It’s always an amusing exercise to watch a legacy media outlet breathlessly report that socially conservative policy organizations want to enact socially conservative policies as Politico did on Tuesday.
The outlet’s latest shock at the ideas proposed by conservatives is the emergence of so-called “Christian nationalism,” specifically in the form of the Center for Renewing America, a policy think tank that was founded by several Trump administration alumni, including Russ Vought, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget.
The article details purported plans by Vought and others to “infuse ‘Christian nationalism’” into policymaking if Donald Trump’s campaign to return to the White House is successful. But what the article describes as “Christian nationalism” is really just a rehashed version of standard social conservatism — the one key difference being that the movement openly states that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and should be governed by Christian morality.
I’m sure the deeply religious Christian Founding Fathers who lived in states that had official religions would be so deeply offended by this notion that they would declare the Constitution a mistake and beg for the return of King George III as their sovereign.
But what makes the whole report from Politico so silly is what it identifies as the disturbing ideas proposed by Vought, CRA, and other so-called Christian nationalists.
Take, for example, William Wolfe, a Southern Baptist who worked in the Trump administration at the Pentagon and at the State Department and who has worked with Vought and CRA in the past. As an evangelical, he holds pretty standard socially conservative beliefs that marriage is between a man and a woman, that abortion is murder and should be illegal, and that schools should not be showing pornographic content to children.
To highlight Wolfe’s supposed extremism, Politico notes that he has deleted a number of his posts on X before pointing to a December post in which he said no-fault divorce should be illegal and that men who father children should be required to “provide for their children as soon as it’s determined the child is theirs.”
Absurdly, Politico characterizes this position as “a clear incursion by the government into Americans’ private lives” while completely ignoring the fact that Wolfe is simply backing an expansion of child support laws that already require the father of a child to pay child support or face prison time.
In another section of the article, Politico says that “Natural Law,” which has its roots in Ancient Greek philosophy before being further developed by Christian philosophers in the Middle Ages, is “the belief that there are universal rules derived from God that can’t be superseded by government or judges.”
“While it is a core pillar of Catholicism, in recent decades it’s been used to oppose abortion, LGBTQ+ rights and contraception,” the article reads. One wonders what was used to oppose those things prior to “recent decades” and what system of rules laws should be grounded on, if not a universal order designed by God that is at the core of the Declaration of Independence.
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But as philosophically and historically illiterate as the report is, it does raise a fundamental question about what should be the philosophical and ethical foundation of a nation’s laws. Are there eternal and transcendent principles that must inform lawmaking? Or is sheer political will and power the only measure of what is right policy since man is the ultimate arbiter of good and evil?
It is a question that those who fearmonger about “Christian nationalism” are themselves afraid or unwilling to answer. The Center for Renewing America and other like-minded organizations have no such fear, and their voice will make policymaking better as a result.