Andrew Torba, Christian Nationalism, and Me

Introduction
So there was a bit of a dustup a week or so ago when I replied to something Andrew Torba wrote on the social media platform formally known as Twitter. He wrote: “God created different ethnic groups. To preserve them is to preserve God’s creation and is therefore an inherent good.”

I wrote in reply: “At best this is half baked primitivism, and at worst it’s a form of incestuous judaizing and radically misunderstands the Cultural Mandate and Great Commission. This is like saying God created different kinds of food. To preserve them in their original state is to preserve God’s creation & therefore an inherent good. So wine & cheese & tacos are out, y’all. Also, no mining, no fossil fuels, no building anything, no medicine — no changing or mixing anything that God made. Leave it raw and untouched just like it was when God said it was good. No fruitful dominion for you. Despite the idolatry of statist multiculturalism, Christians must do better.”

And following this, there was a goodish bit of what we like to call discussion. Torba initially responded to me by saying that I must be fine with piles of illegal immigrants being shipped to Moscow, and then I would have my tacos. 

What He Meant/What I Meant
Now given his reply to me, I don’t have any reason to doubt that what Torba meant was aimed at mass illegal immigration and the various problems that causes a nation, a concern which I agree with. I don’t believe in open borders or that immigration should be completely unregulated. I think immigration should be governed by laws that would be analogous to principles for Christian hospitality. But all by itself, the statement really is half baked, meaning, it’s not finished, under cooked, needs more time in the oven – which by the way, can also imply that there is something good started, good ingredients, but again, needs more work. 

But the statement all by itself is simply not helpful. And many of those who replied certainly did not understand Torba to be merely making a claim about the problems caused by mass illegal immigration. Many doubled-down in the comments claiming that it was necessary for “white people” to preserve themselves from the forces of “antiwhite ideologies,” along with numerous racial slurs, etc. One friend replied in defense of Torba arguing that no one is arguing that ethnicities are totally fixed or hermetically sealed. But as I said in my reply, a whole bunch of his followers aren’t getting the memo. 

And my basic objection is that to allow “whiteness” and “Christian West” to be reduced to the same thing is to allow the categories of critical race theory to win. Now, someone might turn around and say: well, when white people are being targeted for extermination, it doesn’t do you any good to try to make distinctions between “Christian” and “white” – it’s all the same to them. And I am happy to grant that *some* of that is happening in some places with some people and maybe it will get worse before it’s all over, but it’s still more complicated than that. For example, Larry Elder is the new black face of “white supremacy,” according to the LA Times, and Rep. Ayanna Pressley isn’t interested in any “brown faces” that don’t want to be “brown voices.” Related would be the Supreme Court decision striking down at least some Affirmative Action legislation this last summer, and the full court conservative press against DEI policies in corporate America. 

At the very least, to collapse “white” into “Christian” is to give in to our enemies way too soon. I would also like to point out that a majority of our anti-white elites are, well, whiter than leprous wonder bread. For all of their talk of deferring and empowering and uplifting “people of color”, the leprous whites are still in office, still in power. It’s more complicated than just skin color and ethnicity, and it’s foolish to merely accept some of their superficial claims. 

Their real enemy is God and His Christ and His people. They hate Christianity. They hate the Bible. This is why, right on schedule, they also hate Uganda for their new “Aggravated Homosexuality” laws. According to the BBC, Uganda is the new black face of white supremacy (or something like that). 

We Need Better Language
We really need to figure out a better way to make some clearer distinctions. I’m fine with Stephen Wolfe’s careful definition of “ethnicity” in his book The Case for Christian Nationalism, in which he defines it as a particular people in a particular place with shared customs, language, religion, and history (that’s just my short-hand summary, but something along those lines). The Greek word ethnos means “nation,” and so Wolfe is arguing for something deeper than scratch and sniff patriotism: a true love of family, neighbor, home, history, land, etc. But the word “ethnicity” in common parlance has come to mean something almost synonymous with “race” or color of skin. How many stupid demographic forms have we been asked to fill out in the last few decades that have a section for “race/ethnicity?” 

I don’t think those two things *have* to be synonymous, but I think they have become de facto synonymous without very careful qualifications made every 16 inches. Otherwise, what it sounds like you’re saying is that since the color of your skin is from God, you must preserve it. But would you say the same about the color of your hair? The shape of your nose or ears? The color of your eyes? And I suppose the come-back would be, well, what if they were trying to exterminate your color of eyes or color of hair? But that’s where I refer you back to my previous point: despite some generalizations along those lines, it turns out that isn’t really what they are trying to exterminate. What they are really trying to exterminate is Christianity, and in America, a whole bunch of Christians have had lighter color skin. But there’s nothing inherently white about Christianity, as is likely to continue becoming obvious in the coming decades. For example, if the US goes completely pagan and begins a full court press of persecution against Christians, it wouldn’t surprise me if a bunch of American Christians flee to far less “white” nations. Maybe a bunch of us flee to Uganda or Zambia or Ethiopia. More on that in a minute.

My point here is that I think culture is a better word than ethnicity because people more readily understand culture as containing things that we should preserve (godly heritage, good gifts, glories of our nation), things that really are morally neutral (like color of skin, hair, eyes), and things we should jettison (idols, pride, sin, and all immorality). Yes, we absolutely should fight with all our might to preserve what remains of the Christian West. I’m all in. And I can imagine places where to do that faithfully, I will mock certain forms of anti-white rhetoric. Scripture does invite us to answer fools according to their folly. I’ve had four white kids with my white wife, for example, and I’m not embarrassed in the slightest. 

But the Scriptures, also say that we must not always answer fools according to their folly, lest they become wise in their own eyes. In other words, accepting their rules of the game is a great way to hand them the advantage. 

I know there’s been a bunch of talk about the conservative virtue signaling of “punching right,” as though you can score points with liberals by pulling your skirts away from certain embarrassing elements on the right. And let’s be plain: that’s stupid. You can’t really score points with the left. The left is a blood-thirsty mob that devours its own. People on the right who do that already have their reward and then you better believe you will end up Cell Block 4 with the rest of us Christian Nationalists in the end.

You can protest all day long in your Twitter feed that you have concerns about Christian Nationalism, but at the end of the day if you actually believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, and America should in some way acknowledge that, MSNBC doesn’t care about your quibbles. They will use you for your momentary attacks on other good brothers and then they will throw you away when they are done with you. 

So to Hell with that kind of virtue-signalling folly. But despite that, this cannot mean that we must not correct or critique our brothers on the right. As far as the world is concerned, there’s not a hairsbreadth of difference between me and Andrew Torba, Stephen Wolfe, or Donald Trump or Larry Elder or Uganda. And I’m fine with that. But I also want to do everything I can to make sure it’s clear to them why they hate us all so much. They hate us because we stand for truth that goes all the way down and all the way up into Heaven, where Jesus Christ, the Truth made Flesh, sits at God’s right hand. I don’t know if everyone they’ve lumped together *knows* Jesus Christ, but I do know that He is the cornerstone of everything good about the Christian West. He is the stone of stumbling and the rock of offense. And I want that to be abundantly clear, since all the race-baiting is an elaborate distraction tactic. 

Conclusion: Multiculturalism vs. the Church
Let me close with a brief salvo into something that I will probably need to develop further later. I completely agree that we have been duped and brainwashed with multiculturalism. Under the guise of hospitality and kindness to strangers and foreigners (which Christians are required to extend), the radical left has been fomenting an intentional destruction of Christian culture. Not unlike the way they used the wedge of racial equality in the civil rights movement to insinuate sodomy and the LGBT gamut into mainstream American culture, multiculturalism has been another flank in the same battle.

When my wife was in a state university in the early 2000s studying elementary education, one of the predominant banner themes of the whole program was “multiculturalism” and “celebrating diversity,” which was only a thinly veiled cover for accepting and promoting homosexuality in elementary classrooms. In one children’s lit course, the works of one author culminated with a book about a boy who enjoys doing little girl things and it was revealed that the author was a homosexual. When asked to write a paper about how she would use that book in the classroom, my wife simply reported that she wouldn’t. But the professor later asked her how she would address children who were struggling with their sexuality. And that was over 20 years ago. You want to know how we got to drag queen story hour and promoting perversion in elementary classrooms? Look no further than multiculturalism. 

Now, I know a bunch of well-meaning Christians thought that multiculturalism meant being good neighbors to people from other nations, but as it turns out we’ve been more than a little bit like Charlie Brown believing Lucy’s offer to hold the football for us. Turns out our cultural elites do not want to help Christians build the Kingdom of God or further the goals of the gospel. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that every time they offer to help us, we need to hear the offer as an attempt to co-opt and submarine the mission. 

But the answer to that tom-foolery must not be to allow their racial categories to become our talking points. There’s nothing wrong with loving your ethnic heritage, whether you are black or white. And it is true that we should seek to preserve the good and godly things about our inheritance, but there’s also a whole bunch we need to gladly leave behind. My ancestors painted their faces blue and raped and pillaged Christians. That part of my ethnicity needs to die and not be preserved. But I’m also grateful for King Alfred and John Knox and George Washington. But the amount of pigment in their skin, the color of our hair, and shape of our noses had nothing to do with that heritage. As John once told a riverside of Jews: God can raise up children of Abraham from a bunch of rocks. And He has. 

Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash