. It is interesting that in Acts 6 the way this friction is resolved is by appointing deacons who share the same Greek ethnicity as the widows that are the occasion for the problem.
The idea that the glue that is required to hold a social-order together is both a common religion as well as a common genetic inheritance is seen in pre-enlightenment Christendom. This was a time when the major countries of Europe were all Roman Catholic, yet the dominant ethnic lines of England, France, Germany, Italy, etc., developed very different cultures. This is because, I would contend, because both a common faith in a shared religion combined with a common genetic inheritance is the glue that hold cultures together. The idea that culture equals faith plus ethnicity is easy to demonstrate. Another way of saying this is that culture is faith poured over ethnicity. A nation is a shared core religion poured over a core ethnicity. Both must be present. If both are not present chaos is the result.
Certainly one can have a nation that isn’t 100% ethnically homogenous or 100% shared faith, though moving away from 100% should never be the goal. The percentage of the shared faith ethnicity/shared faith must be very high. At least 80%.
So, Harris rightly says that a nation cannot exist on race / ethnicity alone. But he doesn’t want to say that a nation also can’t exist on a shared faith alone which isn’t homogenous in ethnicity. I don’t agree with that.
2.) Harris offers “the Left embraces its own form of nationalism.” I’m not convinced that is accurate. The left is internationalist (Communist). Of course, if the NWO gets its dream you will have national internationalism, which is to say that since the whole planet, in the NWO dream, will be of one mind and one lip (Genesis 11 language there) the whole planet will be one global nation and therefore in a very attenuated fashion one will have “global nationalism.”
3.) #2 above reminds me though that even Alienists are Kinists because Alienists proclaim that the stranger and the alien are their people. Now if the stranger and the alien are the people (the Kin) of the Alienist then in an extraordinarily inside-out fashion Alienists are Kinists. Like the Kinists, they have a special priority for their own people. It’s just that their own people, unlike the Kinist, are the Alien and the stranger.
4.) Harris argues against “America is an idea and not a place.” This is called Propositional Nationhood and definitely is the essence of what Christian Nationalists are fighting against. Props to Harris for getting this right. The Kinist insists that America is not only a place but it is a particular people as well. Pat Buchanan argues this wonderfully in his “Death of the West.”
In Propositional Nationhood, America as a nation becomes reduced to abstractions. Throughout our history, from the beginning, Americans have understood the idea that America is not a proposition but a place and a people. Here is a quote from Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge from 1896 I just came across last night. Many many more examples could be adduced.
“The Restriction of Immigration”
“More precious even than forms of government are the mental and moral qualities which make what we call our race. While those stand unimpaired all is safe. When those decline all is imperiled. They are exposed to but a single danger, and that is by changing the quality of our race and citizenship through the wholesale infusion of races whose traditions and inheritances, whose thoughts and whose beliefs are wholly alien to ours, and with whom we have never assimilated or even been associated in the past. The danger has begun. It is small as yet, comparatively speaking, but it is large enough to warn us to act while there is yet time and while it can be done easily and efficiently. There lies the peril at the portals of our land; there is pressing the tide of unrestricted immigration. The time has certainly come, if not to stop, at least to check, to sift, and to restrict those immigrants… The gates which admit men to the United States and to citizenship in the great republic should no longer be left unguarded.”
In the end, if you will not have Christian Nationalism to govern your social order you will have either Marxist Internationalism or pagan Nationalism or Libertarian anarchy governing your social order. There are no other options.
Give the interview a listen and tell me what you think. Harris is doing some good work by seeking to provide a definition of Christian Nationalism that all can converse about.
