Jon Harris is one of the leading and best podcasters doing yeoman’s work exposing false teaching in the church. A few weeks ago, Evangelical Dark Web interviewed him to talk about history. Jon Harris has recently been working on his own project to counteract the 1619 Project without the flaws of the kneejerk reaction to it, i.e. the 1776 Commission. During all of this the topic of Christian Nationalism has been raging all year long, and Jon Harris recently published a video on why this topic is so controversial and so important.
The theory that Harris posits is that Christian Nationalism is an affront to American political orthodoxy. Therefore in a video titled “The Political Heresy in Christian Nationalism,” he expounds on what the “orthodox” position is and what the “heretical” position is. A popular sentiment in American politics and history is to view America as a nation founded on an idea rather than a nation with a cultural heritage. The neoconservatives believed so strongly that America is an idea that tried taking these ideas and pushing them somewhere else, Patrick Star style, and this resulted in boondoggles in Iraq and Afghanistan, only for the latter to be built back better for the Taliban. Liberals, on the other hand, use the Proposition Nation to justify Social Justice movements as inching closer and fulfilling America’s mission.
Yet if America is a mission, then surely this mission is a failure, in our current state of lawlessness and tyranny. Harris points out that Donald Trump instinctually rejected the Proposition Nation, even if he does not actively or articulately posit an alternative. The Make America Great Again movement went against the prevailing narrative of America being an idea, insisting that we are a nation with a border, language, and our own economic interests. MAGA stood as a populist movement against elites in both parties who would usurp the interests of America and Americans for their own exploits.
Though many like Andrew Torba and Stephen Wolfe are competing to define Christian Nationalism as an affirmative movement, all of it’s opponents recognize that this notion goes against the orthodoxy of our political climate. Christian Nationalism stands against the Proposition Nation, and for that reason, movements like America First have an exceedingly large overlap.
At the end of the day, Christian Nationalism is not about blasphemy laws, its about creating an underlying social fabric of society, as Americans have nothing that binds them together, as the Proposition Nation is even more so malleable than the definition of Christian Nationalism.