YOU CAN'T BE BOTH cHRISTIAN AND nATIONALIST:

The following is a transcript of Reactionary Minds' interview with Paul Matzko. Matzko, an evangelical, is a research fellow at the Cato Institute. He is also a historian of the American Right, and the author of The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement. The transcript has been lightly edited for flow and clarity. [...]

Aaron Ross Powell: Let's start by unpacking the term Christian Nationalism. What in this context do we mean by Christian?

Paul Matzko: This is a definitional issue. If you say someone's a Christian Nationalist, most of the time they're going to say, "Well, no, I don't think I am." Because it's a bit of a loaded term. It's important that we define what we mean when we discuss it, how people who are self-identified Christian Nationalists, what they mean by using the term. What folks who we would say espouse Christian Nationalist views, even though they wouldn't call themselves Christian Nationalists, mean by the term.

The funny thing about Christian Nationalism, the two terms there, it's a bit like the old saw about the Holy Roman Empire being neither holy nor Roman, nor much of an empire. Christian Nationalism is neither particularly Christian in terms of its, I guess you'd say, fidelity to historic Christian orthodoxy, nor is it all that effectively nationalist when it comes down to it.

I think of it as a response to a particular moment in American history. But it is a response to this moment by anxious Christians that echoes previous moments in U.S. history when previous generations of Christians have espoused similar views, just cloaked in different language with different targets, for their anxiety. It's both new in the sense that it reflects this particular moment, but also very old in that you can find strains of what I guess today we would call Christian Nationalism, though it's a relatively recent term, all the way back through American history.

Aaron: What is this moment then?

Paul: [...] I think the key to note is that episodes of Christian Nationalism in American history, and I can tell you more about the long history of this, tend to correspond with feelings of anxiety and are ultimately rooted in cultural fear that some status or place or significance is being lost and might never return. And it ultimately tends to fuel paranoid political activism, which is what we're seeing right now and which we are labeling Christian Nationalism.

Aaron: How does Trump fit into that then? This goes back, I think, to my initial question of what we mean by Christian because one of the odd things that we've seen is an embrace of a man who arguably does not embody Christian values. He seems to be a consummate sinner and does not seem to know anything. When I grew up, there were always these television preachers you'd flip across when the Saturday morning cartoons had ended and you still just didn't want to get up from the TV. So you're flipping channels, and there'd be these guys. One of their characteristics was, as bizarre as they were, they had basically memorized the Bible and could quote all these things.

Trump doesn't have that either. He doesn't know anything, and his values run very counter to my understanding of the values Christ stood for. And yet he's embraced, which seems like this weird response to a lack of influence, because if what you're imagining is happening is that Christian values are no longer central to American life, but now you're embracing as the guy who's going to represent you and bringing them back, someone who is even more in opposition to Christian values than most of those "nones" or secular humanists seem to be.

Paul: Well, it's true. There is an irony or hypocrisy, I suppose, depending on how you view it there. That is one of the reasons why quite a few, maybe I should put #NotAllChristians, or #NotAllEvangelicals, or #NotAllConservativeChristians, because there are significant numbers who were anti-Trump for precisely the reasons you mentioned. They said, "Look, a twice-divorced notorious liar and a grifter is not a fitting representative of Christian interests in politics." They were the minority opinion. After all, at the end of the day, about 80% of self-described Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in 2016, and a similar number in 2020. It's definitely the minority opinion.

As far as why it makes sense though, despite that difference is, again, I think you have to see this as rooted in fear. When you're afraid, there is little you wouldn't do. The way this gets justified, and so I don't want to overemphasize the justifications for it because I suspect that even if these justifications weren't invented, other justifications would've been invented. These are ex-post facto, how do we justify the results that we wanted?

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