The subject of “Christian Nationalism” has been much discussed as of late. A friend and classmate from my theological studies in Otterburne in the 1990s has been decrying it all over social media. His assessment of it relies upon the acceptance of a number of axioms that progressives regard as self-evident but which I correctly consider to be bunkum. Needless to say I do not share his perspective. My rejection of my friend’s fatally flawed opposition to Christian Nationalism should not be taken as an endorsement of it. Quite the contrary. Recently, the administrator of an Anglican social media forum opened a discussion thread on the subject. This essay is for the most part an expansion of my response.
To answer
the question of whether or not nationalism can be Christian in any real,
orthodox, sense, we need to first determine what nationalism is. The best way that I know to do this, is by
distinguishing nationalism from something much older than nationalism with
which it is often confused. That
something is patriotism.
Patriotism
belongs to the category of natural affections.
Think of the love that under ordinary circumstances a child feels for
his parents and a parent feels for a child.
These are natural affections, loves that unless something happens to
impede them, everyone naturally develops.
The love of home, which the late Sir Roger Scruton called oikophilia, is another such natural
affection and one that is very similar to patriotism. Patriotism derives its name from the Greek
word πατρίς (πάτρα in some dialects, such as Homeric Ionic) and its
Latin cognate patria, both of which
mean “native land” or more literally, since they are themselves derived from
the word for father, “fatherland.”
Patriotism is the affection, attachment, and love that one feels for
one’s homeland, one’s country, as naturally as one loves one’s parents and
offspring.
Patriotism, like all natural affections, has been regarded
as good and virtuous from time immemorial.
To illustrate, consider the thirtieth verse of the first book of Homer’s
epic Iliad which is the verse in
which the word πάτρα appears for the first time in Homer. This appears in the portion of the poem where
Homer is providing the background story to the wrath of Achilles which brought
all sorts of nastiness upon the Greeks from his breech with Agamemnon until
their reconciliation after the death of Patrocles at the hands of Hector which
is the main theme of the epic. Chryses,
the priest of Apollo, has come to the Greek encampment to buy the freedom of
his daughter whom Agamemnon holds as a war prize. His graceful address and his offer of an
extremely generous ransom has won over all the other Greeks but infuriated
Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and Argos and general leader of the Greek expedition against Troy. Agamemnon responds with an
extremely rude and ill-tempered speech in which he orders Chryses away from the
encampment and the ships, warning him that if he catches him there again the
symbols of his priestly office will not protect him. Then, to add insult to injury, he adds in verses
twenty-nine and thirty the following:
τὴν δ᾽ ἐγὼ οὐ λύσω: πρίν μιν καὶ γῆρας ἔπεισιν
ἡμετέρῳ ἐνὶ οἴκῳ ἐν Ἄργεϊ τηλόθι πάτρης
This means “but your (daughter) I will not release, until
old age finds her also, in our house in Argos far from her fatherland.” The insult extends into the next verse where
it gets much cruder and Agamemnon’s speech into the verse after that but we
have arrived at the point.
The words τηλόθι πάτρης, “far from her fatherland” are
intended as a particularly cruel twist of the knife here. Obviously, Agamemnon was going out of his way
to say that he will do the exact opposite of what Chryses had requested, but in
stressing the distance of his palace from the girl’s homeland he was also
saying that he will inflict upon her what he and all the Greeks were themselves
suffering at that point in time. The Iliad is set in the last year of the ten
year siege of Troy. The Greeks had been τηλόθι πάτρης
themselves for a long time and were feeling the effects of it, as Agamemnon’s
speech as a whole and the bitter strife that would soon thereafter divide him from
Achilles demonstrate.
Homer’s ability to communicate this in this way rests upon
the common understanding between him, his hearers, and his readers down through
the generations, that one’s πάτρα is to be loved and cherished and that to be
far from it is misery.
So again, patriotism is a natural affection, a feeling of
love akin to love for one’s family and home.
This has many implications. One,
is that patriotism has nothing to do with how you think your country compares
to other countries. Patriotism may
incline you towards thinking that your country is the best in the world but it
is never based on thinking this. The
patriot loves his country because she is his and not because he thinks her to
be better than such and such other countries.
Patriotism has nothing to do with whether or not one’s country is
“great.” While children often go through
a “my dad can beat up your dad” phase they ordinarily grow out of it. Someone who persists in talking this way into
adulthood does not demonstrate a healthy filial affection but rather a case of
arrested development. The same applies
to love of country.
From this implication, we can infer further that patriotism
is not naturally bellicose. Since love
of country, like love of family and home is natural to humanity, and since it
is not based on concepts like “greatness” that measure one’s country against
others, it is not threatened by other people loving their other countries nor
does it impel one to threaten others.
Patriotism is a great motivation to fight defensively in war, that is to
protect one’s country, but it is no motivation to wage aggressive war against
others.
Samuel
Johnson, the eighteenth century lexicographer, famously said “Patriotism is the
last refuge of a scoundrel.” (1) James
Boswell, his biographer, from whom we have the account of this and Dr.
Johnson’s other table-talk, immediately after recording it explained “But
let it be considered, that he did not mean a real and generous love of our
country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and
countries, have made a cloak for self-interest.” (2) The conversation took place in 1775 in the
midst of the controversy that would lead to the American Declaration of
Independence the following year. The
year previous, Dr. Johnson had expressed his thoughts on the American
rebels-to-be and their gripes in a pamphlet entitled The Patriot. There is little
doubt as to who the scoundrels were to whom Dr. Johnson referred.
Although Boswell put it in terms of real versus pretend,
patriotism, and this was not a wrong way of describing it, from the standpoint
of hindsight it could be said that what had occurred was the emergence of a new
thing which was not patriotism as we have described it but which had not yet
been given a name of its own and so for a time it shared the name of the age
old love of country. Did Dr. Johnson
himself see that there were now two things sharing one name? In his Dictionary
he defined patriotism as “Love of one’s country; zeal for one’s country.” Most likely he meant this as a single
definition, certainly in The Patriot
he spoke in Boswell’s terms of real versus pretend, but it is interesting that
the two phrases from his definition could be taken as defining the two
different “patriotisms” of the time.
Zeal is not the same thing as love.
The American Revolution was a war cast from the mold of
Lucifer’s rebellion against God. So was
its antecedent, the Puritan rebellion against Charles I, but Crowell et al., had wrapped themselves in the
hypocritical piety of their legalistic Calvinism. The propagandists of the American Revolution
such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine (“the infidel Paine”) whose minds
were steeped in the skepticism and deism of eighteenth century philosophy had
no such recourse and so justified their actions by appealing to the ideals of
“Enlightenment” liberalism, a philosophy born out of explicit rejection of the
Christian faith of the civilization of the age that preceded the Modern. Since such justifications had little popular
appeal in a day in which the Age’s retreat from Christianity was still in its
early years – past infancy, not quite in adolescence yet – their cloak when
taking their ideals public was patriotism.
It was not the age-old natural affection patriotism but the new thing
that had not yet come into its name but was still borrowing the name of the old
patriotism and so rightly decried as a pretender by Dr. Johnson and
Boswell. The term that would become its
name was around - Johann Gottfried von Herder had used it in a treatise in 1772
– but had not yet become attached to the thing.
In the French Revolution, born out of the same false ideals as the
American and in which the bloody fruit of those ideals was much more naked,
opening the eyes of Dr. Johnson’s friend Edmund Burke to the nature of these
“armed doctrines”, the name and the thing would find each other. That name is nationalism.
The name nationalism is obviously derived from the word
nation. The word nation comes ultimately
from the Latin verb nascor “be born”
through its third principal part natus
sum, “have been born” (3). Natio, the noun derived from this verb
could mean the act of birth but it also mean a tribe, kin group, or people
united by a common birth or line of descent.
It carried this second meaning but not the first into Modern tongues
like English where it became nation.
Here we see an indication of a divergence from patriotism. Patriotism is love directed towards one’s
country – a place. Nationalism is –
something, we will consider what momentarily – directed towards one’s people
group.
This difference should not be exaggerated. The closest
natural affection to patriotism is the love of home. This too is a love of place. Home, however, is the place where your family
is. Love of family and love of home
cannot be separated and similarly patriotism is not a love of the land
considered abstractly apart from the people and institutions and way of
life.
That having been said, the history of nationalism shows that
this difference is important. If
patriotism is the love of home writ large, as in Edmund Burke’s “little
platoons” account of it, nationalism is tribalism writ large. While there is something to be said for the
group loyalty of tribalism, that aspects of it need to be suppressed for there
to be the rule of law and order necessary for civilization is the fundamental
message of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. It is also the reason for various provisions
of the Mosaic Law, most obviously the refuge cities. This is good reason to be wary of something
that is basically tribalism but with the tribe the size of a Modern nation.
The history of nationalism demonstrates that it does not
belong to the same class or category, natural affections, as patriotism. From the beginning nationalism has been
characterized by a belligerence towards others.
In the American Revolution, when it was still going under the name it
borrowed from true patriotism, the belligerence was directed towards the larger
society, the British Empire, of which it had been a part. In the French Revolution, the violence
initially directed against the society’s own traditional institutions and upper
classes quickly turned on anyone suspected of disloyalty to the Revolution and
its leaders and as this “Reign of Terror” started, Revolutionary France
declared war on its neighbours who had militarized their borders in an effort
to contain the revolution. While the
Reign of Terror ended with the arrest of Robespierre and the dawn of the
Thermidor Reaction in July 1794 neither the wars nor the nationalism impelling
them ceased with it and a general who had won his initial fame in those wars
would before the eighteenth century ended launch the first of the serious of
conquests which along with his simultaneous rise to power in the civil
government would twice make him Emperor of France. Among Napoleon’s generals, at least according
to a play from the 1830s, (4) was a man named Nicolas Chauvin who refused to
give up Napoleon’s imperial cause even after it was clearly over and Napoleon
dead, and whose name became synonymous with an imperialistic nationalism that sees
other peoples as existing only to be crushed, conquered and subdued by one’s
own (although from the second wave of feminism in the middle of the twentieth
century it has come to be more commonly used for males with enough self-respect
not to buy into feminism’s lies but not enough sense to be subtle about
it).
A century after Napoleon’s death an Austrian-born German
nationalist would become the leader of a small German socialist party to whose
name he would attach the German word for nationalist. As leader of the National Socialists, he
began his rise to power by exploiting Germany’s grievances over the loss of
World War I and promised to restore Germany to her glory by building a Reich
that would last a thousand years.
Shortly after having won the office of Chancellor in 1933, he secured
himself in that office by declaring a state of emergency after an arson in the
Reichstag (German parliament building) and using the emergency powers this
granted him to transform his office into that of a dictator and Germany into a
single-party totalitarian state that resembled nothing so much as the Soviet
Union which the Bolsheviks had created in Russia. Hitler remilitarized Germany then began
seizing territory such as his country of birth, Austria, which had historically
been German-speaking but never part of the Germany that Otto von Bismarck had
forged under the Prussian House of Hohenzollern (at the time she was the centre
of her own empire under the Hapsburgs), by bullying and threats and exploiting
the fact that the other powers were desperate to avoid the outbreak of a second
war. Then, having made a pact with the
Soviet Union to divide Poland between themselves, he invaded that country,
launching World War II in which he, like Napoleon before him, conquered most of
Europe, before repeating Napoleon’s fatal mistake of trying to seize Russia.
Hitler’s nationalism was particularly belligerent against
other peoples because it was wed to his belief that the races of humanity were
locked into a Darwinian struggle for existence that was a zero-sum game (5) in
which there could be only one winner.
While this was unique to National Socialism, in its three centuries
nationalism in general has consistently demonstrated a hostile attitude towards
other nations that is far removed from the irenic love of country that is true
patriotism. One final detail about
Hitler deserves mention here. On 19
March, 1945 as the Red Army was rapidly approaching Berlin while the American
commander disgracefully held back the Western Allies, a little over a month and
one week before he and his bride ended their lives in his bunker, Hitler issued
the “Destructive Measures on Reich Territory” decree, ordering the destruction
of the civil infrastructure of Germany.
Fortunately for the Germans, Albert Speer made sure this insane “Nero
Decree” was not carried out. Hitler had
ordered the Germans to reduce their own country to the stone age in order to
spite the Russians, but by this point in time he was convinced that the
Russians had won the Darwinian struggle and that the Germans, having failed
him, had lost and were not worthy to survive.
A nationalist could come to this horrid conclusion. A patriot never could.
This is because patriotism has nothing to do with how one’s country and her people
compare to other countries and other people.
It is a love that comes naturally.
Nationalism is concerned with how big and strong and powerful and great
its country is and if its country fails the nationalist can easily turn on it
as Hitler turned on Germany at the end.
Nationalism is not a love, a natural affection at all. It is an ideology, a zealous commitment to
the idea of one’s country as the greatest and best. The nationalist will demand that his country
be made great again. Love, however,
“envieth not…vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.” (6) The patriot loves his
country as she is and if he is a Christian patriot will be far more concerned
with his country’s goodness than her greatness.
Nationalism then is an artificial substitute for the natural
love of country that is patriotism, a substitute that could only have been
produced in the Modern Age. This is
because it is the product of the Modern idea of democracy. The emphasis in the previous sentence is on
the word Modern. Modern democracy is not
the same thing as the democracy of ancient Athens. Nor is it the democracy that is an aspect or
element of the traditional institution of parliament that developed long before
the Modern Age, although it has grafted itself onto that democracy and
corrupted it. Modern democracy is an
idea that comes from Modern liberal philosophy, which philosophy was thought up
by Modern men thinking Satan’s thoughts after him.
We have already touched on this in discussing the American
Revolution and the origins of nationalism.
Satan became Satan by rebelling against the Sovereign King of all His
Creation, God. He was so full of
himself, so proud of his own beauty and other fine qualities – gifts God had
given him – that he thought he ought to rule the universe instead of God. Modern man looked around at Christendom, the
Christian civilization into which he had been born, and thought that he could
think up a better way of organizing things that would eliminate most or all of
human suffering, and rebelled against the civil and ecclesiastical authorities
of Christendom. The semi-Pelagianism
that had crept into the Western Church towards the end of the Middle Ages which
the Reformation in its theological reforms sought to correct was perhaps the
initial impetus for this kind of hubristic thinking, although the Calvinists,
the most Augustinian of the Protestants at least in their own conceit, were the
first of the Modern rebels. Pelagianism
was the early heresy that rejected Original Sin. A firm grasp on Original Sin is a
preventative for thinking that humanity can achieve its own salvation by
political means. In the Fall, man lost
the Paradise in which he had been placed at his creation. Paradise awaits man, redeemed by God through
Jesus Christ, after the Second Coming.
In between, as we struggle against our own sinful tendencies, there will
be no elimination of the suffering that is born out of our fallen sinfulness
but which, having been borne by Christ Himself to the cross, is the path down
which we are called to follow Him. This
does not mean that we are not to try to alleviate the suffering of others, to
the contrary, just as He healed the sick and made the lame to walk and gave the
blind their sight, so we are commanded to do good to others. (7) It means that we are not to think that by
doing so, much less by outsourcing this work to the government, we can
eliminate suffering and create a Paradise in this life.
The Modern idea of democracy, again as distinct from the
ancient idea of democracy and the democracy that developed historically as part
of our traditional parliamentary system, comes directly from liberalism’s
belief that it can create an earthly Paradise and that it is justified in
following Satan’s example of rebellion in order to do so. The constituted authorities, the king and
the Church, should have eliminated human suffering and made a Paradise. That they didn’t do so means they need to be
torn down and replaced with government by the people in whom sovereignty will
now be vested. That is the idea of
Modern democracy, although liberals rarely put it so starkly, and it is utterly
Satanic. It is also the idea that had to be thought first, before that
artificial inferior substitute for patriotism, nationalism, could arise. The sovereign people of Modern democracy is
the nation of nationalism.
Nationalism then, in its historic sense, belongs to the
Modern Age’s revolt against Christianity and so can hardly be called Christian. There is a question, of course, as to whether
what those who call themselves Christian Nationalists today mean by nationalism
is nationalism in its historic sense.
Just as the first nationalists called themselves patriots so there have
been those who have used the word nationalism to mean something closer to patriotism. From what I have seen of self-designated
Christian Nationalists this is not the case with them although that doesn’t
immediately translate into their nationalism being the historical type
either. They have taken up the label of
nationalist in reaction against the post-World War II movement towards
re-orienting everything to an international or global scale with which they
associate the increased secularism of the era.
While I am in complete agreement with their opposition to
secularism and also detest the general way in which the world has been
re-organizing itself since World War II, I do think that the Christian
Nationalists have overlooked a number of things in coming to their
position. Secularism, while it has
gotten much worse in the post-World War II era, is not the product of that
era. The first secular country was the
United States of America (8) and the second was the French Republic formed in
the French Revolution. Secularism was
joined at birth to nationalism.
Also overlooked is a fact pertaining to progressive
liberalism’s aggressive push after World War II to dissolve national
identities, or at least those of the civilization formerly known as
Christendom, both by submerging them in larger identities and breaking them
down through large scale immigration.
While this is on the surface obviously an overreaction to Hitler, on a
deeper level, one of which the progressive liberals themselves are almost
certainly not consciously aware, an attempt to fill a void created by Modern
liberalism.
In Christendom – Christian civilization – allegiance was not
directed inwards, towards the people as a group, but upwards, ultimately to God
in Heaven, but along the way to the sovereign, the king, in the civil sphere,
and to the Catholic – universal – Church in the religious sphere, which spheres
while distinct, overlapped.
The king in Christendom, whether he reigned over a single
realm or a vast empire, was what he is in the New Testament – God’s minister,
to whom Christians are commanded to submit and to honour (1 Pet. 2:13, 17) and
for whom they are commanded to offer supplications, prayers, intercessions, and
giving of thanks (1 Tim. 2:1-3). (9) As
God’s minister, he represented in the civil sphere that was his realm, the
universal government of the King of Kings, which is a much higher sense of
representational government than that of representational democracy.
The Church was called Catholic for a number of reasons, the
one of which that is germane in this context being that she transcended the
boundaries of realm, empire, and nation and was a universal institution that
was one wherever she was found. In every
kingdom and empire, she had One Lord in the sense of a divine Master higher
than any earthly authority. No matter
where she was she confessed One Faith in the words of the ancient Apostles’ and
Nicene Creeds. Anyone from any country
anywhere in the world could join her through her One Baptism in the name of the
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. While this
concept did not disappear in the sixteenth century Reformation at the beginning
of the Modern Age, neither did it pass through that period unscathed,
especially in external practice. On both
sides of the Reformation divide, other things came to took precedence over the
aforementioned matters in which the unity and Catholicity of the Church are to
be found. (10) A tremendous blow was
dealt to the external unity of the Church and in the separation that followed,
between the followers of the papacy and the Protestants, between the Lutherans
and the Reformed, and between all of the above and the myriad of smaller
separatist groups, each communion developed an inward gaze in which its own
identity and distinct doctrines were regarded, in practice at least, as more
important than the One Lord, Faith, and Baptism.
Mercifully, the office and institution of king survived the
Modern Age in several countries, including my own, and forces aligned against
the Catholic Church will, as Christ has promised, never prevail. The position of both king and Church was
weakened from what it was in Christendom, however, by the spread of the now
ubiquitous notion of popular sovereignty and the fracturing of the Church into
denominationalism which both involved a re-orienting of the gaze away from that
which is higher, upward, and beyond, internally towards self, albeit in these
examples the self of the group rather than of the individual person, the inward
focus on which was also developing at the same time, all of these in accordance
with the general shift from the theocentric outlook of Christendom to the
Modern anthropocentric one. It is that
which pulls us out of ourselves and directs us to that which is higher and
beyond ourselves that civilizes us, however, and this general inward
reorientation of outlook of the Modern Age, by weakening these upward
influences has created a vacuum into which different types of
civilization-threatening barbarism enter.
The extreme nationalism of the World War II era was one such
barbarism. After the war, progressive
liberals, realizing the need for a higher allegiance but, being progressive
liberals, unwilling to turn to God, king, and Church, attempted to create
various artificial substitutes in international, regional, and even world-level
associations, organizations, and quasi-governmental bodies, but the soulless,
toxic, bureaucratism that accompanied these at every level proved this to be
but another form of barbarism.
So-called Christian Nationalism is a response to this other
type of barbarism. Unfortunately, it is
no solution because it is enmeshed itself in the Modern way of thinking that
produced the problem. This is evident,
not merely in its embrace of nationalism, the Modern artificial substitute for
natural patriotism. It is also evident
in the kind of Christianity that it weds to nationalism. While not all Christian Nationalists are
evangelicals the form of Christianity that went into making Christian
Nationalism is evangelicalism, not as Dr. Luther and the Reformers used this
word nor as it was historically used in the Church of England nor as it is used
in Europe today, but evangelicalism in a distinctly North American sense of the
word, which evangelicalism, for all that it has to commend itself, has a very
unhealthy tendency to confuse Christianity with Americanism. Americanism, however, is a variant of
liberalism, the ideology that drives the Modern Age’s movement away from God
and Christianity.
Nationalism, we observed earlier, is tribalism writ large,
and tribalism is very much an apt description of Christian Nationalism’s
approach to the various social, moral, and cultural problems that have arisen
in our countries due to the transformation of Christendom into secular,
liberal, Western Civilization over the course of the Modern Age. That approach is to treat these as battlegrounds
in a power struggle between groups, with our group, Christians, on the one side
and some other group or groups on the other side, and to regard the government
as an instrument (and an instrument in battle is called a weapon) with which to
defeat the other group.
Interestingly, this way of looking at things has certain
things in common with the thinking of the progressive liberals who abhor
Christian Nationalism. Progressive
liberals as well, and all the more so the more the progressive takes dominance
over the liberal in their thinking, tend to see everything in terms of power
struggles between groups. For
Christians, however, this way of looking at things ought to be anathema. Eph. 6:12 tells us that our struggle in this
world is not against other people, but against the spiritual powers of darkness
in this world. Moreover, in this the
Christian Nationalist approach bears more than a passing resemblance to the
error at the heart of all progressive thinking, the belief in a political
salvation. Indeed, I would say that the
resemblance to progressive salvation-through-political-means is far deeper than
whatever surface similarity there may be between the Christian Nationalist idea
of the role of government and the classical Tory view, of necessity more
reactionary than conservative in the current political climate, that in my view
is the closest thing there is to a translation of orthodox Christianity into
the language of civil politics. Where
Christian Nationalism and Toryism bear a superficial resemblance is that we
both reject the liberal notion of the separation of Church and State. This liberal idea, the root from which all
forms of secularism sprang, began as an argument for limiting the powers of the
State but inevitably became an argument for limiting the influence of the
Church while exponentially expanding that of the State. Classical Toryism rejected this idea as an
assault on the order of Christendom in which the king and the Church had
distinct roles, distinct tasks to do, distinct spheres in which to do those
tasks, and distinct powers with which to do them. The king was not the instrument of the
Church, he was to do his job rather than the Church’s. The Church was not the
instrument of the king, she was to do her job rather than the king’s. If both did their jobs well, it would work
for the good of the other, because ultimately their roles, tasks, spheres, and
powers came from God and were complementary.
Christian Nationalism, by contrast, which, incorporates liberalism
through the Americanism it blends with its Christianity, rejects liberalism’s
separation of Church and State, not in favour of the old order but of one in
which the State is the instrument of the Church.
This has further diminished the Christianity of a movement,
the Christianity of which was already diminished by being blended with
Americanism. The attitude that is
visibly on display in the movement looks a lot more like hubris than humility. Apart from being the very opposite of
Christ’s own example and what He enjoins upon His followers and apart from
being utterly unappealing and ugly in itself, this is counterproductive if we
regard one of the challenges that Modern liberal secularism has created to be
the re-evangelism of our civilization.
Look back to the early centuries of the Church when, facing the
hostility of both the culture of the pagan Roman Empire and of those Jews who
did not recognize Jesus as the Messiah, the early Christians first set about
the task of evangelizing the ancient world.
They did so, not by political activism and organization, but by
imitating Christ’s example and obeying His command to take up their cross in
humility and follow Him to the point of martyrdom.
In Canada as in the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth
Realms, I have said often in the last few years that we are fortunate to have
as our hereditary Sovereign a man who chose to modify his coronation service so
that being welcomed into Westminster Abbey with the words “Your Majesty, as
children of the Kingdom of God we welcome you in the name of the King of Kings”
he responded with “In his name, and after his example, I come not to be served
but to serve.” I have noted the huge
contrast between this and the attitude of the egomaniacal narcissist around
which the MAGA cult, which overlaps Christian Nationalism to a large degree,
especially in the United States, is centred.
Last week, as Western Christians celebrated the Resurrection of Jesus
Christ and as Eastern Christians on the Julian calendar entered their Holy Week
in preparation for the celebration of the Resurrection, and as the
aforementioned Yankee narcissist thought it appropriate to mark the occasion
with a threat to destroy an entire civilization in war, (11) many infected with
the Christian Nationalism we have been discussing attacked His Majesty in a
most unchristian manner. As the king
himself was observing the Sacred Triduum from the Maundy Thursday service at
St. Asaph Cathedral in Wales to the celebration of Easter in the traditional
Matins service at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, these “Christian”
Nationalists attacked him for not recording a video Easter message. The words “not recording a video” are the
operative words here. He did issue an
Easter greeting on the social media platform formerly known as twitter. He wished Christians around the Commonwealth
a “Happy Easter” and gave the simple but powerful message “He is risen!”
The controversy was entirely manufactured on the part of His
Majesty’s “Christian” critics. Although he recorded a video for Easter last
year, it has not become an established royal tradition for the monarch to do so
as it has to record one for Christmas. The
king’s critics complained that he had sent a message to Muslims wishing them a
happy Ramadan and accused him of everything from abandoning his role as
Defender of the Faith to being a crypto-Muslim.
Anybody who took the time to compare – in good faith, mind you – what
the king said to his Muslim subjects and what he said at Easter this year and
last, would recognize that the fundamental difference between a greeting addressed
to Muslims and a Christian message such as “The abiding message of Easter is that
God so loved the world — the whole world — that He sent His Son to live among
us to show us how to love one another, and to lay down His own life for others
in a love that proved stronger than death” from last year’s video or this year’s
more simple “He is risen” shows the utter stupidity of these accusations and
conspiracy theories.
Through all this His Majesty has shown a far better
understanding of how a Christian king ought to act towards his subjects of
another religion than how these “Christians” have shown of the honour and
submission Christianity requires of us towards our temporal king regardless of his
personal religion. The title “Defender
of the Faith” was originally conferred on the king for writing a treatise
defending the seven sacraments against the criticisms of Dr. Luther in his Babylonian Captivity. Within the same reign, it was redefined to
mean one who defended the Church in his realm against foreign claims of
jurisdiction, including that of the foreign power that had bestowed the title
in the first place. Over the course of
the century that followed it came to include the defence of the reforms made to
that Church in subsequent reigns. Today,
His Majesty’s critics think that it should be given a tribalistic interpretation
that has little if any connection to its historical development and which is
fundamentally at odds with the basic nature and duty of the office of king, to
reign over his realm from a position above partisanship representing law and
justice for all. Whatever corrections
from the standpoint of orthodox theology, His Majesty’s views of the
relationship between Christianity and other religions might be better off for,
they are far preferable to those of the critics who interpret any remarks about
Islam that are not bellicose and condemnatory as “promotion” or “preference.”
(12)
While not all of these critics would identify as Christian Nationalists they
are generally people who have allowed the Christian Nationalist perspective to
influence their thinking just as Christian Nationalism has allowed the
fundamentally anti-Christian Modern ideologies that it has embraced to warp its
version of Christianity. Followers of
Christ should avoid such a movement. We
should love our countries as patriots, honour, pray for, and submit to our
earthly king if we are fortunate enough to have one as Scripture enjoins, place
the orthodox faith of the Creeds of the early centuries when the Church was
undivided ahead of sectarian emphases on lesser matters that pit Christian
against Christian and Christians against everyone else in “struggles against
flesh and blood”, and take up our cross and follow our Lord’s example of
humility rather than hubris.
(2) James Boswell, Life of Johnson, April 7, 1775.
(3) This is a deponent verb – it doesn’t have the regular active voice forms, and has only three principal parts, the third being what would be the fourth in a regular verb (the perfect passive participle).
(4) Charles-Theodore and Jean-Hippolyte Cogniard, The Tricolour Cockade, 1831. Whether Chauvin existed or was a fiction created by the Cogniards is a matter of dispute.
(5) In game theory a zero-sum game is one in which the gains of the one player equally match the losses of the other player so that together they cancel each other out to produce the net sum of zero.
(6) 1 Cor. 13:4.
(7) Compare the works which Isaiah prophesied that Christ would do Is. 61:1-3 with those for which Christ said He would reward His sheep in Matt. 25:34-40.
(8) Progressive liberals in my country, Canada, both amuse and disgust me when they say foolish things about secularism distinguishing us from the United States. Secularism is the American tradition, not ours.
(9) These instructions from SS Peter and Paul, were not written to Christians living under a Christian king, the king in question was the Roman Caesar and specifically Nero whose reign encompassed the period in which the Apostles were writing.
(10) On the one side, they doubled down on their insistence that the papacy was given universal jurisdiction over the Church that had previously played a role in dividing the Eastern Church from the Western Church. By declaring the Church to be absent where the jurisdiction of the pope is not acknowledged, they elevated the papacy above the One Lord, Faith, and Baptism. On the other side, the doctrines that would later be somewhat inaccurately summarized as the Five Solas, were similarly elevated.
(11) This man, who regained his office as head of the New Rome and its beastly empire in a campaign that saw him take a gunshot to the head, drop to the ground as if it had taken him out, then, since it had only grazed his ear, bounce back up fighting (Rev. 13:3), has since outdone this by posting a blasphemous picture of himself as if he were Jesus on the Eastern Pascha (Easter) of the Julian calendar. This was done in the midst of a controversy between himself and the current Roman Patriarch over the pope’s opposition to his war in Iran.
(12) His Majesty’s critics have circulated a meme quoting a speech he gave as Prince of Wales in 1993. The meme is rather mendacious as it implies the words are recent. The quotation, “More than this, Islam can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is the poorer for having lost” should be read in the context of the entire speech entitled “Islam and the West”. In that context, it is about the pre-Modern holistic – he used the word “integrated” - view of Creation. In the same speech, and shortly thereafter, he said “At the core of Christianity, there still lies an integral view of the sanctity of the world, and a clear sense of the trusteeship and responsibility given to us for our natural surroundings.” Note how he said the West “gradually lost this integrated vision of the world”. It was “with Copernicus and Descartes and the coming of the scientific revolution”, in other words, the very anthropocentric view of the world succeeding the theocentric view of pre-Modern Christian civilization that I have criticised as liberalism repeatedly in the text of this essay.
While some might not like the way he treats
the pre-Modern integrated view of Creation as common to all religions, I would
point out that Christianity’s claims to uniqueness have never rested on this
point, but upon God’s having visited His Creation in a unique manner by becoming
Man in the Incarnation, and upon His having accomplished the salvation of the
world from human sin through His having died for us and rose again, none of
which is questioned or even the matter at hand here. That all religions contain truth, is in fact,
the teaching of orthodox Christianity.
This is because religions are derived from natural revelation (the kind
St. Paul talks about in the first chapter of Romans). Christianity’s claims to uniqueness pertain to
special revelation, the historical special revelation of the Gospel.
St. Justin Martyr in the second century
argued that the Divine Logos, which in the preamble to St. John’s Gospel is
identified with God and specifically the Person of the Trinity Who became incarnate
as Jesus Christ, had planted seeds of Himself throughout the nations prior to
His Incarnation, that these had born fruit as philosophy, and that to the
extent the ancient philosophers followed the Logos they could be regarded as
Christian. The opposite view, that pre-Christian
philosophy contained nothing of value to Christianity could also be found if
inconsistently practiced, most notably in Tertullian, but it is difficult to
read the New Testament in the original Greek and side with Tertullian.
Where I would respectfully disagree with the
speech, which remember was given over thirty years ago, is that, while his
overall argument that no one group has a monopoly on either truth or extremism is
substantially accurate, the idea of holy war is, in my opinion, more integral
to the essential theology of Islam than most other religions. His Majesty did say, at the beginning of those
remarks, that he was not an expert on the subject, however, and I would point
out that those who are so quick today to jump on anything positive said in the
direction of Islam usually do so for reasons that are less rooted in the differences
between Christianity and Islam than they are in the United States’ post-Cold
War conflict with the Islamic world.
This conflict arose in part out of the United States’ arrogant belief
that she could do whatever she wanted anywhere in the world with impunity, in
part out of the United States’ being the spearhead of Modern, materialistic,
liberalism, in part out of her having armed and trained the more militant factions
of Islam to use against the Soviets in Afghanistan at the end of the Cold War, and
in part by much of Christianity in the United States having been deformed by
heretical notions, such as the idea that the religion which shares a common
pre-Gospel history with Christianity but which is explicitly built on the
rejection of Jesus as the Christ, the Middle-Eastern state constructed by
adherents of which religion has a vested interest in destabilizing the countries
mostly populated by Muslims in the region, is owed some type of allegiance by
Christians.
