From: A Devout Evangelical and Regular VDARE Reader [Email him]
This Easter weekend, I gave a lot of thought to Kevin Sullivan’s recent review of Jan Adrian Schlebusch’s new book on the war between Christianity and the left. In talking about the article with a politically active friend, I realized why I’m not entirely on the same page with many Christians among the Dissident Right.
Sullivan writes that the author shows that ”authentic Christianity is genuinely right-wing, a bulwark of tradition, and incompatible not only with Marxism and its variants but also even (he argues) with classical liberalism.”
That may be true for Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, but I don’t think that quite accurately describes the evangelicalism that emerged with the Protestant Reformation, rallies around the doctrine of Sola Scriptura, and seeks to conform only to the teachings found within the New Testament.
Is Christianity incompatible with that rival religion called Marxism? Yes, absolutely.
But must we say the same about classical liberalism? I believe there’s no conflict so long as revelation remains supreme: We can still use reason as a very valuable tool and even believe that revelation never contradicts reason while affirming that revelation can transcend reason, as when we struggle to comprehend doctrines like the Incarnation and the Trinity.
We generally should follow tradition, what G. K. Chesterton famously called the ”democracy of the dead,” but beginning in Mark 7:6, Christ makes it very clear that merely human tradition is always secondary to God’s word and should be scrapped when the two are in conflict.
And I would even say that Jesus Christ confounds our political categories of right-wing and left-wing: as evangelical theologian John Stott points out, Jesus was a reactionary in how He affirmed the lasting authority of God’s word but a radical in how He brought out its broad and deep implications.
All that said, I do believe that nationalism is compatible with Christianity and may even be required by Christianity.
In that passage in Mark, it was ”Honor your parents” that Jesus confirmed as God’s commandment. I think the command implies that we should also honor our grandparents and get along with our brothers, and from there we can derive the moral obligation to take pride in our forefathers and to care for our kinfolk, so long as we ALSO show love to all our neighbors, as Jesus taught us with the story of the Good Samaritan.
I do appreciate the article, but I think different Christian denominations have different roads that reach the same conclusion about the need to fight for our nation and fight against the radicals who would destroy it.
