Christian Nationalism vs Global Jesus: Projects of Peoplehood from Biblical Israel to the Collapse of British Patriotism

Arktos Media, 2025

 

Preface

This book sheds much-needed light on contemporary controversies surrounding the seemingly oxymoronic phenomenon of “Christian nationalism,” past, present, and future, as problem and as solution.

Part One explores the ostensibly biblical foundations of Christian nationalism, the first-century Jesus movement, and the early Christian church in Greco-Roman antiquity.  Part Two examines the extent to which the rise and fall of early medieval Anglo-Saxon Christendom was influenced by the “project of peoplehood” reflected in the Hebrew Bible. In Part Three, the focus shifts to a modern history culminating in the post-Christian collapse of British race patriotism.

Does the contemporary crisis of Anglo-Protestant political theology stem from a failure to recognize in the historical Jesus the mythic model for the miraculous appearance of a Patriot King?  The religious, political, and civil institutions of the Anglosphere now oversee the deliberate degeneration of historic Anglo cultures into mere economic zones, populated by rootless, shifting masses of morally debased monads.

Faithful Anglo-Protestants could spark the reformation of the entire Anglosphere by labouring to bring the sweet dream of a Patriot King down to earth. Anglo-American evangelical Protestants are, therefore, a primary target for this book’s message. The spiritual reformation of the Anglosphere is a matter of geopolitical theology.  Anglo-American Protestants need to understand themselves as a people standing outside and apart from the state apparatus of the global American empire. In other words, they must mentally nullify the 1776 American Declaration of Independence, embracing instead an ancestral British race patriotism, in solidarity with their co-ethnics in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand still owing allegiance to the Crown.

I was born a British subject before the creation of Australian or Canadian citizenship, at a time when Anglo-Saxons still counted as one of Canada’s two “founding races.”  My intellectual development has been much influenced by what historian C.P. Champion describes as The Strange Demise of British Canada.  This theme figured largely in my earlier work.

Accordingly, this book was written from an Anglo-Identitarian perspective.  My hope is that a pan-British race patriotism can be rekindled by a reformed, neo-Angelcynn (Old English for “kin of the Angles”) church.  Such a reformation would provide a desperately needed theopolitical alternative to the hegemonic, universalist model of creedal Christianity. Nowadays, even American Christian nationalism routinely invokes the deracinated, disembodied Lordship of global Jesus as its heavenly warrant.

 

For centuries, Anglo-Protestant churches have been famous for sterile struggles between doctrinal orthodoxy and damnable heresy.  Nowadays, however, mainline Anglo-Protestantism has become indistinguishable from the revolutionary humanism driving the globalist regimes misgoverning the Anglosphere.

From its origins in Greco-Roman antiquity, Christianity was beset by a persistent tension between universalism and particularism.  This was manifested first in an opposition between the neo-platonic image of a cosmic Christ who died on the Cross to atone for the sins of all mankind and the Jewish origins story of a national Messiah come to save “the lost sheep of Israel.”

The deeply rooted pull of particularistic ethnic identities was not easy to escape.  Even the early Christian churches of the ancient Mediterranean world found it difficult to resist the impulse to identify themselves as a particular “third race,” neither Greek nor Jew.

Even so, the orthodox Augustinian worldview eventually achieved doctrinal hegemony.  This dualistic vision posited the existence of an eternal City of God, above and beyond the temporal world inhabited by the mortal City of Man.  That other-worldly cosmology met serious resistance once Christian missionaries encountered the stubborn ethnic particularism of the Germanic tribes in northwestern Europe.

There, the world-rejecting orthodoxy of creedal Christianity was often replaced by orthopraxy (i.e., the adoption of Christian rituals and practices by pagan converts).  Roman Catholic theology’s other-worldly doctrines were a tough sell among Germans and Anglo-Saxons.  By and large, they accepted their world as it was, valuing the warrior virtues of heroism far above Christian humility.

Fast forward to our own postwar world.  Following the crushing defeat of German ethnonationalism in 1945, the global Jesus of Anglo-Protestant theology achieved virtually uncontested hegemony.  Today, almost all mainstream Anglo-Protestants reject even the mildest manifestations of ethnic particularism as tantamount to racism.  Indeed, even the advocacy of “Christian nationalism” is denounced regularly from the pulpits of mainline Anglo-Protestant churches in the United States.

 

One might imagine that the established Church of England would accept Christian nationalism as a matter of course.  But the non-negotiable commitment of the English church to global Anglicanism makes that impossible.  As for the Anglican leadership in the former British dominions such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, they, too, want nothing more than to escape from their traditional but deplorable “Anglo-Saxon captivity.”

 

Avowed Christian nationalists in the USA are themselves held hostage by global Jesus.  Christian nationalism is bound to affirm that the telos of human history will be realized only when the primary allegiance of all nations is to King Jesus.

Still, it remains to be seen how a distinctively white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethnoreligious identity can be squared with the ahistorical, universalist reign of Lord Jesus.  Even Stephen Wolfe, the most prominent American Christian nationalist, downplays, when not outright denying, the intractably biocultural dimension of Anglo-Saxon identity.  He has suggested, for example, that even black men such as Booker T. Washington and Justice Clarence Thomas (who happens to be a devout Catholic) have been assimilated into the Anglo-Protestant ethnonation.

By contrast, my thesis is that an exclusive ecclesiastical allegiance to a generic cosmic Christ reduces the distinctive character of every earthly ethnoreligious identity to mere adiaphora (i.e., things inessential in the eyes of the church).  The rebirth of Anglo-Protestantism demands an ethnoreligious foundation.

The theological refusal to reflect on the ethnonational identity of the historical Jesus must be recognized as the outdated product of historically Romanised ecclesiastical establishments, Protestant and Catholic alike. My argument, therefore, is that Anglo-Saxon Christianity should be re-Germanized by re-imagining the Angelcynn church of Alfred the Great to fit the needs of our own age.

The primary constituency for such a re-Germanized Christian nationalism is to be found among Anglo-Protestants.  Unfortunately, the realized biblical eschatology of the historical Jesus sent to save the “lost sheep” of biblical Israel has been suppressed in most Anglo-Protestant churches. The still-future Second Coming of global Jesus remains the bedrock presupposition of Anglo-Protestant theology, however well-grounded a “full preterist” interpretation of the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in AD 70  may be in biblical exegesis or historical reality.

This book provides persuasive evidence that the Hebrew Bible (most likely created between the fifth and second centuries BC) produced a poignant and powerful national narrative.  Conceived by Judean scribes as a pedagogic tool, that biblical narrative inspired the “project of peoplehood” presupposed by the Jesus movement of the first century AD.

 

Jesus was received by many of his co-ethnics as the Jewish Messiah.  He also became the Hellenic Christ.  Jesus Christ was the King of Israel for Jews such as Paul and later of the “third race” of early Christians.

That was then; this is now.

Anglo-Protestants desperately need to recover earlier folkish variants of the Christian tradition.  I suggest that the focus of Anglo-Protestantism needs to be shifted away from its historic preoccupation with personal salvation in the world to come.  Anglos need a sense of rootedness in networks of ethnoreligious communities in which shared ancestry matters as much if not more than doctrinal purity.

Colonial and antebellum New England provided many useful examples of churches as godly little republics as well as clear warnings pointing to the dangers of doctrinaire religion.  Jewish synagogues and Islamic mosques offer countless other non-Christian examples of ethnoreligious communities far more productive of in-group solidarity (aka social capital).

An Anglo ethno-religion is both the institutional precondition and moral foundation for the creation of socially cohesive communities.  Anglo-Protestant churches must become the ethnoreligious heart of breakaway parallel societies devoted to producing healthy, happy, and morally upright families together with British-descended counter-elites set in opposition to the irresponsible corporate plutocracy now misgoverning the Anglosphere.

It may be that Anglo-Protestants will someday receive as King a Christ of their own.  But he is unlikely to return as a 5’5” Jewish man whose name is Jesus.  That fact need not preclude the miraculous appearance of our own Patriot King, were he to become incarnate in Australia and the other British dominions.

In short, my book offers a sympathetic but penetrating critique of the hitherto unchallenged hegemony of global Jesus within the Anglo-Protestant epicentre of the emergent Christian nationalist movement.  My hope is to persuade Christian nationalists that their predominantly Anglo-Protestant movement, like the first-century Jesus movement, can and should embrace, explicitly, its historic, ethnoreligious character outside and apart from the state.

At the same time, a Christian nationalism grounded in orthopraxis rather than strait-laced orthodoxy may attract secular, culturally Christian traditionalists.  While maintaining their resistance to unconditional belief in the established Christian creeds and confessions, such people are more likely to be receptive to a “modernized” folk religion in which the church serves, first and foremost, as a teacher of morality.

In effect, therefore, the book advocates a return to the nineteenth century Broad Church movement in the Church of England pioneered by men such as Sir John Robert Seeley.  Younger Anglo-Protestants in particular, along with their agnostic contemporaries, are having their future stolen from them by a corporatist regime destroying every institution that could provide access to stable, prosperous, middle-class family lives of purpose and meaning.

Their rising discontent could find its first significant outlet in an Anglo-Identitarian Christian movement challenging those who currently manage and control evangelical Protestantism in the USA: the power centre that Christian nationalists call “Big Eva”. This book aims to provide such an oppositional movement with intellectual ammunition as well as insight into the weaknesses of a Christian nationalism that places the mythology of global Jesus over loyalty to co-ethnics. 

Annotated Table of Contents

Introduction

Our Own Worst Enemy? Anglo-Protestant Theology, British Race Patriotism, and the European Civil War

In the nineteenth century British/Anglo-Saxon race patriotism was a commonplace feature of Anglo-Protestant culture.  We begin by examining why and how the twentieth century “European civil war” led contemporary Anglo-Protestant churches to dismiss the English ancestry and white British ethnicity of most of their communicants as a merely implicit and contingent (if not downright unmentionable) circumstance of no theological significance.

 Part One

Creedal Christianity: Theological Origins of the Present Crisis

1. Sweet Dreams of Christian Nationalism (But What About the Protestant Deformation, Globalist Churches, and Jewish Political Theology?)

This review essay discusses The Case for Christian Nationalism (Canon Press,    2022) by Stephen Wolfe.  The author identifies real problems with post-Christian societies.  One wonders, however, why Wolfe takes such pains to deny that he is a “kinist,” much less a “racist.”  Indeed, he seems to find it extraordinarily difficult to distinguish between “Christian nations” and “Christian states.”

2. Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Greco-Roman Antiquity: New Perspectives on the Lordship of Jesus, Judaism, and the “Truthiness” of Christianity

We take a deeper, historical dive into the fundamental presuppositions of Wolfe’s Christian nationalism.  He asserts that “Jesus is Lord” and “Christianity is the true religion.”  In what sense, are those statements “true”?  Were Jesus and Paul really the founders of a new religion?  Was the “resurrection” of Jesus Christ a unique historical event or a mimetic manifestation of a common Greco-Roman literary     trope?

3. Metanarrative Collapse: Has the Christian Cosmology Crafted by Augustine of Hippo Stood the Test of Time?

Augustine of Hippo rewrote a biblical narrative originally conceived as a Hebrew ethnonational epic.  This chapter examines how Augustine’s Hellenistic hermeneutic laid the cosmological foundation for Western Christendom. We also    consider the efforts of contemporary, neo-Augustinian Radical Orthodoxy to restore that crumbling edifice.

4. Global Jesus versus National Jesus: The Political Hermeneutics of Resurrection

The ongoing quest for the “true” meaning of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection cannot be separated from the central political conflict of our time: globalism versus nationalism.  Were Jesus and Paul wrong in their expectation that the “resurrection        of the body” would occur in the lifetime of their followers, at the “end of the age”?  How did they conceive the nature of that resurrected “body”?  Was it to appear as the holy spirit breathing life into the dry bones of Old Testament Israel, as lamented in Ezekiel 37:4-7?  Or did they envisage individual, physical (“glorified”?) bodies emerging from their graves in the far distant future everywhere in the world? 

Part Two

Did Anglo-Saxon Christendom Replicate the “Project of Peoplehood” Posited by the Hebrew Bible?

5. Adam and Eve in Torah: The Lost World of Covenantal Ethnotheology

Despite their differences modern biblical literalists and scholarly literary critics alike abstract Adam and Eve from their place in the particularistic ethnotheology of national Israel according to the flesh.  Both camps view Adam and Eve, whether biologically or mythically, literally or figuratively, as ancestors or representatives of Everyman and Everywoman.  A better interpretation of Genesis 1-3 conceives the pair as characters in the foundation myth of Old Covenant Israel

6. Exodus 34: Covenantal Ethnotheology and the (Re)Birth of the First Holy Nation

In Exodus 34 God enters into the everyday life of Israel according to the flesh via the channel of grace embodied in Mosaic authority.  Having received the Mosaic law, national Israel is thereby empowered to serve as the spiritual womb of the living God, the one to come in an as-yet far-distant future.  The modern functionalist interpretation of Exodus 34 holds that covenantal ethnotheology merely reflects the primitive, particularistic, and narrowly ethnocentric character of ancient Israelite religion.  This approach downplays the problem in practical theology posed by the story: the national religion lacked a secure cultic foundation.  This has been no less a problem for early medieval Angelcynns and contemporary Anglo-Protestants.  How can we preserve a Christian nation if the Presence of the Lord is no longer with us?

 

7. Making Angelcynns: How Alfred the Great Responded to the Viking Invasion

This essay highlights the theopolitical significance of the Anglo-Saxon king, Alfred the Great.  His reign (871-899) brought to fruition the project to establish an Anglo-Saxon Christendom begun by the Venerable Bede in the eighth century. The British-descended peoples of the modern Anglosphere would do well to reclaim Alfred’s legacy.

8. Sanctifying the Norman Yoke: William the Conqueror, the Angelcynn Church, and the Papal Revolution

The Norman Conquest brought Anglo-Saxon Christendom to an end.  William the Conqueror was a fellow traveller of the Papal Revolution of the late eleventh         century. Earth-hugging Saxon churches gave way to the spires of Gothic cathedrals pointing to an empty sky. The “Romanization” of Alfred’s Angelcynn church signalled an Age of Disincarnation, thus splitting the secular from the spiritual realm. 

9. A Choice Not an Echo: Biblical Israel as Mythic Model for Anglo-Saxon Christendom

It seems that the Old English church of the Anglo-Saxon era reflected what scholars describe as “the Germanization of early medieval Christianity.”  It has also been said that the Hebrew Bible was the product of a “project of peoplehood.”  This chapter considers whether the Hebrew Bible served as a model for the creation of the Anglo-Saxon Christendom. 

Part Three

Beyond Creedal Christianity: Neo-Angelcynn Political Theology versus Globalist Churches and the Transnational Corporate State

10. Who are We Now? Restoring the Ethnoreligious Dimensions of WASP Identity throughout the Anglosphere

The world-rejecting cosmology of the church in the Mediterranean world of the late Roman Empire stood in opposition to the world-accepting character of Germanic Christianity.  Nevertheless, both traditions presupposed the universal reign of Lord Jesus.  Christian nationalism therefore remains, for us, something of an oxymoron.  Accordingly, in the Anglosphere at least, the postmodern restoration of Christian nationhood should be inspired by a neo-Angelcynn theopolitics best organized around four “orienting concepts”: process theism, preterism, kinism, and royalism. 

11. Was Early New South Wales (1788-1850) a “Christian Community”?

Anglo-Protestant churches in England (both the established Church of England and its dissenting offshoots) aimed to perpetuate themselves by reinforcing cultural ties between the mother country and the British settler colonies in Australia and elsewhere.  Unfortunately, those cultural ties were not always conducive to the creation of a Christian community, either “at home” or in early New South Wales.

 

12. The White Australia Policy in Retrospect: Racism or Realism?

The White Australia Policy was inaugurated in 1901 at the high-water mark of    British race patriotism. This review essay discusses two books, one on the adoption of the WAP, the other on its repeal.  Both works view the policy from the    perspective of a racial egalitarianism that flies in the face of the intractable reality of racial differences presupposed by the founding fathers of Federation in Australia.

13. Puritans in Babylon: The Impact of Global Christianity on Sydney Anglicans

In the brave new world of “global Christianity,” the largest Christian communities are now to be found in the overwhelmingly non-white realm of the so-called “global south.”  This chapter deals with the response of the evangelical, low-church Anglican diocese of Sydney to the movements that demand conformity to the manifold manifestations of the progressive Cult of the Other.

14. Anglo-Republicanism and the Rebirth of British History: Why Virtuous WASPs Must Challenge the Corrupt Globalist Plutocracy Misgoverning the Anglosphere

The rise of a globalist system, presided over by the managerial elites of                 transnational corporate capitalism, has transformed the British-descended citizenry        of once-proudly “Anglo-Saxon countries” into random collections of stateless people.  This chapter explores the relevance of the Anglo-American republican tradition to a neo-Angelcynn reformation of civil society, outside and apart from     the state, throughout the Anglosphere

15. Monarchs and Miracles: Australia’s Need for a Patriot King

The eighteenth-century Country Party politician, Viscount Bolingbroke, maintained that only the influence of a Patriot King (“the most uncommon of all phenomena in the physical or moral world”) could draw despotic governments and   their corrupted peoples back to the original principles of liberty that had their origins in the ancient British constitution.  The issue here is whether (and how) Bolingbroke’s idea of a Patriot King can be transposed into our own age of woke capital and mass migration to rescue stateless Anglos, now stranded in the (residually) British dominions of the Crown throughout the Anglosphere.