A Christian nationalist speaks

A Christian nationalist speaks. By Doug Wilson, in an interview with Tucker Carlson.

Not what you might expect, and highly recommenced.

Some excerpts:

If there is no God above the state, the state is God. The state becomes God and it assumes the prerogatives of deity. … Cameras at every intersection, aping omniscience. … Control of your mind. They want to control absolutely everything, every keystroke. They want to control everything because they’re aspiring to deity. The reason they’re aspiring to deity is because they don’t recognize any god above them. …

The state is not God. … The early Christians were persecuted not because they worship Jesus, but because they would not worship Caesar. The whole issue of Christians being thrown to the lions had to do with who they wouldn’t worship, not who they would. The Romans were more than happy to add Jesus to the pantheon. But the claims of Christ are exclusive. And Christians would not, recognize Caesar as Lord. Jesus is Lord is the fundamental Christian confession. …

But then the immediate comeback question from our antagonists would be, okay, if you want to have a God above the state, smart Alec, which God? And that lands you right in the middle of theological debate, which is the last place in the world a lot of people want to be. Is it Allah? Is it Shiva, the god of destruction? Is it the Unitarian god? Is it the Christian god?

Our current rulers don’t believe in God, but they do believe in the devil … They want to be be as the Most High. That was the initial temptation, in the garden. You shall be God. So our current rulers are very ambitious, and they want to aspire to that height. We don’t want to resist them in the name of Christ, because we don’t want to launch another series of interminable religious wars, right? Because we don’t want the Muslims fighting with the Jews fighting with the Christians fighting with, you know, all of that …

All law is imposed morality.

It’s not whether you’re imposing morality, it’s which morality you’re imposing. … You can’t have a structured order in society without the imposition of morality laws. Judgment. … But then that leads to the question at which morality. Every moral system, arises out of the worship of a god.

So in Saudi Arabia you’re going to get a moral system that is distinctly different than a moral system that arose out of a country with a Christian history….

You become like what you worship. People begin to be conformed to the image of what they consider to be the highest good. …

Nationalism is better than tribalism or globalism:

There are only three ways of basic ways of organizing human society. There’s tribalism, there’s nationalism, and then there’s globalism. I don’t want globalism. I don’t want to eat bugs, okay? I don’t want tribalism because nobody wants to live in a failed state. Somalia with warlords? Nobody wants to live in Thunderdome. So I don’t want tribalism and I don’t want globalism. And we have a national structure now. Okay. So as a Christian, I would like that national structure to conform to the things that God wants and not the things that man wants. That’s Christian nationalism.

 

Who wants globalism?

 

What if I’m not Christian?

I trust the Christians to take better care of a secularists liberty than I trust the secularists to take care of money. …

That’s not to say that there weren’t warts and sins and blemishes in Christian history. … But they take the worst of the worst in Christian history, something like the Spanish Inquisition, right? Some terrible, terrible thing, which I’m not carrying water for at all. But the Spanish Inquisition killed a few thousand people over a few centuries. That was Stalin on a slow afternoon. The commies have killed 100 million people in the last century or so. Tens of millions of people, and yet they go on serenely, as though their copybook is not blotted and ours is all right. How long have they been dining out on the Salem witch trials or on the the Spanish Inquisition, or this the Fourth Crusade or, you know, different things like that? Yeah, those those were horrific, evil, bad things. But the Christian, theologian, the Christian preacher has a book of God’s revelation with which to condemn these things. We can say that’s inconsistent. That’s that’s not what God wants. And we should conform to what God wants. That’s Christian nationalism. … Christian nationalism means conforming what we’re doing to God’s revealed will in the name of Jesus. It means obeying him, not disobeying him. …

So Christian nationalism does not imply forced conversion?

It does not.

Or a reduction in the rights of non-Christians?

No, it’s an expansion of the rights of non-Christians….

If I were if I were president — and what a glorious three days that would be —  we’d get we would get a lot done in those days. …

Can you give me an example of the liberties non-Christians would gain under such a structure?

How many of our chains have we gotten used to? Too many. So that one of the common things that the people who are trying to scare people with Christian nationalism, like we’re going to go back to The Handmaid’s Tale… And they say we need to keep the government out of our bedrooms, keep the government out of the bedroom.

Well, I had the privilege a number of years ago building my own house, and I know exactly how many screws the government required to be in the sheetrock in my bedroom, how big the windows had to be for egress in my bedroom, how thick the sheetrock had to be in my bedroom. What do you mean, keep the government out of my bedroom? I can’t remove the mattress tag from the, from the mattress because the government is in my bedroom, literally. …

The Bible?

I don’t take the Bible literally. I take the Bible naturally. The way it presents itself to be taken. Poetry is poetry. Vision is vision. History is history. …

I only want to allow coercion if there is black letter biblical justification for it. I don’t have a problem prosecuting rapists because I can show you in the Bible where that should be done. I don’t have a problem prosecuting murderers, because I can show you in the Bible that this is something that God entrusted to the magistrate to do …

I don’t I can’t find anything in the Bible that allows the government to dictate the temperature of the water that comes out of showerhead in my bathroom. Consequently, the government has no business doing that. It’s none of their business. They have no authorization. …

The current government has become tyrannical:

You could fit the Ten Commandments on a postcard, and then you could fit the Old Testament in one volume on the shelf.

Go to the local library and ask to look at the the code for your state. Shelf after shelf. Right. The Federal Register of Laws. Shelf after shelf after shelf. All right. That kind of tyranny.

Somebody has a website, I think, called three felonies a day. The average American is guilty of trespassing. They can always get use for something. Because they’ve got so many rules that you’re always transgressing. And then when they decide to pull the switch, they can just come scoop you up and take you off. …

How is what you just described different from theocracy?

They’re thinking of ecclesiocracy. … Rule by clerics, rule by priests. They’re thinking of something like Iran, with a bunch of weirdbeards issuing dictates …They ‘re thinking of a cabal of clerics and holy men, and shamans and whatever, issuing decrees on the basis of a religion that the populace doesn’t accept. And [they] just jam it down their throats. …

We don’t want the Christian ayatollahs doing that sort of thing. What most people call a theocracy is actually an ecclesiocracy….

The separation of church and state:

Christians invented the doctrine of separation of church and state. That’s our doctrine. That’s that is something that came from us. We’re the ones who developed it. And separation of church and state is crucial because there are two governing institutions. The church governs men in a certain sphere, and the state governs men in a certain sphere because they’re both forms of government. You can keep them separate. You can keep the apples and oranges separate into bowls on the counter because they’re both fruit.

But when people say separation of church and state and they mean separation of God and state, separation of morality and state, separation of ultimate truth, claims and state? I would say stop, wait, wait just a minute. Are you really telling me that you want to live in a state that is utterly disconnected from morality? Is that what you want? …

You have a cacophony of, laws, it reflects the cacophony of opinions among the people. … Societies have to function on the basis of a shared moral consensus. If there isn’t a shared moral consensus, then you’re what you’re going to get is anarchy and disruption.  …

Secularism:

Early Christians would not worship Caesar, and I’m not going to worship the state.

If there is no God over the state, the state becomes God and they proclaim themselves God. I’m going to be like Daniel’s three friends who [refused to bow down to the image of Babylon’s King Nebuchadnezzar.] … We want to pass that legacy on that, refusing to bow down. And Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego said to the king, “Our God is able to deliver us. But whether he does or not, we fear him and not you.” And that’s the thing. That’s the challenge that the secular state cannot abide.

hat-tip Stephen Neil