On Christian Nationalism and religious freedom

In its original and broadest sense, liberalism is not what it’s come to mean in modern American politics — a synonym for progressivism or the left-wing. It’s the belief that human beings have certain inviolable rights and liberties (hence the name), which governments exist to protect. American conservativism, in this sense, is at its root a liberal tradition.

This is important to remember in our current political climate because a certain illiberal right, often called “post-liberalism,” has emerged. For them, these rights and freedoms that are so basic to our nation’s founding and its civic culture — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to largely live your life as your conscience dictates until you cause harm to others — are the problem, something to move beyond.

A few days ago, Tobiah Powell released a sympathetic documentary about one of the largest groups on the post-liberal right, the Christian Nationalist movement. The documentary, “What is Christian Nationalism?,” interviews many of the leading voices of the movement. The longest interview in the film was reserved for a North Carolinian, Stephen Wolfe, who literally “wrote the book” on the movement, with his 2022 release, “The Case for Christian Nationalism.”

Wolfe, according to the book’s blurb, lives somewhere in central North Carolina and has an extensive academic background, including a post-doctoral degree from Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He is not just a backwoods preacher shooting from the hip, unfamiliar with the nuances of the historical and philosophical arguments of liberalism. Wolfe is very familiar with the case for liberalism and rejects it, instead making the case for post-liberalism and Christian Nationalism.

The documentary’s promotional material made sure to use Wolfe’s image prominently, as can be seen below.

Streaming on YouTube, January 9th!

Subscribe to Fearless Wandering Productions pic.twitter.com/knKJtDvLZ6

— What is Christian Nationalism? (@WhatisCN) November 15, 2025

Post-liberal or pre-liberal?

Many adherents frame the movement as moving beyond liberalism and its key tenets like freedom of religion and speech. But it’s worth asking them: Exactly what is on the other side once we move beyond? Rather than moving us to some promising brilliant future, it seems they’re really calling us back to a fairly bloody past — a return to the religious absolutism that dominated Western culture before the Peace of Westphalia. Between the time of the Reformation and Westphalia, there was over a century of bloody conflict between Catholics and Protestants, Lutherans and Calvinists, Anabaptists and everyone. Each prince wanted to mandate how God would be worshiped within his borders, and the local faithful were continuously rising up against these princes to assert their rights (or more often to try to assert their own views instead).

Listening to the interviews in this documentary, and other statements by these men, it’s clear they simply want to return to this state of all out war, where each religion seeks to use the government to impose their own religion.

Dale Partidge, in his statements in the documentary, said “Freedom of religion is, for all intents and purposes, a really bad idea. I don’t want freedom of religion because I don’t think Jesus wants freedom of religion… So should mosques be legal in America? I don’t think so.”

Likewise, Joel Webbon, another key figure highlighted in the film, echoed this, saying he doesn’t think in America it should be legal to have mosques, synagogues, and “certainly not these 90-foot tall demon statues,” adding, “There shouldn’t be public expressions of false worship.” Many princes and pastors from the Wars of Religion would have nodded right along.

Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon says that mosques and synagogues should be banned in America: “There should not be public expressions of false worship. That is idolatry.” pic.twitter.com/Ib3uyxvgUd

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) August 18, 2025

This thinking has real-world impact. The “90-foot tall demon statute” outside of Houston he was referencing is part of Hindu temple. CBN quoted Texas Senate candidate Alexander Duncan denouncing the statue of the “monkey-headed Hindu god Hanuman” by saying, “This is not what the Founding Fathers envisioned when they wrote the First Amendment.”

Here in North Carolina, an 155-foot statue, the tallest in the world, of the Hindu god Murugan is being built in Chatham County, on the southwest outskirts of the Triangle area, according to CBN. Among Christian Nationalists, both of these stories caused outrage and calls for intervention.

Another of those interviewed in the documentary, Joshua Haymes, said, “Hindus should not hold public office, absolutely not… We must not permit demon worshipers to hold public office in our nation.” So not only should their freedom of worship be eliminated but, it appears, other key rights as well.

While these pastors are all Protestants, there is a “post-liberal” Catholic equivalent too, the integralists and “Groypers” like Nick Fuentes, who often ally with the Christian Nationalists (though I imagine if these allies of convenience ever succeeded in actually creating a post-liberal Christian nation, they may have some disagreements on whether that nation would be Catholic or Protestant).

This past weekend, a recent Catholic-school graduate and college baseball prospect, 19-year-old Stephen Spencer Pittman, doused Mississippi’s oldest and largest synagogue, which had many decades ago been targeted by the KKK, with gasoline and lit a large fire, causing significant damage. He told the FBI he considered the site a “synagogue of Satan,” a term frequently used by Christian Nationalists and Catholic integralists. When being read his rights, he said, “Jesus is Lord.” Unsurprisingly, under the story on Twitter, a self-avowed Christian Nationalist said, “Why are there Synagogues in Mississippi? We don’t want your foreign religions in our land.”

As a Catholic Christian myself, it disgusts me to see my religion and phrases like “Jesus is Lord” being used to justify burning down synagogues or calling for the elimination of basic rights for those of other religions. We don’t need to agree with every tenet of someone else’s religion to leave them the space to pursue truth according to their own conscience. If we have as much faith as we claim, it should leave us with confidence that an honest pursuit of that truth will lead to them in the right direction over time.

And even if it doesn’t, as Thomas Jefferson famously said, “The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

The post-liberal worldview, to the degree it has made itself known, appears identical to the failed pre-liberal one. It would be a return to some of the West’s darkest days, not a return to some lost idyllic Golden Age of our ancestors. Sure, we can always find problems to point to — and the atomized dynamic of the current culture is certainly one of them. It would be great to have stronger families, churches, and sense of unity. But the pre-liberal world’s unity often came at the end of a gun, and only after a lot of bloodshed. Let’s remain within the Founders vision for a liberal order instead — one built on political toleration for differences, even serious ones, to give our neighbors the opportunity to pursue truth and goodness how their consciences demand, in hopes they let us do the same.

“On Christian Nationalism and religious freedom” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.