THE COLUMN: Christian Right Gonna Get Yo Momma

In its never-ending rebellion against Greco-Roman/Western civilization and the philosophy of the late 18th century, the international Left has come up with a new bete noire: "Christian Nationalism." As part of its ongoing series, called Exploring Hate, PBS has produced a documentary on the subject, "The Rise of Christian Nationalism." Rob Reiner, aka Meathead from All In the Family from centuries ago, has just flopped with an anti-Christian film, God and Country, with a miserable four-day opening box-office haul of just $38, 415. Meanwhile, David French, the former conservative who appears as a talking head in Reiner's movie, has just written an explainer, "What is Christian Nationalism, Exactly?" at the mother ship of Woke Stalinist orthodoxy, the devoutly anti-Christian New York Times:

The problem with Christian nationalism isn’t with Christian participation in politics but rather the belief that there should be Christian primacy in politics and law. It can manifest itself through ideology, identity and emotion. And if it were to take hold, it would both upend our Constitution and fracture our society.

George begs to differ.

But Christian nationalism isn’t just rooted in ideology; it’s also deeply rooted in identity, the belief that Christians should rule. This is the heart of the Seven Mountain Mandate, a dominionist movement emerging from American Pentecostalism that is, put bluntly, Christian identity politics on steroids. Paula White, Donald Trump’s closest spiritual adviser, is an adherent, and so is the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, Tom Parker, who wrote a concurring opinion in the court’s recent I.V.F. decision. The movement holds that Christians are called to rule seven key societal institutions: the family, the church, education, the media, the arts, business and the government.

Most atheist Leftists have no understanding of the many and manifest differences between and among Christian sects, foremost among them split between Roman Catholics and the various Protestant sects -- Episcopalians, Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Seventh-Day Adventists, et al. -- once fundamental to early America but now waning in numbers and influence. Consider the wording of Saul Alinsky's noxious but effective Rule No. 4: "Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity."

That there is no "Christian church" doesn't matter to someone like Alinsky one bit; he only sees one Principal Enemy (as the Soviets used to call the U.S.). But it is against this wing of Christendom -- as it happens, the wing of most of the Founders who understood they were creating a new nation based upon Christian principles and the wisdom of the British Enlightenment -- that the hostility against "Christian Nationalism" is directed.

When the Founders established the protective notion of freedom of religion and the proscription against a religious test for office, the context was the rivalry and animosity between the Protestant sects and Catholicism, and with the understanding that the small Jewish community could be free to worship as it chose as well. It's worth remembering that the Constitution's prohibition against an "establishment of religion" referred to the establishment nationwide of a single Protestant sect (or, God forbid, Catholicism) -- and yet the states were perfectly free to have established churches: Connecticut and Massachusetts, for example, which were constitutionally Congregationalist into the 19th century. 

The idea that freedom of religion would eventually be exploited against the United States of America by the West's deadliest enemies, the Muslims who had been battling the Christian Byzantines and the European Crusaders for a millennium and who were still raiding and slaving in European countries along the Mediterranean right up through the 18th century, never occurred to them. And yet, the Left has no issues with Islamic supremacists such as Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib in the federal government; it's the waning, defensive Protestants against whom the animosity regarding "Christian Nationalism" is largely aimed.

Remember Constantinople.

Catholics, adherents of a top-down religion with an ancient bureaucratic structure inherited from the Roman Empire, rarely if ever read the Bible. (It's read aloud, in very small bits, at Mass each week.) Nor do they routinely quote from it. They don't believe the world is about to end, they don't have a "personal relationship" with Jesus, and they largely disregard the Old Testament -- it didn't even make it in to the first Christian Bible, assembled by Marcion -- and they can't quote a lick of it. They certainly do not believe it makes predictions about human events -- especially given the fact that the imminent prophecies of the ancient Hebrews (and by Jesus himself, for that matter) have unfailingly failed to materialize except by the most tortuous interpretations. In short, Catholics believe Christ will come again, someday, and so we should live our lives accordingly.

This is a faith alien to snake-handling Protestants, End Times aficionados, Bible-thumpers, glossolalians, crackpot evangelicals, and those who honor Charles of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha as the head of their church -- in other words, those who either make up or who are alleged to make up, the "Christian Nationalist" movement. That it's no threat to the body politic should be obvious to anyone but irreligious bigots and political malcontents who continue to seethe at George Washington (Anglican), Thomas Jefferson (a Deist), Benjamin Franklin (Deist), Alexander Hamilton (nominal Episcopalian) for daring to talk about God so openly in the public square, and in particular for having the effrontery to write in the Declaration of Independence: 

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..

What frightens today's anti-Christians most is that our human rights come not from D.C. or the HR department but from a creator God, and that such an observation is "self-evident." The party of slavery (which was overturned by a cabal of Christians), segregation (ditto), secularism, and sedition -- in other words, the Democrats -- cannot tolerate this, of course. From the day Burr killed Hamilton they've been waging a war against the country as founded, importing the alien ideology of Marxism along with Emma Lazarus' huddled masses, yearning to breathe free and sow discord and discontent. Today, in an imperfect, recedingly Christian capitalist society the rebellion has taken root, having learned to play by the system's economic rules and create large fortunes (most of the obscene wealth in the U.S. these days is on the hard Left) for itself, but still nursing its ancient ideological grudges and cursing the very freedoms that make their lives here possible. They won't rest.