Christian nationalism has become another identitarian movement, nursing grievances and victimhood

Photo: AP Images

M

any years ago, I heard in the name of Rav Shimon Schwab ztz”l that Jews are much better off living in a Christian America than in an atheist one. He was expressing a sentiment similar to that of John Adams, one of the framers of the Constitution and a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, in a 1798 letter to the Officers of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts:

“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge... would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Demographer Joel Kotkin has enumerated many of the benefits of a religious society in a recent article in Unherd, “Why G-d came back: Faith supports education, family and growth.” One surprise, for instance, was the finding over the last 15 years that religiously engaged people are more likely to be well-educated, while atheists are less so. The analysis of the 2022–23 Cooperative Election Study, which surveyed 85,000 Americans, found that attendance at religious services rises from 23% among high school graduates to 30% among those with graduate degrees. Another researcher, Phillip Schwadel, found that each additional year of education is associated with 15% greater likelihood of attending religious services.

Another uncontested correlation with religion is family formation, which is plummeting in the West. The states with the highest birthrates are primarily located in the South, Plains states, and parts of the Intermountain West, which are the centers of conservative Christianity. And a 2022 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology found a link between religious participation on the one hand, and greater financial generosity and stable families on the other. Nearly 20% of those without faith say that they have no close friends, as opposed to 10% for those who are religious.

The epicenter of religious revival, writes Kotkin, is in sub-Saharan Africa, driven in large part by Pentecostalism, which promotes individualism and a strong work ethic. Nearly 57% of Africans are Christian adherents, and 11 of the 20 fastest-growing economies in the world today are in Africa.

Those denominations that promote progressive values rather than traditional Judeo-Christian morality are everywhere in decline vis-à-vis their more traditional counterparts. Once, mainline Protestant denominations — Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and the UCC — constituted 50% of American Christians; today only 9%. In Canada, the once-dominant Anglicans have lost three-quarters of their membership. The Church of England, which has been dismissive of members’ concerns with Islamic militancy and grooming gangs, lost 21% of its membership over the last decade, and is projected to be surpassed by Islam in England by the end of the decade.

WHILE THE founding FOUNDERS were sympathetic to religion in general, they were opposed to the establishment of any particular sect or religion. They were acutely aware of the bitter religious wars between Catholics and Protestants that had wreaked so much havoc upon Europe in the preceding two centuries and were eager to avoid a repetition in the New World. The Declaration of Independence grounds the case for dissolving the ancient bonds to England in “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s G-d,” rather than in particular scriptural passages. Article VI of the Constitution forbids any religious tests for public office, and the Bill of Rights prohibits the establishment of any particular religion.

In his justly famous 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, President George Washington responded to a letter from the head of the congregation, Moses Seixas, in which Seixas expressed “his deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty [for] a Government... erected by the Majesty of the People,” committed to “liberty of conscience,” and “deeming everyone, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language equal parts of the great governmental Machine.”

In that response, Washington commended the citizens of the United States for having “given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation.” He stressed that the rights of Jews were no longer a matter of “tolerance” or the “indulgence of one class of people,” but the product of “their inherent natural rights.” Jews, in short, were not second-class dhimmis.

The recently ratified Constitution, the first president wrote, “gives bigotry no sanction... persecution no assistance, [and] requires only that those who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

In contrast to the nations of Europe, citizenship in the United States was not a matter of blood and soil, but of agreement to the principles of the Constitution. As David Goldman has pointed out, in that sense there was a parallel between citizenship in the United States and membership in the Jewish People. Just as those not descended from the seed of Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov can become members in good standing of the Jewish People by accepting the yoke of the Torah, so can one become a citizen of the United States by professing allegiance to the Constitution, regardless of any ethnic identity. That is what Vivek Ramaswamy, a candidate for governor of Ohio, means when he describes American citizenship as “credal” rather than rooted in blood and soil.

WITH THIS PRELUDE in place, it is clear that the so-called “Christian nationalism” that has taken hold in certain quarters of the American Right, particularly among younger members, has nothing to do with the revival of religion that many believe America needs; and that it is fundamentally at odds with the traditional American approach to religious identity. Rod Dreher, for instance, one of the most prominent advocates of an American religious revival, was also one of the first to draw attention to the prevalence of open anti-Semitic sentiments among young Republicans working in D.C.

Christian nationalism has become another identitarian movement, nursing grievances and victimhood. The movement is an attempt to identify the real Americans — so-called “heritage Americans” — from those whose ancestors are more recent arrivals, such as Jews or those from the Indian subcontinent. And it is typically white-centric. “Christian” is just a term for separating the “good” guys from the “bad.”

Good and bad, however, have nothing to do with religious practice or belief. Nick Fuentes, the Groyper in chief, makes much of being a Christian, but he also describes Hitler, who detested Christianity, as a “really cool guy,” and he shared with Tucker Carlson his deep admiration for the Communist Josef Stalin. Christianity for him and his followers is consistent with admiration for a brutal misogynist like Andrew Tate, racism, and calls to round up the Jews. He is not preaching, as Charlie Kirk once did, the virtues of marriage or of faith and family. No wonder Kirk detested him and was in turn detested by Fuentes.

The Groypers are in agreement with the proponents of DEI, in that they view any group that wins a larger share of the pie than its percentage of the population as having stolen its success or benefited from some massive conspiracy. Tucker Carlson mixes references to himself as a Christian — though he admits to only recently having read the Bible for the first time — and prattles on about how long his ancestors have been in America.

Recently, he launched attacks on two rich Jews, billionaire hedge fund investor Bill Ackman, and Bari Weiss, who sold her online publication the Free Press for north of $150 million, as not very bright, certainly not bright enough to have fairly earned such wealth.

How pathetic. Ackman patiently explained to Carlson the daring bets that have led to his current wealth, but apparently it was beyond Carlson’s ability to comprehend. And Weiss was able to sell for a small fortune a publication she started by herself from scratch because she had built a wide and sophisticated readership. That, Tucker, is how capitalism works.

Tucker has now descended to the fever swamps of conspiracy theory, including a five-part series in which he rehearses long debunked theories that 9/11 was an inside job. That is when he is not asking what America gets from Israel in return for billions of dollars in military aid; or shilling for the government of Qatar, where he recently announced he plans to purchase a home, by arguing that the threat of radical Islam is a psyop by Israel to convince Americans that Israel’s enemies are their own.

DAVID REABOI MAKES an important point. Racism begins with an emotion. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories begin with an explanation — “organized Jewry,” Israeli psyops. In the latter case, the logic is flawed, but the flaws must be unmasked. Crying “hate” is not enough.

Let’s take Carlson’s claim that the threat of radical Islam is completely exaggerated. Carlson says he cannot remember any American killed on American soil by Islamists in 24 years. The number 24 is carefully chosen to exclude 9/11, in which over 3,000 Americans lost their lives.

But even then, it appears that Carlson’s overheated brain — a brain that implicitly allows him to comment on the inferior gifts of Ackman and Weiss — has malfunctioned and caused him to forget a good deal of recent history, including: the 2009 slaughter of 13 and wounding of 30 by Nidal Malik Hasan, a radicalized US Army major of Palestinian origin at Fort Hood; the 2015 attack on a training event and Christmas party organized by the San Bernadino County Health Department, by a Muslim couple, in which 14 were killed and 22 seriously injured; the Boston Marathon bombing, which killed three; the 2016 murder of 49 at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando by another radicalized Muslim. All total, 111 people have been killed in America by radical Islamic terrorists, in nine terror attacks since 2009.

Nor should we confine ourselves to the United States. Islamist terrorism in Europe demonstrates the threat to America as well. Traditional X-mas markets have closed all over Europe in response to numerous Islamist attacks on holiday shoppers. Surely, that must bother Tucker Carlson as a Christian.

Presumably, as an experienced journalist, he has not forgotten the coordinated suicide bombings on the London Underground in July 2005, which left 52 dead and 800 injured. Or the May 2017 terrorist bombing at Manchester Arena, during an Ariana Grande concert, in which 22 were killed and 1,017 injured. Or the coordinated attacks on targets in Paris and a Parisian suburb, November 2015, which left 130 people dead and close to 100 injured critically. Those were preceded earlier in the year by an attack on the offices of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, in which 17 people were killed.

At the Doha Forum in Qatar last December, Carlson portrayed Israel as nothing but a drain on American taxpayers: “What are we getting out of this? Nothing. It’s only cost.” Israel, he claimed, has no natural resources nor strategic value to the United States.

The claim of no natural resources was an odd assertion given that Israel had just concluded a $32 billion natural gas deal with Egypt and sits on vast offshore reserves. Moreover, in the modern world, human capital is the most important national resource, and Israel possesses the greatest per capita assemblage of human capital in the world. Despite having only 10 million people, Israel is a world leader in bio-medical and agricultural research. Nearly every Silicon Valley giant maintains large research and development centers in Israel.

The American-Israeli military partnership is crucial to American defense, not just that of Israel, points out the Hudson Institute’s Michael Doran. President Trump’s Golden Dome defense system draws upon Israel’s combat-tested interception technologies, most notably the Arrow 3 missile. Meanwhile, Israel is developing an Arrow 4 to intercept hypersonic and maneuvering reentry vehicles, which present the greatest vulnerability to America’s missile defenses. And the recently deployed laser-based Iron Dome is a game changer in defense against low-tech threats.

During the 12-Day War with Iran last June, Iran fired hundreds of ballistic missiles and more than 1,000 drones at Israel. The knowledge gained from the defense against those real-world attacks is far greater than that from any theoretical simulation.

Investment in Israel is a direct investment in American security. Israel modifies and adapts every weapons system purchased from the United States, and those modifications are then shared with the United States. For instance, Israel developed external fuel tanks for the F-35, which greatly extended its range without the need for refueling. It also added an advanced array of electronics to disrupt Russian air defense systems and provided the F-35 with the ability to carry heavy external ordinance, turning it into a high-payload strike platform. The Trojan active protection system developed in Israel to protect tanks and armored personnel carriers has already been integrated into American armored vehicles.

In an era of intense American-Chinese competition, Doran argues, America’s greatest advantage is its web of global alliances, and in that system, Israel plays an outsized role. As the Middle East superpower, it absorbs regional shocks that would absorb American attention and resources.

Finally, Carlson failed to note that nearly 100 percent of American military aid must be spent in America, where it supports American military contractors and increases American jobs. By contrast, the $60 billion dollars spent to deploy tens of thousands of American troops in Europe benefit only the economies of the host countries, which spend on average only 1.9% of the GDP on their own defense (as opposed to Israel, which spends 5%.)

Tucker Carlson’s newly acquired version of Christianity — the one which labels Christian Zionism as heresy — it would seem does not place a high value on truth-telling and sees no irony in relying on the money of Islamic fundamentalist Qatar for its propagation.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1094. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)