The Left Tries to Frame Christians As the Mythical "Christian Nationalists"

 I have commented in this blog that one cannot be a Christian and at the same time be a Marxist, a Communist, Fascist, Socialist or any of the other branches from the tree of Marx.  Why is that?  Because at heart, Marxism requires allegiance to the State uber alles. But Christianity demands that you are loyal to, and love Christ above all. As He noted, one cannot serve God and mammon. Our Constitutional Republic was explicitly set up as being under God, not in place of God. Marxist systems of government attempt to replace God with the state. As Mussolini put it: "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."

Today, at the American Thinker Wolf Howling (a pseudonym, of course) has a tour de force essay taking us back to the French Revolution and the modern beginnings of Devil's re-emergence entitled Christian Nationalism: The American Revolution Versus The French Revolution. Both of these revolutions occurred within decades of each other at the end of the 18th century. Each though had fundamentally different philosophical underpinnings. The American revolution had the Bible, and writers such as John Locke. The French Revolution disdaining the Bible, held up human reason as the ultimate good. It was consciously atheistic.  In essence, the French Revolution committed the Original Sin of putting man on the throne of God.

Howling starts his article by pointing out what most Christians believe, that God granted man certain inalienable rights - rights that a legitimate government is duty bound to protect:

Christianity stands athwart neo-Marxists’ over-arching goal of creating an all-powerful government, free from any competing moral or ethical authority. Because America was founded on Biblical principles, neo-Marxists have to drive Christianity from the public square and uncouple America’s founding from its Judeo-Christian roots. The left’s latest effort has been to attack “Christian Nationalism.”

If you are a believing Christian or Jew, you are likely mystified about this newly made-up class of “Christian Nationalists.” According to Politico’s top reporter, Heidi Przybyla, it is a small subset of Christians—evil ones—who want to establish a theocracy. The defining characteristic of this subset of evil Christians is that they falsely believe that God Himself grants each person immutable rights to life, liberty, and property.

Furthermore, we believe that if the government orders us to do something against the Commands of our God, we should resist. I would note that this is the basis for the idea that soldiers should not follow orders blindly but should weigh the legal and moral ramifications of their orders. Just following orders did not absolve the Nazis of their crimes.

The concerted scaremongering against Christian Nationalism carefully avoids discussing the Bible and for good reason. The overarching messages of the Bible are morality, the sanctity of individual life, and the necessity of impartial justice. Indeed, one of the first commands God gave the Israelites before they entered the Promised Land was to create courts of law to administer “true Justice for the people.” He emphasized that the Israelite judges “must not distort justice; you shall not show partiality… Justice, and justice alone, shall you pursue…” (Deuteronomy 16:18-20).

Here I would disagree to some extent with Howling. The moral law presented in the Torah are certainly the Commandments of God, as exemplified in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20). But as Paul wrote, the Law exists to convict every man as a hopeless sinner. No one can escape, and one cannot do enough good works to merit salvation. But God sent his very own Son into the world to live as one of us, but commit no sin, and to die a brutal and horrible death by execution on the cross for the sin of the world.  By faith in Christ and through the grace of God, we may hope to be saved.  This was God's plan from the very beginning, in Genesis. Even so, it is Christ's resurrection that gives us hope that we too may one day be with Him.

The Torah presents us with both the moral law and the ceremonial law. Christ, by his death and resurrection on Easter abrogated the ceremonial law, but the moral law remains. A rightly ordered Christian's first loyalty is to God. A rightly ordered government preserves its peoples' rights under God.

While Howling leads us through a brief history of the philosophical thoughts leading up to each revolution, he closes with these paragraphs:

The canard of “Christian nationalism” comes from the atheist path that brought the Enlightenment to a bloody end with the French Revolution. Virtually all modern society’s ills can be traced back to that Revolution, which birthed socialism and a modern police state with absolute power. Naturally, the first thing the French radicals had to do to remake society was rid the nation of a competing system of morality and authority—i.e., Christianity—and this they did with brutality and bloodshed. George Neumayr explained,

"The secularists of the French Revolution regarded the Roman Catholic Church as the last obstacle to atheism’s final triumph. Blurting this out, the French dilettante Denis Diderot proposed to his fellow revolutionaries that they strangle the last priest with the “guts of the last king.”

The French Revolution’s legacy has been a disaster for humanity. Over 100 million people died in the 20th century because of communist, socialist, and fascist police states unmoored from Judaism and Christianity. Moreover, the children of the French Revolution, people such as Michel Foucault, a gay pedophile, and Herbert Marcuse, have overtaken the West’s ivory towers and poisoned the West with postmodernism, critical theory, DEI, and atheism.

And now, the French Revolution’s legacy gives us the utter canard of Christian Nationalism. It is a charge that relies on historic illiteracy to redefine our nation. It must be fought tooth and nail, for the stakes could not be higher.

As I said at the beginning, Wolf Howling's essay is a tour de force and can not be digested fully without also looking into the many, many links. You will know some of them, but there are others that we new to me at least. Please read the whole post. Christ demands we fight, mostly with our spiritual weapons: our prayer, our confession, our liturgy and communion. But it may sometimes demand our physical weapons as well. Pray, and keep your powder dry.