Christian Nationalist wish list

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3 responses to “Christian Nationalist wish list”

1. 

   Omar

   Jul 11, 2026 6:55 PM

   Wut? Theocracy excludes religious voices from the process of government? Theocracy puts religious voices at the core of government; that’s why it’s called theocracy. The line is chilling but also incoherent.

   Sectarianism comes with the territory in both religious organisations and likewise political parties and grouplets, because their leaders have to justify their existence, power, and the money they get paid by their followers. So, in all religions and political movements that I am familiar with, their leaders stress that “ours is the one true way” to a worthwhile future, salvation, or whatever.

   Take Iran as a theocratic case in point. According to AI: “Roughly 90% to 95% of the country’s population adheres to the Shia branch of Islam. Shia Islam is also the official state religion. The remaining population consists mostly of Sunni Muslims (primarily among ethnic minorities like the Kurds, Baluch, and Turkmen) as well as smaller communities of non-Muslims.”

   The Sunni-Shia divide in Islam has been going since the day after the death of The Prophet (PBUH.) Non-Shias and Christians are tolerated, but may not proselytise. (On a visit there a few years back, I was given a lift in a car by a young man who told me that his mother was always at him to attend the mosque regularly, which he did, to appease her, even though he did not take it seriously.)

   But repression of alternative beliefs and arguments is always a confession of awareness by the repressors of the philosophical weakness of their own position.
2. 

   The Whimster Gap

   Jul 12, 2026 2:26 AM

   “Though not a religion, secularism, like theocracy, is incompatible with our First Amendment freedoms because it excludes religious voices from the process of self-government.”

   Well, that’s got things arse-about-face, hasn’t it? Secularism – properly understood – does not exclude religious voices. Secularism actually guarantees a space for their participation in public life, precisely because it’s public life and so takes all comers. Secularism says, “Oh, that’s what you believe, is it? Fine. Feel free to make the case. Feel free to argue what you like. No strongarming, mind; but that’s about the limit of the limits.” (This is why I’d classify the repressively atheist regimes of people like Enver Hoxa as not secular; they didn’t have the commitment to the state stepping back and letting people figure stuff out.)

   There’s a tendency among reactionary religionists to complain that secularism is a threat to them. That’s why in the UK you sometimes see strange confluences of the more evangelical bits of the Church singing the same song as conservative Muslims. It’s dressed up as a common concern for the rights of the religious, and – more dubiously – of religion.

   But the real motivation is that secularism threatens their ability not to make the case for their position, but their ability to enforce it. And so they’ll join together to moan about how awful secularism is. Of course, they despise each other really, and in the non-secular world they claim to want their pretence of a unified protection of religion would crumble; they’d be at each other’s throats for heresy faster than you could say “Arminian Heresy”.

   They should love secularism, because it protects them against the beastliness of others. But it also stops them being beastly in return if they happen to have the whip hand; and that’s a big price to pay. Too big, it seems.
3. 

   The Whimster Gap

   Jul 12, 2026 2:49 AM

   (Also, as Tom Holland has pointed out, secularism in its modern sense is a Christian invention anyway. Rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s means that one can serve both Rome and Heaven; but in return it also tells Romans that they can leave the Christians – and, by extension, Jews, Zoroastrians, Mithraists, Buddhists, animists, Odinists, Druids, and anyone else who’s going to play by the rules – alone.)