I shared something yesterday about Christian Nationalism. It was an attempt to describe what it actually is, rather than what some would prefer it to be. I stand by what I wrote because it was, essentially, a comparison that boiled the premise down to its mineral elements.

It did not take long, however, for the predictable distortions to appear. I’ve seen plenty more today. That, in itself, is revealing. It is a perpetual reminder that American Christendom has a longstanding weakness. It has the strange tendency to allow the surrounding culture to define the terms of its beliefs. Of course, the result is almost always misrepresentation that immediately becomes an assumed standard. In this case, it seems the world was allowed to frame the argument before the Christians really even knew what they were talking about.

Admittedly, when the Church engages the world, this tension is inevitable. The world does not approach the Church as a neutral observer. It reshapes and deliberately misrepresents what it sees. That is simply the nature of the relationship. The world isn’t hoping for the success of godliness. It wants its demise.

In this particular case, the world has placed Christian Nationalism beneath its own assumption. The assumption is that racism is an inherent characteristic of Christian Nationalism. But again, that assumption is imposed rather than demonstrated. It’s a stigma applied from the outside, and then treated as if it were part of the thing itself.

Again, I repeat, my brief explanation of Christian Nationalism stands, especially my reply to one post that it’s morally incoherent to defend Christianity as the highest or most humane moral ethic for governance while at the same time attempting to justify racism in any form. That’s because, even as an ethic for governance, Christianity cannot be apart from itself as some civilizational artifact. It’s an unbroken schematic that makes unalterable claims. One of its claims concerns the nature of the human person. All have fallen short of the glory of God. None is lesser or greater than another. All need a Savior. Christ is that Savior, and He gives life to all who believe in Him, regardless of tribe or nation. Racism stands in direct contradiction to this basic affirmation of Christianity.

But since it has already been brought up pretty much everywhere, there’s something Christians should probably be talking about, if only to secure the term’s proper definition. There are the Nick Fuenteses and the Corey Mahlers of the world. Everything has its fringe. And the fringe elements are rarely hard to explain. In this case, I’ll simply say that guys like Mahler and Fuentes have gained followings in part because they speak into a very real sense of dislocation, particularly among young white men. That concern shouldn’t be set aside lightly. But no one should assume that the racist result is built on moral credibility. The fact that a listener is wounded doesn’t mean that the diagnosis being offered to him is good, or that the remedy is even remotely Christian.

I think part of what we are witnessing is a failure of catechesis to meet with a genuine cultural disorder. I wrote in a reply yesterday that “many young men have been catechized for years to see themselves as the problem. They’ve been told by so many that they carry inherited guilt. And the only acceptable reconciliation so far has been that they apologize for existing, and that they confess their own Christian traditions as uniquely toxic. Eventually, some of them snap in the opposite direction. When every moral narrative tells you to hate yourself, the temptation is to find one that tells you to justify yourself at any cost, even if that narrative is crude, racialized, or overtly unchristian.”

Writing this, I was thinking of how almost every straight white man/husband in most commercials is a dunce. Conversely, wives are shown as having to endure their idiocy. Even further, all other races and creeds are framed with elegance and respect. This is just a sample among countless, all cultivating self-contempt among white men. And worst of all, it does this without any possibility of parole. There’s no escape. Ever. When relief is nowhere to be found in a cultural framework, it makes sense that some men would devolve into despair or defiance.

But here’s what Fuentes and Mahler get wrong, especially when they try to apply their racist views to Christianity. The Christian Faith isn’t designed to terminate in shame. It’s aimed toward forgiveness, restoration, and ultimately, a community—the body of Christ.

Now, lest we pile on these two alone, don’t forget that CRT and DEI do the same corrosive things, just from the other side. The problem isn’t even with calling out injustice or drawing attention to historical wrongs. There’s plenty of that in every nation’s history to go around. And that’s not something that the Christian ethic misses. The problem is that things like CRT and DEI redefine the person in the same way that godless Marxism does purposely. It categorizes in terms of group identity and inherited moral status, ultimately assigning guilt collectively rather than personally. When that happens, even if repentance were possible (which it isn’t in Marxism), it would be meaningless. That’s because forgiveness has already been replaced with perpetual reckoning, and reconciliation becomes impossible because the categories themselves are considered unalterable.

So, on one hand, one set of ideals is telling young men that they are permanently and inherently unforgivable because they are white and Christian. The other tells them that their resentment is a justifiable response to people who are doing what they’re doing because they’re somehow racially inferior. One condemns incessantly without mercy. The other vindicates an ungodly response. But neither offers a path back to a shared human community.

But again, the mineral definition of Christian Nationalism has nothing to do with any of this. For those in the Confessional Lutheran sphere keeping score, the following is my working definition. It’s my wording, yes. But it’s not necessarily my definition. It’s a summary of what emerged very early in Christian thought.

In short, Christian Nationalism, in its most basic sense, is the belief that a nation is best governed according to the moral ethic of Christianity, recognizing that public life is never morally neutral and that the Christian moral tradition has uniquely upheld human dignity, ordered liberty, and the common good without requiring the Church to rule the state or imposing a theocracy.

That’s it. You’ll see there’s no theory of race. There’s no call to justify resentment. There’s none of that. Because none of it belongs.

And so, I suppose the tragedy in all this is that some very loud voices at the extremes, for whatever reason, continue trying their hardest to make it nearly impossible to understand what Christian Nationalism is. Personally, after listening to Reverend David Ramirez discuss the issue on “The Gottestdienst Crowd,” I prefer where he lands. He’s no slouch concerning its deepest history, and so, he proves he understands it. And he should be commended for it. That said, so many in Christian, namely Lutheran, circles continue to define Christian Nationalism by its worst caricatures, while at the same time, the fringes insist on supplying those caricatures in abundance. Between those two things, clarity is lost, and what could be a fruitful discussion about something real collapses into arguments about things that have nothing to do with the premise itself.