# The Case for Christian Nationalism ***The Case for Christian Nationalism*** (2022) is a book by political theorist [[Stephen Wolfe]] that makes an explicit intellectual argument for a Christian nation governed by Christian principles, including the controversial notion of a "Christian prince." Published by Canon Press — the imprint associated with [[Douglas Wilson]]'s Moscow, Idaho network — it became a defining text for the contemporary hard edge of the Christian-nationalist movement. The book is a central document in the [[Christian Nationalism Ecosystem]], pushing the movement from euphemism toward open advocacy of religious governance. ## The argument Published by Canon Press in November 2022 (488 pages), the book argues from a Reformed natural-law premise that nations are extended kin groups — culturally and, Wolfe allows, ethnically homogeneous — and that a Christian people has the right and duty to order its civil government toward Christian ends. Its institutional proposal is a "measured theocratic Caesarism": a **Christian prince** who suppresses public expressions of false religion while leaving private conscience alone, and a "great renewal" in which the current regime is displaced. The epilogue's call to banish or execute heretics, and the citation of the white nationalist William Gayley Simpson, are the passages critics fixed on. ## Reception The response inside evangelicalism was mostly hostile, which is itself the data point: Kevin DeYoung at [[The Gospel Coalition]] gave it one star ("not the answer the church or our nation needs"); Brad Littlejohn called it three incompatible books; Paul Matzko in *Reason* called it segregationist. The scandal that followed publication — Wolfe's podcast co-host Thomas Achord exposed as the author of a pseudonymous white-nationalist Twitter account, with Wolfe's initial defense of him — attached the book permanently to the [[Theobros]] milieu it had claimed to transcend. It nonetheless sold, and it did the work the vault records on the [[Christian Nationalism Ecosystem]] page: it moved the movement's hard edge from euphemism ("Judeo-Christian values") to open advocacy of confessional government, and gave [[Christ Church Moscow]], [[Canon Press]] and the [[Theonomy]] tradition a contemporary manifesto. [[William Wolfe]] (no relation) carries the same program into policy; [[Albert Mohler]]'s ambivalent engagement marks the establishment boundary; [[Andrew Torba]]'s embrace marks the other edge. [[Manifestos and Founding Documents Hub]]