(REVIEW) How big a threat is “Christian nationalism?” Fear of Donald Trump increased the revenues of big media companies in 2016, and fear of Christian nationalism in 2024 is helping the sale of books screaming about it.

Mark David Hall’s “Who’s Afraid of Christian Nationalism?” (Fidelis, 2024) is an even-tempered, even-handed analysis that examines the hype from both sides. Hall’s writing is succinct and often witty. He notes that “Don Quixote mistakenly attacked windmills that he believed were evil giants, but that does not mean that evil giants don’t exist.”

He writes that Paul, Augustine and Martin Luther might object to “Trump’s post-presidential claim that ‘nobody has done more for Christianity or for evangelicals or for religion itself than I have,' but of course they wouldn’t, as those men at least attempted to practice the Christian virtue of humility.” 

Andrew Whitehead’s “American Idolatry” (Brazos, 2023) has a semi-accurate subtitle: “How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church.” Whitehead’s spectrum, though, has Christian nationalists at the right end wearing deeply tinted glasses, while Americans at stage left have glasses that are “relatively clear.” He doesn’t acknowledge that those at both extremes have extremely dark glasses. Whitehead complains about the right’s “self-interested or fearful messages from the pulpit” but doesn’t acknowledge the left’s similar scary talk from the podium. Both sides, he should say, embrace “us-versus-them thinking” and “nostalgia for the ‘good old days’” — the right likes the 1950s, the left the 1960s.

In “Beyond Immanence” (Eerdmans, 2023) father and son Alan J. and Andrew B. Torrance write about the theological vision of Soren Kierkegaard and one of his spiritual descendants, Karl Barth. The Torrances describe how “Kierkegaard believed that the Danish Church has blurred the distinction between ‘Christianity’ and Danish Society.” They quote Kierkegaard’s description of an “age of disintegration” in which Christianity had become “more and more domesticated, until finally it is not Christianity at all, [but] identical with the world.”

Two centuries ago, this culture-aping was irritating to Kierkegaard and fatal to many individual Danes in the grip of “the sickness unto death” that made them prisoners of their culture and reduced them to “the state of deepest spiritual wretchedness.” But the virulent form of such tribalism became fully clear only with the rise of Adolf Hitler, as the ”Confessing Church” of faithful German Christians noted when publishing in 1934 the Barth-drafted Barmen Declaration.

Its first thesis described Christ as the One “whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death. We reject the false doctrine that the Church could and should recognize as a source of its proclamation, beyond and besides this one Word of God, yet other events, powers, historic figures and truths as God’s revelation.” Hitler-supporting German theologians responded with the “Ansbach Counsel” that linked “the revelation of God” with “the natural orders under which we are subjugated, such as family, Volk, race (for example, blood relationship).”

If that was not clear enough, that statement two paragraphs later proclaimed, “We as believing Christians thank the Lord God that he has given to our people in its time of need the Fuhrer as a ‘pious and faithful sovereign.’” The statement — signed by leading Lutheran scholars — blessed “the National Socialist system of government, good rule, a government with ‘discipline and honor.’ … We are responsible before God to assist the work of the Fuhrer in our calling and in our station of life.” The blood of millions was on their hands.

“Digital Liturgies” by Samuel James (Crossway, 2023) is a thoughtful look at how internet power creates the illusion that we can become godlike creators of our own lonely planets. Particularly useful is the chapter on pornography, which has often driven technological advance — and Christian writers typically don’t want to face it. Politicians talk of ways to block the prying eyes of children, but porn is prying open the brains of millions of adults in a way that may decrease crisis pregnancies but also decreases marriage and community. AI pornography may reduce Thespian employment but move consumers even further from reality.

“Just Discipleship” by Michael Rhodes (IVP, 2023) well exegetes Scriptural passages about helping the poor and shows how “justice without wisdom is powerless, wisdom without justice is predatory.” Particularly intriguing is his look at Chapter 47 of Genesis, where Joseph protects his own extended family but, in the process of saving Egyptians from starvation, grabs for his boss first their money, then their livestock, then their land, and then their own freedom: “Only twelve verses after Joseph provides for his family’s ‘little ones’ by giving them land grants in the ‘best of the land’ of Egypt, Joseph provides for Egyptian ‘little ones’ by taking the land from their parents.”

In chapter one of Exodus, a future pharaoh who “did not know Joseph” enslaves the Hebrews, but was that a popular move among Egyptians because they forgot Joseph’s life-saving and remembered that he was instrumental in enslaving their ancestors?

Marvin Olasky is chairman of the Zenger House Foundation, which annually awards prizes for biblically objective journalism.