By Enos Powell
Read the original article by Enos at his blog here.
Recently, it has become all the rage for the lite WOKE left to accuse the dissident right of being “WOKE RIGHT.” The lite WOKE left is doing this in order to try and gate-keep for the hard WOKE left. It is hoped by those slinging around the accusation of “WOKE RIGHT” that they will be able to discredit the dissident and Christian Right with many who are not epistemologically self conscious in our current truth contest.
Now, I have never understood the guts of this accusation and I have legitimately tried to understand that the WOKE Right and the WOKE Left are really the same only as mirror opposites. The argument that the WOKE Right is the same as the WOKE Left is that both use the same methodology to arrive at their opposite positions.
I hope to give the lie to that idiocy in this post.
The only way to examine a position is to look at the Worldview and theology undergirding it. That is how I intend to answer the question; “Is there such a thing as the WOKE Right which mirrors the WOKE Left?”
When it comes to Worldviews we have to consider the issue of Ontology. Ontology (or metaphysics) examines the principles and causes of being. It examine issues of origins and the nature of reality. The Ontology of the WOKE Left, not believing in an extra-mundane personal God, is time + chance + circumstance. Because of this denial of an extra-mundane personal God, man becomes the agent who determines all of reality. The WOKE Left thus have created, whole-cloth, an ideological narrative that posits an Oppressed vs. Oppressor dynamic wherein those defined as “Oppressed” by the WOKE Left are now allowed to be the “Oppressors” in the WOKE Left worldview. The problem here is that those labeled as “Oppressed” and “Oppressors”are completely arbitrary. This arbitrariness is allowed because, in their Ontology there is no extra-mundane personal and authoritative God who can set the standard for “Oppressed” and “Oppressor.” Not believing in the God of the Bible they are their own God and being their own God they create, by manipulating the evidence, who occupies the “Oppressed” and “Oppressor” categories and, lo and behold, the chief “Oppressor” in this God hating worldview is the Christian White man who has been, by God’s grace alone, the chief carrier of civilizational Christianity.
Now along comes the WOKE lite left who has a vested interested in coming to the aid and assistance of the hard WOKE left and the WOKE lite left accuses the Dissident Right of being WOKE right. However, this accusation fails, particularly as pointed at the Christian dissident right, because the Christian dissident rights worldview includes an extra-mundane personal and authoritative God. The dissident right holds that God created all things in six days and all very good. Because of this affirmation of the extra-mundane personal and authoritative God, the dissident right bows to God’s determination of reality. This means that the dissident right does not move in terms of the WOKE left’s “Oppressor vs. Oppressed” categories but rather moves in terms of the Christian antithesis which teaches that Christians are blessed and the wicked are cursed. When the dissident right looks at world history they see not “Oppressed vs. Oppressor” but they see blessed vs. cursed. When the cursed are successful over the righteous the Christian sees that as the chastening hand of God against His people for their rebellion against God.
All this means that the Christian sees history as much more complex than merely a “Oppressed vs. Oppressor” dynamic. This also means that the idea that a WOKE right exists is just pure bollix. The ontology embraced in the Christian worldview does not allow for a WOKE ontology. Something else that should be noted here is that the dissident Christian right also believes that the righteous should rule over the wicked. That rule over the wicked is to be consistent with God’s revealed Word but make no mistake — it is God’s good toward the wicked that the righteous rule over them.
This brings us in turn to the issue of epistemology in the competing worldviews of the dissident Christian right and the WOKE left. Epistemolgoy answers the question; “How do we know what we know.” The epistemology that the WOKE left has embraced is that of Critical theory as applied across a host of disciplines. Critical theory thus provides the WOKE left epistemological foundation. Critical theory arose in the context of postmodernism. Postmodernism held that true truth (absolute truth) did not exist and that as such all that existed was what they called “social constructs.” “Social constructs” were human inventions serving as “arbitrary truth dynamics” that different people groups and sub-groups would abide by until such a time they changed their minds moving to a different “social construct truth paradigm.” Critical theory arises in this mix insisting that absolute truth does not exist while agreeing with the po-mo project about truth as social construct and the social construct truth that the Critical theory builds is, as we have seen, the whole myth of “Oppressed” vs. “Oppressor” as they alone – solely upon their own authority – designate the “Oppressed” vs. “Oppressor” categories. Now, WOKE epistemology hates the God of the Bible and hates the idea that true truth exists and so not surprisingly, as noted above, the WOKE project has labeled as the chief “Oppressor” throughout world history as the people who own the worldview handed down from God and revealed in Scripture. The anti-Christ worldview that is WOKE finds their natural #1 enemy to be the ones guilty of being the “Oppressors” throughout history. How convenient. Now, the WOKE lite left (many of whom insist they are Christian) come along and support the worldview of the hard WOKE left in the name of Christ. The WOKE lite left join hands with the hard WOKE left to put Christian Nationalists in the dock in order to accuse them of being just like the hard WOKE left. This is a classic example of the Saul Alinsky tactic of accusing your opponent of that which you are guilty.
So, the WOKE Left uses Critical Race theory as their epistemology. This epistemic part of the post-modern project and worldview that the hard WOKE left embraces, rejects the idea of true truth. Contrasted with this is the so-called WOKE Right which rejects CRT as their epistemology choosing instead God’s Word as their epistemic authority. As such, we have to ask, “How can the WOKE Right be the same as the WOKE Left when their epistemology is diametrically opposed to one another?”
By continuing to examine the worldviews of both WOKE left and dissident right we continue to discover complete opposition at every point. Another example would be the anthropology of WOKE left vs. dissident Christian right. The WOKE left hold an anthropology that man is merely matter in motion. Not owning a personal God all that is left for the WOKE left is to affirm that man only has the meaning that man himself gives to himself. With this anthropology the WOKE left has chosen to take as the ideal man the pervert, the feminist, and the Christless minority to be their “Oppressed” heroes. This arbitrary choice is completely in concord with Rousseau’s noble savage theory. For Rousseau and the Romanticist worldview there existed an idealized concept of uncivilized man who symbolized the innate goodness of man as not exposed to the corrupting influences of civilization. This anthropology continues for the WOKE left. The only thing that has been changed out is that whereas for the worldview of Romanticism it was the frontier Indian in the new World who served as the noble savage who was to be esteemed as the ideal man, now it is the sexual pervert, feminist, and Christ-hating minority who serves as the noble savage. Further, the anthropology of the current WOKE left teaches that the man who is the least of all mankind is the Biblical Christian who insists that justice needs to be brought against the modern noble savage.
To the contrary of all this the dissident Christian right embraces an anthropology that teaches that man outside of Jesus Christ is a sinner who can only sin all the time since he has a sin nature out of which arises nothing but sin. The anthropology of the dissident Christian right rejects the idea that man is basically good — and this is never more true than when considering the WOKE left’s noble savages. Because of this the WOKE left hates with all their might the dissident right.
The “Christian” Woke lite left once again does the dirty work of the hard WOKE left by indicting other Christians with sharing the same worldview as the hard WOKE left. We begin to see then a pattern. The lite WOKE left, though claiming Christ, are operating out of a Christless world and life view. They are, by their accusations against their dissident Right brothers of being WOKE right demonstrating that they belong to their father the Devil.
We move next to the worldview issue of teleology. Teleology deals with man’s conviction concerning the purposeful development toward an end, as in history. Teleology answers the question “where are we headed.” For the dissident Christian the answer is “the Kingdom of God and His Christ.” For the Hard WOKE left the answer is “the Kingdom of man.” Note the diametrical opposition between these two answers. The Hard WOKE left believes he is building a better if indeed not perfect Utopia and the one group of people who stand most decidedly against his Utopian project are the dissident Christian right who absolutely hate the idea of building Utopias which, because man is the god in the Utopian visions, always end up being the ugliest of Dystopias. The dissident Right does not look for a man centered Utopia but instead sees history directed towards the postmillennial end of God’s Kingdom being built up on planet earth due to God’s determination, by the work of His Holy Spirit, to have the Kingdoms of this earth become the kingdoms of our Lord and His Christ.
So, given this opposition how can the WOKE lite left – manned by “Christians” who hate Christian Nationalism – ever accuse, with a straight face, that the dissident Christian right is in point of fact serving as a “WOKE” right? The idea is just ludicrous and could only be vomited up by those who have no capacity to think in Biblical categories.
Our last Christian worldview category that we will consider is the worldview issue of axiology. Axiology is the study of values and value judgments. Axiology answers the question; “What is our ultimate value.” For the dissident right the answer to that question is always; “Our ultimate value is the glory of God and His Christ being seen, as determined by God’s revelation found in Scripture.” For the WOKE left the answer to that question is alaway; “Our ultimate value is the advancement of the glory of man, as determined by our completely subjective analysis.” Remember in the WOKE left world and life view there is no God who exists to whom glory can be given. As such, the question of axiology is always reduced to man being his own ultimate value. The hard WOKE worldview is always about the glory of man as determined by some Christless God hating elite. This Christless God hating elite most usually exists as occupying seats of power located in the Mega-State or the Mega-Corporate or the Mega-Banking world. This Christless, God hating elite finds their penultimate value in destroying any Biblical Christian belonging to the dissident Right who would oppose their hard WOKE or even lite WOKE left world and life view and agenda.
So, we see the whole accusation of being “WOKE Right” is utterly without foundation and so completely ridiculous. The Hard WOKE left and the lite WOKE left are operating out of a completely different Weltanschauung as compared to the Dissident Christian Right. To suggest that the Hard WOKE right is the same as the Hard WOKE is just a ploy to poison the well of what the dissident Christian right advocates as it advocates the Crown Rights of the Rightful Rule – the Lord Jesus Christ – over every area of life. The accusation of “Hard WOKE Right” is a brilliant subterfuge birthed from the womb of Satan purposed to dilute the impact of the advance of Biblical Christianity as championed by the dissident Christian Right.
Christian Nationalism vs Global Jesus
This article (appearing on both Iron Ink and Tribal Theocrat ) aims to refute accusations made by some Christians identified with the “lite WOKE Left” that the Christian nationalism championed by “the dissident Christian right” amounts to nothing less than a heretical embrace of the so-called WOKE Right. The pseudonymous author contends that the ontology, epistemology, anthropology, teleology, and axiology of the “dissident Christian right” are set in radical and permanent opposition to the “hard WOKE worldview” which is always about the glory of man as determined by some Christless God hating elite.”
Our author takes it as axiomatic that the Weltanschauung of the dissident Christian right “advocates the Crown Rights of the Rightful Rule” of the Lord Jesus Christ “over every area of life.” The accusation that Christian nationalism is just another manifestation of the WOKE Right fails “because the dissident right’s worldview includes an extra-mundane personal and authoritative God who “created all things in six days and all are very good.” For the author, it follows that the dissident right must bow “to God’s determination of reality.” Our “ultimate value” therefore “is the glory of God and His Christ,” as revealed in Scripture. Biblical Christianity, the author tells us, believes in a universal “history directed towards the postmillennial end of God’s Kingdom being built up on planet earth” in fulfillment of God’s plan “to have the Kingdoms of this earth become the kingdoms of our Lord and His Christ.”
Now, whatever one makes of this defence of Christian nationalism, there is no denying that it reflects a worldview widely shared among Anglo-American Christian nationalists. But, when I recently attended the Right Response Ministries conference in Texas devoted to “Defeating Trash World,” I felt as if I had entered a theological bubble, hermetically sealed within historical creeds and a biblical hermeneutic impervious to scholarly criticism.
Certainly, in the months leading up to the conference, I found it impossible to receive permission (or even acknowledgement of my request) to set up a table displaying my new book from the pastor organizing the event. I even had Amazon.com send the pastor a copy of the book, entitled Christian Nationalism vs Global Jesus: Projects of Peoplehood from Biblical Israel. Admittedly such a title suggests strong dissent from the worn axioms of creedal Christianity as expounded in the article under discussion here.
I had hoped, however, that a display table would spark some interest and an opportunity to defend the book in conversation with speakers and attendees at the conference. I strongly suspect that the reason my request was refused, even after I arrived at the conference with a boxload of books, was that the conference organizers dismissed it as damnable heresy. Certainly, the author of the present article appears to reject any possiblity that the thesis of my book represents a legitimate expression of Christian nationalism.
If one’s entitlement to claim Christian identity turns on fidelity to the creeds, then perhaps I can be denied entry into the fold. On the other hand, as the author of a book entitled Dissident Dispatches: An Alt-Right Guide to Christian Theology I must possess a strong claim to be a member of what our author describes as the dissident Christian right. Certainly, Ehud Would, of Faith & Heritage appears to have recognized me as such when he wrote a thoughtful and generally favourable review of Dissident Dispatches back in 2017. Why are doctrinally rigid, creedal Christians more authentically Christian than cultural Christians who feel bound to dissent from received orthodoxy?
Just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, there have been, and still are, more than one way of conceiving and constituting Christian nations. The nation that was created by the Loyalists who fled to Canada was no less “Christian” than the revolutionary republic created by American rebels who forcibly drove those loyal to the British Crown from their homes and native land.
I was born a British subject before the creation of Australian or Canadian citizenship, at a time when Anglo-Saxons still counted as one of Canada’s two “founding races.” My intellectual development has been greatly influenced by the strange demise of both British Canada and British Australia.
Accordingly, my latest book was written from an Anglo-Identitarian perspective. I sought to demonstrate that a pan-British race patriotism can be rekindled by a reformed, neo-Angelcynn (Old English for “kin of the Angles”) church. Such a reformation would provide a desperately needed theopolitical alternative to the hegemonic, universalist model of creedal Christianity. Nowadays, as we have just seen, even American Christian nationalism routinely invokes the deracinated, disembodied Lordship of global Jesus as its heavenly warrant.
Following the crushing defeat of German ethnonationalism in 1945, the global Jesus of Anglo-Protestant theology achieved virtually uncontested hegemony. Today, almost all mainstream Anglo-Protestants reject even the mildest manifestations of ethnic particularism as tantamount to racism. Indeed, even the advocacy of “Christian nationalism” is denounced regularly from the pulpits of mainline Anglo-Protestant churches in the United States.
Clearly, avowed Christian nationalists in the USA are now held hostage by global Jesus. Christian nationalism declares itself bound to affirm that the telos of human history will be realized only when the primary allegiance of all nations is to King Jesus.
Still, it remains to be seen how a distinctively white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethnoreligious identity can be squared with the ahistorical, universalist reign of Lord Jesus. Even Stephen Wolfe, the most prominent American Christian nationalist, downplays, when not outright denying, the intractably biocultural dimension of Anglo-Saxon identity. He has suggested, for example, that even black men such as Booker T. Washington and Justice Clarence Thomas (who happens to be a devout Catholic) have been assimilated into the Anglo-Protestant ethnonation.
By contrast, my thesis is that an exclusive ecclesiastical allegiance to a generic cosmic Christ reduces the distinctive character of every earthly ethnoreligious identity to mere adiaphora (i.e., things inessential in the eyes of the church). The rebirth of Anglo-Protestantism demands an ethnoreligious foundation.
The theological refusal to reflect on the ethnonational identity of the historical Jesus must be recognized as the outdated product of historically Romanised ecclesiastical establishments, Protestant and Catholic alike. My argument, therefore, is that Anglo-Saxon Christianity should be re-Germanized by re-imagining the Angelcynn church of Alfred the Great to fit the needs of our own age.
Christian Nationalism vs Global Jesus presents persuasive evidence that the Hebrew Bible (most likely created between the fifth and second centuries BC) produced a poignant and powerful national narrative. Conceived by Judean scribes as a pedagogic tool, that biblical narrative inspired the “project of peoplehood” presupposed by the Jesus movement of the first century AD.
Anglo-Protestants desperately need to recover earlier folkish variants of the Christian tradition. I suggest that the focus of Anglo-Protestantism needs to be shifted away from its historic preoccupation with personal salvation in the world to come. Anglos need a sense of rootedness in networks of ethnoreligious communities in which shared ancestry matters as much if not more than doctrinal purity.
An Anglo ethno-religion is both the institutional precondition and moral foundation for the creation of socially cohesive communities. Anglo-Protestant churches must become the ethnoreligious heart of breakaway parallel societies devoted to producing healthy, happy, and morally upright families together with British-descended counter-elites set in opposition to the irresponsible corporate plutocracy now misgoverning the Anglosphere.
It may be that Anglo-Protestants will someday receive as King a Christ of their own. But, as preterist scholar Don K. Preston often remarks, he is unlikely to return as a 5’5” Jewish man whose name is Jesus. That fact need not preclude the miraculous appearance of our own Patriot King, were he to become incarnate in Australia and the other British dominions.
In short, my book offers a sympathetic but penetrating critique of the hitherto unchallenged hegemony of global Jesus within the Anglo-American epicentre of the emergent Christian nationalist movement. I seek to persuade American Christian nationalists that their predominantly Anglo-Protestant movement, like the first-century Jesus movement, can and should embrace, explicitly, its historic, ethnoreligious character outside and apart from both the state and creedal Christianity.
Faithful Anglo-Protestants could spark the reformation of the entire Anglosphere by labouring to bring the sweet dream of a Patriot King down to earth. Somewhat paradoxically, therefore, Anglo-American evangelical Protestants are a primary target for this book’s message. The spiritual reformation of the Anglosphere is a matter of geopolitical theology. Anglo-American Protestants need to understand themselves as an autonomous people betrayed by the corporate state apparatus of the global American empire.
In other words, they must mentally nullify the 1776 American Declaration of Independence, embracing instead an ancestral British race patriotism, in solidarity with their co-ethnics in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand still owing allegiance to the Crown.
Such a Christian nationalism, a movement grounded in orthopraxis rather than strait-laced orthodoxy, may attract secular, culturally Christian traditionalists. While maintaining their resistance to unconditional belief in the established Christian creeds and confessions, such people are more likely to be receptive to a “modernized” folk religion in which the church serves, first and foremost, as a teacher of morality. In effect, therefore, the book advocates a return to the nineteenth century Broad Church movement in the Church of England pioneered by men such as Sir John Robert Seeley.
Younger Anglo-Protestants in particular, along with their agnostic contemporaries, are having their future stolen from them by a plutocratic corporatist regime destroying every institution that could provide access to stable, prosperous, middle-class family lives of purpose and meaning.
Their rising discontent could find its first significant outlet in an Anglo-Identitarian Christian movement challenging those who currently manage and control evangelical Protestantism in the USA: the power centre that Christian nationalists call “Big Eva”. My book aims to provide such an oppositional movement with intellectual ammunition as well as insight into the weaknesses of a Christian nationalism that places the mythology of global Jesus over loyalty to co-ethnics.
The Preface to Christian Nationalism vs Global Jesus, together with an annotated table of contents can be found on my website at:
https://www.academia.edu/124733920/Christian_Nationalism_vs_Global_Jesus_Projects_of_Peoplehood_from_Biblical_Israel_to_the_Collapse_of_British_Patriotism
I would be honoured, and deeply grateful, if an Anglo-American Christian nationalist saw became interested enough in the book to read the book and write a review of it.
Christian Nationalism vs Global Jesus
This article (appearing on both Iron Ink and Tribal Theocrat ) aims to refute accusations made by some Christians identified with the “lite WOKE Left” that the Christian nationalism championed by “the dissident Christian right” amounts to nothing less than a heretical embrace of the so-called WOKE Right. The pseudonymous author contends that the ontology, epistemology, anthropology, teleology, and axiology of the “dissident Christian right” are set in radical and permanent opposition to the “hard WOKE worldview” which is always about the glory of man as determined by some Christless God hating elite.”
Our author takes it as axiomatic that the Weltanschauung of the dissident Christian right “advocates the Crown Rights of the Rightful Rule” of the Lord Jesus Christ “over every area of life.” The accusation that Christian nationalism is just another manifestation of the WOKE Right fails “because the dissident right’s worldview includes an extra-mundane personal and authoritative God who “created all things in six days and all are very good.” For the author, it follows that the dissident right must bow “to God’s determination of reality.” Our “ultimate value” therefore “is the glory of God and His Christ,” as revealed in Scripture. Biblical Christianity, the author tells us, believes in a universal “history directed towards the postmillennial end of God’s Kingdom being built up on planet earth” in fulfillment of God’s plan “to have the Kingdoms of this earth become the kingdoms of our Lord and His Christ.”
Now, whatever one makes of this defence of Christian nationalism, there is no denying that it reflects a worldview widely shared among Anglo-American Christian nationalists. But, when I recently attended the Right Response Ministries conference in Texas devoted to “Defeating Trash World,” I felt as if I had entered a theological bubble, hermetically sealed within historical creeds and a biblical hermeneutic impervious to scholarly criticism.
Certainly, in the months leading up to the conference, I found it impossible to receive permission (or even acknowledgement of my request) to set up a table displaying my new book from the pastor organizing the event. I even had Amazon.com send the pastor a copy of the book, entitled Christian Nationalism vs Global Jesus: Projects of Peoplehood from Biblical Israel. Admittedly such a title suggests strong dissent from the worn axioms of creedal Christianity as expounded in the article under discussion here.
I had hoped, however, that a display table would spark some interest and an opportunity to defend the book in conversation with speakers and attendees at the conference. I strongly suspect that the reason my request was refused, even after I arrived at the conference with a boxload of books, was that the conference organizers dismissed it as damnable heresy. Certainly, the author of the present article appears to reject any possiblity that the thesis of my book represents a legitimate expression of Christian nationalism.
If one’s entitlement to claim Christian identity turns on fidelity to the creeds, then perhaps I can be denied entry into the fold. On the other hand, as the author of a book entitled Dissident Dispatches: An Alt-Right Guide to Christian Theology I must possess a strong claim to be a member of what our author describes as the dissident Christian right. Certainly, Ehud Would, of Faith & Heritage appears to have recognized me as such when he wrote a thoughtful and generally favourable review of Dissident Dispatches back in 2017. Why are doctrinally rigid, creedal Christians more authentically Christian than cultural Christians who feel bound to dissent from received orthodoxy?
Just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, there have been, and still are, more than one way of conceiving and constituting Christian nations. The nation that was created by the Loyalists who fled to Canada was no less “Christian” than the revolutionary republic created by American rebels who forcibly drove those loyal to the British Crown from their homes and native land.
I was born a British subject before the creation of Australian or Canadian citizenship, at a time when Anglo-Saxons still counted as one of Canada’s two “founding races.” My intellectual development has been greatly influenced by the strange demise of both British Canada and British Australia.
Accordingly, my latest book was written from an Anglo-Identitarian perspective. I sought to demonstrate that a pan-British race patriotism can be rekindled by a reformed, neo-Angelcynn (Old English for “kin of the Angles”) church. Such a reformation would provide a desperately needed theopolitical alternative to the hegemonic, universalist model of creedal Christianity. Nowadays, as we have just seen, even American Christian nationalism routinely invokes the deracinated, disembodied Lordship of global Jesus as its heavenly warrant.
Following the crushing defeat of German ethnonationalism in 1945, the global Jesus of Anglo-Protestant theology achieved virtually uncontested hegemony. Today, almost all mainstream Anglo-Protestants reject even the mildest manifestations of ethnic particularism as tantamount to racism. Indeed, even the advocacy of “Christian nationalism” is denounced regularly from the pulpits of mainline Anglo-Protestant churches in the United States.
Clearly, avowed Christian nationalists in the USA are now held hostage by global Jesus. Christian nationalism declares itself bound to affirm that the telos of human history will be realized only when the primary allegiance of all nations is to King Jesus.
Still, it remains to be seen how a distinctively white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethnoreligious identity can be squared with the ahistorical, universalist reign of Lord Jesus. Even Stephen Wolfe, the most prominent American Christian nationalist, downplays, when not outright denying, the intractably biocultural dimension of Anglo-Saxon identity. He has suggested, for example, that even black men such as Booker T. Washington and Justice Clarence Thomas (who happens to be a devout Catholic) have been assimilated into the Anglo-Protestant ethnonation.
By contrast, my thesis is that an exclusive ecclesiastical allegiance to a generic cosmic Christ reduces the distinctive character of every earthly ethnoreligious identity to mere adiaphora (i.e., things inessential in the eyes of the church). The rebirth of Anglo-Protestantism demands an ethnoreligious foundation.
The theological refusal to reflect on the ethnonational identity of the historical Jesus must be recognized as the outdated product of historically Romanised ecclesiastical establishments, Protestant and Catholic alike. My argument, therefore, is that Anglo-Saxon Christianity should be re-Germanized by re-imagining the Angelcynn church of Alfred the Great to fit the needs of our own age.
Christian Nationalism vs Global Jesus presents persuasive evidence that the Hebrew Bible (most likely created between the fifth and second centuries BC) produced a poignant and powerful national narrative. Conceived by Judean scribes as a pedagogic tool, that biblical narrative inspired the “project of peoplehood” presupposed by the Jesus movement of the first century AD.
Anglo-Protestants desperately need to recover earlier folkish variants of the Christian tradition. I suggest that the focus of Anglo-Protestantism needs to be shifted away from its historic preoccupation with personal salvation in the world to come. Anglos need a sense of rootedness in networks of ethnoreligious communities in which shared ancestry matters as much if not more than doctrinal purity.
An Anglo ethno-religion is both the institutional precondition and moral foundation for the creation of socially cohesive communities. Anglo-Protestant churches must become the ethnoreligious heart of breakaway parallel societies devoted to producing healthy, happy, and morally upright families together with British-descended counter-elites set in opposition to the irresponsible corporate plutocracy now misgoverning the Anglosphere.
It may be that Anglo-Protestants will someday receive as King a Christ of their own. But, as preterist scholar Don K. Preston often remarks, he is unlikely to return as a 5’5” Jewish man whose name is Jesus. That fact need not preclude the miraculous appearance of our own Patriot King, were he to become incarnate in Australia and the other British dominions.
In short, my book offers a sympathetic but penetrating critique of the hitherto unchallenged hegemony of global Jesus within the Anglo-American epicentre of the emergent Christian nationalist movement. I seek to persuade American Christian nationalists that their predominantly Anglo-Protestant movement, like the first-century Jesus movement, can and should embrace, explicitly, its historic, ethnoreligious character outside and apart from both the state and creedal Christianity.
Faithful Anglo-Protestants could spark the reformation of the entire Anglosphere by labouring to bring the sweet dream of a Patriot King down to earth. Somewhat paradoxically, therefore, Anglo-American evangelical Protestants are a primary target for this book’s message. The spiritual reformation of the Anglosphere is a matter of geopolitical theology. Anglo-American Protestants need to understand themselves as an autonomous people betrayed by the corporate state apparatus of the global American empire. In other words, they must mentally nullify the 1776 American Declaration of Independence, embracing instead an ancestral British race patriotism, in solidarity with their co-ethnics in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand still owing allegiance to the Crown.
Such a Christian nationalism, a movement grounded in orthopraxis rather than strait-laced orthodoxy, may attract secular, culturally Christian traditionalists. While maintaining their resistance to unconditional belief in the established Christian creeds and confessions, such people are more likely to be receptive to a “modernized” folk religion in which the church serves, first and foremost, as a teacher of morality. In effect, therefore, the book advocates a return to the nineteenth century Broad Church movement in the Church of England pioneered by men such as Sir John Robert Seeley.
Younger Anglo-Protestants in particular, along with their agnostic contemporaries, are having their future stolen from them by a plutocratic corporatist regime destroying every institution that could provide access to stable, prosperous, middle-class family lives of purpose and meaning.
Their rising discontent could find its first significant outlet in an Anglo-Identitarian Christian movement challenging those who currently manage and control evangelical Protestantism in the USA: the power centre that Christian nationalists call “Big Eva”. My book aims to provide such an oppositional movement with intellectual ammunition as well as insight into the weaknesses of a Christian nationalism that places the mythology of global Jesus over loyalty to co-ethnics.
The Preface to Christian Nationalism vs Global Jesus, together with an annotated table of contents can be found on my website. I would be honoured and deeply grateful if an Anglo-American Christian nationalist saw became interested enough in the book to read the book and write a review of it.
Christian Nationalism vs Global Jesus
This article (appearing on both Iron Ink and Tribal Theocrat ) aims to refute accusations made by some Christians identified with the “lite WOKE Left” that the Christian nationalism championed by “the dissident Christian right” amounts to nothing less than a heretical embrace of the so-called WOKE Right. The pseudonymous author contends that the ontology, epistemology, anthropology, teleology, and axiology of the “dissident Christian right” are set in radical and permanent opposition to the “hard WOKE worldview” which is always about the glory of man as determined by some Christless God hating elite.”
Our author takes it as axiomatic that the Weltanschauung of the dissident Christian right “advocates the Crown Rights of the Rightful Rule” of the Lord Jesus Christ “over every area of life.” The accusation that Christian nationalism is just another manifestation of the WOKE Right fails “because the dissident right’s worldview includes an extra-mundane personal and authoritative God who “created all things in six days and all are very good.” For the author, it follows that the dissident right must bow “to God’s determination of reality.” Our “ultimate value” therefore “is the glory of God and His Christ,” as revealed in Scripture. Biblical Christianity, the author tells us, believes in a universal “history directed towards the postmillennial end of God’s Kingdom being built up on planet earth” in fulfillment of God’s plan “to have the Kingdoms of this earth become the kingdoms of our Lord and His Christ.”
Now, whatever one makes of this defence of Christian nationalism, there is no denying that it reflects a worldview widely shared among Anglo-American Christian nationalists. But, when I recently attended the Right Response Ministries conference in Texas devoted to “Defeating Trash World,” I felt as if I had entered a theological bubble, hermetically sealed within historical creeds and a biblical hermeneutic impervious to scholarly criticism.
Certainly, in the months leading up to the conference, I found it impossible to receive permission (or even acknowledgement of my request) to set up a table displaying my new book from the pastor organizing the event. I even had Amazon.com send the pastor a copy of the book, entitled Christian Nationalism vs Global Jesus: Projects of Peoplehood from Biblical Israel. Admittedly such a title suggests strong dissent from the worn axioms of creedal Christianity as expounded in the article under discussion here.
I had hoped, however, that a display table would spark some interest and an opportunity to defend the book in conversation with speakers and attendees at the conference. I strongly suspect that the reason my request was refused, even after I arrived at the conference with a boxload of books, was that the conference organizers dismissed it as damnable heresy. Certainly, the author of the present article appears to reject any possiblity that the thesis of my book represents a legitimate expression of Christian nationalism.
If one’s entitlement to claim Christian identity turns on fidelity to the creeds, then perhaps I can be denied entry into the fold. On the other hand, as the author of a book entitled Dissident Dispatches: An Alt-Right Guide to Christian Theology I must possess a strong claim to be a member of what our author describes as the dissident Christian right. Certainly, Ehud Would, of Faith & Heritage appears to have recognized me as such when he wrote a thoughtful and generally favourable review of Dissident Dispatches back in 2017. Why are doctrinally rigid, creedal Christians more authentically Christian than cultural Christians who feel bound to dissent from received orthodoxy?
Just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, there have been, and still are, more than one way of conceiving and constituting Christian nations. The nation that was created by the Loyalists who fled to Canada was no less “Christian” than the revolutionary republic created by American rebels who forcibly drove those loyal to the British Crown from their homes and native land.
I was born a British subject before the creation of Australian or Canadian citizenship, at a time when Anglo-Saxons still counted as one of Canada’s two “founding races.” My intellectual development has been greatly influenced by the strange demise of both British Canada and British Australia.
Accordingly, my latest book was written from an Anglo-Identitarian perspective. I sought to demonstrate that a pan-British race patriotism can be rekindled by a reformed, neo-Angelcynn (Old English for “kin of the Angles”) church. Such a reformation would provide a desperately needed theopolitical alternative to the hegemonic, universalist model of creedal Christianity. Nowadays, as we have just seen, even American Christian nationalism routinely invokes the deracinated, disembodied Lordship of global Jesus as its heavenly warrant.
Following the crushing defeat of German ethnonationalism in 1945, the global Jesus of Anglo-Protestant theology achieved virtually uncontested hegemony. Today, almost all mainstream Anglo-Protestants reject even the mildest manifestations of ethnic particularism as tantamount to racism. Indeed, even the advocacy of “Christian nationalism” is denounced regularly from the pulpits of mainline Anglo-Protestant churches in the United States.
Clearly, avowed Christian nationalists in the USA are now held hostage by global Jesus. Christian nationalism declares itself bound to affirm that the telos of human history will be realized only when the primary allegiance of all nations is to King Jesus.
Still, it remains to be seen how a distinctively white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethnoreligious identity can be squared with the ahistorical, universalist reign of Lord Jesus. Even Stephen Wolfe, the most prominent American Christian nationalist, downplays, when not outright denying, the intractably biocultural dimension of Anglo-Saxon identity. He has suggested, for example, that even black men such as Booker T. Washington and Justice Clarence Thomas (who happens to be a devout Catholic) have been assimilated into the Anglo-Protestant ethnonation.
By contrast, my thesis is that an exclusive ecclesiastical allegiance to a generic cosmic Christ reduces the distinctive character of every earthly ethnoreligious identity to mere adiaphora (i.e., things inessential in the eyes of the church). The rebirth of Anglo-Protestantism demands an ethnoreligious foundation.
The theological refusal to reflect on the ethnonational identity of the historical Jesus must be recognized as the outdated product of historically Romanised ecclesiastical establishments, Protestant and Catholic alike. My argument, therefore, is that Anglo-Saxon Christianity should be re-Germanized by re-imagining the Angelcynn church of Alfred the Great to fit the needs of our own age.
Christian Nationalism vs Global Jesus presents persuasive evidence that the Hebrew Bible (most likely created between the fifth and second centuries BC) produced a poignant and powerful national narrative. Conceived by Judean scribes as a pedagogic tool, that biblical narrative inspired the “project of peoplehood” presupposed by the Jesus movement of the first century AD.
Anglo-Protestants desperately need to recover earlier folkish variants of the Christian tradition. I suggest that the focus of Anglo-Protestantism needs to be shifted away from its historic preoccupation with personal salvation in the world to come. Anglos need a sense of rootedness in networks of ethnoreligious communities in which shared ancestry matters as much if not more than doctrinal purity.
An Anglo ethno-religion is both the institutional precondition and moral foundation for the creation of socially cohesive communities. Anglo-Protestant churches must become the ethnoreligious heart of breakaway parallel societies devoted to producing healthy, happy, and morally upright families together with British-descended counter-elites set in opposition to the irresponsible corporate plutocracy now misgoverning the Anglosphere.
It may be that Anglo-Protestants will someday receive as King a Christ of their own. But, as preterist scholar Don K. Preston often remarks, he is unlikely to return as a 5’5” Jewish man whose name is Jesus. That fact need not preclude the miraculous appearance of our own Patriot King, were he to become incarnate in Australia and the other British dominions.
In short, my book offers a sympathetic but penetrating critique of the hitherto unchallenged hegemony of global Jesus within the Anglo-American epicentre of the emergent Christian nationalist movement. I seek to persuade American Christian nationalists that their predominantly Anglo-Protestant movement, like the first-century Jesus movement, can and should embrace, explicitly, its historic, ethnoreligious character outside and apart from both the state and creedal Christianity.
Faithful Anglo-Protestants could spark the reformation of the entire Anglosphere by labouring to bring the sweet dream of a Patriot King down to earth. Somewhat paradoxically, therefore, Anglo-American evangelical Protestants are a primary target for this book’s message. The spiritual reformation of the Anglosphere is a matter of geopolitical theology. Anglo-American Protestants need to understand themselves as an autonomous people betrayed by the corporate state apparatus of the global American empire. In other words, they must mentally nullify the 1776 American Declaration of Independence, embracing instead an ancestral British race patriotism, in solidarity with their co-ethnics in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand still owing allegiance to the Crown.
Such a Christian nationalism, a movement grounded in orthopraxis rather than strait-laced orthodoxy, may attract secular, culturally Christian traditionalists. While maintaining their resistance to unconditional belief in the established Christian creeds and confessions, such people are more likely to be receptive to a “modernized” folk religion in which the church serves, first and foremost, as a teacher of morality. In effect, therefore, the book advocates a return to the nineteenth century Broad Church movement in the Church of England pioneered by men such as Sir John Robert Seeley.
Younger Anglo-Protestants in particular, along with their agnostic contemporaries, are having their future stolen from them by a plutocratic corporatist regime destroying every institution that could provide access to stable, prosperous, middle-class family lives of purpose and meaning.
Their rising discontent could find its first significant outlet in an Anglo-Identitarian Christian movement challenging those who currently manage and control evangelical Protestantism in the USA: the power centre that Christian nationalists call “Big Eva”. My book aims to provide such an oppositional movement with intellectual ammunition as well as insight into the weaknesses of a Christian nationalism that places the mythology of global Jesus over loyalty to co-ethnics.
The Preface to Christian Nationalism vs Global Jesus, together with an annotated table of contents can be found on my website. I would be honoured and deeply grateful if an Anglo-American Christian nationalist saw became interested enough in the book to read the book and write a review of it.