WHAT COMMUNISTS?:

Joshua Abbotoy recently pondered in First Things whether a "Protestant Franco" is inevitable for the United States. The managing director of New Founding and Executive Director of the American Reformer, Abbotoy is no marginal figure but an important voice who shows that Christian Nationalism is growing within the traditional Protestant intellectual world. His argument is simple: republican conditions in the United States are in worse shape than they were even during the years leading up to the American Civil War. Under these conditions, fidelity to the Constitution spells doom for believers surrounded by existential threats. In the event these threats worsen (and at the very least, there is no reason to think they will recede), the only alternative is a "Protestant Franco" to return the nation to order. Such a notion might strike the reader as very strange. For the unfamiliar, a "Protestant Franco" is a dictator who serves as an avenging strongman who punishes liberals for their injustice and restores a Christian order directly through his personal rule.

This argument, of course, is very bad, but it is useful for revealing the frame of mind in which Christian Nationalists and other illiberal religious thinkers perceive the world.

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