Christian nationalism’s godless heart

There is a spectre haunting the West — the spectre of Christianity. The Trump regime has found an apt icon of its purpose in the slain Charlie Kirk, who J.D. Vance calls a “martyr for the Christian faith”. At his grandiose funeral in Glendale, Arizona, Robert Kennedy Jr. remarked that just as Christ “changed the trajectory of history” after dying at 33, so would Kirk after dying at 31. One attendee made the same point by dragging a giant cross around the State Farm Stadium on wheels. Everywhere that MAGA and its sympathisers around the world look, they find Christianity under siege. Donald Trump informed the UN of his resolve to protect “the most persecuted religion on the planet today — it’s called Christianity”. Canada’s Conservative opposition echoes his rhetoric: its leader muses that “Christians may be the number one group that are victims of hate-based violence” and wants to stiffen laws in their defence. Across the Atlantic, marchers on Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally donned Crusader outfits and toted crosses to symbolise their desire to fight the dilution of their country’s Christian identity by non-European immigrants.

This rhetoric — by turns timorous and aggressive — blurs once vital distinctions between Christian confessions and denominations. Miriam Cates, a former Tory MP and evangelical Anglican, called on “British Christians” to drop their suspicion of Kirk, she employed a collective noun with which few churchgoers would have been comfortable in previous decades, when rifts between the Church of England and nonconformist chapel, Catholic and Protestant ran deep. In the United States, the veneration of Kirk has been a strangely ecumenical matter.

Kirk, after all, was a Bible-bashing evangelical Protestant who condemned the Papacy. His funeral resembled a glitzy megachurch service. Yet, Roman Catholics have been his most emotional eulogists. Cardinal Dolan of New York likened his speaking tours to the missionary journeys of Saint Paul. Bishop Robert Barron, an energetic podcaster, was reminded of the philosophical method of Socrates and Aristotle. The images of a saintly, smiling Kirk proliferating across America oddly resemble Carlo Acutis, the Millennial influencer recently canonised by the Church for seeking to rescue the young for religion.

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Christianity in this charged moment is no longer an intricate constellation of disputed beliefs but something easier to grasp: an identity. To be a Christian is to commit oneself to a concentric circle of values — the family, the nation, the West, civilisation itself — that are under attack. Those who oppose this Rightward tilt are ironically just as confident in offering capsule definitions of what being a Christian is. Rowan Williams headed the signatories of an open letter against Tommy Robinson’s march, protesting that “the cross is the ultimate sign of sacrifice for the other” and should not be used to incite division: “Jesus calls us to love both our neighbours and our enemies and to welcome the stranger.” The Methodists, Baptists and Pentecostals who signed alongside the former Archbishop of Canterbury would once have regarded his church as an impediment to the gospel and at worst a corrupt institution. He would have seen their fervent biblicism as pretty naive.

The historian Udi Greenberg reminds us in a thoughtful recent book that this is hardly the first time that basic conceptions of mere Christianity have served as banners in culture wars. Though the political instrumentalisation of faith now seems archetypally American, the crucible of the transformation he discusses was Western Europe in the early and mid-20th centuries, when the rising fear of Communism overcame earlier divisions between churches and confessions. The legacy of the Reformation ensured that these ran deep. Right down to the 20th century, Protestants and Catholics believed and worshipped in sharply and sometimes bitterly opposed ways from which they derived very different social and moral doctrines.

Since the Reformation, no one in this fractured Christendom had been able to agree on what counted as a Christian family. Protestant propagandists claimed that the celibate clergy of Rome came between man and wife by forcing women to spill their intimate secrets in the confessional booth. Catholics riposted that Martin Luther had destroyed the sanctity of marriage when he had allowed divorce. There was no more unanimity when it came to the security or prosperity of nations. Protestants used the developing science of statistics to allege that the oppressive Roman priesthood made their flocks criminal and dishonest. Was it any wonder that in superstitious, Popish Naples there was one murder per 2,750 people, but only one per 270,000 in thrifty Presbyterian Scotland?

“Since the Reformation, no one in this fractured Christendom had been able to agree on what counted as a Christian family.”

It took a shared enemy to overcome these animosities. By the time of the First World War, Protestants and Catholics were converging in fear of socialism and feminism. When feminists said there was more to life than raising children — work or emotional and sexual fulfilment for instance — Protestant and Catholic writers borrowed one another’s arguments for their natural subordination and domesticity of women. In particular, they now began to identify Christianity not with a set of disputed dogmas but rather a basic defence of the nuclear family against the menace of selfish and “animalistic” pleasure. Their politicians joined in passing vice laws that cracked down on pornographic books or racy plays that undermined the sanctity of the home. In the Netherlands, for example, Catholics and Protestants teamed up in 1911 to close brothels and ramp up censorship.

The defence of a Christian culture could be progressive as well as puritanical. Protestants and Catholics built the first welfare states. Though Otto von Bismarck had once initiated a fierce “culture war” against the Roman Catholic Church, he worked in the 1880s with both Protestant and Catholic legislators to introduce unemployment and accident insurance for workers. The state and the churches would insulate workers against the temptations of socialism by tempering the worst cruelties of capitalism.

In the aftermath of the First World War though, the continuing dread of socialism would push the churches into some terrible mistakes. The credible fear that the spread of Communism would initiate the same kind of ruthless dechristianisation that was evident in Soviet Russia pushed leading Protestants and Catholics into collaboration with fascist and authoritarian governments. In Germany, both Protestant and Catholic theologians fell for Adolf Hitler’s airy claim that he stood for “positive Christianity” against “Judeo-Bolshevism”. According to the Catholic theologian Robert Grosche, Germany was now a “sacred space” in which confessional differences counted for less than race: the Germans formed a “community of blood” through which all believers came to Christ. They were so impressed by Nazism’s willingness to confront Soviet Russia that they barely noticed its viciousness, especially when it was exercised against groups such as the Jews who did not belong to their racial or religious community. What did bother them about the Nazis were trivial sins against family values: the “tendency toward nudism” of its youth organisations or the wartime policy of running brothels to service the troops.

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This hollowed out conception of Christian civilisation, which provided rhetorical cover for wars of aggression and the mass murder of the Holocaust, should have collapsed with the Third Reich. Yet Christian theologians of all persuasions gamely pressed on with the defence of Christianity thereafter, dodging their share of responsibility for the Second World War with the implausible claim that believers “suffered more under the Nazis than others”. The defeat of Fascism allowed Christians to concentrate on what remained the real enemy: atheistic Soviet Communism, which now threatened to mount a “barbarian invasion” of the West. Catholics and Protestants mingled in Christian parties: one good example is West Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, which hoped that revived democracies could prop up family life and the natural inequalities of capitalism.

The defenders of Christianity slightly modernised it to make it more appealing to war-weary Europeans. They allowed that being a Christian was no obstacle to enjoying the economic miracle of postwar affluence. The opposite was true: once everyone could afford cars and televisions, exclaimed one Dutch Protestant, they would find it easier to be good Christian neighbours. Western politicians influenced by ecumenical thinkers presented human rights not just as a bastion against Soviet totalitarianism but as a precious bequest from Christianity.

Winston Churchill described the European Convention on Human Rights which is so unpopular with Right-leaning Britons today as vital to the “health of… Christendom”. Catholic and Protestants agreed that they should now present marriage not as a brake on eroticism but a means to its highest fulfilment. In bestselling books, formerly stern theologians became marriage guidance counsellors, urging Christian couples to chase mutual orgasms and try out multiple positions, allowing that there was much more to sex than procreation. The French Catholic sexologist Marc Oraison urged Christian men to “follow the beat of the woman’s rhythm” to “synchronise the climax”.

All this sex positivity did not stop Christians from collaborating against people whose tastes and practices did not fit their definitions of good clean fun. They supported a renewed drive to prosecute homosexuals in postwar Europe for example. In Africa and South East Asia, Protestant and Catholic missionaries reacted to the swift disintegration of Europe’s disintegrating colonial empires by suggesting that Christianity might advance economic and social development. Yet they also pressed on with campaigns against polygamy, which they denounced as a “consequence of original sin”. And they intensified their hostility to Islam, which in their minds joined Communism as a materialist threat to the still fragile advance of Christian civilisation. As a Catholic bishop in Tanzania put it in 1959, Protestants and Catholics must overcome the “scandal” of their divisions so that they could take on the “totalitarian” threat of Islam.

This complacent sense that Christianity was the sanctification of the nuclear family and social market capitalism did not survive the spiritual tumult of the Sixties and Seventies. The radical theologians of those decades did still seek a simple definition of Christianity to which both Europeans and the people of their former colonies could subscribe. They just tried to smash the social conservatism of their predecessors by killing off the authoritarian God they had worshipped. Christianity must now become a “religionless” faith: one that respected Jesus as the “outcast” who had dreamed of overturning society but had no need for his Father. Protestants and Catholics competed to see who could break most decisively with the dusty devotions of former times. Dorothee Sölle, a German Catholic feminist, urged her readers to live as the crucified Jesus had done, as if God did not exist.

“They just tried to smash the social conservatism of their predecessors by killing off the authoritarian God they had worshipped.”

The most important thing about this religionless ecumenicism in Greenberg’s eyes is that it failed. If radical theology did not cause the plunges in churchgoing and membership that set in across Europe at that time, it did nothing to prevent them. This means that when European politicians speak about a common Christian civilisation today, they have fallen back on the conservative and authoritarian ecumenicism of earlier decades. This is a zombie Christianity: which has little to do with the actual worship or beliefs of dwindling churches. When Giorgia Meloni speaks of being “a Christian”, she nods at but hardly bows to Italian Catholicism: she is a single mother who is happier to quote Tolkien than Saint Paul. What has not changed is that talk of Christian civilisation still rallies support against the enemies supposedly pressing at its borders or already plotting against it from within, even if they are no longer the Bolsheviks of old. Benjamin Netanyahu’s praise of Kirk for standing “tall for Judeo-Christian civilisation” would have surprised interwar propagandists, who saw Jews as outsiders to or adversaries of Christendom. But they would have understood his strategy, which is to bind Israel and the West in a struggle against Islamism.

Greenberg’s account of interwar ecumenicism is meant more as a cautionary tale to Western countries today than as a precise diagnosis of our present moment, in which America has supplanted Europe as the main battlefield for spiritual culture wars. Americans got to their equally blurry talk about a Christian nation and a Judeo-Christian civilisation by different paths than Europeans. The Second World War played an equally formative but very different role: American propaganda urged Catholic, Protestant and Jewish men to enlist as equal members of a “tri-faith nation” in the combat against the godless Nazis. The rhetoric was pluralist and egalitarian rather than conservative and defensive, which suited what was then an expansive and firmly democratic nation. Greenberg all the same wants to remind us that when Christians feel the urge to unite against their enemies, they should first ask whether they don’t stand to undermine what they once thought precious or distinctive about their own faiths.

Perhaps these fears seem overblown. After all, it is doubtful that the cult of Charlie Kirk will last longer than any other of MAGA’s fitful passions. Yet the journalists and thinkers who have hailed it as a “milestone” in the public resurgence of religion risk discrediting the Christianity for which they speak. Greenberg’s book is a sombre reminder that past efforts by Europeans to defend Christian values did little to help churches but much to excuse the lawless abuse of state power. The few Christian thinkers who did mount a vital opposition to fascism, such as the Catholic humanist Jacques Maritain, sharply distinguished their faith from the visceral, binary loyalties that tie us to a people or a state. Maritain’s fervent pluralism, in which historic creeds can agree to disagree on everything but the inherent dignity of human persons, offers Christians more today than politicians who claim to defend a faith they might struggle to define.
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