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Is Christian Nationalism WEIRD? || SLP608 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_03: Christian nationalism is a hot topic of conversation, especially after the Charlie Kirk memorial, in which the gospel was preached.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Charlie Kirk is in heaven because his Savior sacrificed himself for Charlie Kirk.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes by politicians.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_02: Charlie brought the truth that Jesus Christ was the King of kings and that all truth flowed from this first and most important one.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_03: And we saw the profoundly Christian words of Charlie's widow Erica.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: On the cross, our Savior said, Father, forgive them, for they not know what they do.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: That man.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_03: He did not hate his opponents.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_04: He wanted the best for them.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_04: That's where I disagreed with Charlie.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_04: I hate my opponent.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_04: And I don't want the best for them.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_04: I'm sorry.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_04: I am sorry, Erica.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_04: But now Erica can talk to me and the whole group, and maybe they can convince me that that's not right, but I can't stand my opponent.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_03: But it was all swirled together.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_03: Is this political?
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_03: Is this religious?
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_03: Is this Christian?
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_03: Is this MAGA?
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_03: What even is Christian nationalism?
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_03: It's a question for over here in the UK.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_03: Recently there was a march that Tommy Robinson organized, and one man was given the microphone at one stage.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_03: He dressed like a bishop, he called himself a bishop.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know the denomination he belongs to, and I've done some digging, but I am profoundly concerned by this man wearing a bishop's outfit, proclaiming to speak in the name of God.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yet he speaks and even prays in a quite political register.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_05: We will not bow to tyranny.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_05: We will not surrender our freedom.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_05: We will not be silent any longer.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_03: So, what is Christian nationalism and why should we be concerned?
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_03: I want to show you a few minutes from a conversation that the historian Tom Holland had on the trigonometry podcast, and it puts everything into historical frame.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_03: What we will see is that our questions about Christian nationalism, the way we ask it in the year 2025, are weird.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_03: That's why I've entitled this video, Is Christian Nationalism Weird?
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_03: And I capitalized weird for a very good reason.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_03: It's been an acronym that's been in use for about 20 years now.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_03: Joseph Henrick, the evolutionary biologist, coined it to talk about the psychological peculiarity of Westerners.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_03: We are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic, and the way that we see the world is unlike the way anybody else sees the world.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_03: And Joseph Hendrik is absolutely clear it's Christianity that has made us so weird.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_03: So weird that our conversations about Christian nationalism are peculiarly post-Christian Western conversations.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_03: And we might need to reframe how we think about things.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_03: Christians might need to reframe things.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_03: Secular people might need to reframe things.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_03: And the way I want to get into this is by looking at a question that Francis Foster asks Tom Holland on the trigonometry podcast, and I think it's very revealing.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_03: Are we the only society that has ever thought we can divorce culture and religion?
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_03: Is that not arrogant?
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it is arrogant.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_03: We have thought that we can separate the religious from the secular.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_03: We've thought that we can divorce ourselves from a religious story of life and carry on as before.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_03: Is that arrogant?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_03: Tom Holland says, absolutely, it is arrogant.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_03: It is weird, it is peculiar.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody else does this.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody else divorces the sacred from the secular in the way that us weird Westerners do.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_03: Why have we done it?
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_03: Tom Holland gives the short answer here.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: But but the arrogance, people would say that's justified because of the fact that we have the most um we're we're the products of the of an incredibly advanced civilization that industrialized, um, and therefore basically we've, you know, we've we've got the answer.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I think obviously that that now rubs up against all kinds of anxieties about um Western exceptionalism.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: But I think it does the idea that um our secular liberal society is uniquely advanced.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, to be progressive is itself a very Western thing.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're progressive, you're progressing ahead of everybody else.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, a sense of arrogance is baked into that word, I would argue.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_03: That's the short answer.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_03: Having separated the sacred from the secular and carried on in a secular frame, we have, through the scientific method, developed all kinds of technology and prosperity, and we now think that we are so advanced as a civilization that our arrogance has justified itself.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_03: We might be weird, but we're right, and our prosperity proves it.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_03: We don't need the sacred anymore.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_03: The sacred is like the booster rockets that have gotten the shuttle out of the Earth's atmosphere.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_03: You can jettison religion and you can keep going only with the secular, and I guess our success at reaching the stars is proving to us that you don't now need the sacred anymore.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_03: That's the short answer to why we are so weird as to believe that you can divorce the sacred from the secular.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_03: But it's worth pausing at this moment to notice we are the only civilization that does this.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_03: Every other civilization has had a religious story to tell about itself.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_03: Now there was a post-Christian experiment called communism that wanted to found itself on some explicitly atheistic foundations, but most of us consider that that experiment has failed and failed spectacularly.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_03: There is no successful civilization that has not had some kind of religious story about itself.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe it is a non-theistic religion, maybe it's a polytheistic religion, maybe it's a monotheistic religion, but all kinds of cultures have had stories about themselves that go beyond the scientific and tell a metaphysical story about the world.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_03: We have now wound up in a weird place where we don't really know what to do with this old-fashioned thing called religion because we just want to get on with this secular thing called politics.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_03: So, how do you do the religious and the secular?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_03: How do you go about national affairs and somehow integrate Christianity?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_03: And both Christians and secular people might get this wrong if we don't get the history lesson right.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_03: So let's wind back in the conversation on trigonometry and let's hear Tom Holland tell us the story of how we got to this weird position.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_03: Here's where he begins the story.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: This notion of there being two rival orders gets enshrined by the towering theological genius in the Latin Church, Augustine, um, great in in North Africa in the late fourth, early fifth century um AD.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: And this is against the backdrop of the collapse of Roman power, Rome has been sacked.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: And there are Romans who say this is because we have rejected the old order, the old customs that enabled us to keep the gods on side.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, going back to that stuff I was saying about Athens, these rituals, these festivals are like kind of insurance payments to keep the gods happy.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and now we've abandoned these.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: And the Romans call these religiones.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: So a uh you know, a sacrifice or a festival in honor of a god is a religio, it's a bond that joins you to um to a god and is a kind of guarantee that this god will then look after this after the city.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: And these religiones have been abandoned.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: And Augustine says, no, not a bit of it.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um and the reason for that is that everything in the fallen world is bound upon what he calls the cyculum, which is basically the span of human life, but it means the notion that everything is is doomed to to to to pass away.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: All things must pass, as George Harrison would put it.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um He says that he this is true of empires as well as of individuals.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: Rome is not permanent.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: Rome has no special significance.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: It will pass away, it is bound upon the culum.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: If you want eternity, you must you must bind yourself to the pure eternity of heaven.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's what the real religious.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: And it's only the church that can give you this religious.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: So there you have, you know, as the Roman Empire falls, this notion of there being an order of the ciculum, the order of religious.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: And over the course of medieval history, this becomes institutionalized.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_03: So in this interview, Tom Holland starts with Augustine.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_03: In the book Dominion, he starts much earlier than that.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_03: And we can start the telling of the story much earlier than that.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_03: It wasn't just Augustine that was inventing the sort of the sacred and the secular, he was reflecting upon scripture.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_03: He was reflecting upon things like uh Galatians, for instance, and Tom Holland begins his book Dominion with Galatia and this strange religious idea that Christians start to talk about.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_03: Where in Galatians, Paul in the AD 50s, is saying to these people who are surrounded by pagan deities, why don't you follow the God of the Hebrews, but don't become a Hebrew, right?
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_03: It's really important that you not simply identify with ethnic Israel, because God's interests are not really with ethnic Israel, but with a spiritual Israel, in which you don't need to be circumcised, you don't need to adopt the ethnic national customs of the Jews, you can still worship the God of the Jews by the Spirit and in the divine Messiah.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_03: And your nationality does not need to change.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_03: You can worship the God of the Hebrews without becoming a Hebrew.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_03: You mustn't worship the Galatian gods, you mustn't burn incense to all the deities that are around you, even though your nation is constantly telling you, well, of course, you're from Galatia.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_03: You need to acknowledge the Galatian deities.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_03: And actually, the Galatians are to resist the national religion that is surrounding them, and they are to worship only the particular god of the Hebrews, but not by becoming a Hebrew.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_03: So they are to learn the local language, but never to worship the local gods.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_03: And Paul is assuming an incredible divide between the sacred and the secular.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_03: You can give yourself to the secular life of Galatia, and you can be united to the God of the Hebrews, not by becoming a Hebrew and not by worshiping the local gods.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_03: This was radical.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_03: For pre-Christian societies and even for non-Christian societies today, there is no sacred secular divide.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_03: It's just sacrecular.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_03: It sounds like a messy word to our ears because it looks like a messy reality to weird Westerners.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_03: But that is the way that naturally most people have thought of the world.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_03: There is no sacred secular divide, it's just sacrecular, okay?
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_03: And Paul is assuming a distinction between the sacred and the secular.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_03: And he's following Jesus in that.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_03: Didn't Jesus say, give to Caesar what is Caesar, and to God what is God's?
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_03: He's also following the prophets of old.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_03: Weren't the prophets these truth-tellers that were constantly speaking against both king and priest?
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_03: And didn't the prophets assume that there was a distinction between the priests and the king?
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_03: That there were the Levites who were the priestly class, and there is the royal class of the Judahites, and those two were not the same, and truth could be spoken to priests, truth could be spoken to prophets, and there is a distinction between the sacred and the secular.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_03: This is a thoroughly biblical idea.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_03: Old Testament, New Testament, Augustine, and then Tom Holland keeps the story going.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it going into the kind of the Reformation and into modernity, it mutates to become this idea that there is this space called the secular, which is kind of neutral, it's separated from what has come to be called religion.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: And this is a mad idea.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: No other culture has ever had this idea.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: So when you read about you know ancient Greek religion, they did they had no concept of religion.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: And they certainly had no concept of religion as being something that is separate from the kind of the the everything else.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's you know the the relationship of people to the gods is like the the jinn in the tonic.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: You can't separate out the jinn and the tonic.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: What what what Christianity does is to say, yeah, you can have jinn and here's the tonic and you can separate them out.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's the madness of of the way that we conceptualize the world in the West.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: And Islam that has no concept that you can separate this out.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so this means, therefore, yeah, that what we have in the West is an idea that you have freedom of religion.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: And Jews in the 19th century had freedom of religion in the wake of the the French Revolution.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: They are told, you know, you can you can practice your religion as you want.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: But Jews didn't have religion.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: They they were a people, but they're being told if you want to become the citizens of the French Republic, that's that's brilliant, but you can no longer define yourself as a citizen of of Israel.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you are now a French citizen who practices what comes to be called Judaism as a religion.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so Jews in the 19th and in the 20th century have to adapt the you know their traditions to fit this very specific modern Western secular template.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: And and Western secular democracies require Muslims to do the same, to conceptualize what they belong to as being a religion.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: But classically, that's not how Muslims understood it.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: Islam is a a totalizing way of le leading your life.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: There are there are rules that govern every aspect of your existence.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: God is manifest in everything that you do.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: The idea that there are kind of safe spaces where everyone can meet up and kind of join in a in a secular space is something completely alien.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think that most kind of enthusiasts for liberal secularism understand this.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: They tend to I think they they think that the notion of the secular is something that is common to everybody.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: That it's kind of like, you know, everyone has a sense of what a tree is, everyone has a sense of what a dog is, um, everyone has a sense of what the secular is.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: They don't.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so Muslims are being forced in when they come to the West, are being forced into this kind of procrustian bed of the secular notion of what a religion is.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_03: So here is how history has happened.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_03: There was the sacrecular, then there was the sacred and the secular, but Augustine was very clear, and the medieval church was very clear, that the sacred was on top, okay?
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_03: And the great emblem of this, and Tom writes about it so evocatively in the book Dominion, the great emblem of this is Henry IV having to go on this pilgrimage, trekking across the Alps, waiting outside a church in Italy in the snow, while the Pope thinks about whether he's going to receive King Henry IV back into fellowship.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_03: The Pope had excommunicated Henry IV, and now his whole political regime was completely jeopardized because the Pope had excommunicated him, and he had to go on bended knee to the sacred in order to be welcomed back into the fold.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_03: And very much in 1097 there was that emblem of the way in which the sacred and the secular actually relate.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_03: The sacred is on top, the secular is underneath.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_03: What you then get in a post-Christendom reality is not sacred on top, secular underneath, but sacred and secular now side by side.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_03: And now instead of the language of the sacred and the secular, you start to have the language of the separation of church and state.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_03: And now the separation of church and state has morphed in people's mind into a separation of faith and politics.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_03: So now faith has nothing to do with politics.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_03: And so do you see how the sacred is fading and fading and fading?
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_03: And now not even faith, not even theological convictions, not even metaphysical convictions are meant to come into politics.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_03: And now there is really just the secular, and now everybody's just trying to get a piece of this secular pie.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_03: And the progressives want a piece, and the conservatives want a piece, and Christians want a peace, and Muslims want a peace.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_03: And we're all having a secular fight about the place of faith.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_03: And both secular people and religious believers have bought into the story.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_03: We have all bought into the secularized myth that all there is is power politics.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_03: And so the threat of Christian nationalism is felt very deeply, and of course it's felt deeply when one of the avatars of the Christian nationalist movement, even though he's not a Christian, is Donald Trump.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_03: He's not a Christian nationalist, but he really likes the Christian nationalist vote, and so he will clear protesters in order to have a photo opportunity with the Bible.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_03: And so he will appear on stages and platforms at some remarkably religious and Christian events.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_03: And how can that not appear to people as though this is just one more secular power grab cloaked in religious clothing?
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_03: And in England, when a man who I am not sure has been legitimately ordained into the Anglican communion stands on a stage at a Tommy Robinson rally and utters prayers, dressed as a bishop, I think we have another avatar of what people fear when they say Christian nationalism.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_03: What should we think about all this?
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_03: Well, one thing I'm commonly thinking is, well, that's not the only avatar of what a Christian nation might look like.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_03: Do you remember the crowning of King Charles?
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_03: There he was, stripped of all his powerful regalia, in order to receive an anointing from the Archbishop of Canterbury.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_03: This ceremony dates back 3,000 years to the anointing of Solomon.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_03: They sang handel's setting.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_03: Zadok the priest and Nathan the Prophet anointed Solomon.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_03: Is that Christian nationalism?
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_03: Well, yes, sort of, of a very different kind.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_03: That is the sort of Christian nationalism that traces its roots back through medieval Europe to biblical times.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_03: And what do we have with Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet?
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_03: We have somebody embodying holiness, goodness, and somebody embodying the word of God of truth.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_03: So we've got holiness, goodness, the word of God, truth, and he's being anointed.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_03: This is the oil that represents the spirit.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_03: Here is beauty.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_03: And power is set well underneath goodness, truth, and beauty.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_03: Power is put in its place.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_03: Power is not the top of the pyramid.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_03: And it seems to me this understanding of politics and faith puts power in its place.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_03: The biggest problem with modern conceptions of Christian nationalism is the way that people are making power plays.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_03: Whether it's the sword of violence or the sword of state power, we rightly fear that people are making power grabs in the name of Jesus.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_03: But what if there is a world in which goodness, truth, and beauty come before power?
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm not making an argument for the constitutional monarchy of Great Britain and the Commonwealth.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not even making an argument for Old Testament kings.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_03: I am saying that there is a peculiar vision of reality in which arrogance is dethroned, in which power is dethroned, and in which the one who reigns as king is the true Solomon, the true son of David.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_03: And his way of politics, if you like, is the way of putting away your sword, for those who live by the sword will die by the sword.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_03: His way is the way of word, of persuasion, of service, of sacrifice.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_03: And whatever you think of the phrase Christian nationalism or modern incarnations of Christian nationalism, surely we can all get on board with a kind of politics that prioritizes sacrifice, service, argumentation, persuasion, and love.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_03: The way of Jesus is weird, but it's certainly not arrogant.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_03: If you want to find out more about the way of Jesus, why don't you go to 321course.com?
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_03: It's our introduction to Jesus.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_03: You can binge it in a couple of hours, or you can do it over eight sessions.
• 20:01
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• 20:04
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• 20:06
  SPEAKER_03: You can find a church where you can do this at 321course.com and discover life according to Jesus.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_03: That'll do us for this video.
• 20:14
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