Christian Nationalism Means Hating The USA
I ran into someone this week who proudly declared himself to be a Christian Nationalist. “I’m a Christian Nationalist. I’m a Christian, and I love my country,” he told me. “What’s wrong with that?”
There are pros and cons to being a Christian. There are reasons to love your country, and reasons not to. This purpose of this podcast isn’t to tell people how to identify religiously, or whether to embrace the ideology of patriotism.
Be a Christian if that’s what you want to be. Love your country if that’s what you want to do.
Being a Christian Nationalist is something much more specific than that. Not all Christians in America are Christian Nationalists. Christian Nationalism isn’t really about loving your country. In fact, many Christian Nationalists will admit that they despise the United States of America.
Christian Nationalist Nick Fuentes brazenly talked about his hatred for the USA this week. He said:
“Biden is a puppet. The elections are fake. The social media companies are rigged. The elections are rigged. The news couldn’t be more Jewed up, Jewed up, moneyed up, corporate, under the thumb of the Illuminati, whatever. It’s all real, man.
The devil is in charge of the world. I hope you know that. Straight up, Satan is in charge of America. If you don’t realize that, you’re not paying attention, and that’s not even an exaggeration. Satan runs America. I’m a patriot, but the United States of America is controlled by Satan right now. America, the United States is the great Satan in the world. The United States is controlled by Satan. The regime that runs America is controlled by Satan, and the regime that controls America is the empire that casts a shadow over the world. Satan runs the Western world.
When you talk about the West, when you talk about democracy, you’re talking about the devil. If you don’t see the hand of the demonic in all of this, you’re not paying attention, man. This is an evil country. It is.
Until this country stands for god and the godly, this is an evil country.
And look who runs it. It’s a lot of Jews. The Jews hate me. The Jews hate me, and you know who else the Jews hate? Jesus Christ.
I hate to say it. Nobody wants to say that part. People want to talk about the Chi-Coms and everything else. I’m sick of it. You know what? It’s Jews!
Fuck democracy! I stand with Jesus Christ.
You can have Philadelphia, and you can have democracy. Democracy is the soul of our nation? You can have it. Christ is the soul of this nation. You can have the United States. Christ is the soul of America.
We’re going to have a new country. It’s not going to be called the United States. It’s going to be called America. It’s going to be a Christian nation.”
These words from Christian Nationalist Nick Fuentes show the distinction between nationalism and simple love of country. Nationalism is not the same thing as patriotism. Nationalism is a political ideology that centers around a strict definition of a nation, making restrictions of national identity a primary concern. Nationalists are willing to sacrifice principles such as democracy, liberty, and equality in order to transform the United States into a Christian nation.
Christian Nationalists believe that their Christianity is the very definition of what’s right and what’s good. They perceive democracy and freedom as barriers to achieving the most important goal: Getting every single person on Earth to convert to Christianity, by any means necessary, including political persecution and violent force.
So, Christian Nationalists like Nick Fuentes hate the United States of America. They believe that the equality and democracy of the USA are decadent and evil. They don’t want Americans to be free. They want Americans to obey.
Nick Fuentes hates our democracy so much that he adopts the same kind of language used by Muslim fundamentalists. He calls the USA “the great Satan”. He says that the United States is an evil country. The great evil of the USA is that it allows people the freedom to be non-Christian.
As is often the case with Christian Nationalists, Nick Fuentes believes that American freedom is a plot that has been concocted by evil spirits. Christian Nationalism expects people to believe that demons and devils are real, and that the United States of America is one of their favorite projects. They believe that democracy is a demonic trap designed to lure people into the clutches of a horned desert god called Satan.
Christian Nationalism inevitably veers away from simple notions of patriotism, getting lost in the weeds of ancient Middle Eastern mythology. That ancient mythology in turn leads into ancient hatreds, as we see with the hatred of Nick Fuentes toward Jews.
Christian Nationalism and the Nazi ideology of Adolf Hitler share common historical roots in racist Christian theology. Christian Nationalists obsessively blame Jews for everything wrong with the world, following the centuries-old Christian teaching that because Jews killed Jesus, Jews are secretly in a pact with Satan to control the world and turn everything toward evil.
So it is that Christian Nationalist mythology easily expands into a dark network of conspiracy theories. Christian Nationalists are taught in their churches that the world is a deceptive, demonic trick that should be denied and destroyed. So, they easily dismiss any facts that contradict their beliefs. They reject science. They refuse to believe in documented history. They believe that academics and journalists cannot be trusted, because they are in league with Satan.
Disconnected from objective reality, Christian Nationalists follow their religion of paranoia into a political agenda that is more strongly linked to ancient prophecies than to the basic facts of life in America today. So it is that Nick Fuentes can say with such certainty that elections are rigged, that a Satanic Jewish Illuminati controls everything, that Joe Biden is a puppet of demons. He doesn’t cite any evidence to support his neo-Nazi conspiracy theories, because he doesn’t believe that he has to.
Christian Nationalists begin with the belief that the Christian bible is literally true, and twist their reality to fit that belief. Facts that don’t fit with their belief aren’t considered rationally by Christian Nationalists. Inconvenient facts are instantly dismissed as deceptions created by demonic forces.
So it is that we are faced with Christian Nationalists who are willing to unleash the same hateful Christian ideology that fueled the Nazis, this time attacking the USA from within. This ideology is currently in firm control of the Republican Party.
Last time around, the Christian Nationalists brought us Donald Trump. Since then, Christian Nationalism has become even more radical. What will the Christian Nationalists do if they are able to seize full control of the US federal government again?