#443 — What Is Christian Nationalism?

I am here with Doug Wilson. Doug, thanks for joining me. Great to be with you. Thank you. So, yeah, you debated my, friend, Christopher Hitchens, back in the day. That's was probably, I don't know, fifteen years ago or so. Did you remember what year you did those debates? I don't remember the year. It was, it was a wonderful time, actually. Christopher and I got along great, actually. Yeah. You you seem to. I because I I watched the, the documentary that was born of that collision that it was literally titled Collision. Right. And, you guys were debating, if memory serves, whether, Christianity is good for the world. That was kind of the focusing question. Yeah. Yeah. Correct. So we won't we probably won't recapitulate much of that. I mean, I I think we might fall into debate on a few topics. I think that's inevitable. But I what I really wanna start with here is just to have you educate me and my audience about the American religious landscape. I just have a bunch of questions for you. I should say you have a new book titled Frequently Shouted Questions about Christian Nationalism. Yeah. So we'll we'll get into that. But just to orient us, maybe just the the first question is how how would you differentiate it from what most Americans might think of as mainstream Christianity, if that phrase means much? So in the Baskins and Robins of Christianity, what flavor am I? Right? Yep. Rocky Road. That's what I so, basically, I I grew up in an evangelical home, conservative, bible believing parents. My mom had been a missionary in Japan. My father was a a navy officer who got out to do personal evangelism. So I I grew up in a a home that was decidedly Christian and evangelical. Evangelical in I was born in '53. Evangelical during my boyhood prior to Jimmy Carter simply meant conservative bible believers outside the mainline denominations. There'd been a big battle in the first part of the twentieth century in the main lines, the Presbyterian church, the Methodist church, and so on between liberalism and what came to be called fundamentalism. Mhmm. And, basically, the liberals won and captured the mainline denominations. The conservative believers sort of retreated into the into the woods and built their own alternative structure. They abandoned the seminaries and built bible colleges, built Christian radio stations, and stayed there until the nineteen seventies, more or less. And I grew up in that quadrant of the of the Christian faith. In the seventies, you might say, led by Francis Schaeffer, polarized by Francis Schaeffer, the conservative believers reengaged in what became known as the culture wars back in the days of the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition, those folks. And that was something that we were part of. And there has been in recent years, after the election of Jimmy Carter, who was an avowed born again Christian, there was a …