“Exercise your dominion, O Lord, over this nation”
With speech titles like Professor Glenn Moots’ “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Christian Nationalism,” NatCon isn’t shy about its central demand that America is or should become a ‘Christian nation’ of some sort.
In his speech at NatCon III, Hazony calls upon “intellectuals, politicians, businessmen [and] anybody who is a public figure” to
Missouri Senator Josh Hawley charms the crowd with proclamations like “We are a revolutionary nation precisely because we are the heirs of the revolution of the Bible…Without the Bible, there is no America.”
What exactly it means for public life to, as the NatCon statement of principles puts it, be “rooted in Christianity and its moral vision,” is left deliberately vague and open-ended in a bid to preserve NatCon’s elastic, big-tent coalition. Rather than advance specific policy agendas, many of the more heady speakers at NatCon III prefer to sing odes to pre-modern traditions of Christian political thought; to laud the supposedly central role played by Christianity in America’s founding; or to meditate on either the nature of ‘public Christian virtue’ or the proper relation between church and state in a post-liberal America.
Some simply seek to make the case that, as former Trump administration official William Wolfe puts it, contemporary Christian denominations should stop “content[ing] ourselves to a silo of prophetic witness” outside the halls of power, and should “roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty, and take control of things for the sake of the good of our citizens.”
Some call for the adoption of a robust ‘cultural Christianity’ where Christian symbols, narratives and ‘values’ will dominate public life—a Christian nationalism that stresses the primacy of “the symbolic dimension of politics,” as Brad Littlejohn puts it, “which is usually upstream from actual legal change.”