The Christian defenders of Mairon's motte

I had "Today" off (for recreation) so didn't bring much in the way of blogging machinery. For whatever reason I checked in on Anxious Bench après-ski.

I usually grit my teeth before approaching the Anxious Bench (with rare exceptions). It is the home of several Saint Joseph Christians. You know the type; they are very keen to look after someone else's children, and to be seen doing it. On this occasion Daniel Williams salvages the term Christian nationalism.

Once the media started talking "Christian nationalism", Western nationalists who happen to be culturally Christian started pondering if this was just another motte and bailey. We are well-aware of the strategem from that previous media concoction, "Racism" - it means whatever the media want it to mean, but deep in the motte it means "being White". Of course the mainline Republicans have been ever-eager to twist that term so as to say dems r reel rayciss (how well has THAT worked?). Apropos of that or not, Williams defines Christian nationalism - as against civil religion, what Dubya-era bloggers called ceremonial deism.

I do not know if one might consider, say, Flanders over at OnePeterFive as a Christian nationalist. Theodore "Vox Day" Beale is a nationalist first, for all his protestations to preTheodosian Christianity. Both are in line with 33% of the US that we don’t need a First Amendment. Vox Day would argue for the Inevitable: we can enjoy a Christian-themed nationalism, or must suffer an explicitly antiChristian alliance of nationalists all against Europeans also.

To leave that aside, Williams accepts that modern Christians have engaged a “culture war” and that this is bad.

He has a point on the abortion issue: the Founders accepted medicines to terminate an unwanted pregancy. This went beyond the limits of JudaeoChristian "Bitter Herbs" - being deists or (in Maryland's case) eager to distance themselves from the Catholic culture of Québec. (The deist/Protestant ethical conundrum, instead, concerned "quickening" - when herbs would become dangerous, and a doctor needed to be called in.) As with the, er, Inquisition; assumptions of the past had to take on scrutiny, once the biological sciences - Scientody in Beale parlance - caught up.

I don't know about the Founders' takes on same-sex attraction - but on the "marriage" issue, let alone gender ideology (not "theory") I don't have to. Any religion or philosophy as won’t confront so obvious a mockery of Gnon is either too weak to live or else is itself false. If Williams won't fight untruth, he has no business writing - really, anything in the vein of philosophy.

The motte of Christian nationalism is "being Christian". Williams imagines that he can compose a Bible commentary in the Tongue of Mordor. And Anxious Bench by posting his handwringing is doing Josephianity.

BACKDATE 3/3