Reactionary Christian Nationalism on Display
A window into White Christian Nationalism (as endorsed by Pete Hegseth!).
I have certainly been aware of such people and such views; indeed, at one point, some people I attended church with almost certainly thought this way. But even at that point in my life, the notion that women shouldn’t vote would have struck me as coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs.
That such people have these views is not new. That such people have access to power and are helping shape the national narrative is.
Side note: I am a father of three. My part of the biological contribution took no talent and was far easier than what my wife had to go through. The weird and unnecessary demeaning of women is a tell that goes beyond their perverse theology.
Note that the Secretary of Defense posted the entire interview, with a clear endorsement.
BTW, come for the misogyny, stay for the semi-apologia for slavery and the homophobia.
It is amazing, but telling, that someone who believes that women should submit to men can claim not to be a misogynist. It takes a specific definition to come to that conclusion, shall we say.
Wilson’s view of “theocracy” is also highly flawed. Having the “demos” (the people) govern is not a theocracy by definition, and just calling “the people” a “god” doesn’t make it so, although it is a typical Evangelical move to try and make everything into a religious contest. But really, what he is showing is that he isn’t interested purely in his religious views (which not one is curtailing, by the way); it is about him wanting to dominate politics and therefore all of us.
This all reminds me of something I have commented on before, which is the observation in Jefferson Cowie’s book, Freedom’s Dominion, that a lot of people who claim to believe in “freedom” mean the freedom to dominate others.
There are two views of freedom that are at war in America right now. One is the aforementioned freedom to dominate. People like Wilson and others in the video want the freedom to impose their views on the rest of us (his reference to Saudi Arabia in the interview was telling and damning, given its brutal autocracy) as they currently do on the women in their lives.
The second is a classically liberal, pluralistic view that allows Wilson and his congregants to freely believe as they choose and live as they wish, and allows the rest of us to do the same.
All of this reminds me of an essay I read earlier this week by Thomas Zimmer, which starts thusly:
America is currently experiencing the latest iteration of a very old struggle that has defined the country since its inception. What should this nation strive to be: A land of and for white Christians that supposedly works best when wealthy white men get to exert power and steer the community – or a place where “all men are created equal” and the individual’s status is not determined by what they look like, where they came from, who they pray to (or not), how they identify, and how much money they possess? The answer to this fundamental question of national identity determines who gets to belong and who gets to define the boundaries of what counts as “American,” who gets to shape the public square in their image. These competing visions are best accommodated by fundamentally incompatible political and societal orders: A white Christian ethno-state with strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth on the one hand; an egalitarian democracy embracing a pluralistic society on the other.
This encapsulates what Wilson and his ilk want. They want to define America as a “Christian nation” (the same way Saudi Arabia is an Islamic one) and, further, to use their specific definition of “Christian” in doing so.
I would note that there is clearly a profound weakness in their Christianity because there is no evidence that, for example, Pete Hegseth’s faith has made him a good and moral man. Nor is there any evidence that Trump, perhaps the least religious president in my lifetime (despite Franklin Graham’s assurances), is in any way transformed by his connections to the Almighty. I say this to judge them on the basis of their own rules, which would suggest that exposure to the divine via being “born again” ought to change people’s behaviors. Attempts to tell me that King David both sinned and was a “man after God’s own heart” will not convince me that we should look past serial adultery and other allegations of sexual abuse, but it will just confirm to me he vacuity of the defense.*
The reason people like Wilson and his followers are more than happy to embrace Hegseth, Trump, and the like is because they are a pathway to what Zimmer describes above, “A land of and for white Christians that supposedly works best when wealthy white men get to exert power and steer the community.”
They all may tell themselves they are serving a higher calling by seeking to transform society, but it sure is quite the coincidence that what God wants is a system with white, male dominance!
Back to Zimmer:
Until very recently at least, the Right was indeed losing the fundamental struggle over what kind of country “America” should strive to be. The idea of a “crisis of liberal democracy” has dominated the political and broader public discourse over the past decade. But in crucial ways, it is the conception of “real America” as a white Christian patriarchal homeland that has come under enormous pressure. Socially, culturally, and – most importantly, perhaps – demographically, the country has moved away from the rightwing ideal since the middle of the twentieth century. It is not just a figment of the reactionary imagination that America has become less white, less religious, and more pluralistic in basically every dimension. As a result, the conservative hold on power has become tenuous. In a narrow political sense, they may be in charge right now – in the White House, in Congress, at the Supreme Court. But it is not just political power the Right seeks. They desire cultural domination and affirmation. In the cultural sphere, the public square, and across many societal dimensions like the family, the shift in power away from white male conservatives has been more pronounced. The Right has engaged in a comprehensive counter-mobilization in response – a radicalization fueled not by a feeling of strength, but by a sense of weakness.
Again, freedom to dominate, not freedom of a population to, you know, be free.
Here is a lengthy Politico piece that is very much worth your time: Doug Wilson Has Spent Decades Pushing for a Christian Theocracy. In Trump’s DC, the New Right Is Listening.
In terms of why his claims of not being a misogynist are dubious (he said, understatedly for effect), well…
In particular, Wilson’s critics argue that some of his past writings about sex — including his statements that “the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party,” and his description of heterosexual sex as “A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts” — amount to a tacit defense of marital violence. “These pastors told me a wife is not allowed to tell her husband no,” a former kirker who said she was the victim of marital abuse told Vice in 2021.
I will also note this:
Beyond these near-term goals, Wilson has floated some more fundamental changes to America’s political system: Amending the Constitution to include reference to the Apostles’ Creed, restricting office holding to practicing Christians and changing voting practices to award votes by household, with the default vote-holder being the male head of the household. His long-term goal, he said, is to inspire a grassroots Christian reformation that would excise the whole idea of secularism from American law and society.He admits that this reformation would represent a “huge” departure from America’s current political order, and that even some of his more modest reforms could only be brought about via constitutional amendment — or, if that fails, civil strife.
“I’m fond of saying that reformations never happen to the polite background sound of golf applause,” Wilson said. “It would be tumultuous.”
Would it be violent, I wondered?
“Well,” he said, chuckling, “that depends on the bad guys.”
Hilarious!
What that means, of course, is that if the “bad guys” submit, there will be no violence. But if they choose to resist, well, what else can the “good guys” do but break a few skulls?
There is plenty more, but I will leave it there for now.
I also commend Zimmer’s piece to be read in full.
*I want to stress the notion that I am evaluating them on their own terms, not arguing that those terms are correct. As I have noted many times, earlier in my life, I would have reasonably been described as a conservative Evangelical, so I speak their language and I understand what they are arguing. The logic of being “Born Again” suggests a direct connection to the divine. There is the “indwelling” of the Holy Spirit (one part of the triune Godhead) in the life of a believer, or so the theory goes. It is the kind of thing that is supposed to have the power to, for example, miraculously free a person of a serious drug addiction or to turn around a life of crime. So, if that is the way it is supposed to work, it would be nice to see better people fronting for all of this stuff than we are getting.
The bit about David is a constant Evangelical dodge that is deployed to explain why Christians should be able to trust flawed humans in the now. After all, in the Biblical story, David lusted after a woman and had her husband sent to the front lines so he would likely be killed in the hope that that would allow him to claim said woman. And yet, even after all of that, the text proclaims that “David was a man after God’s own heart”! Cool, right? I suppose it often sounds reasonable to some in the context of a Sunday morning sermon, as we all would like to think we can mess up and still be right with God, but the notion that it is some dictum that papers over accepting a serial adulterer and business cheat as the standard bearer for rightwing Christianity is quite the stretch.
Put another way, it is clear that the real issue is no spirituality as they themselves define it. It is about whether you are part of their tribe or not, and whether you can further their power goals.
Maybe I’m not telling you anything new, but the idea is that the true purpose* of being a woman is to be a mother subject to the dominant male in the household. Just as a man’s true purpose is to be a pater familias with everything that this entails.
A second idea is that happiness consists of living up to one’s true purpose as determined by a rational creator-God.
* More properly: “final cause.” See, e.g., here.
ETA: Obviously, philosophical or theological ideas that are around twenty centuries old (give or take) are generally not exactly fit for purpose anymore.
Hegseth’s X post stated “All of Christ for All of Life.”
I can think of literally dozens of Jesus’s sayings which Hegseth’s statements and actions are diametrically opposed to, starting with “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”.
@drj: I do understand. It nonetheless underscores a profound disconnect between his idea of misogyny and the broader social understanding thereof.
I would say the ‘his ilk’ includes many people now in prominent positions of leadership, policy, and influence in our Federal government, and I do not think it is farfetched or unreasonable to suggest there are some Justices on the The Court, (i.e, Samuel Alito) who are very comfortable with what Wilson and his fellow travelers want.
Remember, these people (and their fellow ilk) believe that the Left is radical.
I am convinced these days that the description of David as “Beloved by God” was another way of saying, “Man, that guy could get away with anything.”
Even when I was young and at my most devout, I could note the pattern where people who wanted social and material gain would cloak their desires in scripture and religious terms. I didn’t have the term “appropriation” then, but now I think it’s a massive appropriation.
Come to think of it, such people are described in the Bible. “Pharisees” are the usual name for them, but there are a few others not so described.
“A second idea is that happiness consists of living up to one’s true purpose as determined by a rational creator-God.”
The most interesting aspect of this belief is that somehow the people espousing it have the idea that they know my true purpose better than I do.
I mean, in a Catholic that makes more sense, because the whole enterprise is hierarchical, which is to say authoritarian. But you know, the whole idea of Protestantism is that my take on what God’s Will is just as good as anybody else’s.
@al Ameda:
I will die lonely on this hill.
I don’t think we should refer to movements that aim to return to a previous state as radical.
Related aside: what does one do when synonyms of a word, as compiled by lexicographers, are contradictory to each other or common usage of the original word?
@Kurtz:
I completely understand your point.
When I was in college, what is happening now would probably have been described as something like, ‘a reactionary restoration.’
Words and terms often change in meaning over time.
Perhaps I am contributing to degredation of language here, I’m not sure.
Man… I guess it sure would be a lot easier for some if the accepted response was:
“Shaddup. Because god says so. Now, go make me a sammich.”
Of course, murder rates would go up a lot in certain gun hugging communities.
Under his eye.
@Kurtz: Huh. I understand “radical” quite differently. I am perfectly comfortable with the notion of a “right radical” or a “reactionary radical”.
Interestingly, I wonder where the MRA’s have gone. What’s espoused in the OP is not at all the MRA line of thought, which usually wanted to point out how everyday feminist discourse (not how they would frame it) excluded talk of sexism against men – which is a thing. (It’s a thing discussed by none other than Andrea Dworkin during her advocacy for the ERA). So I had the MRA’s down as a “reactionary feminist splinter group”. Whether they were radical or not was more of an individual question.
Back to the OP, the people described above are very definitely radicals. They would be happy to toss out the Constitution and 200 years of precedent and custom to get their way.
@Kurtz:
I would call such people reactionaries.
@Kurtz: Corey Robin wrote a whole book, The Reactionary Mind, looking at history and arguing that political conservatism has always really been reactionary, not conservative.
And George Lakoff wrote a whole book, Whose Freedom, arguing that for conservatives freedom means being free to do their duty as they see it, and part of their duty as they see it is making you do your duty, as they see it.
I grew up in what might be called a white-bread evangelical family. I left the church in my late teenage years because it became obvious to me that all the self-described Christians I knew were no different to anybody else. They were very selective about the parts of Christ’s teachings they chose to apply to their personal lives. Indeed “I know it’s not very Christian of me, but …” was a common way for them to excuse their failings with a laugh.
There was no evidence that their supposed “born again” experience had filled them with the Holy Spirit. Far from going out to all the world to preach the gospel, they tended to regard themselves as a fortunate group of people with superior morals somewhat separated from the common herd which was bound for Hell.
@al Ameda:
Not a degradation at all.
In my experience, most people take @Jay L. Gischer’s view of it.
That is 100% understandable to me.
Whether it fits common usage or not, it strikes me that this sort of discussion is one of the ways language evolves.
In this specific case, a great deal of political and economic resources are spent attempting to define or re-define words; narrow or broaden definitions; turn or coin phrases.
It seems like a discussion worth having.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Reaction is as reaction does.
The amusing thing is that American “conservatism” has been in many ways a variant of “liberalism”.
Now you have some silly ideologues trying to attempt a rather half-arsed reconstruction of 19th century European “reactionary conservatism” and rather absurdly trying to combine it with demotic populism.
When the US lacks, and always has lacked, due to its foundation, the previous institutions to revert to.
Monarchy?
Establised religion?
Aristocracy?
There’s always slavery, I suppose.
Even more hilariously, the history of Europe indicates that a “Christian” order has various failure modes: see the Reformation and the Wars of Religion.
Or the collapse of Roman Christian unity just as about soon as Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.
Establish a “Christian” dominion in America, and then wait for about ten seconds for the Catholic ultras and the evangelical Baptists to be at each others throats.
The basis, as ever, seems to be: “Overthrow the existing order, because I hates it, and am bound to come up smelling of roses in the aftermath. Because reasons.”
The outcome tends to be disappointing.
Those who will not learn from history must experience it.
@JohnSF:
This is true.
But the use of the past tense is also true for most “conservatives” these days.
None of the Bible was written for us today