My Wolves Hear My Voice and I Know Them

Why White Nationalism Continues to Find a Home in American Evangelicalism

Between my book review of Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism and detailing the author’s efforts to mainstream white nationalist ideology, I have been thinking about how to historically contextualize the book. Like a child picking and eating a half-healed scab only to reveal the pustulence beneath, Wolfe’s book inadvertently reveals the generational failures of American evangelicalism; self-inflicted wounds are now open to the air, exposing them to the risk of further infection.

White nationalism flourishes in the vacuum created by evangelicals’ unwillingness to truly repent and turn from the racist, misogynistic, and nativist sins of the fathers. Many evangelical institutions responded to the successes of the social movements of the 1960s/70s by turning to damage control; they quietly changed past policies and erased past statements while pretending that little had changed. It was less “repent and turn” and more “tip toe through the tulips and hope nobody notices.” One problem of doing so — apart from what it exposed about the practical theology of American evangelicalism — is that it allowed racist attitudes to fester in conservative Christian circles, reemerging decades later as part of a broader cultural turn towards overt hatred and cruelty.

There are segregated skeletons in evangelicalism’s closet. The choices of white evangelicals — from the construction of slave balconies in the 19th century to the ongoing whitening of the Southern Baptist Convention in the 21st — drove most black evangelicals into segregated churches and separate denominations. That is true of many evangelical denominations, but it especially includes the denomination of which Stephen Wolfe has been a longstanding member, the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA). The PCA was the product of not one but two racist schisms, first a split from abolitionist northern presbyterians before the Civil War followed by a second split in opposition to the attempted racial integration of southern churches, which culminated in the formation of the PCA in 1973.

The PCA would later apologize for its racist history … forty-three years later in 2016. But it only did so over the objections of 123 delegates, who couldn’t entirely block the resolution but were able to wheedle it down to a short, generic apology. Thus, the PCA’s past failures to deal with its institutional racism allowed the persistence of a significant rump in the denomination that was vehemently opposed to even so delayed and so token an attempt to account for the churches’ long history of racial exclusion.

In the intervening decades, the PCA had mostly punted on scandals involving racist statements and associations by affiliated clergy. Strangely enough, one of those controversies would ultimately play a role in the release of Wolfe’s book, which was published by Canon Press out of Moscow, Idaho.

Canon Press was founded by a preacher named Douglas Wilson. Wilson was not a member of the PCA, but several of his closest associates were, including a (now former) PCA minister named Steve Wilkins. In 1996, Wilkins and Wilson wrote a risible apologetic for antebellum slavery titled Southern Slavery, As It Was for Canon Press. Wilkins was also an early board member of the League of the South, a white nationalist organization, and was the pastor to several other prominent members of the League.

Yet although Wilkins and his cohort were ejected from the PCA, they weren’t forced out over their support for white nationalism but because of an unrelated theological controversy involving Wilkins, Wilson, and a number of other reformed clergymen. Those expelled formed a new denomination, the Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, for which Wilson founded a flagship bible college, New Saint Andrews, and Canon Press.

Wilson later wrote a reboot of Slavery As It Was, also published with Canon Press, that was controversial in its own right. He now prefers to call himself a “paleo-Confederate,” instead of a Neo-Confederate. Regardless, given Wilson’s and Canon Press’ reformed and presbyterian connections, as well as their past willingness to publish white nationalist literature, it was a natural home for Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism.

Let’s recast that story another way. A denomination organized in defense of racial segregation failed for more than four decades to pay more than lip service to racial reconciliation. When confronted by a particular opportunity to respond to the white nationalism of some of its members in the 1990s, the denomination punted. Those members still ended up leaving the denomination, but were able to found a new church / seminary network that maintains substantial, albeit informal, ties back to parishioners in the PCA and other reformed denominations. And thus it is unsurprising that a PCA member in good standing could publish a book with Canon Press that references multiple white supremacists in an affirming light.

But there is another, broader sense of white nationalism that permeates Wolfe’s book. After all, animus towards African-Americans is only one of the urges animating the far right today, and arguably not the most significant one. White nationalism has always been as nativist as it was racist. By excluding immigrants, especially those not coded as fully “white,” the ethno-nationalist imagines himself acting as a defender of national purity against an invasion of intolerable difference that will destroy traditional values and tear down treasured institutions.

Anti-immigrant sentiments surface repeatedly in Wolfe’s book. He outlines in excruciating detail a justification for why “a Christian nation can refuse to allow the immigration of fellow Christians from foreign lands.” He laments the Immigration Act of 1965. He criticizes “Western peoples” for welcoming “masses of non-western immigrants” who will not assimilate and instead are “transforming neighborhoods into their own particular cultural image.” (“Western” here is deployed as a functional synonym for “white.”)

But here is perhaps the clearest expression of Wolfe’s anti-immigrant nationalism:

The object of his regard is the non-Westerner at the Westerner’s expense – a bizarre self-denigration rooted in guilt and malaise. Loss and humiliation is the point, however. It is euphoric to him; his own degradation is thrilling. This is his psycho-sexual ethno-masochism, the most pernicious illness of the Western mind. (169)

If you’re not a Very Online Person desperately needing to touch grass, you might not recognize the rhetorical tics of the alt-Right, obsessed as it is with the sexual humiliation of white men. This is the trollish spirit of our online age, which reverts to sexual fetish to explain ideological difference. Thus, to Wolfe, those who welcome (non-white) immigrants are perverts who enjoy inflicting pain on their own people — the (white) native-born — for sake of their own sexual gratification.

It’s no accident that overt white supremacists particularly appreciate these sentiments, with VDare.com and Kinism.com hearing Wolfe’s piercing dog-whistles loud and clear. The latter’s theory is that Wolfe is a fellow racist “in all but name” who has cleverly obscured his sentiments just enough to attract a broader conservative audience, but who will inevitably throw off the cloak and reveal himself when the time is right. (Or throw on the bedsheet, as the case may be.)

It’s a reminder that racism and nativism are invariably entangled in US history. For example, the Second Ku Klux Klan, which is the version known for theatrically pointed hoods and burnt crosses, was just as obsessed with combatting immigration as it was with enforcing segregation. We teach our kids in school about the long history of racial violence in America, but the equally deep history of anti-immigrant and anti-semitic violence — from the murder of Leo Frank in 1915 to the mass lynchings of Italian immigrants in New Orleans in 1891 — receives far less attention although being equally a product of white nationalist ideology.

But this isn’t just history. Until very recently, the most influential news pundit in America, Tucker Carlson, was routinely mainstreaming anti-immigrant, white nationalist ideology on the largest news network in the country, Fox News. (Unsurprisingly, Wolfe is a fan.) Carlson propagated the “Great Replacement” conspiracy, the idea that sinister political elites were helping non-white immigrants swarm the borders in order to rig elections and destroy America. It’s a conspiracy theory that’s been cited by far right mass shooters in recent years, including the doughy murderer at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York that served mostly black and immigrant customers.

Racism, nativism, and white nationalism are inextricably intertwined. Wolfe is merely the latest recrudescence of a very old, very vile ideology that continues to bedevil American evangelicals who have spent the last half century jamming cotton in their ears and placing their hands in front of their eyes.

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As a final note, I should mention that Stephen Wolfe responded to my last substack post about his advancement of white supremacy. To whit:

Matzko builds his case that I’m “racist” on three people, one of which I do not know or cite, another which is found in a footnote that is only tangential to the substance of my argument, another from a single quote for which I offer no commentary in the text. What a joke. Embarrassment.

I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to adjudicate the matter; you can read what I wrote here. It is true that Wolfe quotes only three white supremacists, although this is hardly the defense Wolfe imagines it to be. One doesn’t stumble into favorably citing white supremacists, as if stepping in dog shit while walking down the sidewalk only to find it all but impossible to clean it out of every crevice of your shoe. You may be surprised to find out that scholars will go their entire careers without affirmatively citing a *single* white supremacist, let alone three!

I’m reminded of the titular character from Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satire Dr. Strangelove, the ostensibly ex-Nazi scientist who struggles to keep his arm quiescent, unheiled, as he fulminates about post-apocalyptic breeding. It is hard to suppress who you truly are, even when it’s situationally useful.