April 19, 2024 Bill Federer
There is a controversial new label the mainstream media is using, Christian nationalism?
What is it?
To answer that, there are three points to consider:
The first is, that nationalism is the opposite of globalism;
second, that nationalism depends on the nation; and
third, that Christian nationalism used to be called Christian patriotism, and past Presidents, Democrat and Republican, encouraged it.
Let’s look at the first point: nationalism is the opposite of globalism.
Did you know there are people called “globalists” who want to do away with nations and set up a one world government, which, of course, they will control.
Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum produced an Agenda 2030 video, which had the line: “You will own nothing and be happy.”
This sounds a lot like Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto:
“The theory of the communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”
“Abolition of private property” means “you will own nothing”!
Brock Chisolm, first director of the World Health Organization, explained:
“To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism, and religious dogmas.”
How do globalists plan on getting you to give up your property and freedom? –The Great Reset.
Jack Posobiec of Human Events Daily, stated on OAN, November 24, 2022:
“The Great Reset is very much like communism … They’ll tell you it is about diversity … equality … climate … But … what they want is … total government.”
People will not give up their property and freedom if everything is fine, but if there is a crisis, they will trade freedom for security.
The Great Reset is an orchestrated global crisis to produce dependency on international government.
Michael Rectemwald wrote in Imprimis “What Is the Great Reset?” December 2021:
“Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret write that if the past five centuries in Europe and America have taught us anything … it is that ‘acute crises contribute to boosting the power of the state.’”
Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, warned in a lecture at Stanford’s Classical Liberalism Institute, November 18, 2022:
“The zeitgeist [or mood] on the other side is ‘we are not going to make it for another century on this planet and therefore we need to embrace a one world totalitarian state right now’ …
Whatever the dangers are in the future we need to never underestimate the danger of one world totalitarian state …”
Thiel continued:
“First Thessalonians 5:3, the political slogan of the antichrist is ‘peace and safety’ … I want to suggest … we would do well to be a little more scared of the antichrist and a little a less scared of Armageddon.”
In other words, don’t be afraid of the world ending, be afraid of the people who promise to save you from the world ending.
Henry Mencken wrote in Notebooks, 1956:
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.”
The second point is: nationalism depends on the nation.
Most nations have an “honor-shame” culture, where an individual’s worth is based on what group they belong to, for example:
– Ancient Egypt’s social classes with the Pharaoh’s family on top;
– India’s caste system with four major castes and innumerable subcastes;
– Imperial China with the Hundred Family Surnames;
– European classes with royalty divided from peasantry;
– Islamic ummah communities with men worth more than women, who are worth more than infidels;
– Communism with party members worth more than common people;
– Atheistic utilitarianism gives more value to those contributing to “the state.”
The latest rendition of this is “intersectionality,” where a person’s worth is based on how many minority groups they belong to, with “trans” being superior to all others, resulting in those on the left wanting to impose a “transgender-nationalism.”
Where nationalism is bad in totalitarian nations as they deny individual rights, in America, nationalism has been preserving a nation where you have worth regardless of what group you belong to.
President Roosevelt explained, June 14, 1942:
“The belief in man, created free, in the image of God — is the crucial difference between ourselves and the enemies we face today.”
President Truman said in his Inaugural Address, January 20, 1949:
“The American people … believe that all men are created equal because they are created in the image of God.”
President Eisenhower said November 9, 1954:
“Democracy is nothing in the world but spiritual conviction … that each of us is enormously valuable because of a certain standing before our own God.”
Lincoln stated in his Gettysburg Address, 1863:
“Our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal …
That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Nationalism is bad in socialist and Islamist nations where governments do not guarantee to individuals inalienable rights, but in America, “nationalism” is supporting a nation whose very purpose is to guarantee to each individual their God-given rights.
These rights include freedom of conscience, religion, speech, press, assembly, self-defense, impartial trial, no cruel and unusual punishment — the freedom to determine your own destiny.”
Eisenhower said February 20, 1955:
“The Founding Fathers … recognizing God as the author of individual rights, declared that the purpose of government is to secure those rights.”
The third point to consider is: Christian nationalism used to be called Christian patriotism.
It was as American as football and apple pie.
The word “nationalism” was not even in use in America when Noah Webster compiled his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language, –yet the word “patriotism” was.
Webster’s 1828 Dictionary gave the definition:
“Patriotism is the characteristic of a good citizen, the noblest passion that animates a man in the character of a citizen …
Love of one’s country; the passion which aims to serve one’s country, either in defending it from invasion, or protecting its rights and maintaining its laws and institutions in vigor and purity.”
Past Presidents, Democrat and Republican, encouraged Christian patriotism.
George Washington referred to both “Christian” and “patriot” in his order to troops at Valley Forge, May 2, 1778:
“To the distinguished character of Patriot, it should be our highest Glory to laud the more distinguished Character of Christian.”
Washington wrote, July 9, 1776:
“The General hopes and trusts, that every officer and man, will endeavor so to live, and act, as becomes a Christian soldier, defending the dearest rights and liberties of his country.”
Republican President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and pushed through the 13th Amendment, freeing four million slaves. He stated in his Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861:
“Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him … are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulty.”
Lincoln mentioned the words “patriotism” and “Christianity” right next to each other in his Inaugural Address!
In the Post-Reconstruction era, Republican President Theodore Roosevelt condemned KKK mobs in Democrat southern states, December 3, 1906:
“As Bishop Charles Galloway of Mississippi has said: ‘The mob lynches a Negro … Every Christian patriot in America needs to lift up his voice in loud and eternal protest against the mob spirit.”
Republican President William Howard Taft had stated in 1908:
“No man can study the movement of modern civilization … and not realize that … the spread Christianity [is] the basis of … modern civilization in the growth of popular self-government. The spirit of Christianity is pure democracy. It is equality of man before God — the equality of man before the law.”
Democrat President Woodrow Wilson warned in 1923:
“We call ours a Christian civilization, a Christian conception of justice … Our civilization … can be saved only by becoming permeated with the spirit of Christ and being made free and happy by the practices which spring out of that spirit.”
Democrat President Franklin Roosevelt, an Episcopalian, wrote the prologue of a Gideon’s New Testament and Book of Psalms that was given out to millions of soldiers and sailors during World War II.
Roosevelt stated October 6, 1935:
“The printing of the first English Bible is an event of great significance … We trace … the widespread dissemination of those moral and spiritual precepts that have so greatly affected the progress of Christian civilization.”
Roosevelt stated September 1, 1941:
“Preservation of these rights is vitally important … to the whole future of Christian civilization.”
FDR stated November 1, 1940:
“Those forces hate democracy and Christianity as two phases of the same civilization … They oppose democracy because it is Christian. They oppose Christianity because it preaches democracy.”
Franklin Roosevelt stated May 27, 1941:
“The whole world is divided between pagan brutality and the Christian ideal. We choose human freedom, which is the Christian ideal.”
FDR stated in a fireside chat April 28, 1942:
“This great war effort … shall not be imperiled by the handful of noisy traitors — betrayers of America, betrayers of Christianity itself.”
FDR stated October 28, 1940:
“We guard against the forces of anti-Christian aggression.”
Roosevelt wrote August 22, 1942:
“The action taken today by your Government has hastened the coming of the inevitable victory of freedom over oppression, of Christian religion over the forces of evil and darkness.”
Would today’s mainstream media label Roosevelt a “Christian nationalist”?
Democrat President Truman said, August 28, 1947:
“This is a Christian Nation … As a Christian Nation our earnest desire is to work with men of good will everywhere to banish war.”
Truman lit the National Christmas Tree, December 24, 1952, saying:
“Through Jesus Christ the world will yet be a better and a fairer place.”
Would today’s mainstream media label Truman a “Christian Nationalist”?
Republican President Dwight Eisenhower said, November 9, 1954: “This relationship between a spiritual faith … and our form of government is … obvious … ‘Man is endowed by his Creator’ …
When you come back to it, there is just one thing … man is worthwhile because he was born in the image of his God …
Any group that … awaken[s] all of us to these simple things … is … a dedicated, patriotic group that can well take the Bible in one hand and the Flag in the other, and march ahead.”
Democrat President John F. Kennedy wrote to Brazil’s President, January 31, 1961:
“To each of us is entrusted the heavy responsibility of guiding the affairs of a democratic nation founded on Christian ideals.”
Would today’s mainstream media label Kennedy a “Christian Nationalist”?
Americans have historically been patriotic and a majority Christian.
Patricia U. Bonomi, professor emeritus of New York University, wrote: “The colonists were about 98 percent Protestant.”
In 1947, during the Truman Administration, the U.S. Corp of Cadets required:
“Attendance at chapel is part of a cadet’s training; no cadet will be exempted. Each cadet will receive religious training in one of the three particular faiths: Protestant, Catholic or Jewish.”
J. Tobin Grant wrote in Measuring Aggregate Religiosity in the United States, 1952-2005, that in 1965, America’s population was 93 percent Christian, consisting of 69 percent Protestant and 24 percent Catholic, with 3 percent of the population Jewish.
Jeffrey M. Jones wrote:
“According to an average of all 2021 Gallup polling, about three in four Americans said they identify with a specific religious faith. By far the largest proportion, 69%, identify with a Christian religion, including 35% who are Protestant, 22% Catholic and 12% who identify with another Christian religion or simply as a ‘Christian.’”
In America, religious tolerance evolved from Pilgrims and Puritans to all Protestant Christians, then to Catholics, Jews, liberal pseudo–Christian groups, then to monotheists and polytheists, then to just about every religion, and finally Islamists, atheists, and satanists.
Ironically, the last ones in want to kick the first ones out. They are intolerant of the beliefs that tolerated them.
Ronald Reagan stated August 23, 1984:
“The frustrating thing is that those who are attacking religion claim they are doing it in the name of tolerance. Question: Isn’t the real truth that they are intolerant of religion?”
Bob Unruh wrote in WND.com, April 1, 2024:
“The state … attacks Christians with a so-called ‘non-discrimination’ agenda that actually discriminates against people of faith.”
Why does the mainstream media insist on calling Christian patriots “Christian nationalists”?
For the same reason they call Pro-Life supporters “anti-abortion.” No Pro-Life group labels itself “anti-abortion.” Yet every mainstream news article that covers the subject labels Pro-Life people “anti-abortion.”
Why? Negative word association. They want to malign public opinion against them.
What is happening is called psychological projection.
Intolerant activists accuse Christians of being intolerant, when in reality, they are the ones who are intolerant of Christians.
It is a narcissistic response called blame-shifting, where the attacker blames the victim. They accuse the innocent of what they are guilty of.
Little children instinctively do this, saying, “I didn’t start the fight – you did!”
A cheating spouse will accuse the faithful spouse of being unfaithful.
In the Bible, Potiphar’s wife accused Joseph of lusting after her when she was lusting after him.
Nero reportedly set fire to Rome yet blamed it on Christians.
Democrat Political advisor David Axelrod said on NPR, April 19, 2010:
“In Chicago, there was an old tradition of throwing a brick through your own campaign office window, and then calling a press conference to say that you’ve been attacked.”
Nancy Pelosi called it “the wrap up smear.”
Harry Reid accused Mitt Romney of not paying his taxes, causing negative press which cost him the election. TIME magazine fact checked and found Romney actually did pay his taxes. When questioned, Reid responded, “I lied about Romney, but he didn’t win, did he?”
A tactic employed during the Cold War was to have agitators dress up as faux patriots to commit violence which can be blamed on genuine patriots, maligning them in the public eye.
Left-wing activists use DEI and ESG to force an irreligious nationalism; an unprecedented satanist theocracy; a transgender-dominionism, to censor and cancel Bible–believing Christians and Pro-Life Catholics.
They employ critical race theory, a socialist tactic, to divide those opposing their agenda, in this case Christians, into various groups which fight among themselves.
They employ a “fear mongering” technique.
The Telegraph’s article, December 12, 2023, exposed a Hollywood producer using fear mongering:
“Rob Reiner is deluded about ‘Christian nationalism’—The God and Country movie trailer presents ordinary religious Americans as nationalist boogeymen”:
“Reiner’s … examples of Christian Nationalism … are so broad that even the late Queen Elizabeth had a brush with it … [and] … Billy Graham …
The inescapable conclusion is that average Christian beliefs and average Christian engagement in the public sphere is exactly what Reiner and his abettos [collaborators] hope to target.
They want to shame followers of Jesus from taking part in the very same political activities their secular counterparts do.”
TheGatewayPundit.com reported February 23, 2024:
“Heidi Przybyla, a reporter for Politico, appeared on MSNBC this week and fretted as she explained that Christian Nationalists believe that Americans’ rights are granted by God and not Congress or the Supreme Court …
The rights of Americans DO come from God and not the government, which anyone knows if they have read the country’s founding documents.
How is this person even allowed to comment on politics on TV with this level of dishonesty or stupidity? This is a perfect example of why trust in the media is in the gutter.”
TheGatewayPundit.com published Mike LaChance’s article, February 29, 2024:
“Last week, a reporter for the liberal outlet Politico … suggested that if you’re an American who believes that your rights come from God and not the government, that you’re a Christian Nationalist …
Family Research Council President Tony Perkins and Catholic Vote President Brian Burch fired off a letter … to Politico … demanding an apology … saying …
Politico’s reporter failed to acknowledge ‘that our own Republic was founded on the belief that our rights come from God, not earthly kings or government,’ a revolutionary idea ‘clearly articulated in the Declaration of Independence …
Perkins and Burch called out Przybyla for “an attempt to spread misinformation about Christians.”
Ed Martin of Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, responded, March 1, 2024:
“Heidi Przybyla … isn’t railing against ‘Christian Nationalism,’ she’s railing against the American Founding.”
Mainstream media accuses Christian patriots of wanting to “force” their beliefs on others, but how can you force freedom on people?
Instead of “dominionism,” patriots want “freedomism.”
Patriots don’t want to force their beliefs on anyone, they just don’t want government forcing its progressive beliefs on them. They want the government to stop legislating immorality.
What is Christian nationalism?
The three points to consider when answering that question are:
nationalism is the opposite of globalism;
nationalism depends on the nation; and
Christian nationalism used to be called Christian patriotism, and past Presidents, Democrat and Republican, encouraged it.
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The Faith of FDR – From President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Public Papers, 1933-1945
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‘Only one hope left to save America’
Special excerpt from Eric Metaxas’ new book, ‘Religionless Christianity: God’s Answer to Evil’
By Eric Metaxas May 21, 2024
Eric Metaxas
Special note to readers from WND’s David Kupelian: Eric Metaxas’ two most recent books – “Letter to the American Church” and its just-released sequel, “Religionless Christianity: God’s Answer to Evil” – are, in my view, so important to the future of America that I wanted to share them with WND’s readers. At my request, the author has graciously allowed WND to publish the following exclusive excerpt from “Religionless Christianity.”
The earlier book, “Letter to the American Church,” shows how, just as the vast majority of German pastors and churches during the 1930s witnessed the rise of Hitler and Nazism, yet did nothing to oppose it – and their passivity ended up allowing the unimaginable horrors that followed – today’s American churches and pastors are, with a few notable exceptions, following in the German churches’ disastrous footsteps.
“Religionless Christianity” takes off where the first book ends, exploring more intimately what living a truly Christian life – including standing up to ever-expanding evil when it rises all around us, as in America today – looks like. The message is summarized at the top of the book’s front cover: “There is only one hope left to save America and the world: active, robust, and public faith in God.” I heartily recommend both books.
Following is the “Introduction” to “Religionless Christianity: God’s Answer to Evil”:
We are in a war. Of course, at its heart, it’s a spiritual war. We who call ourselves Christians are called by God to fight in that spiritual war, which expresses itself in innumerable ways all around us, so that what is fought in the heavenlies by angels fallen and unfallen is also fought in our own world, by us, in time and space. God gives us who are made in His image the wonderful and terrible privilege of taking part in eternal things within the context of human history.
Which raises the question: Where are we in human history?
In America we are experiencing our third – and likely our final – existential crisis. The first was our Revolution, when the threat was from without; the second was our Civil War, when the threat was from within. But now we face a third trial, whereby evil forces aim to steal our freedoms and national sovereignty via a globalist world system dedicatedly at war with the God from Whom we derive our principles of “liberty and justice for all,” as well as with the principles themselves. And the threat to us now is from both within and without.
This book is a sequel to my previous book, “Letter to the American Church,” which draws the unavoidably chilling parallels between German Christians’ silence and inaction in the 1930s and the silence and inaction of American Christians in our own time. Both are the result of a drift away from the biblical idea of a muscular faith that expresses itself in all spheres of life and toward a dead and “religious” faith that is merely theological and ecclesiastical. Dietrich Bonhoeffer sought to awaken the church of his day to action, but as we know, they did not heed God’s voice through him and invited the judgment they couldn’t have dreamt would come. So the question for us now is whether we in the American church will heed the prophetic warnings
of Bonhoeffer for our own time and avert the unfathomable horrors of our own silence and inaction.
Near the end of World War II, an imprisoned Bonhoeffer was ruminating about why the German church had failed, and suggested that they had needed a bold and “religionless Christianity” – but had instead opted for mere “religion.” That is at the heart of what we will discuss: whether we might rise to that kind of faith and thereby avert the judgment Germany did not. In this book, I ultimately mean to sketch a vision of hope, that if we are now willing to pay the price God asks us to pay, we might not only avert or delay the coming judgment, but might launch a new era in history.
Among the reasons I have hope is that I am convinced God called me to write “Letter to the American Church” – and not merely to warn us of what lies ahead if we continue to fail to obey Him, but actually to call us to repent, which is His will for us. There is therefore a positive message at the heart of this book, just as there is a positive message at the heart of every one of God’s warnings. We do not serve a peevish and fatalistic God who enjoins us to do His will merely so that He can say, “I told you so.”
I am also hopeful because the response to “Letter to the American Church” has been extraordinarily positive. Many in the American church are clearly eager to repent of their failings and to find churches that understand where we are; they wish to be in the fight to which God now calls us. Countless people have written saying they have personally given scores of copies of the book to pastors, and several large conferences have been held to put the book’s message in front of further hundreds of pastors. Finally, my preaching on the book at Pastor Rob McCoy’s church in California led two Hollywood veterans in the congregation to make an extraordinary documentary film of the book, greatly multiplying the reach of this most urgent message.
Another reason that I am hopeful is rooted in Romans 8:28: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.” Is it not possible that God has allowed us to see how quickly evil can overtake us in these last four years precisely to wake up those who might still be awakened? Are the evils that we see on every front not perhaps God’s tender mercies to us, just as a parent’s chastisement of a child is ultimately in the hope that that child will change his behavior in the right direction and thereby avert the far greater chastisements to come if he does not?
It is a fact that because of the evils all around, many in our nation are finally waking up and seeing the evilness of evil – and realizing that they must shake off their inertia and take action. Many who would not even have used the term “evil” now see there is no other way to frame the things we are seeing, which seem to make no human or otherwise natural sense – and if one sees real evil and knows it to be evil, one is likely to turn to God.
Many across our country are waking up to see that freedom is not free, and that they must become involved in their communities, whether politically or otherwise. Many see that we have come to this awful pass precisely because we have not been living out our faith heroically and in every sphere. Therefore, this endless litany of evils that have befallen us – the nightmare of transgender madness, critical race theory, cultural Marxism, and the increasing corruption in all of our institutions, from increasingly authoritarian government to the propagandistic journalistic establishment and the complicity and groupthink of corporate America and beyond – need not be God’s final and inevitable judgment. If we take action now, all of these things that have happened can be seen as God’s merciful wake-up call to a slumbering church, specifically so that we might repent and do all in our power to live for God in a new way.
So we must wonder whether the present difficulties might indeed lead us toward something like a Second Reformation, one of which we have hardly dreamt. Martin Luther, in standing against the corruptions of his day, could not foresee the Reformation that would follow, but it was dramatically more far-reaching than mere church reformation, with ramifications throughout Europe that ultimately led to the ideas enshrined in the American Founding.
Who was Dietrich Bonhoeffer?
For any unfamiliar with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s story, we may say that he was a German pastor and theologian who heroically opposed Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, and attempted to wake up the German church to stand strongly against them. I write about him at length in my 2010 biography, “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.” When Bonhoeffer saw the church fail in its duty to God and the German people, he eventually went outside the church and became involved in the assassination plots against Hitler, as we shall see. He became engaged to be married in 1942 and was imprisoned in 1943, where he continued to write. He was murdered by the Nazis in 1945, three weeks before the end of the war. He was thirty-nine years old.
Bonhoeffer was a theological genius, as well as a man of profound Christian faith. Perhaps what sets him apart most of all is that he knew that the goal of Christian faith was not merely to have good theology but actually to live out one’s faith. He also knew that pretending faith is a merely “religious” exercise, or an exercise of intellectual theology, is not only a mistake, but an offense against God. Jesus did not come to Earth so that people would become theologians, attend church once a week, and hold to some doctrines. Bonhoeffer knew that God demanded everything of us, and when one doesn’t live out one’s faith, it only proves that one had no faith to begin with.
Finally, as we will say at the end of this book, we need to think of Bonhoeffer’s use of the phrase “religionless Christianity” not merely as a lament for what might have been, but perhaps as a promise to us today of an extraordinarily hopeful way forward in which we really might live out our faith in a way unprecedented in human history.
Eric Metaxas’ books, including “Religionless Christianity” and “Letter to the American Church,” are available at his website, EricMetaxas.com.
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