By Davis Carlton

Owen Strachan has recently decided to go on the war path against Kinism. He has published an article called Against Kinism and Open Borders: A Christian Response to Political Polarities in which he lays out his case. Strachan begins by suggesting that conservative evangelicals have been right to oppose open borders, but the reason for this is essentially limited to concerns over security, and certainly not concerns over racial, ethnic, or cultural preservation. Strachan gives lip service to opposition to “leftist globalism” that Strachan calls “a grave problem” which “should be opposed in no uncertain terms.”

Owen Strachan takes the position that racial and ethnic identity is essentially neutral in that we don’t necessarily need to pursue diversity just for the sake of diversity. Strachan also suggests that ethnically homogeneous congregations aren’t necessarily guilty of sinful partiality and that “Christians should respond with vigor and conviction” when whites are attacked by woke ideology. But everything that Strachan says about the evils of liberalism and “leftist globalism” rings hollow.

Strachan claims that Christians ought to defend whites when they are attacked by woke ideology, but he consistently places identifiers like white and Anglo-Saxon in scare quotes throughout his entire article which obviously indicates that Strachan doesn’t consider being white or Anglo-Saxon as legitimate identities. The only reason to use tactics like this is because you are seeking to undermine white identity as a legitimate concept. In this Strachan joins the scores of Marxist voices seeking to deconstruct the traditional concept of race and ethnicity as understood by our Christian ancestors.

Furthermore, it isn’t as though Owen Strachan hasn’t had plenty of opportunity to speak out on behalf of white people besieged by anti-white hysteria. The BLM riots over the past couple of years that have supposedly been spawned as reactions against white racism are a good tangible example. Strachan and his ilk haven’t tried to set the record straight on the mythology of police brutality directed at blacks. For that we need to go to “racist” and “extremist” sources like Jared Taylor of American Renaissance.

While John Piper “wept for joy” at the election of black radical pro-abortionist Barack Obama, journalists like Heather MacDonald were deconstructing myths behind black incarceration being the result of “racism” rather than criminality. Has Strachan denounced Piper for thinking that having a black president might have been more important than opposing Obama’s very openly pro-abortion stance? Purportedly conservative pastors like David Platt and Matt Chandler have been busy denouncing “systemic racism” and white privilege in a manner that can only be described as “woke.”

Strachan has never made an effort to condemn these prominent voices of conservative evangelicals that he identifies as his “tribe.” He leaves that to those who he accuses as bigoted extremists or worse, Kinists! The best that Strachan can manage are broad denunciations of vague leftist platitudes. I don’t take limp-wristed statements from Strachan about defending white people from the verified hate that they encounter seriously given his track record of silence when he has had ample opportunity to “respond with vigor and conviction” to overt hatred of whites that occurs all too frequently in mainstream society.

A couple of paragraphs make Owen Strachan’s rejection of Kinism abundantly clear. Strachan is able to clearly and fairly articulate the position that he is rejecting, but it only makes his opposition that much more striking. To quote Strachan at length, “As one example (taken from an older Matt Walsh show clip that just surfaced), ‘white’ or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Americans today are urged to perpetuate their ethnicity in order to preserve their nation. In practical terms, this means that ‘white’ people should marry other ‘white’ people and have lots of ‘white’ children, lest ‘white’ people en masse be replaced. If we fail to perpetuate our ethnicity, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture will be lost, and the nation along with it.”

Kinists would agree entirely with what Strachan has expressed, sans the scare quotes which as mentioned earlier only serve to try to de-legitimize the realities of being white or Anglo-Saxon. Virtually all white Christians in history would have agreed that culture is tied to race and ethnicity. If a particular ethnic group is displaced then their culture will vanish. This shouldn’t be controversial as there are no historical examples of one ethnic group being replaced by another while at the same time preserving the original culture of the ethnic group that was replaced. It just doesn’t happen, and Owen Strachan doesn’t really disagree.

Strachan later writes, “Some will protest at this point, though, and say: ‘But if you encourage inter-ethnic marriage, over time your nation will lose its identity!’ This may be true in some sense. Where a nation once looked homogeneous, relatively, it may look far less that way in days ahead. But that, again, is no moral evil… [I]f a given nation changes in ethnic makeup over time, Christians should not necessarily grow alarmed by this. If, for example, there are less ‘white’ children produced annually by families, this is in no way immediate cause for alarm. Will this mean change in that nation? Yes, it will. But from a distinctly biblical vantage point, again, Christians have exactly zero New Testament grounds for advocating the preservation of a dominant ethnicity in a given nation. This simply is not our mission.”

So there you have it. Strachan concedes that exogamy or out-marriage on a large or even moderate scale on a long-term basis will cause a particular group to lose its identity, but he dismisses a concern over this because in his words this “is no moral evil.” Strachan claims that the Bible or at least the New Testament provides “zero grounds” for ethnic preservation. I of course disagree, but I think that Strachan’s argument is flawed even before engaging relevant Biblical texts. Imagine someone telling you that there is “zero grounds” from the Bible that suggests that Christians ought to have a unique concern for the well-being of their children. This means that Christians shouldn’t care if their children marry well or have children that will perpetuate your family’s lineage into the future. Should our immediate response be to scour the Bible for passages that affirm our particular attachment to our own children and their well-being? I don’t believe so. We need go no further than St. Paul’s condemnations of “inordinate affections” (Rom. 1:31, Col. 3:5, 2 Tim. 3:3) to see the obvious foolishness of Strachan’s objections to Kinism with its foundation in natural affection.

The desire to identify with and seek the welfare of one’s ethnic group is as natural and good as a mother loving her newborn baby. If Strachan believes that ethnic identity is neutral as he seems to argue, then the burden of proof is upon him to make his case from Scripture. Strachan’s comments on nationalism gets to the heart of what so many otherwise conservative Christians miss about what the Bible says about national identity. The confusion over national identity is similar to but slightly older than the recent confusion over gender and biological sex. Matt Walsh’s documentary, “What is a Woman?” is effective because it asks a basic rhetorical question, and I contended earlier that Christian nationalists need to ask and be prepared to answer the same question about national identity.

Strachan argues against “mono-ethnic Christian nationalism,” calling it a “wicked ideology.” Strachan insists that, “a nation’s identity is not based in skin color or ethnicity; a nation’s identity is based in common ideals. This conviction is mocked, even ruthlessly, by people online today as limp-wristed liberalism. But it is a sound standard, and I know of none that better conforms to the biblical doctrine of the image of God than this (Genesis 1:26-28).”

This is simply an exercise in equivocation. The Bible always identifies nations as an extension of kin. Nations are typically identified by their common descent from a prominent patriarch and are delineated by genealogy (Gen. 10, 1 Chr. 1-8). God created the nations (Ps. 86:9) and gives the nations their inheritance (Deut. 32:8, Acts 17:26-28). Israel’s entire legal code presupposes the ethnic and close kinship basis of their national identity as in Deut. 15:12 (“your brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman…”). The Law of Kin Rule is also impossible to comprehend without understanding a nation to be comprised of close kin. Finally it also makes no sense as to how Israel could be called brethren to the Edomites apart from genealogy and common descent (Num. 20:14, Deut. 23:7).

As for “New Testament grounds for advocating the preservation of a dominant ethnicity in a given nation” we have the paradigm of Pentecost in which those present heard Peter’s message in their own language. Francis Nigel Lee concludes, “Pentecost sanctified the legitimacy of separate nationality rather than saying this is something we should outgrow. . . . In fact, even in the new earth to come, after the Second Coming of Christ, we are told that the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of the heavenly Jerusalem, and the kings of the earth shall bring the glory and the honor—the cultural treasures—of the nations into it. . . . But nowhere in Scripture are any indications to be found that such peoples should ever be amalgamated into one huge nation” (Dr. Francis Nigel Lee. “Race, People, and Nationality.” 2/2/2005).

The fact that all nations ultimately derive their descent from Adam and as such are made in God’s image and likeness has led Strachan to conclude that kinship is irrelevant to national identity or that people of different races or ethnicities are interchangeable. What Strachan calls “a sound standard” is a total non sequitur. Both men and woman are created in God’s image as well per the very same passage that Strachan quotes, but he certainly doesn’t want anyone to conclude that men and women are interchangeable. Strachan ignores the entire Kinist case that national identity is rooted in ethnicity. Strachan’s strategy is to essentially define nations out of existence by condemning advocacy for “mono-ethnic Christian nationalism” in order to avoid the charge that he supports the globalist Marxist zeitgeist. Speaking of a “mono-ethnic” nation is a redundancy and a “multi-ethnic” nation is an oxymoron.

Whether he realizes it or not, Owen Strachan is fighting for the wrong side. I think that the reason that Strachan has been forced to mention Kinism and Christian ethno-nationalism is that the problems inherent with mass immigration and the resultant social disintegration are growing more difficult to just ignore. That’s good news for us. Those well-versed in what the Scriptures say about national identity and Kinist apologetics are increasingly able to see past the shallow rhetoric of false conservatives like Owen Strachan. Pious platitudes are losing their effectiveness and can no longer cover up for a lack of any real substance.