What Do Christian Nationalists Actually Want?

Matthew Kaemingk: Alright, friends, welcome back to another episode of Zealots at the Gate. Today we are talking about nationalism, and more particularly Christian nationalism. And we have on our show actually someone who declares himself to be a Christian nationalist. And we want to get into this discussion about—you know, Shadi and I are very fascinated with these questions of what makes a nation. What does it mean to love your nation? And what role does the state play in nation-making or nation-protecting? There’s a lot of debates today in America about national identity and about national greatness. And what does it mean to politically love and protect your nation?

So we’re interested in exploring how our guest today thinks about nationhood and the relationship between Christianity, politics, and the production of national greatness. And as pluralists, you know, Shadi and I are thinking about the religious and cultural diversity of this country. And our guest has expressed real and fervent concerns about that religious and cultural diversity. And so we want to really dig into that.

So without further ado, let me just introduce our guest. William Wolfe is the founder and executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership. He has extensive experience serving in the political realm in Washington, DC, but also extensive experience serving in the church, and is active within the Southern Baptist Convention.

And William, first of all, thank you so much for coming on. You have defined nationalism and Christian nationalism in multiple different venues, and we’ll include a couple of notes, a couple of links to some of your articles. But I’m wondering if we can start just by talking—well, first of all, why don’t we just start with your own definition of Christian nationalism? That might be nice. I myself am quite frustrated with what I regard to be very sloppy definitions of the term “Christian nationalism,” often from outsiders. And so it might be good to get just a quick introduction from you in terms of how you would define nationalism first, and then how you would define Christian nationalism. So yeah, so anyways, thank you for coming on. And how would you define those two terms?

William Wolfe: Okay, great. Good to be here. I see we’re going straight to definitional work. David Brooks gotta talk about his own faith journey, but we’ll go—we’ll go right into definitions here.

Matthew Kaemingk: Well, I want to make sure we’re clear.

William Wolfe: Yeah. So look, I mean, I think a lot of people, like, pretend like this isn’t something that—the concept of nationalism isn’t something that has been discussed and written about by a variety of different scholars in the academic realm. It’s like it’s not something that’s been, you know, studied and debated and defined, as if it’s some sort of like nebulous thing that can’t be nailed down.

So I have a definition I like to use. This is from the Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism. I love those little books. I know you guys are academics—those little Oxford handbooks. We had hundreds of them at the library at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. You know, they’re not the deepest dive on things, but they’re good overview. So in that one, editor John Breuilly provides what I think is a fantastic definition, one that I would hold to, and this is how he defines it. So I’m going to make sure to read these definitions so we get them tight and right here. John says:

We can succinctly define the political ideology of nationalism as one which claims that there exists a unique nation, that this nation has special value and therefore right to existence and recognition, and that to secure this right, the nation must possess autonomy, often understood as a sovereign nation-state.

And he also adds—and I think this is really interesting and helpful—he says:

Of all modern political ideologies, nationalism appears to be the most through and through historical.

And so I think what he means by that is, like, the basic feature or tenet of nationalism just sort of arises in the course of history: that there are unique nations composed of unique and individual people that seek to have sovereignty and self-determination, a right to existence and recognition on the global stage, or in a sort of territorial and geographically limited areal stage. And so I think it’s sort of an organic and natural unit of political organization. And I don’t think that that’s crazy. I mean, I think that’s a pretty good definition: unique nation-states that have the right to sovereignty and self-determination.

Matthew Kaemingk: Nice. Okay. Now the Christian part of it.

William Wolfe: Yeah. And so on the Christian part of it, I mean, there’s all sorts of different nation-states out there, right? There, like, in India you essentially have a Hindu nation-state. You have plenty of Islamic nation-states. And for centuries we had Christian nation-states, fundamentally in Europe and also in America.

And so in terms of a definition of Christian nationalism that I like to use, this comes from another Baptist, Paul Miller, who would not be on my side of things, who is a pluralist, who is, I’d say, quite frankly, pretty liberal, despite being a conservative Baptist. And so in his book, Against Christian Nationalism, he has this definition here. I mean, essentially, Miller says that Christian nationalism is:

The idea that America is a unique nation, that it’s defined by Christianity, and that we should want to see our government help ensure that it stays that way.

I mean, I didn’t want to scroll too long there. I mean, Miller doesn’t like that, and then spends a whole book saying that’s a bad thing, that it’s illiberal. And I just read that definition and say, yeah, that sounds historical and good, actually.

Matthew Kaemingk: Okay. So now we got some terms down. Let’s talk about your story. Let’s talk about how you came to this position and sort of, you know, as you think back as a high schooler, how you might have thought about these things, and a college student, how you might have thought of these things. Can you kind of walk us through where you began and sort of the key shifts in the road that brought you here?

William Wolfe: Sure. We’re going to go back to high school. I’ve always been, like, a patriot. It’s been, like, a pretty just sort of instinctual thing for me. I love my parents, wonderful Christian parents. My dad’s probably a little bit more and has historically been on, like, sort of like the libertarian side of things. Maybe that’s a good word to use for him.

I love my—you know, my dad would tell us to do things like, when we were kids, like, don’t say the Pledge of Allegiance, because when we say “with liberty and justice for all,” it actually isn’t true, because it doesn’t extend to the unborn. So it’s like, I appreciate those, like, high, like very, like, Christian-focused elements. My dad is definitely one of those guys where it’s like the Christian—his Christian faith, he saw often in contradiction to features of, like, American patriotism and nationalism. Not unlike the pluralistic or liberal side of things, but particularly on the Christian side of things: we don’t actually provide liberty and justice for all because we slaughter the unborn in the womb in America.

So I was always a little bit more patriotic than my dad. In high school, I can vividly remember my friends here outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, and them talking about how their dads’ blue-collar businesses—construction, upholstery, other industries—had a very hard time competing with illegal labour. And this is in the early 2000s. There was a joke—I live in Monroe, North Carolina—and there was a joke that at the border there was a sign pointing illegals to Monroe, North Carolina. That’s how big of an illegal population we are already dealing with twenty-plus years ago.

So growing up in North Carolina, I had this already sort of baked-in concern of the impacts of things like illegal immigration to our country and its dissolution on our society. And also, coming from North Carolina, the impact of global trade agreements like NAFTA and things like that, hollowing out our textile industries and other things here. So I always had those with me.

In college, I went to Covenant College, the PCA college, and I was a history major. And I was just kind of blown away by just the general sort of anti-American sentiment I would often encounter in my classes there. I had a British professor for my global twentieth-century global trends class that was so constantly just anti-American. And I was constantly arguing with her. At one point, she was like, “Do you want just, like, twenty minutes to make your case for, like, why you love America in this class?” And so I’ve always just sort of had those features with me.

I became a Christian after college, of a pretty radical conversion story. I lost my younger brother when I was twenty-two and he was fifteen, in a tragic accident—one of my younger brothers. And through the death of Evan, the Lord really used that to get a hold of me. I met a Baptist pastor in Washington, DC, Mark Dever, who shared the gospel with me really at sort of, like, rock bottom. And so it was then that I actually believed, that I finally repented of my sin and became a Christian, truly born again in the evangelical sense.

And I moved to Washington, DC, to go to that church, Capitol Hill Baptist. And from there, I got jobs working in politics. So I moved to DC for a church, and sort of the political career kind of followed after that.

But all through that time—and I’ll try to wrap it up with this—like, you know, again, then I worked for a few members of Congress, including Virginia Foxx from North Carolina, as a legislative correspondent answering constituent mail. And let me just remind all your listeners that nobody writes in letters to their members of Congress if they’re happy. They only do it if they’re angry, right? And so my whole job was answering these angry letters. And what were the main things these people wrote in about? Illegal immigration, trade, the loss of American identity. Also, this was in the run-up to Obergefell. That was another big issue too.

Then I worked for Dave Brat, who ran an incredible surprise upset primary and picked off Eric Cantor, the number two in the House Republicans at the time. What did Dave run on? Pro-American immigration restriction, pro-American trade deals. And then shortly after Dave Brat hit the scene, Donald Trump ran on the same thing at the national level.

And I was a very early Trump adopter, because I was pretty sick of the fecklessness of the GOP in terms of selling out our country, not defending Americans, the heartland, these interests. So I was an early Trump supporter, and I was pretty dismayed at how the leading evangelical spokespeople for conservative Christians, particularly Southern Baptists, someone like Russell Moore—I just found them to be deeply unserious in their approach to an engagement with somebody like Donald Trump. Just a complete refusal to understand why Trump had the support that he did. And so that sort of planted a seed in me in terms of, like, we need better evangelical Christian representatives in politics, which after I worked in the Trump administration led me to go into seminary and kind of doing what I’m doing now.

Shadi Hamid: So on the question of Donald Trump, you’re right that at least early on, a lot of evangelical leaders were skeptical. I mean, I would say perhaps for some good reason, that Trump is probably the most secular, irreligious president in American history. And, you know, I think it’s fair to say he doesn’t necessarily model Christian attributes or Christ-like behaviour. How would you respond to that concern that in terms of a role model for the country, in terms of the person who sets the tone for how we should behave through his own behaviour, that he’s someone who doesn’t seem particularly Christian himself? Say more about where you come out on that.

William Wolfe: Yeah, I mean, this is the debate that we’ve been having sort of ad nauseam for ten-plus years about Donald Trump in the Christian evangelical space, right? And so there’s a lot of different ways you can go about this.

First, I think you fundamentally want to judge political actors, political individuals, representatives, off of their policies. And so actually, I would say that Donald Trump’s policies have been very pro-Christian, demonstrably things that Christians would want, regardless of what he said on camera or what he’s done in his personal life. I mean, pretty remarkable, actually, the whole sort of—I don’t know—fable of Donald Trump, that this New York billionaire playboy has had sort of more, like, gut and determination to push pro-Christian policies across the line than we ever got from somebody like Bush, that we would have ever had, I think, from somebody like Romney. You know, like following through on the promise to appoint Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, and particularly sticking with Kavanaugh through that one in particular. I mean, I just don’t see standard-issue GOP guys, who you would probably say display more Christian virtues in their personal life, doing things like that.

So on the policy, I think he’s totally a net positive. And then really, it’s just the idea that, look, I love the Moral Majority in so many ways—batting a thousand in all the predictions of the terrible things that would happen in our country when we lose our Christian influence. But the idea of a politician as some sort of, like, pastoral figure was something I think the Moral Majority left us and I don’t think was exactly right.

Matthew Kaemingk: Thank you for sharing your story about how you sort of developed politically. And I wonder if we might think how you developed theologically on these kinds of things. And if you could share if there were particular Christian scholars or Christian theologians who’ve been really influential to you in the development of your nationalism.

William Wolfe: Yeah, sure. I mean, my theological development was very much from a background of sort of, you know, low church, evangelical, Baptist high school, PCA college, right? So, I mean, this is interesting to me: the Reformed world is so sort of pro-globalist. I mean, you want me to talk about things in terms of my nationalism, which is interesting, Matthew, because it’s like, it’s not something that, like, I—like, super centrally—but I mean, I think it is important.

But, you know, the Reformed Christian world really took on sort of the end-of-history, like, global liberal democracy, open society vision of the world. I found that very off-putting at Covenant College. And then when I moved to Washington, DC, I was at a very conservative, Reformed, evangelical Baptist church, Capitol Hill Baptist Church. And really sort of—I saw this whole world, the Young, Restless, Reformed resurgence world, the TGC world, kind of go all in on wokeness.

And so a lot of my theological sort of development was sort of made wrestling with, is this really what Scripture teaches in terms of, you know, how we view things like immigration and, you know, racial relations in America?

I will name Doug Wilson. It’s funny, people try to pin me to Doug Wilson, and I’ve only met the guy all of two times. I’ve never even been to Moscow. But it was very interesting to me, I would say, in my own theological development. During sort of peak wokeness, Thabiti Anyabwile and Doug Wilson were in some blog posts back and forth on race relations in America. And that’s how I first found Doug in 2014. And as a young conservative staffer, young conservative political staffer, who thought it was ridiculous that we just had to assume that the narrative of Ferguson was a legitimate narrative, that this young Black kid got gunned down—anyway, finding Doug helped me sort of, like, process a better way to approach those things.

I mean, Francis Schaeffer has been very influential on me. Carl Henry, Carl F.H. Henry. You go read these guys, read someone like Francis Schaeffer, who talks about the necessity of a Christian society. Less known, not so much like theologian, but T.S. Eliot is a guy who wrote a lot about the necessity of Christian societies and what would happen if we abandoned Christian heritage in the West. So I could keep going, but there’s a lot there.

Shadi Hamid: Can you talk a little bit about your view of the nation? So I guess there’s different ways to look at America and the founding and what we stand for as a country. Are we a creedal nation? Are we sort of—is it more civilizational or cultural? You could also, I suppose, argue that there’s like an ethnic basis to American identity, you know, which obviously is less common. You know, at least people don’t necessarily publicly affirm that.

So maybe just tell us a little bit about, what makes the American nation? What does it mean to be American? And who is part of our national project? And because I think now there’s a lot of debate—you know, for example, we had a little back and forth on Twitter, William, where you referred to, like, let’s say someone like Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for the Senate in Michigan, as foreign in a sort of pejorative way. So I’m curious, who has buy-in into the nation? Who do you feel is part of the American story? And how do you make judgments about that?

William Wolfe: Sure. I mean, look, so the historical realities, I think, are just so important here, right? Like, the United States was fundamentally founded by Anglo-Christians. Like, Anglo-Protestant Christians, right? Like, at the time—speaking of another book that’s been very influential to me, Did America Have a Christian Founding? by Mark David Hall, right? But I mean, it’s not only Mark David Hall. Anybody who’s an honest student of the founding will get you these statistics: that at the time of the American founding, we were a 90-plus percent, you know, Anglo-Protestant nation. There was one Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. No Muslim signers. No Hindu signers, you know.

So this is—so, you know, you can—you guys could say, or other people say, we don’t like that and we want to radically transform that. That’s fine. But let’s be fair about, like, what the genesis of the American nation was. It was an Anglo-Protestant project. And the, you know, the principles elucidated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were principles, you know, propounded by a particular people, an Anglo-Protestant people.

I mean, Zambia—a great example is, like, you know, in terms of, like, are we creedal or not? You know, Zambia essentially has, like, a carbon copy of our Constitution, and it hasn’t exactly worked out the same way for them, right? Because there was a particular people who expressed universal principles, but for a particular place. I mean, and again, like, you can look at the writings in The Federalist and how, you know, they talk about how Providence has given this land to a people of a particular heritage, nation, culture, language, religion.

And so that certainly was the American founding. And quite frankly, that was the American nation up until the mid-twentieth century. And I’m one of those people who—I want to be very clear—I consider Black Americans, African Americans, to be heritage Americans. And Helen Andrews recently wrote, like, a really good article on this.

Like, if we want to talk about sort of, like, diversity or pluralism in America, the fundamental sort of American deal was, we were predominantly, overwhelmingly white Christian nation, with a large minority of African Americans who are also predominantly Christian, with very, very small segments of other additional racial minorities. And that was the composition of the American nation until the mid-twentieth century, until massive changes in our immigration policy that sort of opened the floodgates for all sorts of other immigration, which actually was explicitly promised to us would not happen, with things like the Immigration and Nationality Act.

And so I think that the historical nature of what we have been up until about seventy years ago is important for us to consider in terms of who we should be. And if people want to drastically rewrite that, well, that’s fine. But I’m certainly not the radical for pointing out what our history has been, I think, has helped propel us to be the nation that we are.

Shadi Hamid: But, you know, as someone who’s a child of immigrants, you know, I’m Muslim, obviously, as longtime listeners will know. And my parents came from Egypt. I think that a beautiful thing about the American idea and the American story, at least from my perspective, is the process of becoming American. The idea that my parents can become American and feel fully American in a way they wouldn’t be able to do if they went to, say, France or Sweden or Norway or Germany. It’s very hard to become German if you’re not already, you know, German.

But the fact that my parents can proudly affirm that they’re American, and also the fact that they don’t have to choose between being fully American and fully Muslim, because we’re a country that respects religious freedom and public religiosity. My parents can be both simultaneously, which I think is a wonderful thing.

And in my experience, I would say too, that children of immigrants tend to be—tend to be more patriotic than a lot of white liberals. You know, a lot of my white liberal friends won’t feel comfortable saying that they love America. But when I talk to, you know, Muslim Americans, you know, many of them—not all of them, obviously—they’re more comfortable just being very happy to be American, because they’ve seen the alternative, because their parents came from an authoritarian setting. They’re more—they value American freedom more, because they know that that’s not something to take for granted.

Anyway, there’s a lot there, but I’m just curious how—like, doesn’t—does that move you? Do you—isn’t that part of what makes America great? The fact that it’s able to bring people from very different cultures and ethnic backgrounds and make them into Americans?

Matthew Kaemingk: Isn’t that what makes America great, that it can bring in and include people from diverse backgrounds, and that they can feel a sense of—a sense of ownership, a sense of belonging, and even sort of a pride that I’m—I’m an American? So, as Shadi’s—Shadi’s mom would say, “I’m really proud to be an American.” So isn’t that what makes America great, William?

William Wolfe: Absolutely not. Not for a second. Not even close. Right? Like, I mean, this is—this is, I think—for a couple of different things. First of all, I think it’s a myth. Like, I think that you’re universalizing from a particular experience that absolutely is not the case.

And how do I know this? Well, because the Democratic Party, the Democrats, are running individuals who are running on platforms to gain widespread election, like statewide races, gubernatorial races, Senate races—candidates saying, “I can’t stand Thanksgiving.” You know, “I hate Thanksgiving. I hate the Fourth of July. I don’t like dogs. I don’t like fireworks. I don’t like football.” I mean, a lot of those things are sort of—some of those are more superficial than others, right? But to, like, be out there saying “I hate Thanksgiving,” and this is, you know—Francesca Hong is like, “I think about how my son is mixed, that puts me in proximity to whiteness.” I mean, this is—this is anti-American, like, silliness through and through.

And I actually believe fundamentally that for the last—again, fifty to seventy years—assimilation has largely been a myth. And again, if you go look back at American history after the Ellis Island wave of immigrants—which I think is where Wolfe particularly comes from; I have ancestry that goes back to the Revolutionary, through, like, maternal ancestry, but Wolfe comes through that era—we were so concerned about assimilation in our country. We essentially had, like, a forty-year immigration moratorium. We were concerned about the influence of Italians and Germans and Jews and other people who had come here at large numbers that we hadn’t seen before.

And so, yes, so there might be some immigrants who come here and assimilate and love America. But the reality is, the idea that that’s what makes America great—and this is why I said not at all. And not the American people. I mean, this is the thing. America is not great because we let [inaudible] else from the world come over here and be a part of our project. America is great because of the people who made our country so amazing that people from all over the world want to come over here.

I mean, this really, if you want to sort of get to, like, a feature of my nationalism: the discounting and, honestly, the disrespect to the founding stock of the American people that built this country to what it was over its first couple hundred of years, two centuries—that somehow those people don’t matter, and what really makes us great is the Pakistani or the Nigerian or the Guatemalan who can come here and assimilate, to varying degrees, into American culture, customs, and patriotism. I mean, to me, that’s just recipe for national disaster.

Matthew Kaemingk: Shadi, he’s talking about your mama.

Shadi Hamid: Well, maybe that’s where I would push you, William, a little bit more. I mean, you talked about Francesca Hong—you know, I think, you know, what she said about Thanksgiving was silly and all of that. But again, like, I want to just, like, focus it on, you know, someone like, you know, my mom, even if she’s not, in your view, representative of a lot of immigrants. Or even myself. I mean, I wrote a book titled The Case for American Power. I’ve said publicly that America is the best place in the world to be a Muslim, that I love—you know, I love this country. And there’s a lot of great reasons to love this country because it’s an idea, because it’s a set of values and ideas and ideals beyond the nation-state.

That’s what makes America different. It has a mission. It has an ideology. Most nations don’t stand for something beyond being what they are. Like, what does it mean to be Dutch? Like, we were actually—Matthew and I in Amsterdam recently, asking this question of different politicians, and they would often say, like, they couldn’t even really come up with an answer. They would say, “Oh, being Dutch means to be hardworking or entrepreneurial,” and they would struggle to answer that. But we have that, because we’re a mission-oriented nation and not a nation that is ethnically based. And I think the founders were very clear about the fact that ideals are what drive the nation rather than being white.

Matthew Kaemingk: Is that a question? I’ll—I’ll make a form of question. Like, would you say that in order for America to be great it needs to have a sort of ethnic dominance or ethnic whole? How would you talk about the relationship between ethnicity and national greatness? That’s the question. How would you talk about the relationship between whiteness, ethnicity, and national greatness? You take that however you would like to.

William Wolfe: Yeah, sure. I mean, again, it’s like, I’m not discounting the idea that it can be wonderful for people who weren’t born in the United States of America to become American citizens, to become patriotic, to love this nation, and want to see its best.

I am—and I think I was clear, but I want to be very categorically clear—the idea that that’s what makes America great, again, I think is just so disrespectful to the American people, to the people who can trace their ancestry here back four or five generations. To the American sons and daughters who fought and bled and died in our wars, in the Revolutionary War, in the Civil War, in two world wars. I mean, the composition of our troops in World War II were not predominantly Muslim or South American. They were the white sons and daughters of the American heartland who fought to purge the tyranny of Nazism from Europe.

And so it’s like, I don’t really like to get bogged down in sort of the, like, is it whiteness? Well, yeah. So the left loves to use that term. It really is like—there’s just the idea that Americans underwent an ethnogenesis from, and became like Anglo-Protestant Americans, out of sort of fundamentally like English stock. And that’s who this nation was. This isn’t even sort of like a rhetorical or theoretical thing. That is who this nation was until about seventy years ago.

And I will posit this—I feel like you’re trying to cut me off, but I will posit this. Like, there is no, like—this idea of, I saw Ro Khanna say, like, what we really need is, like, a multiracial New Deal, and what America is going to become is like the first cohesive multiracial democracy in the world. Matthew and Shadi, America was not a multiracial democracy that made it what it is, that makes it so attractive for people to come here. And if you want to try to claim it is, I mean, just, you do not have facts and history on your side. So you’re trying to propose something new and different of what makes America great. And quite frankly, I would say we can look at this experiment so far and say it’s not going well at all.

Matthew Kaemingk: Okay. So we’ve talked about nationalism quite a bit for the last few minutes. I’d love to get back to the Christianity part of it. And to the centre, for you and me, William, who’s Jesus Christ. And for our lives, declaring him as Lord and Saviour is number one. And I’m wondering if you might talk to us a little bit about the person of Jesus, the teachings of Jesus, the work of Jesus, and how his witness, his life, his work, and his continuing work in your life—how that informs how you publicly express this vision for America. So let’s talk about Jesus for a little bit.

William Wolfe: Okay. I mean, look, I’m a born-again Christian who realized I was lost in my sins and that I was going to stand in judgment, and that there’s nothing I could do that could atone for my sins, and wanted to accept the offer that is made in Scripture to repent and believe and have eternal life.

And, you know, in my early twenties, I think I was sort of a mess and lost. I realized that the religion that I fundamentally subscribed to was the religion of, “When I’m in my thirties and it’s time to settle down, I’ll clean my act up and everything will be okay.” Right? But that’s—that’s not how Christianity works. You can never clean your act up. You know, as Isaiah tells us, all our righteousness is as filthy rags before the Lord.

And so, you know, I have a—I have a genuine, like, conversion experience that, like, you know, centres around a sense of my own sin and coming damnation for it. And the fact that I believe that Jesus Christ is the only Saviour out there, who lived a perfect life, died on the cross for our sins, did not stay in the grave, but was resurrected. And is now, as Philippians 2 tells us, is ruling and reigning over all. And even in Philippians 2, you get that sense of, it’s not a matter of if, it’s just a matter of when your knees will bow. All knees will bow and confess that Jesus Christ is Lord and Saviour, to the glory of God the Father. And so that, you know, that’s the Christianity I believe.

And when I think about the teachings of Jesus, I really strongly hold to a theological system that sees no distinction between the Old Testament and the New Testament, that these two testaments hang together. And that all Scripture is inspired and breathed out by God. And so to me, it’s like, yes, I love the Gospels. I love the teachings of Christ in the Gospels. Genesis is the teachings of Christ. Deuteronomy is the teachings of Christ. Joshua is the teaching of Christ. Proverbs, wisdom, is the teaching of Christ. And so are the Epistles. The Epistles are books that were written by the apostles, many of them by Apostle Paul, Peter, others, James. And these were inspired by the Holy Spirit. And they have Christ’s—they have Jesus Christ’s stamp on them 100%.

So I very much am against red-letter Christianity, that sort of—we can sort of boil down the teachings of Christ. So when I think of applying a Christian theological framework to political realities, I take a whole-of-Scripture approach to it, and I don’t ever try to pit, you know, a parable of Christ against the moral law of God in any way, shape, or form. So that would be, like, how do I, you know, bring Jesus into American politics? It would be by fundamentally trying to espouse what I think is a Christian moral, you know, view for how nations and people should be governed, you know, according to God’s standards.

Matthew Kaemingk: So, I mean, yeah, I’m just—I’m trying to think of, like, teachings of Jesus that might inspire nationalism. What might those be?

William Wolfe: I just tried to explain very clearly, Matthew, that, like, I’m not going to, like it—okay, I’m just going to say, when I—teachings of Jesus include the whole Bible, Matthew, right? So, like, I’m—I’m—I’m—I’m not going to accept the idea that, like, I have to find something from the red letters in the Gospels. Are you—are we—are we fair on that?

Matthew Kaemingk: Oh yeah. No, I just—just wanted to make sure.

William Wolfe: Okay. Well, so, I mean, like, to that idea then—I mean, I mean, look at how—look at what God commanded the Israel—how the God commanded the Israelites to live in community amongst each other. And, you know, a very distinct nation-state, the conflict between—I mean, the idea of distinct nations is all over Scripture, right? Like, the Israelites were a nation, the Canaanites were a nation. There was all these other nations who didn’t know the Lord. There was one nation who did. They had very strict rules, and they had—they had, quite frankly, very strict assimilation requirements to come into their community. You know, and so you could look at that.

I mean, you could look at Acts 17. That’s a verse that I think sometimes even I have probably over-flexed at 17:26. But I think it’s a legitimate verse where it talks about God appointed the boundaries of the nations, and that his will is that they would come and they would seek to know him.

And I’ll close with this, another teaching. I mean, talk about teachings of Jesus—Revelation also has quite a few words of Christ in it as well. And I find it very, very interesting. When you look at Revelation 7, when you look at Revelation 9, and you have these eschatological visions of all the people coming sort of to the mountain of the Lord, coming to Christ at the end of the ages—terms with the language in Scripture is tribes, tongues, nations, and languages. And you have John saying, I looked and I saw, and I could see distinct tribes, tongues, nations, and languages. So the idea that somehow that there’s just sort of, like, this mass homogenization of all people eschatologically doesn’t comport with Scripture, in my opinion.

And in fact, I would argue—so one of this, if I wanted to, like, drill down on, like, Christian theological cases against globalism and for nationalism, is that I think it’s a very over-realized eschatology to try to say that we can kind of peacefully mix all tribes, tongues, nations, and language in any one given nation-state on this side of the return of Christ.

Matthew Kaemingk: I wonder—I wonder though how you would respond, William, to, you know, Jesus testing the boundary between Jew and Gentile, and Jesus pushing the boundaries between the Jew and the Samaritan, and Peter and the early church melding these nations that weren’t supposed to be connecting with one another. They were supposed to be separate. They were supposed to be whole. And the early church in the Roman Empire, you had very curious combinations of churches with, you know, citizens from Africa and Syria and Judea all mixing and eating meals together and caring for one another sick. It does seem like this early Christian movement was transcending national boundaries in ways that were profoundly scandalous. How do you deal with that?

William Wolfe: Easily. I mean, easily, Matthew, because the nation—like, the political body and governance of a nation is fundamentally distinct and should be different and operating according to different principles than the church.

But also, I mean, you want to know what scandal—the real scandal there is that they were going around saying, you need to become a Christian. You need to believe in Jesus. I mean, it’s like the message—like, when they’re talking to Greeks or Asians or whatever it is, like, the message is repent of your pagan, nationalistic, foreign idols and believe in Jesus Christ. And this message of salvation does transcend national boundaries, of course, because we’re saying—we’re saying he is Lord of all. He is Lord of the Jews and Lord of the Gentiles, and the Gentiles including all sorts of, you know, different nations that were not the nation of Israel.

And so, I don’t find this to be, like, a tricky thing at all, Matthew. Like, the spiritual nature of salvation extends to all. The gospel is going out to all peoples of the world. And I just simply do not see anywhere in Scripture that that somehow demands some sort of globalistic political system on top of it. That’s not what we see in Scripture at all.

Matthew Kaemingk: Yeah, I mean, I wonder to myself, there are these early Jewish Christians who are saying, okay, the Gentiles can join our church, but they have to become Jewish. They have to assimilate to our national culture. They need to become like us. And the Apostle Paul says, no, they don’t have to assimilate into our culture. It could cross cultures and it could bring diverse cultures together. So I don’t see that. I wonder how you might respond to that.

William Wolfe: I’m not quite sure what it is that you don’t see. But again, the spiritual—like, this is Christ’s two kingdoms, right? This is, like, sort of, like, basic two-kingdom theology. There is spiritual realities and spiritual governance, and those things are often applied through the church, are applied through the church.

There is, of course—there is no national barrier to becoming a Christian, and no one should ever propose that. And I certainly don’t either. I mean, one of the things I repeatedly remind people of is that the Great Commission begins with, “Go therefore into all the nations, baptizing them and making disciples of Jesus Christ,” not “Bring, therefore, all the nations unto you.”

I mean, like, yes. Like, I mean, I think that what the Jews were doing, though, Matthew, is that they were holding up additional boundaries to spiritual things, not national things. It was spiritual things. They were saying, you have to eat these foods, you have to perform these customs—to what? To be right with God. And the Apostle Paul is demolishing that in Galatians and Ephesians and elsewhere. He’s saying, no, they don’t. They don’t have to eat your foods in your way to be counted righteous before God. They simply need to repent of their sins and believe in Jesus Christ, our resurrected Saviour.

Shadi Hamid: Look, just to follow up on that thread, from an outsider’s perspective—and this is obviously an oversimplification, well, you might dismiss this as a caricature of Christianity—but when I think about Christianity, I think about the emphasis on love and grace. I think about loving one’s enemies, forgiveness for one’s enemies. Those are the themes that we often think about if we’re thinking about the Gospels or the Sermon on the Mount and so forth.

And, you know, when I think about those ideas or those principles, and then I see what I would perceive as the cruelty of certain policies—like when it comes to, like, mass deportation, rounding people up, not giving people due process, seeing one’s adversaries in politics as being enemies to be defeated, the way that many folks on the Christian right talk about Democrats and liberals as being evil or beyond the pale—I just keep on coming back to this sense that this is not what I would imagine Christ saying or doing. That this kind of aggressiveness is just, like—it seems to be not in the spirit of the kind of Christian or Christ-like approach to dealing with one’s adversaries. And I guess that’s what puts me off with a lot of Christian nationalism. Is not that tone is the most important thing, but there seems to be a kind of combativeness and intensity and aggressiveness that I just have trouble—like, help me work through that. Like, I want to—I want to understand how the kind of the seeming cruelty of certain policies or rhetoric can be justified.

William Wolfe: Are you a pacifist?

Shadi Hamid: No, no, not at all.

William Wolfe: Okay. All right. So, I mean, well, that’s a helpful starting point, right? So it’s like, you know, I think that mercy to the, you know, guilty is cruelty to the innocent. And so if we’re talking—so there’s, again, very big distinction between rhetoric and—you know, sticks and stones might break my bones, but words will never hurt me, right? So it’s like, you know, what are we saying versus what are we doing?

I have been a loud advocate for mass deportations, not out of hatred for the illegal immigrants who are here in the United States of America, but out of love for my American citizens, my fellow American citizens.

And also, I think that I would just suggest that the fact that you think that I think sort of says something probably about, like, the news sources you consume and what stories grip our national moral imagination. Because the stories of the father who—the fathers who are [inaudible] by illegal aliens driving drunk, or the families who are murdered by sometimes not illegal, but legal aliens who are here and don’t know how to speak our language, who have CDLs from states who never should have granted them, driving trucks on the road and running over American citizens. The stories of Kate Steinle and Laken Riley.

I mean, I’ve been recently rereading Patrick Buchanan’s State of Emergency from 2006 about the third-worldization of America. I mean, in 2000, there was a couple in Central Park who was assaulted by five illegal aliens who knocked out the man, dragged the woman to a shed, and raped her for hours. Each one of them criminal illegal aliens who had been issued a detaining order by ICE. That New York failed—New York City, as a sanctuary city, failed to honour.

I mean, and those are just a few examples. I think that the idea that we should enforce our laws and protect our American citizens from criminality and from violence of illegal aliens, which is possible to be deterred—my suggestion here is not that if we deport all illegal aliens, crime and violence goes away. Of course not. There will always be crime and violence within any populations, but some of it is certainly more avoidable than others.

And again, just the idea that somehow enforcing our duly enacted immigration laws is unloving, to me, just kind of blows my mind. To me, that is an idea, therefore, that somehow, because Christianity includes love and its teachings, that we have to settle for political anarchy. And so, yeah, I mean, I think there’s always sort of—there’s always a tension there between love and justice.

But also, I mean, when I see actually what Trump is doing—I assume you guys know this, but if you don’t, or if your listeners don’t—right now we have one of the most generous offers I’ve ever seen in my entire life for breaking the law on the table. If you are here illegally in the United States of America, you can get on an app. You can get a cash bonus and a free flight home. You’re not thrown in jail. If you willingly come here and if you willingly present yourself as somebody who broke our laws and entered our nation illegally, and say, I would like to return to my home country, we will give you money and a free flight home. Man, that sounds pretty loving to me, honestly.

Shadi Hamid: But don’t you think that reasonable people can disagree on a policy issue like mass deportations? I mean, my concern is that, like, you’ve said publicly that people who don’t support mass deportations hate America. I don’t support mass deportations. Does that mean that I hate America? Like, shouldn’t we be able to say that even if you and I, William, disagree on the question of immigration, we still respect each other as Americans, and we give each other grace and the benefit of the doubt, and we don’t assume that the other person is beyond the pale or that I hate America? Do you see what I mean?

William Wolfe: Absolutely. And in personal conversations—well, sure. I mean, these ideas of love and hate are not completely nebulous ideas. They’re things that can be defined. And yes, I mean, I would suggest that if somebody holds to a position that our laws are irrelevant—in whatever field. And it’s fascinating how it’s almost only ever in this field.

And quite frankly, Shadi, it’s not only on the left. Here, I’ll hit the right too. I recently saw the clip of Charlie Kirk speaking at, like, a roofers conference, and these, like, white, blue-collar, patriotic, conservative Americans were like, we don’t want mass deportations because we don’t want to lose our labour force. I think that is an act of hatred towards America. It’s fundamentally an act of hatred towards American citizens.

I was at a conference in Texas recently, and I try to keep things nebulous—I’m not trying to ding anybody. I was going to give a Christian case for mass deportations, and this very kind, maybe in her sixties lady who was at the table for me, she was like, “Well, can I keep my maid?” So she’s telling me she’s employing an illegal alien illegally. She’s committing a crime in our country, and she’s asking me if she can keep her maid. And I jokingly said, “Well, we can deport her last.” And then I very seriously said, “No, you can’t, because you can’t get an exception.”

So we can—we can have all sorts of, like, personal conversations kindly, generously. But our sentiment and our interaction with each other is not a substitute for reasonable federal policy that is a safeguard against anarchy in our country. And really, if you want to say that we should not enforce our laws, whether it’s on immigration or anything else, then you are, I say, at the bottom line, a form of an anarchist. And I would say that is actually hateful to American citizens who are suffering because our laws are going unenforced.

Matthew Kaemingk: So William, you’ve talked about in many speeches and articles, you know, whether it be, like, imposing biblical morality or letting the Bible be our guide for the laws of this country. And I wonder if you might dig in just a little deeper and go with us and imagine that the Republicans do really well in the midterm elections. And, you know, maybe JD Vance wins in 2028. And the Christian nationalism movement continues to grow and gain in strength. What sorts of biblical laws would you like to see brought into the American legislature? Can you sort of talk us through some of the big biblical laws that you’d like to see?

William Wolfe: Sure. In terms of enforcing morality on people—just for all our listeners here, every single legislation is an act of enforced morality, right? Obergefell was enforcing morality on this entire nation. Roe v. Wade was enforcing a morality on this entire nation. Even whatever your vision is for the pluralistic utopia is enforcing a morality upon this nation.

Matthew Kaemingk: I completely agree.

William Wolfe: So it’s like, I am not—I am not unique in saying I would like to see a certain morality legislated in the United States of America. That doesn’t make me some sort of, like, Christofascist. That makes me somebody who—Martin Luther King wanted to impose a racial morality on America.

Sure. Okay. So, I mean, look, I mean, I think even beyond the immigration issue, I think some of the most—let me pick a couple buckets here, and one is going to go hard against the right.

Look, I mean, I think that we—I was watching this story play out. There’s the story of this surrogate mother who is carrying this child for a couple who wanted to have the child aborted, and she did not want to abort. And so she fled to Texas. She was able to deliver the child that has a heart defect. I think now the child is back in custody of the couple that essentially rented the womb to purchase a baby. I mean, to me, this is staggeringly immoral and dystopian, that we have surrogate mothers fleeing their contracts so they’re not forced to abort the child.

And so, I mean, that to me—dealing with things like the rapidly growing surrogacy industry in America, to me, would be top of the line. I don’t know when and how Americans decided—we certainly never voted on it—that it was now legal to buy human beings through renting a womb. And Republicans are not very good on this issue. So surrogacy is a massive issue, which just speaks to the degradation of the value of human life, parenting, marriage, child-rearing in our country.

I think we absolutely need to overturn Obergefell. That shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody. I don’t know what it looks like, who else we need to get onto the Supreme Court to appeal that decision and to overturn that at the federal level. That’s a big one.

I am deeply concerned about the growth of the vice economy in this country—gambling, sports betting, prediction markets betting—that are destroying the lives of young American men, often more conservative American men, but that’s certainly applicable on both the right and the left. So taking action against the vice economy.

So it’s defending marriage, defending life, abolishing abortion, you know, trying to remove this growing vice economy that’s destroying people’s lives. I mean, all those are pretty, like, I’d say boilerplate, like, Christian issues that I would like to see advanced and go a long way. Continuing immigration enforcement obviously would be a big one as well.

And, you know, it’s like, I mean, I think that, like, once you start kind of ticking down those rungs, making our country a place where it’s possible for, you know, young couples, families, to get married, buy a home, survive on a single income, I think is a deeply Christian policy in many ways that is not quite back on the table yet, that needs a lot of work. Those would be some of them.

Matthew Kaemingk: So I’m going to pick kind of a ridiculous, you know, biblical law, like lying. You’re not supposed to lie, right? Or you’re not supposed to lust after another man’s wife. You know, and obviously you wouldn’t go around throwing people in jail who are lusting, I’m assuming, or lying.

William Wolfe: We do throw people in jail for lying. It depends on what it is: libel, slander, defamation.

Matthew Kaemingk: William, you’re a dad, and you deal with children who lie. You don’t ask them to be thrown in jail. So in terms of being a small-government Republican, you would not want the government to, I trust, expand and, you know, throw people in jail for every small sin. So what—how do you constrain the government so that it does not get so massive, imposing all of these different biblical rules and laws? So, like, what principle might you use to discern between sort of the spiritual and biblical laws and the actual things you want to write into the American law?

William Wolfe: Yeah. Look, I’m not—I am not a card-carrying theonomist. And in fact, I’ve done multiple debates with the card-carrying theonomists, right? Like, I’m not trying to bring the, you know, the biblical rule of the Israelites as applied to the United States of America today.

And so I mean, in terms of, like, small government—again, it’s like, you know, I’ll see your question and raise a ridiculous counterfactual, that is true, is that we are imprisoning people for lying, Matthew. Just for lying about people’s gender. Literally, there’s a teacher in Ireland—not America, but part of the West—who’s been in and out of prison because he refuses to lie about somebody’s biological sex.

So I would like to actually—I would like to, first of all, if we could have a more Christian nation and a more Christian government, sort of throw off the incredibly authoritarian, you know, speech codes of the left that we’re all subject to currently, and in some ways decreasingly under Donald Trump’s federal government.

But, you know, like, I think the thing is, of course, not every sin is a crime. I mean, this is pretty boilerplate in standard things. I mean, we think about, you know—and the crime—crimes are things that we have criminalized and that impact people in, like, the public arena. And so I actually—I actually wasn’t joking when I told you that we do throw people in jail for lying. But obviously not for lying in a household to individuals. But, you know, if you lie about somebody to the degree that it’s going to impede their ability to get employment, yeah, you can have action against individuals for that. That’s actually a pretty deeply Christian thing derivative of one of the Ten Commandments.

I mean, I don’t really have a lot of particulars in terms of what I’ve already laid out. I don’t want more expansive speech codes. I actually want less of those.

Shadi Hamid: But isn’t there a question here of who decides that? Again, reasonable people and reasonable Christians, if we’re just limiting it to Christians, can disagree about what biblical morality entails. I mean, Christians disagree amongst themselves about what it means to apply, you know, God’s moral law in the public sphere.

So then it becomes a question of, there is a risk that Christian nationalists might get something wrong. Let’s say they’re in power, and they’re corrupted in some way by that power. Part of what happens in real life is that we go astray and sometimes we lose our way. I mean, my concern is that if you have people in power who believe they have a monopoly on truth and they’re so certain and so confident that they’re right and others are wrong, that they won’t have a way to self-regulate or to self—to kind of check themselves. I mean, do you worry about that, that potential corruption happening if Christian nationalists are in power?

Matthew Kaemingk: Yeah. So how would you know that Christian nationalism has become corrupted in any way? Are there specific lines that you wouldn’t cross, you know, if the movement were to become corrupt? How would you know?

William Wolfe: Yeah, I mean, I think maybe one thing that would be helpful here—and I’m not sure if we really establish this as a baseline—I’m a very big believer in the American system as it has been and as it should be. And Stephen Wolfe, who is much more of an outspoken Christian nationalist than I am, wrote a whole book on it. I think he’s done a really good job talking about how you can have theoretical ideas and you can have principles, but they always have to have prudential applications that are fit for the people in the government at hand.

Like, so it’s like, I believe in the Bill of Rights, you know, and in the Constitution of the United States of America. You know, so it’s like, I think that, you know—I actually, I really think that in many ways is sort of Christian national—return to the principles of the American founding and sort of classic interpretations of the Constitution is not so much a revolution, but a return.

I mean, what does it look like when things get corrupted? I mean, again, I would just argue we live in a pretty corrupted system already. We can see what that looks like. Of course things can get corrupted. Here’s one thing I don’t support: I don’t support term limits, right? So it’s like, I actually think that the people have the right to elect their representatives, and if they want to keep electing their representatives, they should have the ability to do so.

What are the checks? This is, like, Civics 101. What are the checks and balances in the American system? It’s elections. I think we should continue to have free and fair elections. You know, replace your member of Congress every two years, your senator every six, your president every four, get involved at the local level. Like, I mean, that’s—that’s the American system, right, guys? The checks and balances are the people. If the people think their governing elected representatives are corrupt, are doing wrong, vote them out and put new people in.

Matthew Kaemingk: And you’re fine if democracy keeps on producing un-Christian leadership?

Shadi Hamid: I mean, let’s say that Christian nationalists or Christians in general don’t do well in elections, and the liberal left keeps on winning in 2028 and beyond and continues to move America in what you consider to be a dangerous direction of secularism and, you know, whatever else it might be. Is that something that you’re okay with?

William Wolfe: Well, being okay with—if that’s what the people choose.

Shadi Hamid: Well, yeah, just to be clear, you’re clearly not happy about that. It’s more of, would you respect the results of the election and continue to participate in democratic debate?

William Wolfe: Well, I paid taxes during the Biden administration, right? So it’s like—I mean, yeah, I mean, fundamentally, I mean, this is, again, this shouldn’t be shocking to either one of you guys, but, like, there are limits, right? And there’s, you know, there comes a time when the blood of liberty needs to be refreshed—I mean, when the tree of liberty needs to be refreshed with the blood of tyrants, right?

So it’s like, we are—Americans are revolutionary in many ways in terms of, you know, we fought a war to secure our independence and our freedoms. I have been a big advocate of pushing back on sort of this, like, “there’s no political solution here”—like, to the people on the right, the online right, who are like, there’s no political solution, we’re not solving this, you know, buy guns and ammo. I mean, I think you should buy guns and ammo, but the idea of a civil war, a second civil war in America, maybe between the left and right, is truly horrific. It’s not something I’m advocating at all, for at all.

Sometimes I, you know, I get dinged for this quote I gave of Samuel Davies about taking up arms. And again, that was just more like a theoretical thing. Andrew Fuller, great British Baptist pastor, preached this sermon, you know, trying to—because Christians have always had this sort of, I think, a pacifistic streak to them. You know, when the British were afraid they were going to be invaded by Napoleon, Andrew Fuller preaches a sermon, Christian Patriotism, where he’s not calling for, like, revolution or violence, but he’s saying, like, hey look, if the French invade, like, we should as good citizens, even as Christians, be willing to take up arms to resist it.

So look, I mean, we need to have those conversations on sort of the multiple levels that they’re happening. But, you know, is there—oh, is there some clearly dark, dystopian future in which I think it would be legitimate for people to revolt? Sure. Do I think we’re anywhere near that? No. And so that’s the kind of level of conversation we’re having today.

Matthew Kaemingk: I want to take us back to, you know, Shadi brought up the strong language that you use on Twitter—we’ll say strong language—that you use in advocating for your political goals. You know, the Apostle Paul talks about the fruit of the Spirit of God, like, how do we know a person is in the Spirit? And he lists these qualities: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. That these are sort of the markers of a person whose life is in the Spirit.

And I’m wondering, do you feel like that would be an appropriate way to judge your online speech? Or do you feel like maybe, because the state of the nation is in sort of an emergency state, that the fight is so intense that maybe Christians need to suspend the fruits of the Spirit and we need to fight? Like, how do you think about, yeah, these fruits of the Spirit and how they inform our public speech, and how we act online and things like that?

William Wolfe: Yeah, I don’t think it’s a matter of adoption or suspension. I think it’s a matter of, you know, what is the debate, what is the context at hand? You know, so, like, the way I speak to my children is going to be very different than how, you know, how I talk on Twitter, right? Or how I post about what I think are horrific evils.

Honestly, if anything, guys, genuinely from the bottom of my heart, I think I am too kind to the left sometimes. I mean, like, they are doing truly, I think, just mind-bendingly dark and horrific things. I mean, again, just their recent news story: seven-year-old boy murdered by four trans-identifying individuals, with concerns that it was possibly a ritualistic murder or sacrifice. I mean, young children being abused by their, you know, their homosexual coupled parents that they’ve been purchased into or adopted into. Sixty, seventy, a hundred million unborn children slaughtered in American wombs over the last fifty-plus years.

I mean, I think the level of evil that we’re dealing with—and of course, it’s not like the right is innocent. I’ve got a lot of concerns about our foreign policy adventurism and the destruction and death that we’ve caused overseas, often under the flag and under the cross as well. Like, I’m a decently non-interventionist type of individual.

So, I mean, I just think that, like—think that the fruit of the Spirit is not the sum and substance of the speech we see in Scripture. That there are examples of strong speech fitted for strong evils. And if that’s what I’m engaging in in the public square, then that’s more how I’m going to calibrate.

Matthew Kaemingk: So would you say, like, the fruits of the Spirit are sort of more relevant for family and church life, and public speeches—how would you—do you feel like this fruits of the Spirit have relevance or authority over how you speak in public?

William Wolfe: Yeah. Yeah, sure. Absolutely. I mean, yes, how—I mean, I try not to lie about people. I do. You know, I’ve deleted Twitter posts before, not a ton, but there’s a few, there’s a couple I’m really not proud of that I’ve deleted, that my enemies still have and trot out from time to time.

You know, but I think that—I think that speaking—I just, I don’t see—yes, I think they’re applicable. And also I just don’t see, like, a contradiction between plain, blunt, or even strong speech sometimes against things that I’m proposing are morally evil and horrific and/or bad for people. Like, I just—I don’t think that’s in contradiction. I think that’s, you know, another form of Christian speech: telling the truth about evil.

Shadi Hamid: Yeah, I’ll just say, just a very quick note. I don’t think anyone on the left supports the abuse of children. I just want to be—this is, I think, where—just I think there’s a risk of characterizing one’s opponents as being worse than they actually are. I don’t know any leftists who go around saying, hey, we want to abuse seven-year-old kids. I mean, that’s just not—that’s just not the case.

William Wolfe: Shadi, that absolutely is the case. They literally are out there saying we want to teach seven-year-olds, eight-year-olds, nine-year-olds all sorts of horrific gender—you know, we want to expose them to pornography in the classroom for the sake of sexual liberation. And in Montgomery County, Maryland, it was actually evangelicals and Muslims—and maybe, I think, Jews were a part of it too—who, like, led a lawsuit against Montgomery County Public Schools to try to secure the right for religious parents to opt their children out of—I would argue it is abusive.

Shadi Hamid: So, I mean, look, I get what you’re saying. Oh, I see what you mean. You’re saying that even just having LGBTQ-themed lessons in school is a kind of abuse.

William Wolfe: Yeah, absolutely.

Shadi Hamid: Okay.

William Wolfe: Okay. And they want that. They say, we want to teach your kids, you know, about how—like, about, like, anal sex. And I don’t know if you have to blur, you know, blur that out at, like, you know, ten years old. Yeah, I think that’s abusive. And they are saying we want to do it.

Shadi Hamid: As we can wrap up here, I do want to ask you about—like, let’s say Christian nationalists do well in elections, or let’s say that even you’re appointed to a position of power at some future point. How should I, as a Muslim, view the rise of Christian nationalism? Should I be concerned, afraid? Could there be some benefits for me? I mean, to what extent do you see me as your co-equal in the kind of American story, as a fellow citizen? Because, I mean, when I hear “Christian nationalism,” I hear people who are privileging Christian identity over non-Christian identities. And I’m just curious where I stand, where I would end up standing in all of this as an American Muslim myself.

William Wolfe: Well, of course you’re a co-equal citizen. I mean, at least you are in my mind, and I don’t see a lot of people, like, proposing anything other than that.

I mean, do I—so this is a funny question in the sense of, like, do I think more Christian nationalism would be better for somebody like you? Yes. Because, I mean, like, I don’t—I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t know a lot about what you believe, you know, from your, like, your Muslim heritage and background, right? But it’s like, if—if you don’t like child brides, right, you know, and if you don’t like a lot of the other things that are associated with truly devout Islamic practice and would prefer to live in a more liberal society, yeah, I think you’re going to want some more Christian nationalism in our country to, you know, ward off those kind of things.

I mean, because that’s like—if there is a Muslim majority ruling America, you know, it’s going to look very devout, faithful Islamic Muslims. They’re going to look a lot more like Syria and places like that. So I would say, yes, you would want more of us to stop the extremists.

Shadi Hamid: Oh, I see what you’re saying. We need Christians to stop the Muslim extremists.

William Wolfe: I mean, yeah, absolutely. Right? I mean, like—I mean, do you—do you want—do you want Sharia law ruling in the United States of America?

Shadi Hamid: Okay, but who do you mean, that is, like—do you really think there’s a risk of American Muslims imposing Sharia law on their fellow Americans? I mean, do you honestly think that’s a major—that’s a major risk? I mean, we are only about one percent of the population.

William Wolfe: Yeah, well, yeah, absolutely, it’s a risk. I mean, look at—you look at Europe. I mean, again, it’s just like, right now, small town Pittington of, like, a few hundred people is getting twelve hundred military-age migrants, the vast majority of whom are going to be Muslim, you know, imported into their cities. I mean, yes, they’re going to make the women wear the burqas. Yes, they’re going to, like—I mean, of course they are.

Shadi Hamid: I mean, dear—do you think all—I mean, do you think all Muslims are just automatons who are extreme? I mean, you’re making it sound like all Muslims want to cover up women and force them to wear burqas and that sort of thing. I mean, it’s pretty rare to see a burqa in the US. I mean, sure, women cover their hair, but that’s different than the burqa, which is specifically tied to places like Afghanistan and so forth. But—and there are also many Muslim women in America who don’t wear the headscarf. And so, you know, we’re a diverse community, and you have different flavours of practice and levels of observance and all of that. I just would—I would want us to be careful about, like, not generalizing and saying all Muslims are X. You know what I mean?

William Wolfe: Sure. I mean, is there a Muslim—what would you think is the most liberal Muslim-majority country? Maybe some of the Emiratis. I mean, like, it’s not there. I just have to look around the globe and see where there is Muslim rule in nations and how it goes.

I mean, look again, what’s happening in Europe. I mean, there’s a whole entire debate over there, particularly about the burqa and its use. I mean, yeah, so it’s like—I’ll be—look, Dearborn, Michigan, now fifty-five, you know—home of Henry Ford—now a fifty-five percent majority Muslim population. Muslim mayor, Muslim city council. I just, like—I mean, I hear what you’re saying, Shadi, but it’s like, what’s so bad about that?

Shadi Hamid: What’s so bad that Dearborn is majority Muslim? That’s just who lives there. A lot of Arabs gathered there. What’s so scary about—

William Wolfe: Are they wearing—well, are they wearing the burqa or not? I mean, they are, right? It’s like, you can go there and see, look at the videos. Like, I mean, it is being—the population is living according to Muslim laws and customs.

Shadi Hamid: No, that—okay, I’m sorry. That’s just not true, that Sharia law is being imposed in Dearborn, Michigan. I mean—

Matthew Kaemingk: Anyway, Shadi, you feel free to just talk right over me if you want to. But I’m wondering for Shadi’s future, like, once again, like, the next ten, twenty years, imagine that Christian nationalism continues to grow in its strength and power. Would Muslims have difficulty building mosques, starting Muslim organizations, running for political office? What sort of difficulties might the Muslim community expect in the future if Christian nationalism continues to rise?

William Wolfe: Yeah, well, I mean, they’re certainly not experiencing many difficulties today. So this is, you know, pretty hypothetical, right? But I mean, I think this is—I think this is one of the biggest questions that we need to wrestle with as Americans. I’m certainly not alone in this. I mean, there are plenty of, you know, highly placed elected officials, like the Speaker of the House, Representative Brandon Gill, who are concerned about the rise of political Islam, which I actually think you can’t separate the two in any way, shape, or form.

Matthew Kaemingk: No, we know what your concerns are. We’re wondering what you would want in the future. What exactly? Go ahead, Shadi.

Shadi Hamid: But you don’t think it’s possible to separate between Islam and what you call political Islam? So you see Islam as a political ideology, not as a religion. So you see Islam writ large as a threat. And you think that—

William Wolfe: Of course it’s a religion. It is an authoritarian political religion, as shown everywhere it is enforced and practised in Muslim-majority states. Of course it is. I mean, Islam as a religion is 100x more political than Christianity. And I’m just stating true things that are demonstrably proven and observable.

Shadi Hamid: Okay, but saying that Islam has more political implications than Christianity is different than saying it’s necessarily authoritarian. That’s, like, a very big claim, to say that Islam as a religion is inherently authoritarian.

William Wolfe: I think that’s also demonstrably true. I mean, it’s so funny. We talk about, like, the patriarchy on, like, the Christian side of things. And again, that’s dialled up to 100 in any Muslim-majority society and country.

Shadi Hamid: Is that true in Turkey? Let’s just take examples.

Matthew Kaemingk: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I wonder actually—and William, I don’t know if you would say this or not—but I wonder if your vision of Christian nationalism might kind of respect, like, might kind of respect a Muslim desire to impose their religious—like, do you have any respect for Muslims who say, I want to impose Sharia law on Syria? Or no?

William Wolfe: Well, the way you frame that is as a gotcha.

Matthew Kaemingk: No, no, no, but you don’t have respect—let’s put Muslims to the side. Hindus in India. They want to develop a nation on Hindu values. Do you kind of like—are you kind of like, gosh, I kind of respect that. I’m not a Hindu, but I respect wanting to shape my nation around Hindu values if those were my values. So let’s put Islam to the side and do the Hindu thing.

William Wolfe: I respect people who have the courage of their convictions. I mean, I’d put it like that. But yeah, I mean, look, look at what’s happening in India under Modi. I mean, I have—I’ve—I know a lot of Christian missionaries who have had to flee the country because the Hindu nationalism there is so strong.

So, like, I, you know—I also have respect for the Japanese in terms of having, like, the courage of their convictions and wanting to perpetuate and preserve, like, a Japanese society. I think religion is an integral feature of, like, cultures and societies and nations.

And so, like, no, it’s like there are—there are these people who try to be like, oh, Christian nationalism is just like American jihad, you know, and I think that’s ridiculous. But yeah, I mean, I do have, like, the—I have respect for people who have the courage of their convictions and are working to put them into practice, just generally.

Matthew Kaemingk: Okay. We’re coming to the end of our time, and I do thank you for sort of fielding all these different questions. You’ve been a really good sport. I want to make sure I get a good answer on this in terms of imagining Christian nationalism continues to grow. What happens to the Muslim community in America? Will they have difficulty building mosques, starting organizations, promoting their faith, running for political office? What would happen? What would you envision? Or should they just leave? And if you would want them to assimilate, what would that assimilation look like?

William Wolfe: That’s like three different questions, Matthew. Let me try here.

Matthew Kaemingk: Do your best.

William Wolfe: I think if you’re coming here to the United States of America and fundamentally trying to transform our communities, our states, or our nation, you should encounter difficulties of various kinds. I’m not 100% sure exactly what those are, right? But it’s like, that’s what they are doing.

So in terms of, like—let me single out some particular actors. So, like, CAIR, Muslim Brotherhood, organizations like that: do I think that they need to be more closely scrutinized by the federal government, local and state officials? Absolutely.

I mean, I think it’s a real question. I’m sure Shadi is not going to like this at all, but I think it’s a real question as to whether, like, genuinely devout Muslims can faithfully take the oath of office to the American Constitution that we take, to defend and protect from all enemies both foreign and domestic. Are they taking that in good conscience?

Shadi Hamid: Muslims do that all the time. I mean, there’s Muslim public elected officials at various levels of government who have run for office. I mean, that’s not, like, a rare thing, and they do take oaths of office. Like, what are you suggesting, that at some level they’re lying, or that they don’t actually believe in the oaths that they’re reciting? Like, I’m just kind of trying to understand what you’re saying.

William Wolfe: Considering that using deception is an officially sanctioned method for subversion, infiltration, and the conquering of societies under Islam—yes, I think that’s a legitimate—

Shadi Hamid: That’s a classic—that’s a classic, like, anti-Islam trope. You don’t really believe that Muslims are going around just, like—just, we’re inherently deceitful and we inherently are—are just lying about our intentions? You really believe that about Muslims writ large, like, all of us are just this undifferentiated body of lying, deceiving people who can’t be trusted in American society?

William Wolfe: Nothing close to what you just said came out of my mouth.

Shadi Hamid: I mean, if you want—you just said it’s a part of Islam to deceive. Is it not a sanctioned feature?

William Wolfe: No, it’s not.

Shadi Hamid: Yes, it is.

William Wolfe: But you’re not an expert on Islam, William. To assume the worst of a different people and to generalize about them in this way, and to say that—you’re basically implying that we as American Muslims are a fifth column. We’re a threat that can’t be trusted, because we can’t give the oath of office and we can’t commit ourselves to the American Constitution. You can see how that could be, like, a dangerous thing to imply about four or five million people in this country.

William Wolfe: All right. I mean, so, like, we’re doing the big, like, generalization thing now. But taqiyya is actually a legal concept in Islam. It is. I’m not making that up, Shadi. It absolutely is. So, I mean, are you telling me that that’s not there?

Shadi Hamid: I have never—so this taqiyya thing that I hear from, like, right-wingers on Twitter, these Islamophobic tropes, I’ve never in any kind—well, I could just be lying about this, of course. That’s the problem. Like, if we’re inherently deceiving, we’re going to lie about deceiving other people, right?

But, you know, like, you have to also experience Muslims as real people. And I don’t know if you have Muslim friends or have encountered, like, Muslims in American life. I’ve never heard of the concept of taqiyya growing up in Muslim Sunday school with my parents. I’ve studied Islam and Islamist movements in the Middle East. Never have I heard someone bring up this, like, word of taqiyya, so-called, like, deception for the sake of the faith.

And honestly, I don’t even know where this trope came from. Maybe there were specific examples where Muslims were being oppressed and being persecuted for their faith, and there was this idea that to survive, you could just say what you wanted the other person to hear as an issue of survival. But I think that’s present in most faiths, that there are certain situations where if your life is in danger, you can say what you need to say to survive.

But I’m just, like—like, this idea that Muslims are inherently authoritarian and inherently deceitful, that we’re all one way. Couldn’t I just get you to acknowledge that Muslims aren’t all the same? There are some Muslims who are more strict and there are some Muslims who are more liberal. I mean, Turkey is a Muslim-majority country that is largely secular, where the majority of women don’t wear the hijab. Or the fact that Senegal is a Muslim-majority country that has repeatedly elected a Christian president. Like, we are diverse, just like any other faith. We’re not all the same way. Like, we Muslims debate and disagree with each other all the time.

Anyway, like, I would just like—I would just want to push you a little bit to not assume the worst about us. Is that fair? Like, could you just, like—or do you just think that we’re a threat? I mean, if that’s what you think, and that we can’t, like, we can’t build—like, it sounds to me that you would want to restrict our ability to build mosques in America, which would be a violation of freedom of religion and the Bill of Rights. I would just put that to you.

William Wolfe: Look, I mean, this is like—this is the classic debate of, like, personal versus systemic things, right? And it’s like, are there exceptions to the rule? Are there personal exceptions? Of course. Are there, like, systemic things that we can look at that Islam believes, that Islam does, that Muslims do when they—

Shadi Hamid: Islam isn’t a person, though. When you say Islam believes, Islam does—Islam isn’t, like, anthropomorphized as a person.

William Wolfe: That’s the religion. That’s the term for the religion.

Shadi Hamid: Right, but Muslims disagree on what Islam says on key questions. Like, we—like, Muslims debate. What does it mean? What does Sharia entail? People disagree on what that means in practice. That’s why you have secular people in Egypt and Islamists, and they disagree with each other about Islam’s role in public life.

We’re not, like—I’m just trying to say, like, like, there are secular Muslims. There are Muslims who believe in Islam, like, observing Islam in their private life but don’t want to have it in public. There are some who do want to have more Islamic law in public life. But, like, like Zohran Mamdani or Abdul aren’t going around saying they want to implement Sharia law. They’re not, like, these automatons who want to impose, like—if anything, the criticism of Zohran is that he’s too pro-LGBTQ or too pro-trans rights. I mean, at some level, anyway.

William Wolfe: Yeah, but it’s interesting you bring up Mamdani, because very early into his tenure here, he’s already had multiple—it’s like, I don’t want to nickel and dime—multiple Islamic, than the same way I would say Christian—multiple Islamic celebrations in his public office, in ways that if he were an evangelical Christian mayor, you know, he would be getting flogged and persecuted in the public square and debate for violations of the First Amendment and enforcing his religious beliefs on others.

Like, he—yes, he is certainly an interesting case. And that’s a whole nother conversation about sort of, like, the socialist liberal Muslims, right? But, like, even still, even still, he is unapologetic in pronouncing his faith and practising his faith publicly, in ways that actually Christians in America have been told that it’s not okay for us to do. So, I mean, I do think that’s very interesting.

Shadi Hamid: But you’re unapologetic about your own faith. So why wouldn’t Muslims—why can’t Muslims be unapologetic about pronouncing their faith? That’s precisely what you want to do with your faith.

William Wolfe: Well, yes.

Shadi Hamid: And that’s your whole project.

William Wolfe: Yes. And—and this is just a demonstrable statement of fact: Christianity is foundational to the American experiment and country and nation in a way that Islam never has been. So, yeah, they’re different.

Matthew Kaemingk: So, but it sounds like you would want to restrict the building of mosques and things like that. So you do see that there would be limitations on Muslims if Christian nationalists were in power.

William Wolfe: Well, I mean, look, on the mosque question, I think it really does depend on what is happening at the mosque. Do I think that mosques are foreign to the American country? Yes, absolutely. I mean, that’s just, again, a statement of fact, right? It’s not a natural part of who we have been as Americans for hundreds of years.

And so, what is happening in the mosques, what’s being taught there, what’s being propounded and its implications on society? I mean, again, it’s like, there’s no question that some mosque—let’s make sure we use our exception language here—that some mosques can be breeding grounds for violent extremist ideology, right? So it’s like, and for conceptions of Sharia law that are authoritarian and seeking to rule. So it’s like, to me, it’s more like, what is being taught in the mosque, what is the approach here, than it is just sort of blanket sort of like, no, you can’t build any mosques. I’ve not said that ever personally. You know, some people do.

Shadi Hamid: But—but as—but as a secular liberal could say that, hey, we got to monitor those churches that are breeding grounds for Christian nationalism and people like, you know, William Wolfe, who want to impose biblical morality. It could very easily be, like, turned on you. You do realize that, because that’s what people think you’re doing sometimes.

William Wolfe: Well, it already—I mean, again, it’s—it already has been, right? So it’s just like, everything that—this has been a funny feature of this conversation, where it’s like, everything that you guys think could be bad if Christian nationalists are in power, I am telling you, is already happening from the left when they’re in power against Christians.

Shadi Hamid: But I mean, yeah, so it’s like—I mean, so that’s good. You don’t think it’s good for liberals to be anti-Christian. You don’t think liberals and secular people should be monitoring churches and checking about whether they say extreme things about Christian nationalism. You believe in freedom for Christian churches. Anyway.

William Wolfe: Yeah, sure. In general. But I mean, I will—I would want to concede me—I mean, like, you know, I do think that, like, there is—there’s, like, this is a question of, like, what, you know, what are the religious teachings inspiring or condoning, right? So it’s like, I think if you have, like, a Christian church that is regularly preaching to its people that they should be firebombing abortion clinics, they probably should get a visit from, like, authorities, right? So it’s like, I mean, there’s—it’s not like there’s no limitations on what Christians can or should be doing under the guise of claiming Christianity, right? Like, I don’t think using Christian as an excuse to promote violence, you know, is acceptable either, right? So, like, there’s limits on that too.

Matthew Kaemingk: Well, we are way over time. Do you have time? One last question, William?

William Wolfe: Yes.

Matthew Kaemingk: All right, man. Centre of the Christian faith: loving your enemies. Who is your enemy, and how are you called to love them? Finish us off with that.

William Wolfe: That’s not the centre of the Christian faith. The centre of the Christian faith is repenting and believing in Jesus. Matthew, it’s not. It’s not. I’m not going to accept your framing there. It is not the centre of the Christian faith. Not even close. That is not—Jesus Christ actually defeated his enemies, Matthew, and he’s going to put them all under his feet. So it’s like, I’m sorry, I can’t accept that. So you want to try that question again?

Matthew Kaemingk: No, I think that’s a great way to end.

William Wolfe: Well, no, I mean, that doesn’t mean we don’t love our enemies. I’m not going to accept the—I think that’s actually quite a liberal vision of Christianity, that the centre of it is loving our enemies, when we worship and serve a risen, resurrected, and reigning Christ who’s going to return with a sword to put all of his enemies under his feet, the ones who do not repent and believe.

Matthew Kaemingk: I still think we should love our enemies.

William Wolfe: Absolutely. But I will say this: loving your enemies is not a public policy prescription, right? Like, I think that we can absolutely—I’ve said this before, it’s like, you know, you’re not a very good Christian if you don’t help somebody broken down on the side of the road because you think they’re an illegal immigrant. You, of course, you should help them, right? Like, you know, that—that’s not how we should be carrying ourselves. But we can also still enforce our immigration laws, and I see no contradiction between the two.

Matthew Kaemingk: William, thank you so much for coming on. I think—I think both sides knew this would be a challenging conversation, and you stuck with it and you answered our questions, and I’m grateful for that. I do think as America continues to polarize and divide, we need these spaces where people who really disagree and even maybe dislike each other talk to each other. And I want to thank you for sticking with this. It’s not always easy or fun. And so, yeah, we asked you a lot of tough theological and political and cultural questions today. So I do really want to thank you for that, William.

William Wolfe: Yeah, thanks for having me, guys, on.

Shadi Hamid: And I’d like to echo that too. I mean, yeah, thanks so much, William. Really appreciate it. Grateful to you for coming on and talking to us.

William Wolfe: Thanks for having me.