As the heat has been turning way up recently on the Christian Nationalism debate (people use all kinds of different phrases for that debate) lately, I have noticed more than a few people trying to find the middle of the road. These are the “split the middle” types seeking to insist that all sides on the debate are in error.
I offer two quotes as examples;
“The reason that there is so much heat (instead of light) being generated surrounding some aspects of Christian Nationalism is partly because of two ditches that need to be avoided:
One side seeks to ‘ethni-tize’ everything (or make it all about ‘clanship’ as David Schrock has said), ultimately mimicking some sub-biblical philosophy, and the OTHER side seeks to spiritualize everything – to untether natural relations – and disparage family, land, or any shared historical affinities.
Both are unbiblical and idiotic.”
Jim Brushtune
Reformed Baptist Pastor
“Kinism is a poisonous, unbiblical overreaction to the left’s social justice and CRT.”
Reformed Rican
First, we might note that this is a little evidence that the Overton window is shifting ever so slightly on the subject. As recent as just a year ago, people would not have suggested that there was some truth in Christian Nationalism insisting that the problem with CN is that it has gone to far. A year ago people were still, in the main, raining down anathemas on all ethno-nationalism type of arguments.However, one has to realize that this “middle of the road” nonsense is just not sane. Keep in mind that in the last 60 years or so we have lived through social revolutionary times and each decade as seen that Revolutionary activity push the culture increasingly to the left. Because this is so, any counter-revolutionary activity (such as Christian Nationalism) in any degree looks Revolutionary to the leftist Revolutionaries and the hoi polloi rank and file who have had their minds captured by the left.
This means that the least push for Christian Nationalism/Kinism/racial-realism or ethno-nationalism is going to be seen by the hoi polloi middle as something that is automatically extreme no matter how slight that push is. As such, the “middle of the roaders” who desire to say that we have to deal with two extremes are seeking to codify where the left’s revolutionary impulse has taken us over the last 60 years. To be sure, they may want to undo the most recent push of multiculturalism with the success of the trannie and sodomite leveling but they would never want to go back to the days when the US was a 88% white and largely Christian nation. Why, that would be to make everything about “clanship” or, alternately, that would be a poisonous unbiblical over-reaction. In the words of guys like Andrew Sandlin or Doug Wilson that would be akin to “Nazisim.”
And yet that is the world that for the first twenty years of my life that I lived in. Now, to insist that world was a good place and to be preferred as having greater stability as compared to and with what we have now is considered turning everything into clanship and practicing a poisonous unbiblical over-reaction.
Championing what we were in 1980 societally is not Nazism, no matter what Doug Wilson or Andrew Sandlin tell you. Those of us who desire a Biblical Christian Nationalism that honors the various white Anglo-Saxon Christian regional flavors that used to characterize these united States is not trying to ethnic-ize everything. Instead it is merely to want to honor our Fathers who combined a love of nation with a love of their own respected regions (regionalism).
So, beware the “split the middle” type arguments. The numbers of those arguing for the “Nazi” position are so minuscule there is no need to take them seriously. Oh, there is no doubt, that those Nazi minority types out there will be pointed too as “classical Christian Nationalism” but that is all done to poison the Christian Nationalism pool.
Those who are seeking to reason that people (Kinists, Christian Nationalists, ethno-nationalists, racial-realists) on all sides are wrong are themselves wrong. The Christian Nationalists are not seeking to ethnic-ize everything and the Kinists are not a unbiblical poisonous reaction, though those on the moderate left and the far left want you to think so.