A (White) Wolfe in Sheep's Clothing
White Supremacy in "The Case for Christian Nationalism."
My review of The Case for Christian Nationalism is now up at Reason Magazine. It’s a bizarre book. The author calls for the creation of an ethno-state ruled by a Protestant prince who will impose the outward form of Christianity on the entire nation, restrict immigration, end the feminist gynocracy, get swole, and avoid the consumption of vegetable oil. The book whiplashes between utterly unhinged chauvinist screeds and dense explorations in minutiae of the political thought of Reformation era theologians.
But book reviews have strict word limits. So here I want to unpack how the book is an attempt to mainstream white nationalism in evangelicalism. Let’s start with the topical paragraphs from my review:
Wolfe has composed a segregationist political theology. If ethnic differences are the natural order of things and if the natural order is good, he reasons, then those differences should dictate the bounds of an ethnically homogenous Christian nation. Wolfe denies that he is making a white nationalist argument, partly on the grounds that he has nonwhite friends and partly because "the designation 'white' is tactically unuseful." But black friends or not, if you wanted to inject a sacralized white supremacy into the conservative mainstream, this book would be a primer on dog whistling past that particular graveyard.
Other reviewers have highlighted Wolfe's racist associations. The book's publisher began as a vanity label for a self-described "paleo-Confederate." Wolfe co-hosted a politics podcast with a closeted white supremacist named Thomas Achord, who once called black men "chimps."
But the problem here runs deeper than mere associations. Wolfe repeatedly incorporates notorious white supremacists into his argument, including the neo-Nazi William Gayley Simpson, the antisemite Ernest Renan, and the virulent racist Enoch Powell. His first chapter opens with a quote affirming "tribal behavior" from Samuel Francis, whom the racist writer Jared Taylor once praised as the "premier philosopher of white racial consciousness of our time." Wolfe's fascination with such ideas predates this book: He has also written an essay linking Francis' idea of "anarcho-tyranny" to black people's allegedly innate criminality.
I’m not sure that even critics of the book have fully grasped the significance of Wolfe quoting from what amounts to a Who’s Who of White Supremacy. And note that his citation of these reprobates is not merely window-dressing — which would be bad enough — but are proffered as evidence for his own argument about the nature of people and nations. I’ll quickly run through the lowlights, starting with Wolfe’s citation of each.
A Who’s Who of White Supremacists
One might accuse me of assuming and norming the “Western European male” experience in this chapter. I am not worried about this, since I am male, and am rooted ancestrally in Western Europe, and am speaking largely to a Western European male audience. I fully acknowledge that my goal is to reinvigorate Christendom in the West–that is my chief aim. The question for most of my audience is, ‘Which way, Western Man–the suicide of the West or its revitalization?’ (pp. 118-119)
That last phrase is a reference to a book by a godfather of modern white supremacy, William Gayley Simpson. After a religious deconversion — motivated in part by his rejection of Jesus’s teachings against violence — Simpson became a Nietzchean, a fascist, and a believer in the biological superiority of white, Western Europeans. Simpson’s book, republished in the 21st century by a neo-Nazi press, is a hodge-podge of racist pseudo-science featuring chapters with titles like “The Necessity of Eugenics” and “The Everlasting Truth About Race.” Thus, when Simpson asks, “Which way, Western Man?” his answer is resistance to the point of violence against the “race suicide” of white people via racial and ethnic integration.
Wolfe encodes all of this — both the question and the reference to “suicide” — in order to justify his focus on the “Western European male,” while coyly including a footnote that signals the implicit but missing adjective “white.” However, Wolfe leaves Simpson unfootnoted, chuckling, I’m sure, at the incomprehension of normie readers possessed of a blessed illiteracy of the finer points of the white supremacist canon. The Simpson reference is a hateful Easter egg hidden for those with a more developed palate in hoods and shirts.
Wolfe is less coy with his reference to Enoch Powell.
Those Americans who denounced the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 were right about its consequences, as was British politician Enoch Powell with regard to British immigration policies; but they were ignored or dismissed as ‘racists.’ (p. 348)
Powell was a Conservative Member of the British Parliament, who opposed the passage of the UK’s 1968 Race Relations Bill (which was comparable to the US’s Civil Rights Act of 1964). Strangely for an otherwise obscure British politician with an inauspicious career half a century ago, Powell remains popular with the American alt-Right today for his infamous speech titled “Rivers of Blood.”
In the speech, Powell lamented that equal protection under the law for minorities and immigrants would mean — using a constituent’s words — that “in 15 or 20 years time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.” Powell decried interracial marriage, asserted that minorities and immigrants were stealing what rightly belonged to native-born whites, and threatened vigilante violence by whites should the bill pass.
This is the speech of a man whom Wolfe asserts was unjustly dismissed as “racist.” Which means either that Wolfe is unable to see bald racism when it presents itself or that he fully understands it is racist and simply agrees with the sentiments.
Wolfe referenced Powell to justify his own call for potentially violent revolution in defense of “cultural particularity” (p. 348). This is an irresponsible thing to say when we have had multiple mass shootings motivated by anti-immigrant sentiment. When a white nationalist killed 23 people in 2019 at an El Paso Walmart, the shooter claimed that he was doing so to defend America from Hispanics enacting “cultural and ethnic replacement” through lax immigration policies and interracial marriage. Wolfe would have been working on this book in 2019, and yet still chose to include an apologetic for violent, anti-immigrant revolution in its pages.
But of all the white nationalists that Wolfe references in the book, he chose one in particular to give pride of place with a quotation at the opening of chapter one.
“‘Tribal behavior’ is what makes human beings human. Take it away from ‘man’ or ‘humankind’ and what you get is not ‘pure man’ or ‘liberated man’ but dehumanization, and from that, tyranny.” — Samuel Francis (p. 39)
Samuel Francis was one of a group of columnists at conservative periodicals in the 1990s and early 00s who were eventually fired for promoting racism. The final straw for Francis came when he spoke at a notorious white nationalist conference and called for “the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites” that was rooted in their superior “genetic endowments.” As I noted in my review, upon Francis’ death in 2005 he was lionized by the leading racists of his generation. “No one,” to quote fellow white nationalist Jared Taylor, “did more to alert whites to the crisis they face, and no one called them more eloquently to action.”
This is who Wolfe chose to open the body of his argument with. He fatuously footnotes his quote of Francis, saying with a wink and a nod that the quote merely relates to the debate over the public celebration of Christmas. But Wolfe was betting that his readers wouldn’t bother looking up the source material; doing so puts Francis’ statement in a rather different and unsettling light.
The quotation comes from an article on VDARE.com, which is a white supremacist website (run by another exiled columnist, Peter Brimelow) that is named after Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World. The name evokes a racist, dystopian fantasy common among white nationalists; just as Dare disappeared with the rest of the Roanoke colony — either killed by or absorbed into the local indigenous tribes — so too might white America in the 21st century be absorbed into the brown and black masses in an act of racial suicide.
Wolfe strips Francis’ affirmation of tribalism of its racialized context, but the immediate paragraphs preceding it make it clear that Francis was primarily concerned with the way modern liberalism says individuals have worth apart from their “nation, religion, community, ethnicity, gender, history, [and] culture.” Francis argued that the holidays greetings imbroglio was downstream from America’s failure to exclude “non-Christian ‘religious minorities’,” by which Francis meant immigrants from India, Africa, and the Middle East.
So when Francis wrote that “tribal behavior is what makes human beings human,” he was saying quite transparently that white, native-born Americans should exclude black and brown immigrants from the nation in order to save their traditions and mores from contamination. That is the viewpoint on which Wolfe decided to anchor his own argument for the importance of “kin,” “blood,” and “volk” in the construction of ethnically homogenous nations.
At this point, you should see a pattern emerging. Wolfe picks a white supremacist author and cites their work in such a way as to hide its overtly racist context from unobservant readers.
You might be tempted to ask, perhaps Wolfe didn’t know that he was promoting some of the most notorious white supremacist intellectuals of the last half century? That is, at best, an insult to his intelligence, but let’s entertain the notion. Maybe he’s never heard of VDARE? Maybe he pulled Francis’s quote without reading the article? Maybe he’s simultaneously familiar with the thought of an obscure mid-century British politician but somehow never heard of his only famous speech? Maybe he never read Which Way Western Man, the book, and was merely copying the internet meme version (while also incorporating the core idea of civilizational suicide)?
Or perhaps we should just take Wolfe at his word.
Straight from the Wolfe’s Mouth
After all, this book isn’t Wolfe’s first work to touch on race and national identity. While a postdoctoral fellow at the James Madison Program at Princeton University — which, to be fair, likely thought they were supporting a very different project than was pitched to them — Wolfe wrote a 2022 essay elaborating on another idea he had borrowed from Samuel Francis. The concept was “anarcho-tyranny,” which Wolfe spins into a conspiracy theory about how governing elites enable or even encourage criminality among poor minority communities in order to justify greater control of the law-abiding, white public.
Just to make the racist underpinnings of his theory crystal clear, Wolfe asserts that the violent, “anarchic element is composed largely of black Americans,” who “considered as a group” are “reliable sources for criminality.” In juxtaposition to black criminality, Wolfe implicitly praises white vigilantes, including Kyle Rittenhouse. (Unsurprisingly, Wolfe also retweeted posts praising the subway vigilante who killed Jordan Neely.) “The Regime has effectively sent a message to all white men: you cannot confront disorder in your neighborhood.” Their goal? To pacify white men by stripping their “feeling of place,” extracting “our resources,” and “eradicat[ing] whiteness.”
You can see this sentiment reflected — albeit with less baldly racist overtones — in Wolfe’s book, where he spends a great deal of time justifying human tribalism as an outgrowth of ethnicity rooted in shared geographical place. And on the few occasions where racism is mentioned in the book, it’s dismissed as a mere rhetorical tool for suppressing people like Wolfe, Enoch Powell, and the like. Wolfe toned it down somewhat for the book, but his sentiments are crystal clear when looking at his other writings.
That includes Wolfe’s stated distaste for interracial marriage. He once wrote, in a since deleted thread, that although individual intermarriage is not wrong, “groups have a collective duty to be separate and marry among themselves” because 1) “we are drawn to similarity (as Aquinas said), which is therefore part of our nature and so part of our good” and 2) mass interracial marriage would mean that “nations, peoples, ethene would cease to exist” as they are swallowed into a “mass, monoculture.”
This is Plessy v. Ferguson as marital treatise; separate but equal as pastoral invocation. It would not be out of place in the musings of a 1960s segregationist speaking of the intrinsic bounds of habitation that God had planned for the different races and peoples of the world. That which God has put asunder, let no man put together!
Since Wolfe says that some interracial marriage is okay, just not too much, one wonders who precisely in his ideal State gets to decide what the appropriate level of interracial marriage is? Does his Protestant Prince decide, gifting le droit du seigneur to those lucky few for whom interracial marriage is not a Francis-can / Powell-ian / Simpson-ite / Wolfe-ish act of ethnic suicide? Which way, Western (White) Man?
I won’t claim to understand the reasons why Wolfe wrote this book, but if a person had the goal of mainstreaming white nationalist thought in evangelical circles, this book would be a good starting point. It references some of the most significant white supremacist ideologues of the last half century, but turns just enough of their overtly racist context into subtext in order to maintain a degree of plausible deniability. (Or however much deniability one is willing to grant such mealy-mouthed excuses as having non-white friends or deflecting that the word ‘white’ “hinders and distracts people from recognizing and acting for their people-groups, many of which…are majority ‘white.’”) (p. 119)
At this point, Wolfe’s sheepskin is so threadbare as to be a disguise for only the most gullible sheep in the herd. Which raises the question, why have Wolfe’s ideas gotten a positive hearing in some conservative evangelical circles? But this post is running long, so we will wait for another occasion to explore that topic.