The Confusion of Torba & Isker’s “Christian Nationalism”

Today I received Torba & Isker’s Christian Nationalism in the mail. I think it took me 30 minutes to read. It is more of a pamphlet then a book and so I probably paid too much for it. Below are a few random observations on a book that overall, left me discouraged, if only because I had others telling me that there was a good deal here to be hopeful about even if it was written for those just getting on the Christian Nationalist train.

I.) The Good

1.) Torba and Isker return repeatedly to the necessity for Christians to build parallel communities. This is something I have been saying for over 20 years. My only qualification on that has been to say that Christians need to be building parallel but not completely isolated communities. If and when we build our parallel communities we still want to be connected enough to the larger culture around us so that we can be salt and light in that context. This is why our parallel communities dare not be completely isolated. Think of the necessary communities I am talking about as ice cubes in a drink. The ice cubes influence the drink but are not influenced by the drink. The ice cubes are parallel to the drink but are not isolated.

2.) Torba and Isker take on the whole “Judeo-Christianity” myth driven for the most part as it is by a Dispensational theology.

“True antisemitism is overlooking Jews or failing to evangelize them because you believe they are ‘chosen’ by God and therefore get a free pass from rejecting Jesus Christ.”

Torba & Isker
Christian Nationalism

This was a brave thing for them to do since writing anything that distinguishes Christianity from Judaism is touching the third rail of social concourse. It is just not done without being electrocuted. I salute them for pointing out the contradiction in “Judeo-Christianity” and further insisting that Christians need to realize that Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews are enemies of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

3.) Torba and Isker clearly are postmillennialist in their eschatology. They understand that Christianity as a public square faith will never regain its traction until it is forever done with premillennialism and amillennialism — with defeatist and retreatist eschatologies. They remind their readers continuously that Jesus Christ has bound the strong men, that He came to usher in the Kingdom, that He, having all authority in heaven and earth, commissioned His people to disciple all the nations, that Jesus Christ is ascended to the right hand of the Father in order to rule until all His enemies have been placed under His feet. A Christian Church that does not have the mindset that it is to conquer all non-Christian kingdoms that rise up against the Kingdom of Christ is a Christian Church in name only.

4.) Torba & Isker take on the foolishness of Dispensationalism with its horse dung theology of rapturism and escapism. They point out rightly that supercessionism (which Dispensationalism denies) is the normative position of the historic Christian Church. (Supercessionism is the Christian knowledge that that not merely that the Old Testament Hebrew faith has been fulfilled by the coming of Jesus Christ and so being incomplete apart from Christ is ended. This means that God has no special relation with Judaism and is only the God of Jews inasmuch as they repent and trust Jesus Christ to forgive their sins.) Torba and Isker rightly point out that the God of the Bible is done with Judaism just as the God of the Bible is done with Islam, Hinduism, Mormonism, and every other false religion.

5.) We concede that Torba and Isker are reaching for something that might approximate Christendom. They have miles to go before they are ringing exactly the right notes but at least, unlike most of Christianity, they realize that where we are at now is only promissory of complete and utter destruction.

II.) The Bad

1.) Whatever Torba and Isker are peddling, at the end of the day, it is not any kind of Christian Nationalism that I would understand as Christian Nationalism.

First, of all the Christian part of their nationalism is iffy. Torba and Isker include Roman Catholics, and the Eastern Orthodox in their aspiration for a return to Christian Nationalism. Torba & Isker call the Quakers who settled Pennsylvania a heretical sect (and they were) but are silent about the heretical sect that were the Roman Catholics who settled Maryland.

This displays a gross ignorance of church history. Protestant Christians do not view Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox as being particularly Christian. Maybe Torba and Isker need to review their Reformation history. Maybe a review of the St. Bartholomew’s day Massacre in France? Maybe a few lessons on the filioque controversy between East and West. Maybe some teaching on the anathemas issued forth from the council of Trent against the Protestants. I’m sorry Andrew and Andrew but Christian Nationalism is not Christian Nationalism when you seek to include non-Christians into your Christian Nationalism. Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox need to repent before they can have any role besides bus riding in our Christian Nationalism.

Second, the Nationalism part of their Christian Nationalism is also iffy. Andrew & Andrew seem to fail to understand that the very idea of Nationalism includes the idea of racial/ethnic harmony.

“We (Our Christian Nationalism) don’t care about your race, ethnic background, or your past sins because neither does Jesus care.”

Torba & Isker

Christian Nationalism

“Christianity is not limited to any race, ethnicity or culture (I Cor. 12:13, Gal. 3:27-29). Therefore Christian Nationalism cannot be limited to any race, ethnicity, or culture.”

Torba & Isker

Christian Nationalism –p. 7

 It is not Nationalism if in the Nationalism one is trying to build  is characterized as a hodge-podge of peoples from every race and ethnicity imaginable just so long as they are “Christian” (even Roman Catholic and Easter Orthodox). Clearly, where we are at here with the twin Andrews is a kind of Civil Nationalism which has always been a bastard child of genuine Nationalism and as a bastard child never lives for long very well. In order for any Christian Nationalism as pursued by any people of any race/ethnicity there must be stable large percentage core of people who share a common race/ethnicity and so culture. Let’s go, for the sake of argument, 85%. After that core there can then be another assimilated 10% of peoples from other ethnicities and then the last 5% or so will find the unassimilated strangers and aliens that every Nation likely has.

Torba and Isker give a running account of how all the original 13 colonies began as explicitly Christian states. What Torba and Isker fail to mention is that each of those explicitly Christian states also had the commonality of all being comprised of white people. The Christian Nationalism we had in our beginnings was not mélange Nationalism.

So, the Christian Nationalism of Torba and Isker is fine as long as one isn’t expecting either a genuine Christianity that produces Christian Nationalism or a Nationalism that is particularly ethno-National. Besides that, it’s great stuff.

In the end what the Andrews are giving us is a Ecumenical non-Nationalism. I suppose, as I said above, they are going for a civic nationalism but I’m not sure they realize that.

Honestly this is weak sauce.

2.) I have to protest the painful reductionism of this pamphlet. As I was reading I found myself thinking; “This is Dick and Jane meets Political Philosophy.” Now, I get the idea of having to reach your audience and of writing for your audience but dear God in heaven above if we have been reduced to the 2nd grade reading level and sentence structure of this book I’m not sure I’d want to be part of any successful Christian Nationalism that grows up in such a populace. Can it really be that we have become the simpletons that Torba and Isker are writing for? Have we descended that far? I found myself thinking that this was such a far cry from the Federalist Papers which were written for the average farmer and newspaper reader in 18th century America that we perhaps should just surrender. I’m not sure I want to be a part of a Christendom that is inhabited and characterized by the kind of reader to which the Andrews are appealing.

I prefer instead to believe that the Andrews vastly underestimate their audience.

III.) The Ugly

1.) “We do not … think that America is ‘chosen by God…'”

Torba & Isker

Christian Nationalism

Actually, properly understood I do believe that America was chosen by God. I look at the arrival of those first explorers, Pilgrims, and Christians and I do believe that God chose America to be a covenanted nation and that indeed it was a covenanted nation by its relation through its ancestors to the Solemn League and Covenant. Indeed, one reason I think we are getting spanked good and hard is because we have rebelled against the God who chose us for His ends.

Now, I don’t believe that America is chosen by God when that is invoked by all the flag wavers who are forever wrapping the flag around the Cross in order to advance their latest anti-Christian project. I don’t believe that America was chosen by God when Billy Sunday revivals ended with the men who got saved signing up to fight in WW I. I don’t think America was chosen by God when Franklin D. Roosevelt led the troops in singing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” when on a Battleship in the Atlantic. I don’t think America was chosen by God when God was invoked on the side of the abolitionists or the temperance movement idiots. So, objectively speaking, “yes, American was chosen by God,” but subjectively America was not chosen by God to do any number of things that it has done as invoked by cracked head clergy.

2.) “American Christianity no longer looks like it once did at the founding of the Christian nation, but it is still nevertheless a nation of Christian people.”

Torba & Isker

Christian Nationalism

How anyone can say this with a straight face just leaves me dumbfounded. I allow it is possible that I don’t get out and around enough but in my world America is not even close to being a nation of Christian people. The fact that we have stood by while over 60 million infants have been tortured and slaughtered in my estimation gives the lunacy to the quote above.

3.) “The US was founded as a Christian nation. It was only the federal government that was founded as a secular entity, so as to not infringe upon the established religion of these Christian states.”

Torba & Isker

Christian Nationalism — p. 12-13

Yes, and we all know how that plan worked to allow the Federal Government to be a secular entity and how the FEDS indeed did not infringe on the established religion of the Southern States in 1861.

Torba and Isker seem not to realize that secular is not possible if by that you mean a position or institution that has no religious underpinning.

4.) Wherein Torba and Isker teach me that my forefathers were abolitionists.

“As Christian Nationalists, we generally do not seek to apply uniform laws across the entire US of America, except in the most egregious circumstances, such as for example the legal acceptance of slavery which our forefathers (abolitionists) sought to abolish…”

Torba & Isker

Christian Nationalism

How do Torba and Isker explain the Bible’s uniform acceptance of slavery as a Institution that is acceptable among Christians?

5.) File Under: Somebody notify Charlemagne;

“Christians do not believe in forced or coercive conversion to Christianity. This is inconsistent with our religion’s teaching on free-will (II Pt. 3:9) and all conversions to Christianity must be voluntary.”

Torba & Isker

Christian Nationalism — p. 10

Actually, the idea that Christianity can’t be forced or coercive is historically a relatively recent idea. Charlemagne believed in forced conversions. The Crusaders certainly believed in forced coercion.  The tribes set free by Cortez were glad for their forced conversions.

Look, I get it that we desire men to see the reasonableness of Christianity and so bow the knee to Christ willingly but I’m willing to go all Boniface on peoples if the need calls for it.

6.) “Christians are integralists and not theocrats, in that we have favored two separate institutions, one for religion (the Church) and one for government (the state).”

Torba & Isker

Christian Nationalism — p. 9

Actually, inasmuch as Christians expect both of those separate institutions to each be Christian they have indeed always throughout history been both integralists and theocrats. Where they have not been theocrats they have not been Christian.

 

McAtee Contra Doug Wilson on Charges of “Skinism” and Other Theological Points

“One collection of folks who excel at both racial vainglory and racial animosity is a group that call themselves kinists. I call them skinists…”

The thing that requires me to identify kinists as racists (and as much in defiance of the Scriptures as any they oppose) is the overt malevolence they routinely show toward the image and work of God Himself. To mock folly and sin is a prophetic duty. To mock the color of a man’s skin is to defy the handiwork of God. Crimes motivated by racial animosity (in any direction) reveal a pathetic culture, the end result of worshipping pathetic gods. They were not the end result of the triune God’s decision to make some of us white and some of us black. When whites worship pathetic gods, the end result features the same kind of twistedness. And how the people (Kinists) say they love God, whom they have not seen, when they routinely taunt the handiwork of God in others, handiwork they have seen, thereby showing they detest the image of God? Of course they might say they only mean to insult certain sins — they might say that in response, but it is not what they actually do. Spend 15 minutes on a skinist website or FB group, and will find plenty of examples of hostility to the creational work of God. If I were admonishing a man for laziness, and I suddenly found myself upbraiding him for having two legs, I have crossed over from legitimate admonition …

 

Racial malice and racial vainglory are sins against God, not because they take the obvious factors of race into account as they interpret the world, but because they are malicious and vainglorious.”

Doug Wilson

Skin & Blood

1.) Allow me to admit that there have been times when I have seen black people being mocked by white Kinists simply because they are black. I do agree when this happens this is a bridge too far. However, I do not think this is the norm for Kinists and I know that Wilson can’t prove it is the norm. Anecdotal evidence is not proof.

I do think though that the Rev. Wilson might want to take into some considerations that there currently is an ongoing attempt to genocide white people, or at the very least turn them into hewers of wood and drawers of water (slaves). I would anticipate that as such red pilled white people might be a wee bit touchy towards those who are seeking to do that to them. Does Wilson need to be reminded that it is minorities along with other constituencies who are have been captured by the cultural Marxists so as to be the new version of the proletariat who are being employed to bring down Biblical Christianity with its unique Western Institutions — nearly all of which was built by our Christian white forebears?

I will grant that it is still sin to mock the color of a man’s skin if Wilson will grant that a majority of people with pigmented skin have been co-opted to genocide White Christians and to roll Jesus Christ off His throne.

2.) Having admitted the above, I would also say that the white Kinists I know are the people who are the most likely to reach out and help people from other races when they are in genuine need. I completely reject Wilson’s anecdotal charge of malevolence. The Church I serve, for example, has sent several thousands of dollars to black Africa in the past to seek to relieve problems there.

3.) Note also that Wilson assumes above that only white people are Kinists. I know black Knists, Filipino Kinists, Mexican Kinists, Sub-continent Indian  Kinists, and Mexican Kinists. Are all these people skinists also or does Wilson save his pejoratives for only white kinists?

These Kinist Christians have no problem having fellowship with one another while at the same time prioritizing their respective peoples as the Scriptures teach. I’ve seen it with my own eyes and participated in it myself. Wilson wants to paint kinists as solely white and as uniquely haters. In doing so he reveals his ignorance on the subject.

Doug talks about Facebook groups. I am in a facebook group that is Kinist and is populated by a potpourri of kinists from different races. We love one another but do so as understanding the principles of kinism (the Bible).

Some time ago when I was being attacked by people like Wilson (SPLC) it was not only white Kinists but kinists from other races who came to my defense. Doug just doesn’t know what he is talking about. Nothing new to that when it comes to this subject.

4.) Doug would have to concede that Paul affirming true the race of Cretans being always liars, evil beasts and lazy gluttons a racial slur. Hey Doug, was the Kinist St. Paul (actually the Holy Spirit) guilty of overt malevolence and of wrongly mocking the Cretans?

12 One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own, said, “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.” 13 This testimony is true. Therefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith, (Titus 1:12-13, ESV)
Today Paul might say some races are more prone to violent crime than others. It’s just an observation of a natural reality in differences of races. Just as we talk about the penny-pinching Dutch, or the stubborn/fighting Scotsman, or the quick-tempered Irish.

5.) I still insist that there is a stream of the Gnostic in Doug. Doug seems to think that if the black man and the white man would alike properly worship the same God that would eliminate all the differences between race. I do not believe that is true. I believe that the races were created by God to be distinct and different and those distinctions and differences remain even when they all worship the one true God in the proper manner.

6.) Culture is not merely the consequence/outworking of the gods people worship in a set culture. This is contrary to Doug Wilson’s assertions. Culture is also the consequence of the gods people worship as combined with the genetic reality that God in creation made those people to be.

Wilson wants grace/worship to overthrow nature and as such he reduces culture as a consequence of only what/who a people worship. To the contrary grace restores nature and as such culture has to take into account both grace/worship that is restoring and the nature that is being restored.

Wilson tends towards Gnosticism.

 What I am trying to say here is that a renewed Irish man and a renewed Kenyan are still Irish and Kenyan, and just as those of us of particular qualities or dispositions yet have those qualities or disposition after Faith, so does the Irish or Kenyan retain ethnic or racial qualities and dispositions. If the Irishmen and the Kenyan worship the same God the same way they are not going to cease being distinctly Kenyan or Irish merely because they have been regenerated. Regeneration and proper worship of the one true God doesn’t erase what it means to be Irish or Kenyan. It doesn’t negate or remove the distinctions.

Upon grace the Irishman is a better Irish man then He was before grace and the Kenyan is a better Kenyan then he was before grace, but they are still God ordained products of what they are made of, yet now touched by God’s grace.

7.) Keep in mind that Doug keeps talking about race when Doug has said he does not think race exists. How can he do that?

Touching McAtee’s Over the Top Rhetoric

At the recent “County before Country” conference held in our favorite kinist hater’s (Michael Foster) church I had several friends in attendance who later reported back to me their impressions. What I found most interesting about their impressions is that they were thoroughly under-impressed with the speakers. I think the common input was “Meh.” However, they did enjoy the conference and were glad they went because of the networking that they did as combined with the ability to be around other men who shared their some world and life view as well as Christian confession.

One other motif I wanted to touch on in defense of myself was the common report from more than one chap that I knew who was in attendance. It seems that my name came up in more than one conversation. Christian Nationalism is catching on and being a public Kinist and a Reformed minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ my standing is a bit unique. Most Reformed clergy are running full tilt away from any notion of Christian ethno-Nationalism, while I, following the words and sentiments of the Reformed Fathers, am pleading with Reformed believers everywhere to embrace this basic building block of Reformed Christianity. Anyway, it seems that a consensus is forming that little old shy and retiring me is “over the top with his rhetoric.”

Now normally, this might cause me to reflect on whether this may be true or not but I know that the problem here is not my over the top rhetoric but the inability of people to understand how dangerous of a situation we are presently in. We are in a situation where all that is left to people like me is the strength of my rhetoric as combined with the cogency of my arguments.

People seem to forget that this charge of being “over the top with his rhetoric” is not new to me. They charged the Reformers with the same sin;

Neither the vulgarity nor the violence nor the charges of satanic motivation nor the sarcastic mocking is unique to [Luther’s later Jewish] treatises. If anything, Luther’s 1541 Against Hanswurst and his 1545 Against the Papacy at Rome, Founded by the Devil contain more scatology, more sallies against the devil, more heavy sarcasm, and more violence of language and recommendations. The polemics of the older Luther against the Turks and Protestant opponents are only slightly more restrained. Against each of these opponents- Catholics, Turks, other Protestants and Jews- he occasionally passed on libelous tales and gave credence to improbable charges. In all these respects Luther treated the Jews no differently than he treated his other opponents.

Mark U Edwards
Luther’s Last Battles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 140.

If the language of Calvin’s Institutes seems harsh in places we should remember that this was the mark … of theological controversy in that age. The times in which Calvin lived were polemic. The Protestants were engaged in a life and death struggle with Rome and the provocations to impatience were numerous and grievous. Calvin, however, was surpassed by Luther in the use of harsh language as will readily be seen by an examination of the latter’s work, The Bondage of the Will which was a polemic written against the free-will ideas of Erasmus. And furthermore, none of the Protestant writings of the period were so harsh and abusive as were the Roman Catholic decrees of excommunication, anathemas, etc., which were directed against the Protestants.

Loraine Boettner
Calvinism in History: John Calvin

People may not want to believe this but the times we are living in, in terms of the safety and health of the visible Church, are even more dangerous than they were in the 16th century at the dawn of the Reformation.  These times call for the sharpest rhetoric one can find in their quiver. My detractors will be interested in knowing that I’ve, more than once, begged forgiveness during my times of confessing sin before the throne of God for being too lackluster and retiring in conversations.

We are currently sitting on the precipice of a long continuance of the Church’s second Babylonian captivity. This is not a time for a kind of speech that will fail to communicate the danger(s) we are under currently. I will not apologize for my rhetoric and I will not moderate my sense of urgency that my rhetoric is seeking to communicate.

Buckle up normies and sophisticates alike. This is a ride that is going to require a re-engineering of your sensitive sensibilities.

Of Eliza Fletcher, Black on White Crime, & Similar Observations

Smell of White female heiress and young mother Eliza Fletcher’s rotting corpse led police to her discovery. Suspect arrested for the murder is a black male with a prior history of kidnapping as well as having served 20 years in prison for a violent crime….

Police were searching near a vacant home in Memphis, Tennessee, when they discovered Eliza Fletcher’s body and a discarded garbage bag containing what appears to be her running shorts.

Online Articles

Eliza Fletcher was a professing Christian who liked her routine morning jog. Cleotha Abston on the other hand was a seasoned criminal who was waiting on DNA test kit results to prove that he was guilty of a previous sexual assault from 2021, when in September 2022 he got the hots for Eliza Fletcher and allegedly abducted, raped, and murdered her.

https://news.yahoo.com/watch-took-long-tie-eliza-221944889.html

All of this is somewhat reminiscent of another Tennessee black on white rape and murder from 2007 when  Channon Gail Christian, aged 21, and Hugh Christopher Newsom Jr., 23 were abducted, brutally raped, tortured and murdered.

This kind of crime when committed follows a particular paradigm as exposed by a little booklet put out by the New Century Foundation titled;
The Color of Crime; Race, Crime, and Justice in America. There we find reported that when Interracial Crime is considered;

• Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit 15 percent.

• Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against blacks. Fortyfive percent of their victims are white, 43 percent are black, and 10 percent are Hispanic. When whites commit violent crime, only three percent of their victims are black.

• Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.

• Blacks are 2.25 times more likely to commit officially-designated hate crimes against whites than vice versa.

Now, all of what I have reported commits the sin of noticing … yea, even the crime of noticing. It seems we have arrived at the point that when it comes to the “bad taste” scale, that it is in more bad taste to bring to the fore the above statistics than it is bad taste to rape and murder a white female and mother of two small children who is out for a morning jog. At the very least bringing forth the above statistics is at least in the same category of bad taste as abduction, rape, and murder.

One indicator of that is some of the responses of people to this hororfic crime.

1.) What was she doing out jogging that early in the morning?

As if she brought her own abduction, rape and murder on herself by daring to assume that early morning jogging was forbidden by the presence of black thugs in the city.

2.) Did you see what she was wearing?

As if her jogging outfit explained why someone might do to her what they did.

This is not to argue that young women should be out jogging in scantily clad apparel during the wee hours of the morning in questionable environs. It is to say that we shouldn’t be looking for reasons why she made mistakes as if those mistakes excused the behavior of the beast in question. People who do less than wise things shouldn’t be visited with abduction, rape, and murder.

One more thing before we shift gears. If God’s law had been followed and if the murderer of Eliza Fletcher had received the required death penalty for the rape he committed in 2021 then the children of Eliza would still have their mother. Love for Eliza and her family required us to bring God’s subscribed death penalty to Eliza’s assailant before he was her assailant and when he was another woman’s kidnapper and rapist. But because we as a culture think that we can be nicer than God Eliz’s murderer was free to kidnap, and rape again this time topping it off with murder.

While I’m here on this subject on crime I find it fascinating and mystifying at that same time that the Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers is emptying out Wisconsin prisons granting parole to the worst kind of offenders behind bars. Likewise Democratic US Senator Candidate and current Lt. Gov. of Pennsylvania John Fetterman is also doing much the same. Add to this there has been a change in laws in Illinois that will begin 01/23 that will prohibit a judge from imprisoning someone arraigned before them until the trial can take place for the following crimes

Aggravated Battery
Aggravated DUI
Aggravated Fleeing
Arson
Burglary
Drug-induced homicide
Intimidation
Kidnapping
Robbery
2nd-degree murder
Threatening a Public Official

So, it will not be that criminals can’t be arrested but it will be that the arrested criminals of the above crimes can’t be held in jail after arrest but before trial. People guilty of the above crimes in Illinois may well be arrested but at the criminal’s arraignment on the charges the judge, by force of law, will not be able to remand the criminal into custody until the trial. The accused criminal will be right back out on the street with no bail or monitoring to make sure they don’t commit additional crimes or bother to show up for their trial.

Now, when you combine Gov. Tony Evers work in Wisconsin in emptying his prisons (Gov. Evers has a goal to reduce the Wisconsin prison population by 50% via this parole process he is pursuing) with Lt. Gov. John Fetterman’s similar course of action in Pennsylvania, with Illinois above law change with the reality of who disproportionately commits violent crimes one sees a pattern that forces one to ask;

Cui Bono? For whose benefit?

Or switching it around, who is going to be most victimized by the loosing of criminals upon society?

I have an answer that I think makes sense in this climate? Do you have an answer that makes sense to you?