Suppose I told you that, at a certain well-known, purportedly conservative seminary, there is a professor who has been on staff for over a decade, who has openly stated that “the Gospel is about racial reconciliation”? Would you believe me?
Suppose I further said that the leader of said seminary is considered one of the most prominent conservative Evangelicals, and that he has asked specifically for people to judge him by those he platforms? And neither of these people has been publicly corrected, or fired, and are still training pastors?
Is the frustration mounting yet?
Now you can understand the frustration that is building within a generation of young Christians, particularly young men. They know the Gospel is not about racial reconciliation, or about social projects, and they are sick of being told that it is. They are sick of being told that being a celibate “homosexual Christian” is ok. They are sick of being told that they just have to live with how things are; that nothing can be done to restore biblical Christianity. And that makes them very vulnerable.
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You see, the left has been using Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals for a very long time. They don’t so much care if their action succeeds. They care that it causes the target to react the way they want. Thus, the statement “the Gospel is about racial reconciliation” is not intended to convince people that the Gospel really is a social project. It is intended to get conservatives to react. Combined with thousands of other similar (and more radical) statements from this professor and others, the goal is to create a reactionary movement that the left can control or at least manipulate. This is the dialectic the left lives by.
Here is how the dialectic works in practice. The left makes a broad, sweeping attack on some aspect of Christianity. The conservatives in the Church, who generally want to think the best, tolerate it, for a time, until the pressure becomes unbearable. Then they react, but because they are righteously angry, they do not react logically and often overcorrect. The left seizes on the overcorrection and moves public opinion further in their direction by playing the victim and pointing out how ugly the so-called defenders of righteousness are acting.
The vulnerable young people I mentioned above have realized that the so-called “Big Eva” elites are mostly either leftists or men without chests. And they have reacted. They have become Christian nationalists. On the surface, Christian nationalism sounds great. We want a nation of Christians who act like Christians. But Christian nationalism is not about making America godly. Christian nationalism is the overcorrection to Big Eva. It is, to borrow a phrase from James Lindsay, the right hand of the left.
Christian nationalism and Big Eva both have the same ultimate goals and very similar views of the world. Big Eva works from a critical theory perspective on the world, assuming the world is made up of internalized racism and power dynamics. The author of The Case for Christian Nationalism, Stephen Wolfe, has openly said he is a critical theorist. The parallels are stark. Big Eva has worked exactly as Alinsky intended: it has created a reactionary movement.
In the reaction to Big Eva, many Christian nationalists have overcorrected. Others in the movement have begun to blame everything on the Jews. Still others refer to “the longhouse” as if institutionalized feminism is the source of all their problems. If this sounds much like critical race theory, where blacks blame all their problems on whites, that’s because it is. They’ve just swapped in new victims and oppressed classes.
The rise of the Christian nationalists has been a field day for leftist publications. Regular articles, Twitter posts, videos, and every other imaginable form of media chronicle the latest insanity from a figure in the Christian nationalist crowd. The dialectic is being propelled to the next level, and the pendulum, which swung hard right in the wake of Black Lives Matter and COVID, is now slowly being swung back left. The Christian nationalist movement has not consolidated an inch of the ground they won. Instead, the left has advanced its agenda by making the conservatives look like loons.
Marxism, feminism, homosexuality, and critical theory are all major problems in the church. Christian nationalists understand that and are righteously frustrated. But becoming the enemy to beat the enemy is not the response of Christ. When Christ was crucified, he said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:24). The Christ-like response to the Marxist incursion is to forgive them.
Forgiveness, however, does not mean compliance or apathy. The frustration the Christian Nationalists are feeling needs to be channeled differently. The Bible tells us how to handle false doctrine in the church. Romans 16:17 tells us to mark those causing division in the church and avoid them. That part gets quoted a lot, but if you read the rest of the verse, it identifies those who cause division as those trying to change Paul’s doctrine. Paul challenged Peter publicly (Gal 2:11-14) when Peter was in error, and repeatedly called out, sometimes by name, people bringing false doctrines into the church. For those within the context of a local church, the process is outlined in Matthew 18.
Undertaking the necessary process to clean up the false doctrine in the church will require courage and a willingness to stand for truth, even if it means standing alone. In a way, Christian nationalism is the easy way out. It assigns all the blame to a convenient boogeyman rather than treating people as individuals, as Christ and the Apostles did. But Christians are not called to do easy things.
Christians are called to be like Christ and follow His word. Nobody ever said that was easy.
Percy Sinclair is a STEM PhD student, writer, and avid gardener. He’s published two books and has several more in process. He’s married and lives in the Midwest. He and his wife love to garden and have far more plants than they know what to do with.
