Christian Nationalism is the Prosperity Gospel for Politics | The David Knight Show

A speech that Josh Hawley gave at the Heritage Foundation. They had something they called the National Conservative Conference, NatCon. NatCon. And it was about Christian nationalism. And, you know, when I look at it, are we trying to use Christianity, or are we fighting against the efforts to—are we trying to use Christianity to get what we want? In other words, it’s kind of a politicized, prosperity gospel, right? Well, you know, it works really good if we have a Christian society. We’ve had a lot of people who said that. Most recently we’ve had Richard Dawkins who said that.

He said, yeah, you know, I would definitely, as they’re filling up the country with Muslims, he said, I would pick Christianity any day of the year, you know, any day of the week, or whatever, over Islam. And he goes, I really like the church cathedrals and the Christmas stuff and all the rest of the stuff. He likes a lot of things. The fruit of Christianity, by the way, I like the tree, you know, as Doug Wilson pointed out. He says, yeah, I love those apples, but I don’t like that orchard. Let’s cut down those trees.

It really—you know, you can’t have the fruit of Christianity without the root of Christianity, which is Christ. You can’t have the fruit of Christianity if you make this all about materialism and you don’t have the supernatural power that is behind it for the Christians. And so like Dawkins, you’ve got a lot of people who, from a political standpoint, you know, just like you’ve got Joel Austin out there telling people, well, you give me a lot of money and God’s going to give you back even more money, right? The prosperity gospel.

It makes it all about material, money, and wealth and, you know, the typical American stuff about ease and comfort and affluence and that type of thing. And then you’ve got the politicians like Josh Hawley, who look at this and say, well, we would like to have an orderly society where everybody is behaving nicely and cooperating together and all that kind of stuff, so I’d like to have that fruit. And so let’s make that, you know, the thing that we’re going to strive for. And throughout this long speech that they reprinted, that’s really what he’s talking about.

He’s talking about how wonderful it is to live in a society where people are faithfully following Christ and his guidelines, but he doesn’t want to talk about God in it. And so it really is a political version of the prosperity gospel that you see from people like Joel Austin. And he begins talking about it by talking about Augustine and his city of God. I’ve mentioned that briefly at other times. As Rome was destroyed, Augustine was in North Africa, and he said, you know, and a lot of people were saying, well, that’s it, you know, Rome got soft because of all these Christians, and look at what’s happened now.

It’s just collapsed in and of itself. It’s Christianity is the fault. And so he said, no, that’s not the case. And so he wrote the city of God, and he contrasted the city of God with the city of man. He said, in the city of man, you’re going to have people who are going to be focused on love of self. Are we like that? They’re going to have a lot of division and conflict. They’re going to have temporal concerns. They’re going to be focused on here and now, and they’re going to have contempt for God.

So do we sound like the city on the hill, the shining city on the hill, or do we sound like the city of man? When you look at those four things there, I think we check all of those boxes. And he gets it wrong because he says, you know, the city of man, these problems that we have of society, they come from human desires, from human reason, the destructive nature of ambition, how we pursue power. He said, while Augustine said all nations are constituted by what they love, his philosophizing actually described an entirely new idea of a nation unknown to the ancient world, a new kind of nationalism, if you like, a Christian nationalism organized around Christian ideals, a nationalism driven not by conquest, but by common purpose, united not by fear, but by common love, a nation made not for the rich or for the strong, but for the poor and spirit, for the common man.

Where’s Christ in that? You notice he doesn’t talk about it throughout this. Instead, we are a nation that is forged from Augustine’s vision. He said, some people will say, I’m calling America a Christian nation, and so I am. And some will say, I’m advocating for Christian nationalism, and so I do. Is there any other kind that is worth having? The truth is, he said, Christian nationalism is not a threat to American democracy. Christian nationalism founded American democracy, and it is the best form of democracy yet devised by men, the most just, the most free, the most humane, praiseworthy, and so forth.

Everything that he is focused on is secular. It’s just that instead of, you know, your money or your house or your new car or whatever leads you to the prosperity gospel, what he’s looking at is a political affluenza, political peace and that type of thing. Nowhere does he talk about how lives were changed. Nowhere. Yeah, the city of man, the city of God said, Augustine, are going to be intertwined. They’re not going to be separated until judgment. The wheat will grow up amongst the tares. But we have to ask ourselves what we personally are rooted in.

Is it in politics? Is it in this world? Or is it in Christ? Thank you for joining us. Have a good day. Thank you for joining us for today’s episode of the David Knight Show. Please do your part and try not to spread it. Financial support or simply telling others about the show causes this dangerous information to spread farther. People have to trust me. I mean, trust the science. Wear your mask. Take your vaccine. Don’t ask questions. Using free speech to free minds. It’s the David Knight Show. [tr:trw].

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