Here we are at the end of 2024. As I’ve look back over the topics I covered this year on resurrecting orthodoxy, I noticed that a good number of my posts this year had to do with, shall we say, a very specific “war” going on within the largely Evangelical world: Left vs. Right, Woke vs. Christian Nationalist, ex-Evangelical vs. Evangelical…that sort of thing. I began with an extended book analysis of Doug Wilson’s book Mere Christendom, then did another analysis of Deconstructing Christianity by Alisa Childers and Tim Barnett. A little while later I looked at Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood.
I did all that in the midst of an election year. Now that we’re at the end of the year, the presidential election is over, and things (at least temporarily) have toned down from an “11” on the craziness scale to about a “9.2,” I thought I’d tackle one more book: Caleb Campbell’s Disarming Leviathan: Loving Your Christian Nationalist Neighbor. A friend of mine on Facebook posted it as a recommendation, so I thought I’d have a look at it. To give a bit of a spoiler alert, I found the book mystifying. And so, I thought I’d write about it in one long post, if for no other reason than to get myself to clarify in my own mind the problems I’ve come to see particularly with “liberals,” “ex-Evangelicals,” and “Never-Trumpers” over the past few years.
Back in 2015-2016, when Trump initially ran for an eventually won the presidency, even though I hated him at the time, I sensed that he was sparking a major political re-configuration. The traditional “GOP vs. Democrat,” “Conservative vs. Liberal,” “Right vs. Left” lines of demarcation were being completely redrawn, and I don’t think most people realized it at the time. And I think a lot of the chaos and confusion and toxicity everyone has experienced over the past eight years primarily comes, not from the single person of Donald Trump, but from the “political vertigo” millions of people have been feeling, due to the fact that the old categories they had used to navigate political and cultural issues and give themselves a sense of “at least I understand what’s going on” security no longer were relevant or applicable. The result has been when people lose their sense of security, then tend to freak out…and America has been going through an eight-year-long freak out session.
All that said, the reason I found Disarming Leviathan mystifying is that it seemed obvious (at least to me) that Caleb Campbell is trying to figure things out and “give a prescription,” so to speak, regarding how to deal with this supposed “Leviathan-like threat” to America, but he ends up misreading a whole lot of things because he hasn’t diagnosed the fundamental problem to begin with. There are a lot of people who are probably in the same boat as Campbell. They think they are on a boat in the chaotic sea, battling Leviathan, when in reality, they’re on a dingy in the harbor of American politics, splashing about, mistaking their own splashing with some imaginary monster of their own making. In all sincerity, I want to say, “Just stop splashing and let things calm down…there’s no monster under your boat.”
So, I’m going to go through Campbell’s book briefly, although not a full-blown “book analysis” that I normally do. I’m taking all of one post on it. And this post will close my blog post contributions for 2024.
The Basic Thesis of Disarming Leviathan
The basic argument in Disarming Leviathan should be pretty obvious. “Leviathan” is American Christian nationalism, and it has taken captive and manipulated scores and scores of Jesus followers (mostly in the Evangelical, Baptist, Reformed, Pentecostal, and non-denominational camps) into supporting “fearmongering, rage-inducing, Bible-distorting, arrogant, deceitful, dehumanizing behavior” (3). Christian nationalist leaders have traded in Jesus’ teachings in order to grasp for the “sword” of political power. Translation? They voted for Donald Trump.
That being said, Campbell confesses early on that the rise of American Christian nationalism made him so angry that he realized that the posture he was taking against Christian nationalism was actually becoming the “posture of Leviathan.” He wanted to attack them, instead of reaching out to them and minister to them. In fact, what he calls for in the book is for his readers to view American Christian nationalists as a mission field that need to be presented with the Gospel. American Christian nationalists may profess to be Christians, but their “actions and stated beliefs are contrary to the gospel” (14). Translation? They have different political views than Campbell.
The first part of the book consists of statements, definitions, and characteristics regarding what American Christian nationalism is. The first four chapters are titled as follows:
- “The Apocalypse: Division, Desperation, and a New Calling”
- “A Figure in the Shadows: Understanding American Christian Nationalism”
- “Leviathan Emerges: The Spiritual Power Behind American Christian Nationalism”
- “Leviathan Exposed: The Emptiness of American Christian Nationalism”
The last four chapters, though, are essentially a blueprint, or “field guide” for Campbell’s reader to help them reach out to American Christian Nationalists:
- “Disarming Leviathan: Engaging Our Mission Field”
- “Meeting Leviathan: Preparing Our Hearts for the Work”
- “Engaging Leviathan: A Field Guide”
- “Leviathan’s End: A Story of Hope”
The Problem(s) with Disarming Leviathan
Let me say up front that I agree that there really are some hard-core Christian nationalists who really do fit the definition that Campbell describes. They really want Christians to literally take over the government and really want to make Christianity the official religion of America. There really are people who bought into the Q Anon nonsense and there really are people who think this “Christian” nation should look mostly white. And there are really people who think the Bible prophesies about Donald Trump and have pictures of him being cradled in the arms of Jesus with an AK-47 strapped to his back.
People like that, though, are utter fringe. They are not a majority of Americans, and they are not a majority of conservatives or the GOP. In fact, that doesn’t go far enough. It’s not that the are not a majority of conservatives—they comprise a miniscule sliver of them, in the same way I can describe a caricature of the most left-wing lunatic fringe, and it would be true that people like that comprise only a sliver of the Democrat party.
The problem with Disarming Leviathan, though, is that although Campbell at one point says that American Christian nationalists are not the same thing as your average patriotic conservatives who simply want the best for America, in reality, throughout his entire book the “Leviathan” he warns about looks a lot like an absurd caricature of Trump voters, namely conservative and Republican positions. And that is the basic problem I have with the book. It’s not that Campbell, or anyone, is either “liberal” or “conservative.” It’s that he has slapped a Jesus bumper-sticker on his liberal political positions and, since he is certain Jesus is on his side, has (literally) labeled all Christians with conservative views as being in league with the devil.
Although he is trying to convince his readers (and himself) that such people should be pitied and that the real Christians (those with his own political views) should see them as a mission field, the fact is that Campbell’s stance really is no different than that of fundies like Ken Ham, only with the political stances reversed. The fact is that everything in the book looks at things through a liberal American political lens, the result being that Campbell mistakes the Gospel and the Kingdom of God for the typical Democrat talking points for the past eight years. As I read his book, I got the impression that the only news source Campbell has accessed for the past eight years is MSNBC, and he has uncritically swallowed every word and claim without a moment’s reflection. When you parrot the talking points of Al Sharpton and Rachel Maddow, you’re not dealing in reality.
Now, Campbell seems to be completely sincere and well-intentioned throughout the book, but to be honest, on almost every page of my copy, I have “ironic” and “projection” written in the margins. To be clear, I’m not angry with him at all. I feel sorry for him. At the same time, I found so much in the book humorously absurd. He just doesn’t get it. With that, let me now just dive into my own “conversation” with various things Campbell has in his book.
A Conversation with a Leviathan Combatant
1. Campbell begins his book by calling 2020 an “apocalypse,” highlighting Covid-19, the case of George Floyd (among others), the BLM demonstrations, and the January 6th “insurrection.” He then laments that there were so many supposed Christians who got dupped by spiritual leaders who didn’t act like Jesus, but who instead went down the road of Christian nationalism and pushed anxiety and suspicion over Covid-19, racial justice and the election to gain political power.
- Covid-19: Let’s be clear—the vaccines were fast-tracked by the Trump administration. Furthermore, at the time, many Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, said they weren’t going to trust the vaccines because Trump was having them down. As soon at the Biden administration took power, the vaccines were mandated. The issue was never the vaccines themselves. The issue a lot of people had were the mandates and the shutdowns.
- BLM: Again, the issue so many people had were not with the “peaceful protests.” The issue was with the violent riots that resulted in the killing of people and the destruction of millions of dollars worth of property.
- January 6th: I do not know one person who thinks January 6th 2021 was nothing. Everyone agrees that those who violently broke in deserve to be punished. The issue people have is two-fold: (A) there were a lot of people who literally had the doors opened to them to wander in after the violence was over who later got arrested and jailed; and (B) we know now that there were, in fact, FBI sources within the crowd that day—when that was suggest originally, there were howls of “conspiracy theory,” but that has turned out to be true. That’s not saying the FBI was behind it all—obviously. But it doesn’t look good, especially when that came on the heels of the supposed kidnapping plot of Michigan governor Megan Whitmer, where the case was thrown out because the majority of the alleged kidnappers were FBI agents who were trying to rope in a few guys to do it.
- My point is that there are critical details with these three examples Campbell highlights that he simply ignores. The irony is that later in his book, he says that American Christian nationalists (i.e. conservative Republicans) hate critical thinking and attack anyone who tries to ask tough questions—and yet that is exactly what has happened over the past few years. I can’t begin to count the times I have been verbally attacked by pointing out the above points.
2. Campbell then tells a story about how he encountered a young woman who was working for Charlie Kirk’s Turningpoint USA. Campbell was surprised that this young woman was joyful… “at least more joyful than I was.” He then noted that she told him, “Politics is really important, but at the end of the day, I really just want to follow Jesus.” Campbell then says that in that moment the Holy Spirit told him, “This person doesn’t need your theological attacks. She needs to be graciously reached with the good news of the kingdom of God.” She was in a cult.
- Regardless of your political views or how you feel about TPUSA, let’s look at this situation. This young woman was joyful and said that even though politics was important, she really just wanted to follow Jesus. Campbell, though, failed to realize that this young woman was exhibiting one of the fruit of the Spirit, and that she was telling him she was more about following Jesus than about politics. Instead, since she was on the “wrong side” of the political aisle, Campbell decided she was “in a cult.” He was the one who was making politics the determining factor of what the Gospel is.
- To be clear, I don’t care much about Charlie Kirk and TPUSA. I know it is a conservative political action group, and I know Kirk is a conservative Christian, but I’ve never heard him or his group advocating the things that Campbell claims are the hallmarks of Christian nationalism.
Later on in the book, Campbell comes back to Kirk and TPUSA as an example to how “Leviathan…guides people to worship political power” (73). He quotes Kirk as saying, “Theological disputes are important, but if we don’t get liberty, we will be debating them in prison.” I know enough about Kirk to know that one of his big issues is the first amendment and the freedom of speech. The point he was clearly making (as many others have as well) is that the freedom of speech is fundamental to a free society. That is true. That’s not now Campbell took it though: “If we don’t take political power, Kirk argues, our enemies will put us in prison, and so taking power by any means necessary is justified” (75). Call me crazy, but I don’t see anything in Kirk’s comment that talks about taking political power by any means necessary. Whether or not I agree with everything Kirk or TPUSA says, the fact is, they have a right to make political arguments and promote candidates. Nothing they do is subversive or violent. They are engaging in the political process. That is what civilians in a free democratic society should do, regardless if we agree with their stances or not.
3. Campbell also takes some time to articulate what American Christian nationalism believes. Here are the highlights:
- God has a special relationship with America, just like He had with Israel in the Bible.
- The government should be run by Christians.
- Christianity should be the official religion of the United States.
- America was founded on Christian values.
- The government should oversee and fund the Christian church.
- The government should promote Christian values.
There is a lot there. I cannot begin to address all of that. All I’ll just say is this. Yes, there are some people who are die-hard Christian nationalists who believe all that stuff to the core of their being, I just have never met one. Whoever these people are, they are a sliver of the country. Even Douglas Wilson (I did a book analysis of his book at the beginning of 2024), would not ascribe to all those things…and he actually embraces the notion of “Christian nationalist.” In fact, in his book, he actually rejects some of those things. So, what am I to conclude? If a self-described Christian nationalist’s view of “Mere Christendom” does not look like the description of Christian nationalism that Campbell gives in his book, and if that self-described Christian nationalist is a single pastor living in Idaho…how much of a real “threat” is Christian nationalism? Not much. Of course, even though he does not say it in this way, Campbell conflates Christian nationalism with MAGA and the modern GOP. Again, regardless of your political leanings, Christian nationalism (which is a fringe movement within a sliver of American Protestant Christianity) is not the same thing the political shift that is now known as MAGA.
4. Now, there are things Campbell gets absolutely right. He says that despite the many virtues America does have, that it “is still just a kingdom of this world, and kingdoms of this world cannot be the kingdom of God” (30). He says that true patriotism in America “emphasizes bringing together people around common beliefs; nationalism, by contrast, emphasizes excluding those they view as outsiders” (33). He also gets it right when that a telling sign of an evil force is that it ends up producing anxiety and rage, fear and hatred, and that it feeds off of chaos—and this is opposite of both true patriotism and truly following Christ (although the two are obviously not the same).
Again, it is absolutely true that the segment of actual die-hard Christian nationalists is very militant. But it is simply false that they represent the majority of conservatives who voted for Trump and the GOP. You can not like Trump—that’s fine. I didn’t like him in 2016. But over time, it became blindingly obvious to me that the majority of the divisiveness and chaos in this country wasn’t really coming from him. It was coming from, quite frankly, establishment politicians and media who were, to quote Campbell, “like Leviathan…seek[ing] to manipulate their followers through fear and subterfuge” (43). He said American Christian nationalist leaders were doing that—and perhaps in their little subcultures they were. But from my vantage point, on a national level, from the Russia hoax, to pee-tapes, to “they are mostly peaceful protests, and if you disagree, you’re a racist,” to so many other things—the actual rage was coming from the other direction. Heck, we were told that if Trump wins in 2024, that the USA as a democracy would cease to exist.
Again, this is not saying Trump is a good Christian guy—obviously he is not. And it’s not saying there are some doozies within the GOP—there obviously are. I’m simply pointing out that the “Leviathan-like” perpetrators of hate and rage, on an actual national level, were not these Christian nationalist leaders (whom he names in the book, and of whom I’ve never heard), but major figures in politics and the media who were stoking the fear and rage fires to keep people paranoid…in order to get them votes.
5. This is evident in Campbell’s book in the way he describes the unchristian issues that supposedly Christian nationalists have. You can recognize a “Christian nationalist” based on these things: being pro-life, being pro-Israel, being pro-debt reduction, being pro-work, being pro-marriage, and “voting on God’s word.” They ignore Scriptures that talk about caring for the poor, the immigrant, the widow, prisoner or orphan. They buy into QAnon. They want to promote a white, suburban Evangelical version of America, and that means trying to get rid of anyone not like them—like the Romans tried to erase the Carthaginians, the Turks tried to erase the Armenians, and the Nazis tried to erase the Jews. That is what your Christian nationalist MAGA voter wants. I’m sorry, enough with the “MAGA are Nazis” shtick.
In a highpoint of extreme irony, Campbell claims that American Christian national leaders “embellish stories, fabricate scenarios, and frequently outright lie about the nature of those in the them group. Functionally, this creates an imagined enemy, a big, bad, scary, monster who is out to destroy us. This monster also creates a useful scapegoat for all the problems we face” (54). Again, this is no doubt true with some actual Christian nationalist leaders. And yes, many run-of-the-mill conservatives and Evangelicals do hold to paranoid caricatures (like ALL public schools are indoctrination mills who are pushing CRT). But that entire quote perfectly summarizes how, quite frankly, Democrats and the media have been characterizing Trump and conservatives for the past eight years. There are too many examples to cite, but here are just a few—no, there were no pee-tapes, there was no Russia collusion, the failed pull-out from Afghanistan wasn’t Trump’s fault (he wasn’t president at the time), he didn’t call Nazis “very fine people,” his Madison Square rally was not like a Nazi rally in Nuremburg. Again, you don’t have to like him, but you do need to deal with reality—and the same people who were lying to you about those things (and a lot of other things) were the same people telling you that Biden was mentally fit as a fiddle when it was clear he wasn’t.
As a side note, Biden’s performance in the June debate with Trump was not surprising to me at all, because I was paying over the past four years. Many of my liberal and “never Trump” friends, though, were horrified—they had never seen Biden so mentally incapacitated. How could that be? Simple: the news sources they read and watched purposely didn’t cover his clear mental decline—and by not doing so, they were effectively lying about it.
6. The core problem that Campbell has in his book, and that (ironically) most actual Christian nationalists AND Christians (be they liberal or conservative) also have is this: they fail to see the difference between the actual Gospel/Kingdom of God and national politics. Obviously, a Christian nationalist who wants Christians to “take over” the country and actually enforce Christianity are guilty of that. I’m talking about something different though. It’s something that Christians have wrestled with for centuries, if not millennia. It’s what Augustine addressed in The City of God.
Now, Campbell is right in his book when he emphasizes that Christians should always be working for peace and reconciliation, and that Christians should work on loving our enemies, etc. But throughout the book when he is saying things like that, they almost come across as over-generalized platitudes. On one hand, he’s right when he says, “While states can be composed of many Christians, the state itself is not inherently Christian nor can it act in Christian ways. The state cannot follow Jesus, live out the Sermon on the Mount, or embody the fruit of the Spirit” (71).
The state cannot be Christian, because the state is not a person. Only individual people can be Christian or not. That means, though, we can’t expect the state to “live out the Sermon on the Mount” or “embody the fruit of the Spirit.” Only image-bearers of Christ can do that. The state essentially is a governing system that is set up by people, hopefully to maintain an orderly, just, and safe society. But what that inevitably means is that the state has the responsibility for dealing with evil and chaos sometimes…a lot of times…all the time. And that means things are always going to be messy and not perfect in the attempt to maintain an orderly, just, and safe society. The state, in an admittedly imperfect way, has to tackle complex and messy issues.
Let’s just take one issue as an example: illegal immigration. According to Campbell (and I’ve heard it nonstop from the “left side” of the political aisle for years), Christian nationalists (and basically conservatives and Evangelicals) hate immigrants. One “example” he gives of a poor soul under the influence of Christian nationalism is “Cousin Jim” who claims that “some evil Jewish billionaire is funding thousands of drug-dealing rapists to invade our southern border to take our jobs!” (103). Let’s put aside the fact that I’ve never heard anyone ever make that claim before. Call me crazy, but that might just be an oversimplified caricature of conservatives. Campbell also has “Aunt Betty” needing to ask herself, “What if my attitude toward immigrants is not what Jesus wants from me?” (107).
What’s the problem with these caricatures? First, although there might be actual far-right Christian nationalist nutbars who literally don’t want any immigration whatsoever, the fact is that conservatives and Republicans and Evangelicals don’t have a problem with immigration—they are concerned about the illegal immigration that has allowed millions upon millions of undocumented and unvetted people into the country. One of the actual Constitutional responsibilities the federal government actually has is to protect and maintain our national borders. That is something it has utterly failed to do. We have a process for legal immigration that allows millions in—and that is good and fine. No one I know is against that. What people are against is that the federal government hasn’t been doing its Constitutional job—and the result is chaos, drug-trafficking, human-smuggling, sex-trafficking, and a lot of needless death of both American citizens and immigrants who have been brutalized by the cartels.
The point is that illegal immigration is a really serious issue—it is a serious humanitarian issue. I have never heard anyone on Fox News ever say, “We need to keep all them immigrants out!” NEVER—I’ve always heard, “We want immigration; we’re a nation of immigrants; we just need to stop the illegal immigration that has become a serious humanitarian crisis.” And to take that concern and twist it as being some sort of racist, “anti-immigrant,” Leviathan-like thing is to actually engage in the misinformation and deception of Leviathan. Caring for the poor and immigrant does not mean letting very powerful and dangerous cartels use human beings made in the image of God for drug-trafficking and human smuggling. In fact, when the state shirks its Constitutional responsibility, that is the opposite of caring for the needy—it is being complicit in the abuse. The state needs to maintain an order border, so we can have a workable immigration system, so that we can be in a position to actually care for immigrants who come into this country.
Campbell’s Conclusions
Campbell ends his book by saying that of course Christians shouldn’t avoid politics altogether. As citizens in a democracy, Christians should be engaged, but they need to make sure they stay allied with Jesus, first and foremost. That is absolutely true. Campbell says Christians shouldn’t be a partisan donkey (Democrat) or elephant (GOP); they shouldn’t avoid politics altogether, but neither should they see themselves as “warriors,” because warriors often end up serving “the dragon.” Instead, Christians should strive to be “servants” who serve “the lamb.” That is absolutely true.
The problem is that Campbell’s perspective in the book is thoroughly partisan. He may say there is a difference between Christian nationalism and a conservative Christian who simply is patriotic and loves America, but the fact is his description of Christian nationalism is a description of basic political conservatism.
Ironically, at the end of the book, after Campbell says that American Christian nationalists value many honorable things, he states, “It can sometimes be easy to focus on the bad in our mission field, treating ACNs as one-dimensional monsters…. A person who hates the culture of their mission field is not a missionary but a colonizer. A colonizer expects them to receive their version of the gospel and to live it out in ways that align with the colonizer’s culture” (117). Now, that is true, and it’s a good thing to say.
It’s also true that there are conservatives, and Evangelicals (and certainly actual Christian nationalists) who thrive on ugly caricatures of any who doesn’t agree with them as being “liberal” or “left.” My own story that I talk about in The Heresy of Ham involves a very YECist fundie headmaster convinced that I was some kind of “wolf in sheep’s clothing liberal” because I happened not to believe the earth was 6,000 years old. So, I know what I’m talking about when it comes to this sort of thing. But I also know that the way to combat that is not to turn around and do the same thing the other way.
Campbell sort of gets it…but he still is doing the same thing. All I can hope for is now that the recent election is over is that more people will take a step back and consider the possibility that they have allowed themselves to be whipped up into an anxiety-riddled frenzy over the past eight years, and that maybe they need to chill out. The overall vibe I get from Campbell is that he is a good and sincere guy. I just think that he, like many others, is dead wrong on this. Christian nationalism is not a threat to the country. It is a radical sliver within Protestant Christianity in America. It is a threat to people’s actual Christian faith, yes. But it isn’t the same thing as the GOP, or conservativism, or MAGA. If you want to see Leviathan at work, look to the unchecked established government bureaucracy that actually has power.
For me, politically, I want the government to be reined in and controlled so it can actually: (1) tackle the debt, (2) cut down on the bureaucracy, (3) address the border crisis, (4) keep the economy healthy for everyone, and (5) work for international stability—and that means standing up to actual bad actors in the world. That should be the government’s job. I will always have a certain amount of loathing and suspicion for politicians—but if those issues are responsibly addressed to a degree, I’ll be good. Whether one is a Christian or not, those should be goals every American should want to see accomplished.
Whew…this was long. I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad I did the book analysis post series I did in 2024, but I think I’m over and done with all talk about Christian nationalism, “Wokeism,” or anything else that this post touched on. Consider this absurdly long post to end 2024 my official “washing of my hands” of these issues. I have no desire to engage in these sorts of issues anymore.
Happy New Year.
