Hypocrisy and Projection
It is all the rage for radical leftist professors to scream and cry about the impending terrors of Christian Nationalism. This is a rhetorical strategy we’ve seen before. However, it is also part of a deeper problem. It is a problem that threatens the state in a way the same professors claim Christian Nationalism does.
As a professor at a state university, I can’t go to work without hearing faculty share their fears of an impending Christian Nationalist “theocracy.” Last week, two Arizona State University (ASU) professors told students at an ASU event that if they don’t elect Kamala Harris, they will be forced to breed, invoking the tired Handmaid’s Tale trope. An ASU spokesman excused this hyperbole as protected free speech. That is misleading. These professors aren’t guest speakers invited to campus. They are ASU faculty (state employees), who signed a contract promising to not use ASU resources to advance political causes.
The hypocrisy is evident to all who can see. The people who claim to be worried about others imposing their beliefs through the government are doing just that. More than hypocrisy, it is projection and cunning strategy: alert the public that the other side is doing something terrible while you are doing the same thing to throw everyone off your scent. The DEI departments at state universities are another perfect example: call everyone else a racist while you divide humans up based on skin color.
But there is a deeper layer to this.
The state and the church are separate institutions. Even when they pursue the same goal (the glory of God), they do so in different ways. The state has borders. Its laws only extend to those borders. Other nations have their own laws, which do not extend into our nation’s borders. The state has a duty to protect its borders. If it cannot do so, it is no longer a state.
On the other hand, the church (invisible) has no borders. It is a truly global institution. It takes the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ into every corner of the earth. Christians will ignore borders even on the threat of prison time or death to get the Gospel to foreign nations. The twentieth century saw many such acts of heroism behind the Soviet Iron Curtain. Today, somewhat humorously (but only somewhat), taking the Gospel onto state university campuses can feel like smuggling Christian contraband into East Berlin.
Christians are part of both institutions, church and nation. The left cries wolf about conservative Christians trying to impose their religious law on the United States. Of course, the United States already relies on Christian law: do not murder, do not steal, etc. Not to mention the benefits of Christian social custom and a host of philanthropic efforts—hospitals, schools, adoption agencies, etc. If the left really wants government sanitized of Christianity, we will take those back as well.
As I said, the left spends its sleepless nights fretting about Christian Nationalists. A friend shared an article with me about how to identify a Christian nationalist. I thought it might be from The Onion or The Bee, but it was a “serious” article. It said that Christian nationalists attend radical churches. Such churches often post their beliefs on their websites. To identify a Christian nationalist, go to their church’s webpage and see if they believe things like this: The Bible is the inerrant Word of God; marriage is between a man and a woman; do they believe life begins at conception; do they believe pornography is a sin. That’s what gets you put into the Christian nationalist category. Basically, being a Christian. Christian Nationalism, as a term now thoroughly in the cultural bloodstream, no operates as a catchall insult for what was normal a generation ago.
Media shenanigans aside, the truth is we are indeed living in a time when there is an attempt to make the state a branch of the church, to envelope the state in ecclesial logic.
But it is the apostate leftist church doing this armed with a confused theology of liberation. It is a church claiming that since the church recognizes no borders, neither should the state. Anyone from anywhere should be able to enter our nation (or any nation) for whatever reason.
There are several potential explanations for this maneuver, but one is that this apostate church can’t explain suffering and inequality. In short, they have no doctrine of Providence. It is random, and it is unfair. Some were born into comfort in the United States, and others were born into a country where life is materially harder, which is unjust. Additionally, the easy life of someone in the United States is really due to the oppression and suffering of minorities in the past. Both are enough to say that such people should lose their privilege as part of restorative justice.
That is a terribly insufficient answer to the problem of suffering. It is superficial in its analysis of the past and childish in its analysis of the present. But it is what this apostate church has imposed on our government. The state’s hands are tied, and it cannot defend its own borders, for it has no right to perpetuate suffering and inequality. Sometimes leftist Christians say the quite part out loud. But most of the time this faction scapegoats Christian Nationalists, accusing them of tyranny while subordinating the state to improper ends.
Christians have the actual solution to the problem of evil. As applied to the state and world history, the Apostle Paul states it when he speaks to the philosophers in Athens. He tells them: And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him (Acts 17:26-27a). Christians understand God’s Providence. This includes God’s blessing and God’s discipline on faithlessness. Paul concludes that thought by telling the Athenian philosophers that God is near to us. He is revealed to all in general revelation. The liberal apostate is not only ignoring the Bible, ze is ignoring clear general revelation.
The second explanation of this apostate church is the belief that their false Gospel means solving material differences between humans. This is where they are actually Marxists. They think of history as a conflict between the “haves” and the “have nots,” and they convince many Americans that Jesus came to help the “have nots” get more. They impose this religion on the state in many ways. One such way is to deny the state its right and duty of exclusion, to protect its border. Another way this imposition is employed is by justification of redistribution of wealth. Still, another is the politicization of state education.
The Reformers were very well aware of the problems of a church ruling the state. Although there were different views among them about this, the line that traces to the United States through separatists, dissenters, and non-conformists is one that warns about the church over the state. They each have their function, but neither rules over the other. Tyrants don’t like this. Marxist tyrants especially hate it. If they can’t destroy the Christian church (and it is their real obstacle in America), they can at least infiltrate it and use its apostate branches for their own ends to direct the state.
So, ours is a day of an apostate church teaching anti-nationalism. This helps us understand why radicals stay up at night worrying about Christian Nationalism. It is projection. They know what they are doing, and they are afraid their enemies might try to do it also. The truth is that Christian beliefs are already the foundation of law in the West. This is true whether it is natural law or revealed law. What the apostate Christian anti-nationalism aims at is undoing that Christianity and replacing it with their own vision of justice. It is a vision of a nightmare. But at least they reason that everyone is living in the same nightmare.
Image Credit: Unsplash
Anderson’s article is divided into two parts. The first part is about the inverse of the story of the boy who cried wolf. Here, a boy continually assures us that all he sees are sheep. And he either cries sheep because he can’t recognize the wolf in sheep’s clothing that lurks near or he is in league with the wolf.
We might ask if Anderson aware of some of the articles on this website. Some of them call for a return to White Anglo Saxon Protestantism while others call for laws that would criminalize blasphemy and breaking the Sabbath. And remember all of the Christian symbolism that was on display on Jan 6, 2021. And so there is a realistic threat of Christians attempting to seize some significant level of control over the government in our nation now.
As for the 2nd part, do we Christians have all of the answers? Please note the atrocities that came with Christendom. It seems that the Bible was written to tell God’s people how to live, but what place should unbelievers have in society? Should they be under Christian rule? History emphatically answers that question with a ‘NO.’
You really simplified Christian nationalism here.
Some pastors are arguing to make other religions illegal. That’s CN. That’s worthy of concern. It isn’t made up – just spend some time on Twitter.
David, actually he doesn’t. Are there some people who embrace the CN moniker who believe that, sure, but to say that’s what all people who believe our nation, and every nation, should be totalitarian in this way simply is not true. Christians who believe in theocracy, like I do, disagree about a million details, regardless of what you read on Twitter. As I’ve learned since being engage on there since earlier this year, Twitter isn’t reality.
Here is a quote from Mark Rushdoony, whose father, RJ, was the father of of Reconstructionism and who people caricature as someone who believes in a tyrannical Christian state:
“Theocracy is falsely assumed to be a take-over of government, imposing biblical law on an unwilling society. This presupposes statism which is the opposite of theocracy. Because modern people only understand power as government, they assume that’s what we want.”
This article isn’t true. “Liberals” (because that’s what you call anyone who doesn’t support Trump) don’t want to get rid of Christianity and they don’t label ALL Christians as CN. (Should we talk about the conservatives who consider all Democrats satanic? Evil? Is that any different?) The United States was a haven for those who suffered religious persecution in England. Guess what? Each state was home to different sects. Roger Williams founded the First Baptist Church of America, yet believed in separation of religion and state so they could worship freely. (Being as Pennsylvania was home to the Quakers and worshipped differently.) There was no nation-supported religion. There was freedom to worship. By imposing Christian beliefs on our nation through legislation, that is not Constitutional. The founders wrote the Constitution, and it was the first to draw its power from the people. “We the People.”
The first document to ban religious tests for any office of government. (Tests required by England.) The first amendment clearly states “Congress shall make no law respecting an *establishment* of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Christian is not under attack in the US. Last time I checked, churches still exist. They still worship. It might surprised you to know that I’m a Christian. My daughter was raised in a private Christian school. The reason I had her there is because I didn’t want public teachers leading the students in prayer if it came to that. The desire to bring back prayer to schools is the start of religious persecution for those that attend. (Jewish people don’t pray the same way Christians do, for example.)
I truly believe Trump won to give Christians four years to remove the blinders and see the deception that has permeated their lives. The idolatry of a lost man who claims with blasphemy “I am the chosen one.” Fear is motivating believers. There is chaos and confusion that leads Christians rather than peace. We’re living in the Last Days, and I don’t think it’s going to end the way you think it’s going to. God have mercy on your souls.