There has been a startling rise in political and religious catastrophism among the New Right in America during the last few years. This has taken different forms, including Michael Anton’s “Flight 93 Election,” Sohrab Ahmari’s “Against David Frenchism,” Rod Dreher’s Live Not By Lies, and Adrian Vermeule’s Common Good Conservatism. These authors share two things in common. First, they are certain that America has been broken by the American Left deliberately and by the Right accidentally or through stupidity. Second, it seems clear that they do not really like America all that much. Often they are not even nostalgic for an older America, but for something much older than 1776.
This is strikingly true of both Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism and Patrick Deneen’s Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. These two works have important similarities. Both authors are dissatisfied, even angry, with contemporary America. They see the political Left as an abomination, but the Right, especially neoconservatives for Deneen and “regime evangelicals” for Wolfe, can attract even more of their ire. Both reach back to pre-American sources for answers: sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformed Protestant thinkers for Wolfe and classical antiquity and medievals for Deneen. Both draw from a wide range of sources and thinkers, at times illegitimately. Both are nostalgic for elements of the past that may not have been as positive as they seem to think: Deneen for aristocracy and Wolfe for the sixteenth century. Both arguably mistitled their works. Wolfe’s book is really about nationalism, not Christian nationalism, because in his usage, “Christian” does not modify or limit “nationalism,” it only directs it toward a veneer of Christian societal ends. Moreover, Wolfe’s argument can only appeal to ultra-reformed Presbyterians. Baptists, much less Pentecostals, Orthodox, and Catholics, would not be very welcome in Wolfe’s regime. A better title might be “A Return to Calvin’s Geneva.” Deneen’s book could perhaps be called “Common Good Conservatism,” which is the primary positive focus of his book, or “Why Our Elites Must Be Replaced,” which is its primary activist thrust.
Most importantly, they are both focused on the need for obedience to the right sort of authority. They both complain about too much liberty and appear to share a general dislike for the Founding Fathers, except for a scattering of anti-federalists. Indeed, Deneen makes his dislike of our “Lockean” fathers repeatedly clear. Wolfe prefers John Winthrop’s narrow understanding of liberty and religious freedom. In this they share a great deal with the new American Right.
The best part of both works is their recognition of the real problems in contemporary America that make living as Christians today deeply problematic. They provide at least a partial critique of the argument that America is less Christian today than it was in the past and that the change is an improvement for Christians. This also suggests that the audience most likely to be open to their arguments is Christians who are already deeply concerned about the direction of society and unconvinced by the Russell Moore–style “winsome” arguments from the last few years. Both Christian nationalism and Catholic integralism present a rhetorical alternative to defeat that will appeal to a slice of American religious believers.
However, their alternatives are problematic—and problematic in distinct ways. Wolfe wants a type of Presbyterian nationalism: a very male-dominated, ethnically limited, theologically strict Christian nationalism. Deneen is less explicit, but he leaves the impression that where things really went off the rails was when Luther nailed the Ninety-Five Theses on the door. There is no hint of racial, ethnic, or misogynistic attitudes in Deneen’s work. There is, however, a nostalgia for a past (imagined?) time when elites cared for regular people and the lower class had more virtue. The rest of this review will first critique Wolfe’s work and then turn to Deneen’s before a brief conclusion.
Wolfe’s Christian Nationalism
Wolfe’s book sets out a clear goal: to show that Christian nationalism “is just, the ideal arrangement for Christians, and something worth pursuing with determination and resolve.” Wolfe is very detailed about his definitions, sometimes so much so that his point is easy to miss, but the most important aspect of his definition of Christian nationalism is that it is identical to his definition of nationalism—he just adds “Christian”: “Christian nationalism is a totality of national action, consisting of civil laws and social customs, conducted by a Christian nation as a Christian nation, in order to procure for itself both earthly and heavenly good in Christ” (Wolfe 2022, 9).
For Wolfe, everything done in the nation matters to the state, all the way down to a mother nursing a child. It is not clear whether he realizes how similar this is to Mussolini’s understanding of fascism: “All for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing and no one against the state” (Bosworth 2023). By itself this would be troubling enough, but as Wolfe makes clear, this Christian nation must be ruled by a Christian prince with the power to oversee and correct pastors and churches.
Because Wolfe’s book covers so many things, and because he covers them in such an eclectic way, I will briefly address the five main problems I see in it.
Racism
While it is important to not throw accusations like racism around lightly, it is also important not to dance around racist arguments. Readers should judge the evidence for themselves. However, Wolfe invites criticism on this issue. Even without the massive controversy over Wolfe’s good friend and podcast cohost Thomas Achord having a racist and misogynistic alter-Twitter account, Wolfe’s own work is enough to give the reader pause (Dreher 2022; A. Roberts 2022; Einselen 2022). He begins his first chapter with a quote from Samuel Francis, a racist viewed as a guiding light by many on the alt-right; moreover, the quote is taken from Vdare.com, a white supremacist site (Francis 2004). More importantly, a substantial portion of Wolfe’s book is devoted to demonstrating that nations are a pre-fall idea and thus by nature morally acceptable, and that nationality is not about creed or belief, but a shared sense of place, family, kin, and ethnicity. He repeatedly says that ethnicity does not have to mean race, but it is not clear what else it might mean.
In an excellent piece on the racial problems in Wolfe’s book, Paul Matzko goes through a litany of references to explicit racists from Wolfe’s book, though Wolfe’s writing fails to make that clear (Matzko 2023). In a typical example, Wolfe quotes a line from William Gayley Simpson, a Nietzschean believer in white supremacy, and then in a footnote, which fails to use Simpson’s name, Wolfe insists this is not a “white nationalist” argument because he is personally friends with people of different ancestry (Wolfe 2022, 118–19). Later, in the epilogue, he lists the two primary abuses against the American people by “elites” as the Obergefell decision and the Immigration Act of 1965 (Wolfe 2022, 443). He does not clarify in that section why immigration is so bad, but he does so in a footnote almost one-hundred pages earlier, where he quotes Enoch Powell arguing that over time, immigration can destroy a culture (Wolfe 2022, 348). Wolfe does not tell the reader anything about Powell other than that he was a British MP who was unjustly accused of being a racist. But as Matzko notes, Powell is well liked by the alt-right today because of his “Rivers of Blood” speech, where he lamented that immigration means that in “time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man,” attacked interracial marriage, and threatened violence (Matzko 2023). More disturbingly, Wolfe’s footnote of Powell is in a section where Wolfe justifies violent revolution in America today because open immigration policies are damaging our “cultural particularity.” To Wolfe, immigration is the bogeyman because new people coming to a country are not like “us,” and thus inherently destructive to a Christian nationalist regime. Left mostly unsaid, but clearly implied, is that most immigrants are also not white. It also must be noted that Wolfe’s X (formerly Twitter) account and other online writings are more direct with claims such as: “White evangelicals are the lone bulwark against moral insanity in America” (Wolfe 2023, 2022).
Sexism and Misogyny
It is difficult to miss the sexism and misogyny throughout Wolfe’s book. In one clear example, Wolfe uses an analogy to show how his Christian prince will limit and correct erring Christian pastors: “A husband does not ordinarily fulfill the duties of his wife, but he procures what is necessary for her to perform those duties, establishes the conditions for her to perform them well, approves her good performance, and corrects her when she performs her duties poorly. In doing these things, he has not performed the duties of a wife” (Wolfe 2022, 312). Wolfe then explains the rest of the analogy by saying that the Christian prince is like the husband, and the wife like the instituted church. The prince should correct “the lazy and erring pastor” and reform the ministry as needed. Leaving aside (for later) the theological and political problems of a Christian prince having authority to correct pastors, Wolfe’s view of a marriage is remarkably patriarchal.
This view of the husband ordering his wife around is explicit multiple times in the book and used by Wolfe to justify, among other things, that only men should have the vote, both in government and in vocational associations (Wolfe 2022, 73). This is only a sample of the gender issues in the book. In the deeply problematic epilogue, Wolfe has whole sections where he blames many contemporary problems on the “gynocracy,” which is his veiled slur for rule by women—by which he means rule by “women’s vices.” Wolfe makes similar claims on X, where he explicitly denies that women should have the vote, for example.
Rhetorical and Citation Issues
Third, there are both rhetorical and citation issues in the book. Wolfe has a kind of rhetorical tic that he goes back to repeatedly. He makes a strong claim. Then he references a variety of sources that support part of that claim, and without making it clear that he is doing so, he pivots to an even stronger claim that his sources do not support. For example, near the end of the book he talks about religious liberty in the American Founding. He has already spent a great deal of time seeking to clarify that religious liberty does not mean we all get to believe and act on what we want. Rather, it means that the conscience is free, but that the state can limit any activity that it determines might harm religion. Presbyterian nationalists can ban Baptist churches if they deem it necessary, for example (Wolfe 2022, 403). But then he quotes a variety of Founders and modern scholars on the importance of religion. The quotes are accurate. It is true that most Founders thought religion was necessary for civil happiness, even those opposed to religious establishment. But then Wolfe makes a rhetorical move that his evidence does not support: “At issue, then, is not whether the arrangements of civil society ought to promote religion but how it ought to promote religion” (Wolfe 2022, 414). However, most of the sources he just quoted would very much disagree with that conclusion. This problem is endemic in the book.
In addition, there are instances where Wolfe simply misreads or misapplies his sources. His chapter titled “Loving Your Nation” provides several examples of this in a handful of pages. One of Wolfe’s principal goals in this chapter is to discredit the idea of a creedal nation created around a set of agreed propositions, such as the way the Declaration of Independence creates the United States around shared beliefs rather than shared ethnic heritage or identical church affiliation. Instead, Wolfe maintains that nations are based on familiarity and connections to others.
To make this argument, Wolfe begins his chapter with a quote from C. S. Lewis to the effect that loving one’s country “means chiefly love for people who have a good deal in common with oneself,” and in that way it is like love of family (Wolfe 2022, 117). But he neglects to recognize that Lewis provided a stern reaction against abuse of this idea in The Four Loves, where Lewis noted that love of one’s country “becomes a demon when it becomes a god.” Lewis also noted that the belief that one’s country is always right can “shade off into that popular Racialism which Christianity and science equally forbid” (Lewis 1960, 22, 26).
Even Wolfe’s attempts to use classical texts to prove his point are flawed. He spends a lot of time appealing to Cicero as proof that Western civilization has always used ethnicity and place to hold nations together. But as Susannah Roberts notes, Wolfe badly misreads Cicero, largely because he does not recognize Cicero’s first name, nor realize that Cicero is not in fact native to Rome (S. Roberts 2022). Cicero does not love Rome because he was born there or because of kinship, but because of friendship and shared belief. Moreover, it is absurd to use Rome as an example of ethnic nationalism because it was the first cosmopolitan empire that allowed any ethnicity to earn citizenship. America, of course, is the second.
Nation and Ethnicity
This leads directly to the fourth problem with Wolfe: his view that a nation can only be of one ethnicity (Wolfe 2022, 135). This is difficult to work through, as Wolfe is not clear on what he means by either nation or ethnicity. You know it when you experience it. However, his primary focus is on blood relations. He argues that “Christian philosopher Johann Herder was correct in saying that the volk is a ‘family writ large’” (Wolfe 2022, 139). The reader could be forgiven for not realizing that Herder was one of the fathers of German nationalism and Romanticism who taught that God “‘has instructed each national group after its own manner,’ and that amalgamations were accordingly sinful. Man should not join what God has kept apart” (Dover 1952, 126). Wolfe is crafty in how he describes ethnicity. It sounds like ethnicity means race, but in a footnote he denies this (Wolfe 2022, 119). However, he is adamant that different ethnicities cannot live life together because we have a natural God-given inclination to live among people like us (Wolfe 2022, 148). In the context of the second claim, ethnicity clearly relates to race—he talks about ethnic majorities and ethnic minorities separating and creating political lines.
Wolfe’s view of the nation as one racial Volk would be troubling enough on its own. But the roots of it relate to his belief that what we naturally feel shows us what is good, because according to Wolfe, in the pre-fall world, our natural instincts were always good, and grace has reestablished that goodness. It is a fascinating, curiously romantic, “the heart cannot err” kind of argument. But it is not Christian. And it leads to deeply unchristian conclusions. For Wolfe, neither the nation nor presumably the church can be ethnically mixed.
The Christian Prince
The fifth problem in Wolfe’s book is his insistence that a Christian prince will lead the Christian nation. He is quite serious about this. He wants a “great renewal” in Christian nations and cannot conceive of it without “great men” (not great women!) to lead it. He looks for “a measured and theocratic Caesarism—the prince as a world-shaker for our time …[who] restores their will for the good” (Wolfe 2022, 279). Why do we need this Christian prince? Because he must function as a mediator to put the people’s will into practice. What is this Christian prince? Like any other prince—but Christian. He is responsible for national action and serves as the “pious father to the people” (Wolfe 2022, 293).
Wolfe sees the Christian prince as having the ability to correct errors of churches and pastors. He “has the power to call synods in order to resolve doctrinal conflicts and to moderate the proceeds. Following the proceedings, he can confirm or deny their theological judgments” (Wolfe 2022, 313). Wolfe insists that the prince does not control the church, but he asserts that the prince “can eliminate error” because no error is part of the true church (Wolfe 2022, 316–17). It is a clever way to deny that his prince has power over the church—to define anything the prince does not like as outside the “true church.” It is not even quite accurate to refer to Wolfe’s vision as Constantinian, because he would give the Christian prince even more power than Constantine claimed. His Christian prince is a hybrid king-pope.
Final Thoughts
There are numerous other concerns with Wolfe’s book. In a 475-page book on Christian nationalism, he almost never quotes Scripture. Baptists, Pentecostals, and Catholics should be terrified of Wolfe’s vision, as they have no place in it. His epilogue is a forty-page rant with complaints about things as varied as “the gynocracy,” dad bods, low testosterone, women, progress, and the state. Wolfe argues that the situation in America right now justifies a violent revolt by Christians against the state and the enforcing of a Christian nation on a non-Christian majority (Wolfe 2022, 345–47). But I have focused on these five problems because they are endemic to his work and fatally injurious to the project of Christian nationalism.
Deneen’s Regime Change
Deneen is quite different from Wolfe. There is not a shred of reason to see anything in his work as racist or sexist, for example, and he is certainly not Presbyterian. But he has a similar disdain for the elites that allegedly run our lives and violate local norms and beliefs. As a professor at a small college in western Pennsylvania, I am familiar with the kind of disdain for “flyover country” that some in our cultural, financial, and political capitals have. However, reading Deneen complain about elites is an odd phenomenon. Deneen has spent his life in elite institutions: PhD from Rutgers; federal government work; professor at Princeton, Georgetown, and now Notre Dame; fellowships at Princeton and the University of Virginia. He is one of the elites. And yet, in general, Regime Change reads like it was written by someone who is desperate “to be in the room where it happens” and thinks that whatever decisions are made must be unjust because people that agree with him were not part of the process.
That said, by far the strongest part of the work is his critique of American elites. He notes that elite education first destroys traditional guardrails by redefining them as oppression and then teaches elites to “navigate a world without any guardrails” (Deneen 2023, 8). College provides a substantial safety net for elite students to learn this—sex, drugs, identity changes—all without consequences. However, these now-obsolete guardrails have been removed from the rest of society as well, but there is no safety net for ordinary people. Deneen ably summarizes a variety of works in recent years that have demonstrated the social destruction and disintegration of classes as well as the elite disdain, on the Left and Right, for ordinary people. The result is that the working class and elites hate each other, perhaps more today than ever, and seek to destroy each other (Deneen 2023, 21). Much of this rings true. Early in the book Deneen focuses on our managerial and college-educated elite who rule so poorly over so much of our lives. The Iraq conflict, the 2008 financial crisis, and COVID-19 all feature prominently, and Deneen recognizes how the effects of this failure of leadership falls hardest on those least able to cope. He also goes into depth about the problems of both post–World War II conservatism and progressivism. These critiques are largely valid.
However, Regime Change essentially assumes the conclusions of Deneen’s previous book, Why Liberalism Failed, and so the problems in that book are also in this one. Deneen’s previous book argued that the problems of liberalism today were baked into the American Founding. He makes this argument in a few pages in the penultimate chapter of the book, but his conclusions from it can be seen throughout Why Liberalism Failed. In Deneen’s view the American Founding and early twentieth-century progressives were not at odds, but instead united in a shared commitment to liberalism. To demonstrate this, he argued that James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, officially supported democracy even as they created antidemocratic or republican forms of government. But as many reviewers noted at the time, there were numerous problems with Deneen’s argument.
In Regime Change Deneen roots the causes of our contemporary problems in the beginnings of the Enlightenment with the triple evils of classical liberalism, progressivism, and capitalism. Indeed, it is hard to discern who Deneen dislikes more: John Locke, John Stuart Mill, or Adam Smith. The rot today is not perversion of the system, but latent in the system. But if so, why did it take so long to flower? Deneen is fond of quoting Tocqueville as an authority. But Tocqueville visited America almost fifty years after the Founding and was constantly struck by the difference between American democracy and aristocratic France in terms of both virtue and civic practice. Tocqueville saw many positive elements in mid-nineteenth century America. How so, if it was a Lockean hellscape? A better answer is that the Founding was not purely Lockean (it is also worth noting that many academics would disagree with Deneen’s reading of Locke). Far from abandoning Christian virtue or a conception of limited liberty, the Founders repeatedly noted that virtue was a necessary precondition for liberty.
Deneen is overly nostalgic for a vision of a pre-Enlightenment past when an enlightened aristocracy cared for the poor working-class peasants and government aimed for a blended society with a truly mixed constitution where the elites and poor lived in a kind of harmony. Deneen repeatedly says that the elites in America run too much of society, wrongly told us what to do during the COVID-19 pandemic, have too much wealth, and that universities accelerate this problem through their focus on progress and social change (Deneen 2023, 121–22). He contrasts this by referencing Aristotle regularly to show how the ancient Greeks preferred a mixed constitution. It is difficult to know how seriously to take this. One can entirely agree with Deneen about the problems of wealth inequality and an overbearing administrative state and simultaneously be deeply skeptical that Athens, which was filled with slaves and suffered from frequent civil conflict, was a better system.
However, the greatest difficulty with Deneen’s argument is the title of the book and the means he justifies to accomplish his ends. For example, the further Deneen goes in his story of “common good conservatism,” the more Marxist he sounds. This impression is solidified by the title of his concluding section, “What Is to Be Done?,” which he takes from Lenin, apparently unironically. In his pamphlet of that title, Lenin argued that the revolution will never come about from the proletariat alone. They needed elites to be dedicated revolutionaries to lead them to the promised land. Deneen proposes something similar: “The conscious and intentional development of a new elite” to galvanize the working class to a kind of Trumpian politics without the narcissism of Donald Trump. He does not want to eradicate elite power. He wants a better kind of elite, a noble aristocracy that will “act on behalf of the common good” (Deneen 2023, 152, 155).
How will this unlikely vision come about? Through acts of raw power by actors for common good conservatism that will shatter and remake the elite consensus. They must use Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends. Deneen quotes Machiavelli specifically on the need to use mobs to shout abuse at the senate, run through the streets, and terrify the population of Rome (Deneen 2023, 165). It is shocking how similar this vision is to the events of January 6, 2021. But these means are essential because only “powerful political resistance by the populace against the natural advantages of the elite” can create a mixed constitution to deliver the common good (Deneen 2023, 167).
Deneen then details what this new common good would look like. It is a long and conflicting wish list that includes reducing the size of Washington, DC; a national service requirement; taxes on university endowments; the evils of the suburbs; reducing immigration; and the need for a family czar that learns from what Hungary is doing well (Deneen 2023, 171–85). Deneen cites Viktor Orbán, the controversial leader of Hungary, as a key example of an elitist working for the working class. Deneen does not quite come out and say it, but it seems like Orbán is the closest contemporary model of Deneen’s desire for a leader to use Machiavellian means for Aristotelian ends in practice. But the results in Hungary are frequently oversold. While Orbán regularly praises Hungary’s “Christian culture,” only 12 percent of Hungarians regularly attend church, and Hungary’s birth and marriage rates are far lower than America’s.
The difficulty for Deneen is that he is telling a 250-page just-so story, as Rudyard Kipling once called his fable of how a giraffe got its spots. And while just-so stories are perfect for reading to small children, they are less successful in accurately explaining a causal relationship in a train of philosophical ideas over three-hundred years. Really, Deneen is telling two just-so stories. One is about how the Enlightenment ruined us from the beginning. The other is about how Machiavellian means and a better elite can lead to an Aristotelian mixed constitution.
Finally, toward the end of the book Deneen spends a bit of time explicating 1 Corinthians 12 and 13. Indeed, the Roman Catholic Deneen deals in far greater seriousness with Scripture in his work than the Presbyterian Wolfe does in his. However, as Peter Leithart has noted, when Paul in Corinthians is calling for the people to use their gifts for each other in an integrated community, he is not talking about doing so as a nation, but as a church (Leithart 2023). Thus, despite his greater attention to Scripture, Deneen, like Wolfe, confuses and combines the spheres of church and state.
Conclusion
This points to one of the four common factors in Wolfe’s and Deneen’s books. First, both want the state to fulfill a role in bringing about community and harmony that only the church can really accomplish. Second, neither likes America or democracy all that much. Third, both hate “meritocratic elites” but simultaneously think the only solution is to have the “right sorts” of elites in charge instead. Finally, both believe that violent means are justified to remake society. Wolfe is much more direct about this as he argues that a violent revolution is already legitimate because of the evils of the American state. Deneen is more veiled, but it is hard to argue for Machiavellian means without being willing to countenance violence.
That is a genuinely terrifying conclusion, precisely because Wolfe’s and Deneen’s arguments are most likely to appeal to the type of Christian that believes America is on a terminal downward decline, is desperately looking for a solution to the problem, and believes the time for action is now.