Understanding Progressivism and Christian Nationalism

I’ve been rereading The Brothers Karamazov. This book changed my life when I read it at seventeen, and returning to its pages in a culture and at a time so different from the one in which I originally encountered them has given me a unique angle for considering the changes that the world and I have undergone in that time, especially in regard to faith. 

If reading Curtis Yarvin’s work were good for only one thing (there’s actually a lot to appreciate about it but if) then it would be the realization that Progressivism must be understood literally and historically as a sect of Christianity but one that has dropped the God proposition. In its place, Progressivism has erected the Moral Mission, an unholy marriage of humanism, natural law, and Whig history that takes the Christian ethos of justice, universal love, and self-abnegation and turns it into an idyll. 

This would have some problems since the Christian moral system required a distinct metaphysic in order to make any fucking sense. Loving your enemy is only justifiable if you happen to know that your Creator is also his creator and you have a duty to both that God and your enemy that outweighs the value of your life. Parted from that background, it is perhaps one of the most senselessly insane propositions imaginable. 

Blue America discarded that metaphysical scaffolding and became “Progressive.” Red America retained it and remained “Christian.” This has led to all kinds of interesting political and social outcomes, such as affluent Blues using their political leverage to push policies that benefit themselves and impose heavy costs on working-class Reds [See effects of mass immigration on economic prospects for low-skill labor and social cohesion/capital. See Rob Henderson’s “luxury beliefs.”] as long as they can market those policies as helping even worse off third-world peoples. Pretty slick, right? Robbing Billy Bob to give alms for Reynaldo. You also get to procure a nice little economic bonus for yourself while being able to point to the growing GDP and claiming that this proves that people’s lives are improving across all bands, even if those people themselves are actually increasingly unhappy. Holy, holy, holy, lord GDP almighty!  

And whenever Billy Bob starts to get upset, you can beat him over the head with the self-abnegation part of the religion that he still believes in sincerely. What a con! Frank Abagnale is furious he didn’t think of it. 

But Progressivism is old news. Even the boomers now know that “social justice” or “wokeism” (seriously the worst conceivable name) is a religion, but the connections to communism usually prevent them from understanding that it’s actually a Christian one. It takes the most abstracted, idealized elements of Christian morality and eschatology and tosses the rest. 

But what about the newer arrival on the scene, “Christian nationalism”? What I find interesting about CN is that it is in some ways a mirror of the moral scavenging Progressives have already performed on the corpse of Christianity proper, but with different priorities. The priorities of CN are the elements of Christian moralism that make for good governance and the safeguarding of regular people. Having Christian laws makes for a pretty good society, but those laws were never (or rarely) made explicit as religious laws because it was unnecessary. They were inscribed culturally on the hearts of Americans even if they never made it into the legal code. De Tocqueville said as much in Democracy in America. I’m not going hunting for the exact quote that I’m thinking of in that beast, but here’s one that I happened across after a few minutes of browsing that I think works. 

I doubt that man can ever support complete religious independence and entire political freedom at once; and I am brought to think that if he has no faith, he must serve, and if he is free, he must believe.

America is obviously no longer a Christian nation. Either you get this or you don’t. Christianity has been largely usurped and replaced by what can be accurately described as “therapeutic deism.” There is a God, but he’s super chill and he just wants you to be happy. He wants everyone to be happy. Sin? What are you talking about, brother? Have you tried micro-dosing? If you did, you wouldn’t be here talking to me about sin!

And as a result of this disappearance of Christianity as a real force in the culture, liberty becomes coarse, degrading, toxic. 

The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction! For the world says: “You have desires so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and powerful. Don’t be afraid of satisfying them and ven multiply your desires.” That is the modern doctrine of the world. In that they see freedom. And what follows from this right of multiplication of desires? In the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; in the poor, envy and murder; for they have been given rights, but have not been shown the means of satisfying their wants…Interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own nature, for many senseless and foolish desires andhabits and ridiculous fancies are fostered in them. They live only for mutual envy, for luxury and ostentation.

~Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov 

There is a certain tension that runs throughout the entirety of the Bible: God consistently stresses the importance of spiritual matters over material ones, but He also cares about material suffering and about providing good lives to those He loves. The spiritual peaks of Christianity demand the highest degrees of self-sacrifice, but away from those peaks, one finds a concern for decency, comfort, and good governance that is very human. Joining these two elements is exceedingly tricky, but one can usually tell when it goes wrong. 

What CNs desire is for those laws to be made explicit and legally enforceable because the cultural consensus that made enforcing them unnecessary has evaporated and the result has been the destruction of the norms that make dignified life possible for those without money. Though this might involve some type of theocratic authority, it isn’t necessarily so. There are atheists that also want to live under Christian laws simply because they believe that those laws are effective. Now, if Joseph de Maistre is to be believed, this will prove ultimately ineffective, but those who oppose CN don’t generally do so because they think it is ineffective. They do it because they think it is wrong. But understanding why is something that I’ll have to save for another time. For those wondering, yes, I will be addressing Kierkegaard’s Attack on Christendom at that time, and David French is an idiot and a snake in the grass, but we all already knew that, right?