Christian Nationalism -- The Movie

And: Kostya Levin Becomes A Father; Facing The Demographic Doom Spiral

Pastor Andrew Isker, from 'What Is Christian Nationalism?’

Take a look at this trailer for an upcoming (January) documentary exploring “Christian Nationalism” as defined by a particular group of hard-right men — all Calvinists, I think, but correct me if I’m wrong — inspired by the work of Stephen Wolfe. Wolfe calls for a “measured theocratic Caesarism” to govern America, and promotes ethnic consciousness. He has denied promoting a theology and anthropology of racial separation (“kinism”), but his once and once again podcast partner Thomas Achord, who was outed in 2022 for Jew-hatred, racism, and misogyny preached under an online anon account, is affirmatively a kinist. Wolfe might not literally be a kinist, but his work is certainly kinist-adjacent.

There’s a short clip at the end of a bunch of young men sitting on a back porch smoking cigars — that’s part of the ethos. It comes from the so-called “TheoBros patriarch,” Pastor Douglas Wilson of Moscow, Idaho. To his credit, Wilson, observing how so many of these younger pastors have embraced Jew-hatred, Holocaust denial, and racism, spurred the “Antioch Declaration,” condemning all these things as anti-Christian. When Wilson condemned a specific instance of this stuff (a notorious neo-Nazi “White Boy Summer” video), Stephen Wolfe chastised Wilson for condemning guys who responded positively to this trash rather than reaching out to them.

One of the men featured in the doc is Joel Webbon, a hardcore antisemitic pastor in Texas. (Quote, from elsewhere: “If you’re not being called a Nazi, an antisemite … you’re not fighting hard enough.”) In the trailer, he utters a chilling line: “But the will to power is the only true prerequisite for change.” Webbon then praises “a unified, deliberate, strategic minority that had the will to power.”

Will to power is not the Gospel. “Will to power” is a phrase associated with Friedrich Nietzsche — you know, the author of a late 19th century book called The Antichrist, in which he condemned Christianity as weak, sentimental, and decadent, and Jesus Christ as an “idiot”. If Webbon were simply making a historical observation, e.g., that Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in divided Russia, though a small cult, because they had strategy and will to power, that would be one thing; but he is clearly prescribing this as a strategy for Christian Nationalists.

It is a repulsive corruption of the Gospel, and Doug Wilson is right to call it out. If you know anything about Weimar Germany, you know that the Nazis despised Christianity, but early on used its language and concepts to seduce millions of German Christians into thinking National Socialism was compatible with the faith.

But you know, this stuff comes from somewhere. I read over the weekend some progressives and liberal conservatives going off on me online over my Free Press essay warning about the dangers of normalizing this stuff, as Tucker Carlson did with his softball interview of Nick Fuentes. “We told you so!” they say — as if my postliberal-ish writings made the way for Nick Fuentes. It’s absurd.

Apparently if we had all pretended that everything was just fine in pre-Trump America, none of this bad stuff would have happened. Right. I don’t recall those voices speaking out against the insanely radical stuff liberals in power did during the Great Awokening — the kind of thing that pushes people to the far right. Postliberalism did not start with the Right, but with the Left; postliberalisms of the Right are a reaction.

Take, for example, this clip of the pastor Andrew Isker on Tucker Carlson seven months ago. Isker is in the Christian Nationalist movie (you can see him in the trailer), and is author of The Boniface Option, which I reviewed here when it was released. In the review, I noted that Isker is full of hatred, but the things he hates are more or less the same things I hate (Weimar America stuff — read the review). The problem is that all he offers as a solution is to focus one’s hatreds and ramp them up.

Well, there’s more now. In the show, Isker — who is much more affable in person than on the pages of his book — explains to Carson why he took his wife and kids and left their home state of Minnesota, where his family has lived for six generations, to relocate to Tennessee. They’re starting a Boniface Option community there. The last straw for the Iskers was when Gov. Tim Walz signed into law a bill that allows the state to seize your minor child if the child wishes to transition, but you won’t go along with it. The Iskers’ oldest child has autism. As part of his condition, the boy will not talk about what happens at his school. Andrew Isker said for all he knew, the school could be talking the boy into transitioning, and by the time he found out about it, the state could assert its right to take the child from his family.

“I didn’t want to be the test case,” Isker tells Carlson. So they fled the state. Who can blame them?

Isker is spearheading the building of a sprawling rural Tennessee “charter community” called RidgeRunner. In principle, I can’t fault him; it’s perfectly natural to want to live around people who share your own culture and principles. Read this story on Josh Abbotoy, a real estate developer who is behind the project, and who denies he’s a Christian Nationalist, but says he’s not going to judge the views of those to whom he sells properties. In the Tucker Carlson interview, Isker says, plausibly, that the long-term trend in the US is towards separation, as the common culture that most Americans once shared evaporates. It’s hard to see that he’s wrong.

But here’s the thing about Isker. As with the Fuentes interview, if the only thing you knew about him was what you saw on Tucker Carlson’s softball interview, you would think he was a quite reasonable conservative Christian man, even a social visionary. Carlson ends the interview by praising Isker’s “cheerfulness and optimism,” which is certainly how Isker presented himself.

But as I said in the Boniface Option review, the book is hard to read as anything other than a rage tract written by someone who is very, very online (e.g., he frequently uses the online slang term “bugman,” which speaks of a sociological reality, but is creepily dehumanizing).

Isker also co-authored a book on Christian Nationalism with Andrew Torba, the Gab founder, who is unapologetically antisemitic and racist. More from the RNS piece:

In a podcast earlier this year with Texas pastor Joel Webbon, Isker rejected the idea of “Judeo-Christian religion” and blamed Jews for the rise of secularism.

“We have to be wary of them,” he said. “We have to not allow them to have power in our culture and destroy Christian culture.”

Isker, who did not respond to repeated requests for an interview, has described his move to Tennessee as a chance to live near friends and “laugh at each other’s jokes on our front porch.” But he has also characterized the move in political terms.

“If you were able to take even a few hundred people that all think the same way and have all the same ideas about common good and politics and so forth, and you can consolidate them in the same place, you can exercise far more political power, even with a few hundred or a few thousand people, than you can on your own, widely dispersed across the entire country,” he said in a video posted on social media by RidgeRunner.

There’s a very dark spirit at work here. We absolutely should stand against the very dark spiritual things that Isker calls out in some of his work — but the Christian response to this cannot be whatever it is he’s peddling. If these hyper-Calvinist TheoBros ever came to power, their America would be a much worse place, even for white conservative non-Calvinist Christians like me. In the clip, one of the TheoBros says that religious liberty is a bad thing. Look, I want to make it clear that I’m glad that America is a country where people like him have the freedom to believe and proclaim that, and even to set up a settlement according to their principles. But that doesn’t mean I think that what they’re up to is good.

The challenge for conservatives like me is to come up with a meaningful alternative. I am living in Europe, and watching in real time European civilization dissolve under the pressures of global capitalism, mass migration from outside of Europe, and civilizational despair and self-hatred. There is nothing wrong with wanting your country to remain, you know, your country. If liberalism becomes a mandate for the suicide of nations, religions, and peoples, then you should not be surprised when people turn to radicals like Andrew Isker and Stephen Wolfe for a solution. In my next book, I’m going to be exploring other options.

Earlier this year, a local French court shot down a plan to build Monasphère, an intentionally Catholic settlement in the countryside — this, as a violation of France’s laïcité. These ordinary Catholics — friends of mine — had no intention of being a political force. They just wanted to be able to live peacefully among people who share their religion — the same religion that built France, and Europe. They were stopped in court by legal challenges from some locals and secularists. From a report (in French) in the Christian Tribune:

It is deeply regrettable that initiatives like Monasphère , which aims to establish Christian communities near spiritual sites, encounter such opposition from certain secular activists. This project, which seems entirely consistent with Christian values ​​of mutual support, sharing, and spiritual communion, has become an easy target for groups more concerned with defending their ideological vision of secularism than with the well-being of society.

Monasphère, co-founded by Damien Thomas and Charles Wattebled and supervised by Pierre-Edouard Sterin, proposes to set up living spaces where families can be in contact with sanctuaries, monasteries or convents, combining spiritual life and life in the countryside.

The idea, which emerged in 2020 after a discussion between several Christian families, responds to a deep desire to live one’s faith on a daily basis, in an environment where Christian values ​​can flourish.

This project has been a resounding success, attracting over 1,800 families, and embodies a model that could be the future of Christian life in France. However, a group of opponents, mainly retirees, has risen up to prevent it from coming to fruition.

In L’Île-Bouchard, the revolt of progressive septuagenarians against Monasphère is based on no just principle; it is a distorted interpretation of secularism. They denounce the creation of this “Christian village” as a form of communitarianism, while turning a blind eye to the intolerance they themselves display towards religious practices.

For, as Damien Thomas pointed out, the primary objective of this project is to allow Christian families to live in peace, share common values, and reconnect with nature. Nothing could be more legitimate, and yet, this aspiration for a tranquil Christian life is perceived as a threat by those who seem intent on erasing all traces of faith in France.

These insane laïcs think they’re protecting the Republic, but they’re really destroying their country. If you won’t permit peaceable Christian minorities to settle in the countryside together and live quiet lives of prayer and community-building, you will inevitably radicalize them. But the secularists can’t see the difference between Monasphère and whatever it is the militant, politically-engaged Christian Nationalists in the US are up to. (Which again, I support their right to do!)

It should be clear to you readers how much I oppose the far-right Christian Nationalism project and consider it to be an enemy of Christianity and an enemy of civilization — but can we not at least have the good sense to recognize that it comes from somewhere? Do we really have to choose between Tim Walz’s Minnesota and a politicized white Christian Nationalist colony? This is the kind of choice that cultural and economic dynamics put before Weimar Germany — and as history shows us, the early 1930s belief among Franz von Papen and other German conservatives that the Nazis could be controlled was a world-historical error.

I want you to notice too that the Nick Fuentes interview was not the first time Tucker Carlson has brought national prominence to a very far right, antisemitic figure, and made him far more palatable by downplaying or flat-out ignoring how radical he really is.

The rest of today’s newsletter follows the jump. Please subscribe — only six dollars per month for at least five newsletters each week. In the rest of today’s newsletter, I talk about Tolstoy and fatherhood, and a deep new review essay in the London Review Of Books, talking about population decline and its challenges.