Was Nietzsche Right?

Wolfe’s Controversial Book Invites A Stark Question

Depending on how you look at it, Stephen Wolfe’s bestselling new book The Case for Christian Nationalism is either a very unambitious work or a very ambitious one.

On the one hand, it can be read as an argument for a perennially valid political philosophy, rooted in principles true for Protestant Christians always and everywhere. As controversial as some of that philosophy’s conclusions might sound, Christians of prior generations would have felt no such shock, which raises questions about why that philosophy sparks such outrage today. On this view, the recent pathologization of “Christian nationalism” in the public square—a project aided and abetted by many contemporary Christians themselves—amounts to little more than historical amnesia. The Case for Christian Nationalism declines to take that “blue pill.” Instead, it argues for a bold reclamation of an unfairly neglected political tradition.

On the other hand, it is a book that strongly implies, if never quite claiming overtly, that that same Christian tradition has historically been wrong in important ways. As such, it can be read as an audacious attempt to shift the trajectory of Christian theology away from its past and into a relatively uncharted future. This is a reading many will resist, but I see no real way around it.

As a result, I anticipate that Wolfe’s book will prove to be a Rorschach test. Progressives looking for seemingly outrageous “pull quotes” to crucify the author will find plenty of material: this book spends no time apologizing for its own conclusions or trying to pander to the widest possible audience. Conservatives interested in a systematic restatement of Protestant political theory will find Wolfe canvassing a vast range of sources that are little read today. And activists girding up their loins for political combat will find bracing exhortations to the fray.

All sides should agree, though, that Wolfe’s book is significant with regard to American conservative Christians’ thinking about politics. His claims are weighty, and henceforth one won’t be able to avoid them. For better or worse, these are the terms on which future debates will likely proceed.

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If there is a single animating theme of Wolfe’s book, it is the maxim that grace does not destroy nature, but renews it.¹ The Case for Christian Nationalism argues, at its core, that political life ought to respect the natural ties and affinities that structure human flourishing in the world, such as attachment to place and family.² As such, it is a book with a distinctly paleoconservative flair—a sensibility broadly lacking in conservative political writing these days, but one with a venerable pedigree extending back to the Southern Agrarian writers and beyond.

The bulk of the volume is a fairly straightforward exposition of Protestant political principles that were uncontroversial for the larger part of American history, and for centuries before that.³ To that end, the book covers such topics as the ability of public authorities to regulate public heresy and blasphemy,⁴ the relationship between civil authority and church order,⁵ and the positive merits of “cultural Christianity”—that is, the norms and expectations appropriate to a Christian social order, such as the expectation that families go to church on Sundays.⁶ Indeed, Wolfe is at his very best when systematically demolishing the claims of some recent theologians (Russell Moore in particular) that the breakdown of Christian culture represents an affirmative good. Is the replacement for that culture—the toxic ideology of absolute personal liberation welded onto an identitarian politics—really something to be celebrated? Wolfe (and I) will happily take the values of Mayberry, flaws and all, over those of contemporary Washington D.C.⁷

Much of this content is not especially novel, and I doubt Wolfe would want it to be read as such. That isn’t to say, though, that it won’t be controversial in a modern milieu. In recent years, “Christian nationalism” has become a term of abuse used to bludgeon virtually any Christian who would dare to suggest that their faith has anything to do with politics (well, conservative politics).⁸

Wolfe rightly refuses to play this game. After all, someone who believes that the metaphysical claims of Christianity are true, and seeks to order civil law on that basis, is acting no more irrationally than someone who legislates on the basis of a secular world-picture. Accordingly, the fact that Christian principles end up informing the law is exactly what should be expected from Christian lawmakers. One could even go ahead and drop the “Christian” modifier: for the Christian, this view of political order amounts to nothing more than the claim that law should track reality as it is.

For my own part, I might quibble with Wolfe’s contention that a necessary condition for pan-Protestant political coexistence must be churches’ extension of access to the means of grace to all Christian believers—a position that I think means a prohibition on “closed communion.”⁹ My Lutheran ancestors fled Germany in the mid-1800s to avoid such a synthesis,¹⁰ and a judgment by the civil authority that the Eucharist must be offered to all baptized Christian believers, without danger to their souls, strikes me as entailing an uncomfortable degree of line-blurring between civil and ecclesiastical authority. But this is a small point in a much bigger work.

Were these themes the sum and substance of The Case for Christian Nationalism, this review would be a lot shorter. As I read the book, though, it seems to me that it offers a rather more radical take on the Christian tradition as a whole. And it is this reinterpretation, instead of any particular turns of phrase or political proposals, that should (but unfortunately won’t) most occupy the book’s readers.

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In the book’s epilogue, Wolfe drops his prior scholastic terminology and permits himself to speak more freely. I choose to begin a critical evaluation there, because it is there that Wolfe provides the most striking statement of the tension at this book’s heart.

As previously mentioned, The Case for Christian Nationalism is a vigorous defense of particularity over against homogeneity. And Wolfe takes this motif to its most radical expression in a passage that is worth reproducing at length:

The Western mind has a universalizing tendency. The root of this tendency seems to be our emphasis on the human over the ethnic. Try to imagine how you would view the world if you had no comprehension of the concept “human,” no universalizing concept of man. One’s ethnicity to another would be as dogs are to cats. Think about how that would frame one’s sense of duty and his good. . . . [T]he Western mind thinks almost entirely in terms of humankind, in terms of universal humanity. We universalize our ethics, patterns of thought, altruism, and conceptions of the good. We even universalize our universalism—we ascribe universal thinking to non-Westerners. . . [T]hese virtues are products of centuries of Western political life. Our own universalizing is a particular Western thing. Non-Western peoples do not think like this. . . . Universality is far less prevalent among non-Westerners, who tend toward a more ethno-centric frame of what is good. That is, they view other ethnic-groups not in terms of common humanity (though certainly they have a conception of humanity) but in terms of ethnicity—in terms of ethnic in-group/out-group. . . . My point is not to attack non-Westerners but to highlight that they are normal; indeed, they are right. . . . The various Western ethnicities should view the world more through an ethnic frame. Or, put differently, they must stop universalizing their ethics, ways of life, patterns of thought, and sense of what is good and become more exclusive and ethnic-focused.¹¹

Pause here. Implicit in Wolfe’s argument on this point is the idea that there is something peculiar to the West that leads Westerners to universalize their “conceptions of the good,” and their sense of common humanity over ethnic particularity. Non-Western cultures do not share this sensibility, so there must be something embedded in the Western mindset that helps to explain it. What could be the explanation of this distinctive Western tendency? 

The answer is blindingly obvious: it is Christianity as such. It is Christianity, with its proclamation of a universal God over and above the gods of the nations, a universal ekklesia into which the diverse peoples of the world have been engrafted, and a universal natural law binding upon all people everywhere, that produced this Western “universalizing tendency” which Wolfe finds problematic.¹²

You need not take my word for it, though. Take it from Friedrich Nietzsche:

Why be public-spirited? Why take any pride in descent and forefathers? Why labour together, trust one another, or concern one’s self about the common welfare, and try to serve it? . . . That every man, because he has an “immortal soul,” is as good as every other man; that in an infinite universe of things the “salvation” of every individual may lay claim to eternal importance; that insignificant bigots and the three-fourths insane may assume that the laws of nature are constantly suspended in their behalf—it is impossible to lavish too much contempt upon such a magnification of every sort of selfishness to infinity, to insolence. And yet Christianity has to thank precisely this miserable flattery of personal vanity for its triumph—it was thus that it lured all the botched, the dissatisfied, the fallen upon evil days, the whole refuse and off-scouring of humanity to its side. . . . The poisonous doctrine, “equal rights for all,” has been propagated as a Christian principle: out of the secret nooks and crannies of bad instinct Christianity has waged a deadly war upon all feelings of reverence and distance between man and man, which is to say, upon the first prerequisite to every step upward, to every development of civilization[.]¹³

Nietzsche was a perceptive critic of Western modernity—indeed, Wolfe cites him favorably in several places¹⁴—and he correctly recognized just how radically the Christian proclamation diverged from the religious traditions that had preceded it. Paul’s words in Galatians 3:28— “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus”—have undoubtedly been much abused in recent years, but there is no denying the revolutionary political force of that notion.¹⁵

For Nietzsche, of course, this Christian turn was one of the Western tradition’s original sins—culminating in an elevation of mediocrity, a denial of “pride in descent and forefathers,” and a collapse of “all feelings of reverence and distance between man and man.”¹⁶ It initiated, in short, the abolition of natural particularity, the same abolition that so troubles Wolfe.

What exactly was it, though, that Christianity so disrupted, that prior order upon which Christianity “waged a deadly war” according to Nietzsche? In his famous study of classical religion, The Ancient City, historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges argues persuasively that Indo-European religion began with ancestor worship, or the appeasement of the spirits of the dead.¹⁷ An early Roman paterfamilias was the custodian of the land on which his ancestors were buried—sacred land—and so also the priest of the family’s worship, which entailed worship of the hearth-fires that were revered as divine in their own rights.¹⁸ As families began to gather together into clan networks and later cities, new deities emerged to represent those networks and cities in turn.¹⁹ But those deities, like the family hearth-fires from which they had emerged, were particularized. A deity such as “Athena” was not conceived as a discrete metaphysical entity to which the residents of many communities might offer worship, but as the deity of that particular place: the “Athena of Athens” received no worship from, say, any visiting Corinthians.²⁰ This world-picture helps explain how Odysseus’s longing to return home to Ithaka is not mere sentimentality; rather, it is a longing to return to his particular gods of hearth and home and land.

And here a particular difficulty emerges for Wolfe’s argument: it would seem that antique paganism does a better job of underpinning his political theory than does Christianity itself. Considered abstractly, what belief system could better reinforce one’s natural love of home and family and kin than a religion grounded in that natural love, a religion forming overlapping chains of unbroken continuity back through the generations of one’s particular family and polis, a religion with father-rule at its very core? In view of Wolfe’s claim that the Western mind has a “universalizing tendency” which it ought to reject, coupled with the fairly clear historical datum that this “universalizing tendency” has its roots in Christianity, paganism seems to have some crucial advantages here. 

In the simplest terms, The Case for Christian Nationalism is a book zealously defending the natural goods internal to the nation, but its argument seems to entail that the goods internal to the nation would be more perfectly realized if Christianity were false. The actual truth of Christianity seems like a metaphysical inconvenience for the project. And that strikes me as a perilous place for any Christian political theory to find itself.

Let us assume for the sake of argument, though, that Nietzsche and I are both wrong, and that the Christian tradition does not intrinsically carry within it a universalizing impulse. On this view, perhaps The Case for Christian Nationalism represents an effort to correct the past trajectory of that tradition in important ways. (Such an approach would require an alternate explanation of the West’s distinctive “universalizing tendency,” which is not clearly provided, but let that pass.)

Wolfe does make some gestures in this direction. In his discussion of the order of loves rightly fitting to human beings, he argues for a conception of “complacent self-love” (a term of art), which is a theme that the Christian tradition has “only hinted at” previously.²¹ This complacent self-love involves, at bottom, a prerational affinity for particularity.²²

This concept, however, soon leads into difficulties of its own. Specifically, the ability to operationalize this love requires a clear conception of that in the interests of which I ought to act, over against other asserted claims on my allegiance. Here we come to Wolfe’s concept of the “nation,” which is left surprisingly ambiguous. We learn from Wolfe that the “nation” is not to be identified with the post-Westphalian nation-state,²³ or with racial groups in the modern sense,²⁴ but rather with “one’s own people-group” and “sharing . . . particularity with others.”²⁵ Exactly what, though, demarcates one nation from another? The argument in this section unfolds at a dizzyingly high level of abstraction, with specific comparative examples in short supply. Wolfe acknowledges, to be sure, that “[t]he idea of nation is notoriously difficult to define”²⁶—but more is required than the book provides. Surely, for instance, my college is not a “nation,” no matter how many of the phenomenological conditions for nationhood (similar customs, similar backgrounds of residents, common sense of place) it possesses.

Notably, the closing chapters of Wolfe’s book appear to presume that the United States of America is a “nation,” but according to his paradigm this seems debatable.²⁷ For instance, the ideological gulf today between liberal San Franciscans and conservative Texans strikes me as so vast that it can be reasonably questioned whether they share a common national identity on Wolfe’s terms, except in the most threadbare of senses.²⁸ Is the U.S. federal government perhaps better analogized to an imperial structure, presiding over a motley array of individual “nations” (the states that comprise the Union)? And if so, is such a regime politically licit? The answer, given Wolfe’s framework, is not obvious.²⁹

I’ll put my own cards on the table: I’m skeptical that any particular social configuration other than the family can be identified as distinctively “natural” in this regard, for the simple reason that what is taken to be “natural” is never apprehended apart from prior metaphysical (that is, “supernatural”) commitments. If Carl Schmitt was right that all modern political concepts are secularized theological concepts³⁰—and he was—then the spiritual and the temporal cannot be seamlessly cordoned off one from another, as if “natural” political configurations could remain somehow sealed against the disruptive force that is Christianity. Indeed, as John Milbank has persuasively demonstrated, the identification of any particular social order as “most basic” is a project profoundly conditioned by theological assumptions.³¹ Put simply, whatever one conceives a priori to be the most important locus of belonging will inform one’s political conclusions. This is an inherently theological determination.

And here we come to the book’s fundamental impasse. Either (1) Christianity is itself the real problem, such that paganism would probably do a better job of attaining the nation’s natural goods, but unfortunately paganism happens to be false, or (2) the apparent “universalizing tendency” of Christianity must be reinterpreted, but in a manner that is left substantially unclear. Neither horn of this dilemma seems particularly appealing.

Now, I do think there is something to be said for the phenomenological experience of cultural difference of the sort that Wolfe identifies.³² Some years ago, I spent a few days living in Berlin, and I was particularly surprised that the way that the German people around me moved and behaved—their way of “Being-in-the-world,” to crib shamelessly from Martin Heidegger³³—felt so profoundly familiar to me. My own ancestry is Anglo-German, with strong emphasis on the German, and the manner in which I was raised to occupy space, to get around in the world, was very similar to what I observed on the Berlin streets—extending to such characteristics as the Germans’ punctuality, their regard for order, their swift walking speed, their reverence for sacred space, and so forth.

Whatever this similarity or resemblance is, it is not racial in the sense that that term is usually understood. A few years before, I was approached by a panhandler of African ethnic origin just outside of Red Square in downtown Moscow. It was a striking experience because before that, I’d never heard a black person speaking Russian. Behaviorally, though, his way of Being-in-the-world—his Dasein—was no different than any of the other Russians around me on the street.

I take Wolfe to frequently be getting at something like the phenomena I’m describing here. And he is not alone in noting the potential political implications of these differences. Among others, controversial Russian political theorist Alexander Dugin argues for a conception of international order philosophically oriented around the different Dasein, or ways of being-in-the-world, represented by the lives of those dwelling within the world’s great civilizations.³⁴ Here he echoes a theme elaborated by Oswald Spengler,³⁵ and more recently Samuel Huntington³⁶: clear differences do seem to exist between cultural blocs within the world, and those differences seem to be very fundamental and irreducible to nation-state distinctives or biological characteristics.

I think Dugin’s argument can be pushed further than, to my knowledge, he himself has extended it: Dasein only exist, and are only recognizable as Dasein, rather than as manipulable objects present-at-hand or ready-to-hand, within the common horizon of Being—which the Christian tradition has historically identified with God and with the Good as such.³⁷ Here, civilizational difference is unavoidably mediated by the universal God, Who is Beauty as such and so disclosed within the diversity of civilizations who call upon Him. As Acts 17:27 teaches, God made the world’s nations “that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us.”

An argument built out along these general lines, rather than one structured around appeals to a self-contained “nature,” would likely sidestep many of the concerns I’ve developed here. It would, however, raise much deeper questions about the interrelation of “nature” and “grace,” and whether this dichotomizing paradigm—a “two-tier Thomism,”³⁸ which some Protestant scholastics appropriated uncritically from the Roman Catholic tradition—might harbor significant structural flaws.³⁹ That, at least, was the argument of Henri de Lubac and the tradition of the nouvelle theologie that followed him,⁴⁰ a tradition taken up by contemporary Lutheran theologians like Robert Jenson.⁴¹ But this is a subject beyond the scope of this review. 

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One Sunday morning several years ago, I woke early and made my way down into the Old City of Jerusalem, to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that stands—as tradition has it—over both the hill of Golgotha and the cave in which Jesus was raised from the dead. There, I joined a crowd of parishioners inside the cathedral and just outside the Aedicule, the tiny interior chapel built over the physical site of Christ’s Resurrection. The other churchgoers around me hailed from every imaginable region—Africa and Asia and Latin America and others I didn’t recognize immediately. The service was delivered in Latin—a language with which I have some familiarity, but not by any means my native tongue.

Despite not knowing the language, I never wondered where we were in the service, because the liturgy, with its familiar movements and gestures and practices, spoke for itself.⁴² Not for nothing has the Christian tradition historically referred to the Sacraments as “visible words.”⁴³ And I will admit, in those moments in the smoky, incense-filled chapel, I felt a closer kinship with those around me than I ever did on the streets of Berlin. United into one worshiping whole, we shared a distinctly Christian Dasein, over and through and beyond our individual cultural ways of being. 

That experience of unity, it seems to me, has inexorably political implications. It is a physical—or better, existential—prefiguration of a coming Kingdom. And for the Christian, this is a truth with which any and all “nationalisms” must contend. To be clear, I certainly don’t make that claim as a “liberal internationalist”—I take the thriving of the nation qua nation to be vital, and too often overlooked in an age of social and cultural flattening. I suspect Wolfe and I are political co-belligerents on a great number of issues. But the theory behind such a commitment matters as much as the political conclusions that follow from it.

Wolfe makes clear he is largely uninterested in political visions that proceed from an “eschatological” perspective, that draw their conceptions of human flourishing from the promise of the one people of God at the end of all things.⁴⁴ But what if the eschatological—that theological vantage on the world, from which Christian conceptions of reasonableness ultimately derive—is the only kind of politics there is? Our understanding of “natural” order is conditioned by the tradition within which we find ourselves—and for Christians, that tradition culminates in a civilization-transcending End.

Wolfe is right to stress that our political theories need not end in kumbaya-style late liberalism. But nor, for Christians, can they ever again be pagan.

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Editor’s Note: This is the first installment in a four-part symposium on The Case for Christian Nationalism. See the introduction to the series here.

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