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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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I would be very wary of using Wikipedia as a source for theology, and especially for the intersection of theology with politics. Wikipedia follows the reliable sources, and the reliable sources tend to be secular mainstream media filtered through an overwhelmingly secular user base, which is to say not very reliable at all. While writing my last message I found myself looking at the wiki page on millennialism, realised that the entire thing was unsalvageable nonsense, and concluded it would take too long to dismantle and therefore I just wan't going to mention millennialism or postmillennialism at all. This is unfortunately an all-too-common experience with Wikipedia and the subject of religion.

So that said...

It is basic Christian orthodoxy that Christ is lord of the whole of life - not just Sunday, not just the sabbath, not just whenever we're feeling pious, not just some imagined secular sphere. If one is a Christian, one is a Christian all the time. So I do not particularly associate that part with Christian nationalism - indeed, I think a general American Christian response to Christian nationalism worries has been to point out that they have always been Christian in the public sphere before, that Christianity has always shaped their values and political commitments, and that the unreasonable push is actually that would demand people cordon off part of their life and identity from their public commitments.

Similarly you mention that politics are inevitable for Christians and Christians must engage in them, must even fight - this too strikes me as, well, normal and the way it has always been for Christians. So that does not strike me as a Christian nationalist distinctive.

As for parallel societies... I have to admit I'm blanking here, because I'm not aware of where self-described Christian nationalists are doing anything like that. Dreher's Benedict Option flips between being a truism and being a headlong flight for the hills depending on what's more convenient for Dreher as an internet warrior in any given moment (and he will call you names if you disagree), but the Benedict Option at least commends a type of parallel society. Sometimes the postliberals give the impression of wanting to set up a parallel society, at least when they're not fantasising about a Hungarian-style top-down programme of public reorganisation, but they haven't done anything to meaningfully create one (except insofar as they exist within the Catholic media and cultural sphere, which does have a kind of internal society, albeit one rapidly fraying). Where do you see them building such societies?

More generally...

I understand Christian nationalism to be an argument about how to be Christian in the public sphere, not whether or not to do so. If they have made you more conscious of ways to be meaningfully Christian in public, and to build Christian community within a larger polity, then that is a good thing, but I would caution against signing on with 'Christian nationalism' as a project.

This is one conservative Christian comment on Christian nationalism that strikes me as useful - it recognises that the term is sufficiently indistinct as to be confusing, and it then more clearly lays out what is poisonous in terms of nationalism, but also what is required of Christians in terms of political and social engagement.

EDIT: Oops, posted too soon. To comment on specific policies, I'm not sure how much good symbolic recognition necessarily does for the church. The US constitution does not mention God at all, whereas the Australian constitution (my own) indicates in its first sentence that Australia forms a commonwealth "humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God", and every sitting of parliament begins with a public reading of the Lord's Prayer. Yet it is not clear that these symbolic acts have made Australia a more meaningfully or piously Christian society than America - if anything we may well be less so. So I would be wary of pinning too much hope on top-down state actions. If as Adams said the constitution is only adequate for "a moral and religious people", the only way to nourish it is to ensure that the people themselves are indeed moral and religious, from the bottom up. Symbolic statements strike me as, well, just slapping a sticker with 'moral and religious' written on it on top of something that isn't.