Protestantism

Book review – Christian Nationalism vs Global Jesus: Projects of peoplehood from Biblical Israel to the collapse of British patriotism by Andrew Fraser

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Christian Nationalism vs Global Jesus: Projects of peoplehood from Biblical Israel to the collapse of British patriotism
Andrew Fraser
Arktos Media Ltd., 2025
Available for $33.00 (paperback) or $45.00 (hardback) from www.arktos.com or from amazon.co.uk

Reviewed by Hugh Perry, Lake Placid, New York in Heritage and Destiny, September-October, 2025; reposted by permission.

Andrew Fraser, long time advocate and thinker on matters pertaining to Europeans worldwide but particularly Anglo Saxons, has given us yet another book reflective of long research and ever deeper probing on the most vexing questions. In his Christian Nationalism vs Global Jesus he probes the old question of Christian religion and racial identity.

In the Book of Galatians, Chapter 3, we find the often quoted verses: “26 So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, 27 for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.”

These verses and the entire book were written to wean the Galatians of central Turkey off the belief that Christians yet needed to follow the Old Testament ritual laws. Although asserting that group identity is rendered meaningless in Christ, it also classifies believers as “the seed of Abraham.” This confusion is often viewed as the differing perspectives of the Old Testament, given to a specific genetic people, the “children of Israel,” and the New Testament which offers a new form of covenant not limited to one people. In this reading of Testaments, Old and New, many are those who see the seeds of a destructive universalism in the Christian teachings.

Many are the racial nationalists over recent centuries who saw in Christianity, at least, as it developed over the years a teaching virulently threatening to those committed to race, tribe, ethnicity and all forms of group identity beyond the theological. In fact, the ideology of “civic nationalism” is a recent system of seeing ideas, political and economic, as being the core of patriotism. In this world view, Enlightenment politics with its positing of democracy, human rights, equality before the law, free market economics etc, are seen as far more important than ancestry or any cultural reading of group identity.

Some would argue that these universal political dogmas are the result of Christian universalism. They see the current war on all forms of identity as the inevitable flowering of New Testament dogmas and faith in Christ being the only real “brotherhood.”

In an alternative version of this critique, the European (alternatively French) New Right views paganism as – by definition – more tolerant of mankind’s diversity. This position sees all monotheistic faiths, Islam, Judaism and, of course, Christianity as incapable of viewing the Other except through their own dogmas. The Other is only fulfilled if and when he becomes us.

In sum, whether seeing Christianity as a force weakening homogeneous groups via liberal humanism or, as a crusade to obliterate all identities other than its own, it is the Christian faith which has brought us and continues to bring us to the current mortal threat to White peoples around the world.

This critique will, of course, have to explain the ability of racial, ethnic and national awareness to survive in deeply Christian times and places, ranging from Catholic to Protestant to Orthodox cultures. In fact, the argument could well be made that many strains of Eastern Orthodoxy still maintain a Christian orthodoxy but very much in keeping with racial and ethnic identity. Plus, we should not forget that Afrikaner apartheid and American southern segregation were promulgated by two of the most deeply religious Protestant peoples.

The matter remains far from simple. Of one thing we suspect all may well agree – that institutional Christianity has over recent years become an active force committed to the destruction of racial survival. The question lingers: need it have been or be that way?

Into this debate has entered one of the most prolific writers on issues of White racial identity, Andrew Fraser. He is not a thinker who remains frozen in preconceived notions but has constantly delved ever deeper into racial identity and survival. Two caveats need be added. 1) Fraser is primarily concerned with the survival of his, the Anglo-Saxon people; and 2) he is a Christian. Neither of these convictions is less than essential to Fraser’s overall world view.

In addition Fraser is not simply a complainer. Yes, he dissects that which ails us. And, yes, most of his musings focus on the Anglo-Saxon worlds. But, he has also created a system which he views as a possible means to a resurrection of his peoples’ spirit. It will remain to the reader to decide whether this solution is realistic or, at least, workable. Racialists are often long and adept at diagnosing illness but short on the precise form of a possible cure. Fraser’s writings, at least his most recent ones, offer both.

In fact, the trajectory of Fraser’s thinking is long and complex. His books and articles are thoroughly researched and make for serious, never superficial, reading. This reviewer has often wondered why he is not up there with some of the more serious thinkers to emerge in the varied and creative strands of dissident rightist thinkers. The recent extensive work by Joakim Andersen, Rising From the Ruins: The Right of the 21st Century, outlines dissident schools of thought ranging as far afield as Bharatiya Janata in India to thinkers and movements in the Philippines. Yet, Christian-based movements merit only a few pages, only one of which is from the Anglosphere. Indeed as far as England goes the author, otherwise so detailed, gives us just two pages on the English Defence League.

Truth be told English (or British) nationalists have not fared well at all in the post World War II era. Featuring endless splintering and little electoral success, Andersen may be justified in given the “green and pleasant land” short shrift. So Fraser is advocating for two ostensibly long suffering causes, Christianity and Anglo-Saxon identity. Yet if his thinking is truly analyzed his models may well be relevant to white peoples around the globe. And even if limited to those areas for which he prescribes his cure, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and, to some yet lingering extent, America, Fraser offers scholarly research and, at least, a most hopeful unlikely cure.

It is impossible to separate Fraser from his life’s struggles. The fierce opposition which his opinions encountered served to clarify his own world view.

Andrew Fraser was born in Canada at a time (1944) when that nation’s Anglo-Saxon roots and fealty to the Crown were still strong. He holds BA and LLB degrees from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He went on to achieve an LLM from Harvard and an MA from the University of North Carolina. He eventually emigrated to Australia, to teach at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He helped establish the approach of teaching legal theory as part of the history and philosophy of Western legal tradition. He even went so far as to discuss how much the Western legal tradition owed to Christianity.

Eventually his entire department was relegated to second class status at the school. They wished to focus on the career aspects of the law. Finally, in July of 2005 he wrote a letter to the Paramatta Sun questioning Australia’s open immigration policies. The result was quick and furious. By the time the dust had cleared Fraser was suspended from teaching, then accepted an early retirement. This was not the end, for in March of 2006 his letter was branded a breach of Section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act. The sorry story goes on, including Fraser’s persecution at Christian bible schools for whose courses he’d enrolled. For details see his book, Dissident Dispatches (2017: Arktos).

In sum this is a man who not only talks the talk but also walks the walk, suffering for his heretical beliefs on matters racial and much else. He is a tireless writer and profound analyst of the fading fortunes of Anglo-Saxons wherever they may dwell.

In order to understand properly the policies advocated in this Christian Nationalism Versus Global Jesus book we will first look at the conclusion of an earlier book, The Wasp Question (2011: Arktos), which was reviewed in H&D #49 by Ian Freeman. After explaining steady demonization and erosion of Anglo-Saxon identity he suggests three schools of thought upon which a renaissance might be constructed.

They are kinism, preterism and Covenant creationism. Each provides a theology capable of embracing believing Christianity as well loyalty to the people’s identity. Kinists believe that Old Testament prohibitions of mixing species still are obligatory today. They go so far as to view multiracial marriages as a violation of the sin of adultery, seeing the racial, ethnic family as similar to the nuclear family.

Preterism sees history as not a waiting for the Second Coming of Christ. They see no rapture or apocalypse in the future. To them the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 AD was the end of the Old Covenant. From that point on each distinct nation fulfills its destiny via its unique relationship with Christ. Cosmic creationism takes the above a bit further. It sees the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple as ushering in a new era in which God’s grace will now be imbued into every nation or ethnos of the known world.

By the end of The Wasp Question Fraser advocates for mediating corporate bodies such as families, schools, industries, who will be many carriers of the Christian ethnos of the folk.

But it is in his most recent book that Fraser arrives at the final hope (prayer) for the resurrection of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism.

In Fraser’s view, “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.” This is done, we’d add by bringing millions of other races into the Anglosphere as well as by poisoning, with liberal secularism, the Anglos who previously were its sole citizens.

In place of the oft noted “persistent tension between universalism and particularism”, Fraser posits that Anglo-Protestants desperately need to develop folkish variants of the Christian tradition. He sees the defeat of Germany in 1945 as a serious blow to the folk versions of both Protestant and Catholic Christianity which were encouraged there in the 1933 to 1945 era.

What is required in the future? Fraser sees “an Anglo ethno-religion (as) both the institutional precondition and moral foundation for the creation of socially cohesive communities. Anglo-Protestant churches must become the ethno-religious heart of breakaway parallel societies capable of 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.”

The book is a serious scholarly attempt to maintain Old Testament ethno-loyalty while embracing the Christian faith. In fact at one point in his argument Fraser asked whether “other singular incarnations for other unique nations or even other worlds have been forever excluded from the realm of possibility by divine decree?” (Shades of the Traditionalist School of Rene Guenon here?)

The book covers many arenas of Anglosphere surrender with several chapters devoted to Fraser’s new home of Australia and its neighbor New Zealand in hundreds of pages (488) of exquisite detail. Fraser would prefer that the Church of England trace its roots back to the Angelcynn (old English for “kin of the Angles”) church of Alfred the Great.

Of more recent vintage Fraser sees the 19th century Broad Church Movement as one which, as he quotes Stewart Brown, “moved beyond clerical narrowness and excessive dogmatism.” Their view was “that the purpose of the national Church was the spiritual and moral cultivation of the nation, the preservation and interpretation of its history and the defining of its highest aspirations . . . for them, Christianity was social and historical relgion, as well as a personal faith; it was about the redemption of nations as as individuals.”

That this form of rebirth might actually occur in history may seem far fetched. Can an Anglosphere flooded with other races and propagandized to hate itself prove capable of a phoenix-like regeneration. But it is less than a century since the Anglosphere viciously turned on its own people. Australia and New Zealand legislated the maintenance of their own racial identities. Even in America it took until 1965 to dismantle the barriers protecting its European communal identity.

Fraser’s final words are a call for the “idea of patriot king” and his civilizing mission. Fraser hopes (prays?) that there may yet be found in the Royal Family someone still loyal to his people and their identity. He readily grants that “the appearance of the patriot prince would be a miracle indeed.”

This reader has followed Andrew Fraser through the many twists and turns of writings and public battle. What the patriot king may yet do in Anglosphere nations already overrun by aliens is hard to imagine. How a public long brainwashed to despise themselves and their religion may yet find its roots and fight for them is hard to picture.

The hope remains in the rapid deterioration of Western Europe, North America and Australasia. Some lost resolve may yet be located to struggle even at this eleventh hour, with vote totals of “dissident right” political parties continuing to climb.

Fraser envisions the coalescing of racial, ethnic traditional and Christian forces to rescue the Anglosphere. The present is surely a time of great flux. Probably, few H&D readers hope for or envision this Christian patriot king and his return.

Yet, as G.K. Chesterton concludes in his very moving poem The Ballad of the White Horse, which he wrote in 1911.

“And the smoke changed and the wind went by, And the King took London Town.”

 

 

Protestant Conversos are important in the Evangelical Protestant movement and remain strongly pro-Israel

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While the term “converso” is commonly associated with Jews who embraced Catholicism during the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions but continued to live in crypto-Jewish communities (see Separation and Its Discontents, Ch. 5), a lesser-known development is the emergence of Jews—by both faith and ancestry—who have embraced Protestantism in modern times. This is  yet another example of Jews infiltrating Christianity in order to shape it toward their own ends (see, e.g., here, here and here on the Catholic Church).

This dynamic was recently highlighted in a post by Chris Menahan of Information Liberation. In it, evangelical leader Laurie Cardoza-Moore, speaking with Israel National News, warned that the United States is experiencing a resurgence of 1930s-style antisemitic sentiment.

She had choice words for the “woke right,” singling out prominent figures such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. “These individuals are normalizing antisemitic rhetoric and questioning U.S. support for Israel. Some are even engaging with known terrorist sympathizers and hostile regimes. Carlson, for example, has interviewed leaders from Iran and Qatar—figures openly committed to Israel’s destruction. This is deeply disturbing, especially given their influence within conservative circles,” she stated.

As a filmmaker, Cardoza-Moore expressed concern over the growing influence of anti-Israel voices on the right. “Carlson interviews pastors from groups like Christ at the Checkpoint who accuse Israel of occupation. As a Christian, he should know better. Candace Owens claims to be Catholic. They should understand the biblical imperative to stand with Israel. And yet they are using their platforms to spread disinformation to Christian, conservative audiences—audiences that shape the future of the Republican Party,” Cardoza-Moore added.

Cardoza-Moore, while discussing “The Lost Jews of the Inquisition,” used the moment to criticize Carlson and Owens and reveal her ancestral connection to the Jewish victims of the Inquisition.

“This project is close to my heart. My own family descends from the conversos—Jews forced to convert during the Spanish Inquisition. On his deathbed, my grandfather told his children, ‘We are Jewish.’ That revelation opened my eyes. Many Hispanic and Latino Americans, including recent immigrants, may also descend from those same roots—without even knowing it,” the evangelical leader revealed.

Indeed, there is a nugget of truth behind Cardoza-Moore’s statement. A 2018 study found that approximately 23% of Latin Americans show genetic markers associated with Sephardic Jewish ancestry, and historians believe there could be between 80 to 100 million descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews worldwide. However, these figures may not be so clear-cut. According to DNA tests in a previous study, Spanish-Americans in the Southwest are not descended from Jews, but from Spaniards. These scientists ultimately found no major Jewish connection.

Nonetheless, instances of Jews converting to Christianity are undeniable even into the present. While Catholicism was the destination for most historic conversos, the last two centuries have seen a small but highly influential number of Jews convert to Protestant evangelical Christianity.

Several prominent historical and contemporary figures exemplify this trend:

Michael Solomon Alexander (1799–1845) 

Born in Schönlanke, Prussia, Alexander was trained as an Orthodox rabbi.  However, after migrating to England, Solomon received his baptism in 1825. Ordained in the Church of England, he was a member of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews and became professor of Hebrew and Rabbinic Literature at King’s College London.

Backed by Britain and Prussia, he was consecrated as the first Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem on December 7, 1841, overseeing a vast diocese that included Palestine, Syria, and Egypt. Alexander advanced Hebrew liturgy, founded schools and a hospital, and laid the cornerstone of Christ Church, the city’s first Protestant church.

Leopold Cohn (1862–1937) 

Born Eisik Leib Josowitz in Berezna, Hungary, Leopold Cohn was orphaned early, trained in Hasidic yeshivot and claimed rabbinic ordination. Seeking answers about messianic prophecies, he emigrated to New York in 1892 and subsequently converted to evangelical Christianity and was ordained a Baptist minister. In Brooklyn, he founded the Brownsville Mission to the Jews in 1894, later renamed Chosen People Ministries, which became the largest U.S. mission to Jews. A prolific preacher and author of the autobiography To an Ancient People, Cohn championed what would later become modern Messianic Judaism.

Louis Meyer (1862–1913) 

Raised in a Reform Jewish family in Crivitz, Germany, Meyer earned medical and science degrees before immigrating to Cincinnati. Converted through a Presbyterian mission in 1892, Meyer graduated from the Reformed Presbyterian Seminary in 1897 and was a minister in Minnesota and Iowa. An adept writer and lecturer, he helped shape early 20th century Hebrew-Christian (proto-messianic) networks. Notably, he edited periodicals such as “The Jewish Era” and authored “Eminent Hebrew Christians of the Nineteenth Century.”

Moishe Rosen (1932–2010)

Born Martin Rosen in Kansas City, Missouri, to Ben Rosen and Rose Baker, Moishe Rosen was raised in Denver, Colorado, in a household that blended Reform and Orthodox Jewish traditions. His mother’s parents were Reform Jews from Austria, while his paternal grandfather was Orthodox. Despite attending synagogue regularly, Rosen viewed religion as a “racket.” After graduating from the University of Colorado, Rosen married Ceil Starr in 1950. In 1953, both converted to Christianity.

Ordained as a Conservative Baptist minister in 1957, Rosen worked for 17 years with the American Board of Missions to the Jews before founding Hineni Ministries in 1970. This project would later be renamed to Jews for Jesus. After leaving ABMJ in 1973, he incorporated Jews for Jesus as an independent organization, revolutionizing Jewish evangelism through confrontational street tactics inspired by the hippie counterculture and anti-Vietnam War activism. His trademark broadsides—provocatively titled pamphlets like “Jesus Made Me Kosher”—helped the organization distribute over two million tracts annually by the mid-1980s.

Jews for Jesus grew into the world’s largest Messianic Jewish organization, with a $13 million budget and international branches by the time he retired as executive director in 1996. Rosen’s organization holds distinctive Christian Zionist positions. Jews for Jesus supports Israel’s territorial claims and viewed the nation’s restoration as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

David H. Stern (1935-2022) 

A Ph.D. recipient in economics at Princeton and former professor at UCLA, David Stern embraced Christianity in 1972 and became a pioneer of the Messianic Jewish movement. After earning an M.Div. at Fuller Seminary, he made aliyah to Jerusalem in 1979 and devoted his scholarship to restoring the Jewish context of the New Testament. His landmark “Complete Jewish Bible” and “Jewish New Testament Commentary” reframed Scripture with Hebraic terminology, while his manifesto “Messianic Judaism: A Modern Movement with an Ancient Past” articulated the movement’s theology.

Stern’s views on Israel were deeply theological, believing that Palestine belongs to the Jews and that Messianic Judaism would eventually form a critical mass in Israel. Through his Complete Jewish Bible translation, Stern emphasized the Jewishness of Christianity and advocated for recognizing Israel’s central role in God’s plan.

Sid Roth (1940-)

Born Sydney Abraham Rothbaum on September 7, 1940, in Brunswick, Georgia, Roth was raised in a traditional Jewish home but found organized religion irrelevant to his life. His primary goal was to become a millionaire by age 30. By 29, he had graduated college, married, become a father, and worked as an account executive for Merrill Lynch. However, feeling unsuccessful for not reaching his financial goal, he abandoned his family and career to embark on a quixotic quest for happiness.

This search led Roth into Eastern meditation and New Age practices, where he encountered what he believed was a spirit guide but which began to torment his mind with evil power. His spiritual crisis reached its peak when a Christian businessman challenged him. The businessman explained that Roth’s occult practices were condemned in Deuteronomy 18 and that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah which his Orthodox upbringing had concealed from him. In desperation during a tumultuous night of his life, Roth prayed a simple two-word prayer: “Jesus, help!” The next morning, he woke up to find the evil presence gone and his mind filled with supernatural peace and love.

This encounter in 1972 transformed Roth’s life completely, leading to his restored marriage and his entire immediate family’s conversion to Christianity. In 1977, he founded Messianic Vision and launched a nationally syndicated radio broadcast aimed at reaching Jewish people with the Gospel.

His television program “Sid Roth’s It’s Supernatural!” began in 1996, featuring weekly interviews with people who claim miraculous healings and supernatural encounters with God. Through his media empire, including the It’s Supernatural! Network (ISN) and Middle East Television (METV), Roth has built a global platform reaching millions with his message of supernatural Christianity while maintaining his focus on evangelizing “to the Jew first.”

Roth has been a fervent supporter of Israel, operating television networks that are “must carry” on every television set in Israel. His ministry emphasizes that Israel is central to God’s end-times plan, stating that “the center of God’s universe is NOT Washington D.C. but Jerusalem, Israel.” He frequently discusses biblical prophecy related to Israel and advocates for Christians to support the Jewish state financially and through prayer.

Curiously, Roth has been an ardent supporter of Donald Trump, predicting in 2020 that Trump would be a “two-term president” and receive Nobel Peace Prizes. He believes Trump was divinely appointed to support Israel, stating that “God directed me to mobilize as many Christians as possible to vote for Trump because of his positions on Israel and abortion.” Roth has prophesied that Trump will have “a major encounter with God himself” and that his presidency represents God’s blessing on America.

Joel Chernoff (1950-)

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, but raised from a young age in Cincinnati, Ohio, Joel Chernoff came from one of Messianic Judaism’s founding families. His parents, Martin and Yohanna Chernoff, established Congregation Beth Messiah in Cincinnati in 1970—the first modern Messianic Jewish congregation in the United States.

In 1972, Chernoff formed the music group LAMB with Rick “Levi” Coghill, a studio guitarist and fellow believer. LAMB pioneered what became known as messianic music, blending ancient Jewish musical motifs with contemporary folk-rock sounds and Hebrew lyrics. Over two decades, LAMB recorded 14 albums that sold over 600,000 copies, with several songs reaching the Top 10 on contemporary Christian music charts.

Beyond music, Chernoff has played a significant role as a Messianic Jewish leader. He has served as General Secretary and CEO of the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America (MJAA), the largest institution representing the worldwide Messianic Jewish community. He also founded and chairs the Joseph Project International, which has delivered over $170 million in humanitarian aid to Israel and operates as the country’s largest importer of such aid.

Jonathan Cahn (1959-)

Raised in New York State by a Holocaust survivor mother within a committed Jewish family, Jonathan David Cahn attended synagogue regularly and celebrated his bar‑mitzvah in the traditional manner. Like a significant portion of American Jewry, he found organized religion irrelevant to his daily life, though he was proud of his Jewish heritage.

Cahn’s early spiritual doubts deepened as he struggled to reconcile the vibrant depictions of God in Hebrew school lessons with the dry formalism of synagogue worship. After a near-death experience at age 20, he ultimately found conviction in biblical prophecies and embraced Messianic Judaism before graduating from SUNY Purchase.

Cahn subsequently founded the Beth Israel Worship Center in Wayne, New Jersey, and serves as president of Hope of the World Ministries, an international evangelistic organization. He gained worldwide recognition with his 2011 debut novel The Harbinger, which draws parallels between ancient Israel and the United States, suggesting that events like 9/11 represent divine warnings.

The book became a New York Times bestseller for over 100 consecutive weeks and sold over 2 million copies. His subsequent bestsellers, including The Mystery of the Shemitah, The Paradigm, and The Oracle, have established him as one of the most prominent voices in modern prophetic teaching, focusing on end-times prophecy and calling for national repentance and return to biblical principles.

Cahn strongly supports Israel and views the Jewish state as central to God’s end-times plan. He teaches that Israel faces spiritual warfare from “principalities and powers,” particularly from Iran (which he identifies with the biblical “principality of Persia”). Cahn believes the “forces of hell” have been trying to destroy Israel since 1948 and that the nation’s restoration fulfills biblical prophecy.

Further, Cahn has been one of Trump’s most vocal evangelical supporters. In 2019, he prayed over Trump at Mar-a-Lago, declaring that God had “raised you up to be a Jehu to your nation” and calling Trump to safeguard Israeli interests.

Cahn has likened Trump to the biblical king Jehu, a “warrior king” called to “make his nation great again” by overturning ungodly leadership. He believes Trump was “born to be a trumpet of God” and appointed to overturn “America’s cult of Baal” (making a reference to the abortion movement). Following Trump’s 2024 election victory, Cahn praised it as “the greatest political comeback in American history” and argued that “the only real threat of fascism in America actually comes from the Left.”

Wayne Allyn Root (1961-)

In a similar vein, conservative media personality Wayne Allyn Root illustrates a similar trend of Jews embracing Christianity. Root is an ethnic Jew by birth—” 99.5% European Jewish” as confirmed by DNA testing—who became an outspoken evangelical and, for a brief moment, a high-profile member of the Libertarian Party. Root converted to Christianity in the early 1990s and has been actively involved in conservative and libertarian circles.

Root’s run for vice president in 2008 alongside former Congressman Bob Barr represented a neoconservative subversion of the Libertarian Party’s presidential agenda. Root unapologetically departed from standard libertarian non-interventionist principles, saying he was a strong supporter of the War on Terror, but only believed it was mishandled.

He endorsed the “troop surge” in Iraq, saying, “I agreed with the recommendation of the Generals on the ground—to build up a troop surge. We did and it’s been a great success.” Root’s rapid ascent in the Libertarian Party naturally provoked a backlash from the more principled, non-interventionist members of the party. The now-inactive libertarian blogger “Classically Liberal” accused the Barr-Root ticket of being “neocon infiltrators” who brought “foreign interventionism” to the party. Their presence as Libertarian Party nominees betrayed libertarian principles of non-interventionism.

Like several Jewish political figures in the U.S. political arena, Root eventually changed his political stripes, leaving the Libertarian Party to embrace Trump-style populism. Since his pivot, he has adopted conventional hawkish positions toward neocon bête noire Iran, describing it as “the biggest threat to Israel’s existence ever.”

Root and his fellow Messianic Jews and Jewish converts to evangelicalism demonstrate the folly of trying to convert them Christianity. Even when they convert, they continue to pursue political agendas that advance Jewish interests at the expense of the Gentile host population. It’s quite literally in their DNA.

*   *   *

As commentators like Mike Peinovich have astutely observed, efforts to limit Jewish social mobility have been most aggressively pursued under National Socialism and in certain Muslim nations, particularly Yemen, where Jews were ghettoized and barred from achieving equal status.

Reduction of Jewish power, not conversion is the answer to the lingering Jewish problem.

History suggests that no matter how sincere the conversion, the political consequences remain the same: loyalty to the tribe persists unless Jewish power itself is checked.

Bruce Shipman and the Idealized Image of Jews among Elite Protestants

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In his The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, Eric Kaufmann described liberal Protestantism as one of several liberal traditions in American history. Although it had its origins in the 19th century, by 1910 there arose a liberal Protestant elite committed to “universalist, humanitarian ethics.” Elite Protestants (but not the great mass of Protestant Americans) were opposed to immigration restriction in the 1920s and were at the vanguard of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. They embraced the dream of universal humanity, and they developed idealized images of Jews who, after World War II, had assumed the leadership of liberal causes in the U.S.

But, as Kaufmann notes, Anglo-America has lost its political power and has been deposed from its position as cultural trend setter. Some of the fallout from the demise of elite Protestants can be seen in Mark Oppenheimer’s Tablet interview of Bruce Shipman — the Episcopalian chaplain who ran afoul of the Israel Lobby (my take). The interesting part:

Oppenheimer is recounting a conversation he had with a leftist Jewish friend who is critical of Israel:

[Oppenheimer]: I said to him, “You spend so much time among anti-Zionists. How can you tell which ones, which minority, are anti-Semites?” And he said, “Well, that’s easy.” He said, “It’s the liberal Protestants. The Jews aren’t anti-Semitic, even if they’re called self-loathing. And the Muslims aren’t anti-Semitic, because they get us.” He said they understand everything about us, as we understand everything about them. He said it’s the well-meaning leftie Protestants. They profess a deep spiritual kinship with Jews, they’ve often lived in the Middle East, they’ve led tours there.

[Shipman]: He’s talking about me! [laughs]

Muslims and Jews understand each other; they see each other as implacable enemies and they understand each other’s fanaticism, their mutual hatred, and the impermeable barriers between their groups. As Christine Amanpour showed in God’s Warriors (see also here), religious fanaticism in Israel and among Muslims is the order of the day in the Middle East. Indeed, the social structure of society fragmented into mutually hostile groups is endemic to the area and likely biologically based (see here, xxv-xxxi). Neither expects any quarter. A fight to the death. Read more

The Protestant Deformation of Christian Nationhood, Part 2

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The Revolutionary Excesses of Christian Humanism

Throughout the Western world, both State and Church have adopted Barth’s doctrine of “near and distant neighbours.”  When we encounter “foreigners” or “strangers”—whether as citizens or Christians—we must not allow “being in one’s own people” to become “a prison and stronghold.”  Every man must instead obey God’s command “to move out from his beginning and therefore seek a wider field.”  The result has been that neither the State nor the Church works any longer to preserve and protect what even Barth conceded is our “divine disposition” to love kith and kin over both neighbours and strangers.  On the contrary, political and religious leaders, alike, now act as if “our only impulse” should “be so to strengthen the inner forces of our own land and people that we can not only tolerate many foreign countries, and many foreigners who find a second home among us, but make them our own.”  Barth denied that the church can “legitimate its own division along racial lines ‘because the community owes to the world a witness…to the mutual fellowship of human beings.”[1] In the years since his death, the “inner forces” pushing both State and Church to embrace the neo-communist program of open borders and mass Third World immigration have become so powerful that the national identity—indeed the very survival—of every Anglo-Saxon Protestant (and European Christian) country has been thrown into doubt.  The universalist humanism invoked to justify the globalist program is based not upon reason but upon an “existential leap of faith” entailing a host of unknown and potentially dangerous consequences.  Unless and until Protestant theology recognizes the ecclesiastical legitimacy of the Volkskirche, it may be impossible to avoid “excessive” reactions from the forces of ethnoreligious particularism demonized by Barth.  Christian ethnopatriotism is down but not out. Read more

The Protestant Deformation of Christian Nationhood, Part 1

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Introduction

Contemporary Protestants try hard to be nice.  Church leaders ceaselessly call upon Christians to be “inclusive” and “compassionate” when dealing with “the Other.”  Introductory texts in theology teach that the “church is always threatened by a false unity that does not allow for the inclusion of strangers and outcasts.”  Among White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, in particular, the compulsory embrace of humanity’s “rich diversity” is the prescribed antidote to “the ominous coupling of a shadowy religiosity with a militant nationalism or racism in such slogans as ‘God and Fatherland’ or ‘God, family, and country.”[1]

According to Princeton theology Professor Daniel L Migliore, such “vague but uniformly comforting references to God and religious values” shaped “the ideology of too many German Christians during the Third Reich and are still invoked by “chauvinistic movements in the United States and other countries.”[2] The notion that nationalism is a social pathology owes much of its all-pervasive influence to Karl Barth (1882–1968), a Swiss Protestant theologian who achieved fame and more than a little notoriety in the 1930s through uncompromising opposition to the National Socialist takeover of both church and state in Germany.  The fact is, however, both Barth and Migliore seriously misrepresent the relationship between Christian communities of faith and the blood bonds of national identity.

The Bible provides ample warrant to designate “nations” and “peoples” as essential building blocks in the constitution of the holy, catholic, and apostolic church of Christ.  Indeed, Christ directed his disciples to “make disciples of all the nations.”(Matthew 28:19)  The Old Testament people of Israel thus became the prototype of the Christian peoples of God in the New Covenant creation.  Accordingly, the Russian Orthodox Church affirms that all peoples have the “right to national identity and national self-expressions” within the Body of Christ.  In the nineteenth century, even an Anglican theologian such as FD Maurice saw the Old Testament as the history of a “peculiar nation” whose destiny is fulfilled and completed in the New Testament.  God’s covenant promises to Old Israel are fulfilled when “a universal Church [unfolds] itself out of that nation,” taking “root in other nations and peoples throughout the ancient world.”[3]

But during the twentieth century ethnonationalism lost its religious aura of sanctity.  In the erstwhile “Anglo-Saxon countries,” in particular, few Protestants any longer believe that it is part of God’s plan to form the character of each nation by means of the “spiritual body” within it, giving rise to what the Germans call a Volkskirche.  Even Anglicans reject the idea that the Church of England was and should be again the Church for England and the English people, at home and in the diaspora.  That decisive break with the past is very largely due to the Protestant Deformation produced by the theological crisis afflicting the German church during the 1930s.[4]

Ideological Civil War and Theological Crisis

The Protestant Deformation in Germany was part of the collateral damage inflicted on Christian civilization by the “ideological civil war of the twentieth century” in which “the universalist extremism of Bolshevism provokes the extremism of the particular in Nazism.”  Ernst Nolte portrays the role of German National Socialism in the europäische Burgerkrieg between 1917 and 1945 as an “excessive” reaction to Bolshevism.  In his view, an “excess in what is justified at the outset leads to the unjustifiable.”[5] The same dynamic operated in the theological crisis which engulfed Protestant churches in Germany as growing numbers of academic theologians, pastors, and parishioners eschewed neutrality and took opposing sides in the ideological conflicts dividing society at large.  Soon after the Machtergreifung (the Nazi seizure of power) of 1933 which endowed Hitler with dictatorial powers, open ideological warfare broke out between a breakaway Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church, hereafter BK) under the intellectual leadership of the Karl Barth and the Deutsche Christen (DC) movement in mainstream Lutheran and Evangelical churches.  The latter were soon united under a Reichsbischof sworn to serve the Führer.[6]

Emanuel Hirsch (1888-1972) was just one of many prominent theologians whose loyalty to the National Socialist regime placed them at daggers drawn with Barth and the BK.  Very early on in the ideological civil war tearing Germany and Europe apart, Hirsch aligned himself openly with the right.[7] Meanwhile, on the left, Barth, began his life-long journey as a fellow-traveller, a radical anti-Nazi widely suspected to be soft on Communism.  Early in his career, he was known “as the notorious ‘red pastor’ of Safenwil;” late in life during the Cold War he excused “his peculiar attitude towards aggressive Communism in Hungary” by reference to the “good intentions” that inspired leftist totalitarianism.  Barth’s ideological allegiances account for his “excessive” reaction to the rise of the DC movement.  Even “Barth’s ‘friends’ in the Confessing Church thought him too difficult and not diplomatic enough.”  In fact, he was seen as the “greatest danger” to the church “because he picked too many specific battles with National Socialism.”[8] Few would call Barth’s “rationality” into question.  Barth was not, however, always so generous to his DC opponents, whose teachings he dismissed contemptuously as a “blatantly nonsensical” and “irresponsible pseudotheology.” [9]

Such vituperative rhetoric was both unjust and lacking in Christian charity.  Robert Ericksen, a historian who shares Barth’s anti-Nazi stance, nevertheless describes Hirsch and two other prominent theologians supportive of the Deutsche Christen as “well-meaning, intelligent and respectable individuals who also happened to support Adolf Hitler.”  He carefully demonstrates that each of these men developed an intellectually defensible theological rationale for his political stance.  But, he continues, in and of itself, reason could not ground their political judgements.  Like Barth, they made “an existential leap of faith” when choosing sides in the ideological civil war raging around them.  In the end, however, Ericksen agrees with Barth that DC theologians were on the wrong side of history when they portrayed Jews as “a destructive force in Germany.”[10] Ernst Nolte is not so sure; he suggests that the anti-Judaism of the National Socialists had a “rational core” which “consists in the factual reality of the large role played by a certain number of personalities of Jewish origin at the centre of the communist and socialist movement, evidently because of the universalist and Messianic traditions proper to historical Judaism.”[11]

No doubt Jews were heavily over-represented in both Russian Bolshevism and the German Communist Party, a circumstance often cited by Hitler to justify his anti-Jewish policies.  Such empirical data made little impression upon Karl Barth.  As an intellectual leftist, Barth was predisposed to philo-Bolshevism; as a Christian humanist he naturally leaned towards philo-Semitism.  He shared in the cosmopolitan universalism inherent in the messianic traditions of both historical and contemporary Judaism.  For Barth, Jews, far from being an especially evil race were God’s ever-present reminder to Christians of the essential sinfulness of mankind at large.  Barth broke “radically with those more traditional Christian thinkers who see in Israel’s refusal to receive Christ a purely human refusal, a merely human blindness to the messiahship of Christ.”  For Barth, according to John Johnson, “the Jews do not receive Christ because God has ordained their rejection of him.”  Israel’s disobedience, whether in killing Christ two thousand years ago, or in siding with the Bolsheviks in their ideological civil war against bourgeois Christians in modern Europe, “is really a sign of humanity’s rebellion against God.”[12]

Barth went further, suggesting that the existence of the Jews was, in itself, proof of God’s existence.  But the Jews cannot “fully convince the rest of the world of its need of God until the Jews themselves acknowledge their own need and enter the church.”  God’s salvific plan for humanity therefore requires the mass conversion of the Jews at the Second Coming of Christ.  Barth insists that the “Church can understand its own origin and its own goal only as it understands its unity with Israel.  Barth denied that God has rejected the Jewish people.  The New Covenant of Christ did not supersede the Old Covenant with the seed of Abraham.  Old Israel remains under the bow of one covenant joining it with the New Israel of the Church until the last days when “Jesus Christ will come again in His glory with all His angels.”  Jew and non-Jew would finally be fused together in the Body of Christ.[13]

Barth and other “progressive” German pastors worked to undermine the theological foundations of the deeply-ingrained Christian wariness towards Jews.  While they were successful in destabilizing orthodox theology on the Jewish Question, their efforts attracted the law of unintended consequences.  On the traditional understanding, God cursed the Jews because they rejected the Lord Jesus Christ.  If a Jew is baptised, therefore, the theological case for discrimination against him collapses.  But, once German Christians were persuaded to find the source of a Jew’s ethno-national identity not in his theology but in his genetic make-up, the seeds of an intractable ethno-racial conflict were sown.  However well-intentioned it may have been, Barth’s ecumenical enthusiasm brought the biological dimension of Jewish racial identity into sharper relief.  Just as the murderous excesses of the revolutionary left heightened the horror attached to the Schreckbild of “jüdischer Bolschewismus,” Barth’s frankly irrational faith in the divinely-ordained, messianic role of the Jews inevitably provoked counter-excesses among Christians sympathetic to the cause of German national revival.

Barth vs. the Volkskirche

In a speech at the Berliner Sportpalast on 13 November 1933, a prominent DC leader, Dr Reinhold Krause, vowed that the National Socialist Revolution was not going to halt before the gates of the church.  On the contrary, he looked forward to the full assimilation of ecclesiastical matters into the realm of politics; the Volkskirche was to be folded into the Volksstaat.  When Krause went on to reject both the Old Testament and the theology of St Paul because of their Jewish origins, it was clear that the DC had become the “mirror-image” of Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism.  Both Germans and Jews were to be defined as members of a race not a religion.  Conceiving the Jewish Question in racial rather than theological terms, Krause condemned the church’s mission to the Jews as a serious threat to the racial integrity of the German Volkstum.  Accordingly, the DC supported the so-called Aryan Paragraph requiring the dismissal of pastors who happened to be baptized Jews.[14] In the face of such provocations, Barth rapidly assumed leadership in the creation of the BK, drafting much of the Barmen Declaration of 1934 which formalized the split within the German church.

Eleven years later, the bloody denouement of Europe’s ideological civil war left Germany lying prostrate in Schutt und Asche. Barth emerged as the clear victor over völkische rivals such as Emanuel Hirsch who received what amounted to an immediate dishonourable discharge from the Göttingen theological faculty.  In 1935, Barth had lost his position as “the most highly regarded professor of law in Germany” when he refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the Führer.[15] But, back in Switzerland, he continued his campaign against Hitler’s Germany while working on his magnum opus, the twelve volumes of Church Dogmatics—which remained unfinished at his death.  By the Sixties, he was a world-renowned religious thinker, even appearing on the cover of Time magazine.  His massive body of work is not, however, without its critics.  Barth’s “excessive” reaction against the ideal of the Volkskirche led him not just to deny that the “ordo of nation and nationality” is “immanent in human nature” but to “dichotomize” Christ as the head of the Church from the ecclesiastical body which is the earthly-historical form of his existence.[16]

Barth denied that the Church can “be regarded as a human production.”  It does not owe its existence to this world; rather the being of the Church is “secured, unthreatened, and incontestable only from above, only from God, not from below, not from the side of its human members.”  What Barth “finds important about the church is not its empirical or historical dimensions, but rather its essential identity with Jesus Christ.”  His “understanding of the church oscillates between the poles of the essential (Christ is his body, the church) and the merely accidental and empirical.” As a consequence, “Barth’s ecclesiology lacks…a sense of persistence or durée.”  Many of Barth’s critics identify “the Spirit’s work with persistent, enduring social forms” and advocate “a critical historicism focused on the practices, structures, and traditions of historic Christianity.”  But few, if any, of Barth’s academic critics dare to redeem the ideal of the Volkskirche from the shame and ridicule heaped upon it by the victors in the ideological civil war of the twentieth century.  Generally speaking, theologians who are critical of Barth’s “reluctance to see God’s revelation ‘captured’ in human time” join with him to deny that “in the national determination of man we have an order of creation no less than in the relationship of man and woman and parents and children.”[17]

According to Barth, “the concept of one’s own people is not a fixed but a fluid concept.”  Such ideas have become the conventional wisdom of our time.  Similarly, few theologians today demur from Barth’s claims that “the majority of peoples have for centuries been physical mongrels.”  Mainstream Christians in every erstwhile Anglo-Saxon country now “confess our people as a historical construct,” their purely contingent national identity cannot be identified as a command of God or a presupposition of the divine order of things.[18] In his struggle to overturn the orthodox Christian doctrine of nations, Barth’s ideological triumph was complete.  But that victory exacted a steep price.

Go to Part 2.

[1] Daniel L Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology Second Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans, 2004), 13, 31.

[2] Ibid., 31-32.

[3] Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarchate of Moscow, Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church, II. Church and nation, available online at: http://3saints.com/ustav_mp_russ_english.html#2; Jeremy Morris, FD Maurice and the Crisis of Christian Authority (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 4, 93, 103-105.

[4] I have borrowed the phrase “Protestant Deformation” from James Kurth, “The Protestant Deformation and American Foreign Policy,” (1998) 42(2) Orbis 225.

[5] François Furet and Ernst Nolte, Fascism and Communism (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 4, 11, 29. See also, Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Burgerkrieg, 1917-1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen, 1987).

[6] Steffen Recknagel, Evangelische Kirche im Dritten Reich-Deutsche Christen und Bekennende Kirche im Zwiespalt zwischen Anpassung und Widerstand (Norderstedt: GRIN Verlag, 2005) 5-6.

[7] Robert P Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emanuel Hirsch (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1985).

[8] Frank Jehle, Ever Against the Stream: The Politics of Karl Barth, 1906-1968 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B Eerdmans, 2002), 2, 89, 54-55.

[9] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Creation III 4 (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 309

[10] Ericksen, Theologians, 26-27, 154.

[11] Nolte, Fascism and Communism, 28.

[12] John J Johnson, “A New Testament Understanding of the Jewish Rejection of Jesus: Four Theologians on the Salvation of Israel,” (2000) 43(2) Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 229, at 237.

[13] Ibid., 237; Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of God II 2, 284.

[14] Recknagel, Evangelische Kirche, 6-7; see also Kevin MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents: Towards an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (Westport, CN: Praeger, 1998), 146-147, 160-161.

[15] Jehle, Ever Against the Stream, 13.

[16] Barth, CD III 4, 305; Ian A McFarland, “The Body of Christ: Rethinking a Classic Ecclesiological Model,” (2005) 7(3) International Journal of Systematic Theology 225, at 226.

[17] McFarland, “Rethinking,” 227; Karl Barth, God Here and Now (London: Routledge, 2003), 83; Joseph L Mangina, “Bearing the Marks of Jesus: The Church in the Economy of Salvation in Barth and Hauerwas,” (1999) 52(3) Scottish Journal of Theology 269, at 278, 302; Karl Barth, CD III 4, 291, 305; Joseph L Mangina, “The Stranger as Sacrament: Karl Barth and the Ethics of Ecclesial Practice,” (1999) 1(3) International Journal of Systematic Theology 322, at 333.

[18] Barth, CD III 4, 291, 294-295.