Why Christian nationalists can still be conservatives

Editor's note: This article is part of a point-counterpoint on Christian nationalism. Read Garen Christopher Kaloustian's argument, “Why ‘Christian nationalists’ are liberals — whether they realize it or not,” here.

Garen is right about something that many self-described nationalists might rather not admit. Modern political nationalism emerged alongside liberalism, and the two were often allies.

The nationalists of 19th-century Europe were not generally fighting to restore the old order. They were often fighting against it. They wanted Italians to rule Italians, Germans to rule Germans, Hungarians to rule Hungarians. That put them at odds with the great dynastic empires and, frequently, with the Church. Metternich had good reason to regard nationalism and liberalism as related threats.

Conservatives have to conserve something that actually exists. For an American, that something is not the Habsburg Empire or Bourbon France.

Throne and altar

I should disclose my own bias here. I'm Catholic. I recognize the authority of the pope. I have no particular interest in proving that America is, or must remain, a Protestant nation, and I'm considerably more sympathetic than the average American conservative to the old Catholic critique of liberalism. In fact, I tend to see the Protestant Reformation itself as one of the great ruptures that eventually produced the liberal world. When Garen talks about throne and altar, I understand the appeal.

But I'm also an American, and this is where I think his argument goes wrong.

Garen defines nationalism as a doctrine of political legitimacy: Sovereignty belongs to the nation rather than to a king or emperor. Because this transfers legitimacy from the top down to the bottom up, he calls nationalism a species of liberalism. As he puts it, "To actually be conservative is to reject bottom-up legitimacy."

Why?

That might describe a particular kind of European reactionary thought. It does not describe American conservatism as it has existed for more than two centuries.

America's inheritance

An American conservative inherits a republic. He inherits the Constitution, representative government, the common law, federalism, Christianity, local institutions, and a political tradition in which the people are understood to possess rights that precede the state. He can argue about how well those things fit together. He can even acknowledge that some of them have roots in liberalism.

What he cannot plausibly do is declare the entire American political inheritance illegitimate. After all, what's "conservative" about asking Americans to overthrow a 250-year-old constitutional order in favor of a European political system that they never had?

The same problem arises with Garen's treatment of Christianity. He's on firmer ground in describing throne-and-altar politics as part of the historic integralist tradition within Christianity. But Christianity itself is not synonymous with monarchy.

As a Catholic, I don't need to speculate much about this. The Catechism teaches that political authority ultimately derives from God. But it also explicitly recognizes a diversity of legitimate political regimes. The Church's Compendium of Social Doctrine goes farther: “The subject of political authority is the people considered in its entirety as those who have sovereignty.” The people may entrust the exercise of that sovereignty to elected representatives and replace them when they fail.

That doesn't mean Catholicism embraces simple majoritarianism. John Paul II warned against the idea that truth is “determined by the majority,” and the Church teaches that political authority remains bound by the moral order and the common good. The people can't make something just simply by voting for it.

But that is very different from saying legitimate political authority requires a king. Catholic teaching manages to hold together two ideas Garen treats as opposites: Political authority ultimately comes from God, and the people can nevertheless possess and exercise political sovereignty.

So the choice Garen eventually gives us — Christendom on one side, a liberal empire or balkanized ethnostates on the other — is too neat.

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Cherry bomb

In fact, Garen makes a distinction that helps explain where I think he goes wrong. Nations and nationalism are not the same thing. Nations are ancient. Nationalism as a political doctrine is modern.

I've been reading Christopher Hibbert's history of the French Revolution, and one little scene in the book captures the ambiguity nicely. Hibbert describes crowds wandering through the Tuileries after the royal family's flight in 1791: "A cherry hawker sat with her basket on the eiderdown quilt of the Queen’s bed. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘Today, it’s the nation’s turn to be comfortable.'”

What exactly did “the nation” mean to her?

By 1791, the word had acquired a radical political meaning. The revolutionaries claimed that sovereignty belonged to the nation rather than the king. Perhaps our cherry seller had absorbed the new doctrine perfectly well.

But she was also using a word that referred to something considerably older: the people of France. The revolutionaries did not invent them.

France already possessed a people, a history, a culture, a territory, institutions, traditions, and a religious inheritance stretching back centuries. The revolutionary innovation was the claim that this pre-existing nation was now sovereign.

Americans and America

That is almost exactly the distinction Garen himself makes. And it's why I think he asks his historical argument to do too much. He is right that modern nationalism emerged from the liberal and revolutionary upheavals that challenged Europe's old dynastic order. But he has already conceded that the nation itself is much older. Establishing the liberal genealogy of nationalism therefore doesn't establish that conserving a nation, preferring one's fellow citizens, or preserving a national culture is inherently liberal.

The fact that 19th-century Italian nationalists fought against throne and altar does not tell us whether an American in 2026 should believe that America is a real nation, that its government has particular obligations to Americans, or that its inherited culture is worth preserving.

What today's Christian nationalists generally mean by "nationalism" is not that every ethnic group in America should receive its own sovereign state. They mean something closer to the opposite: They believe Americans themselves constitute a nation, with a particular history and culture rather than merely a common set of administrative boundaries. That nation can include people of different ethnic backgrounds who nevertheless understand themselves to belong to a common people.

They believe citizenship entails obligations that don't extend equally to every person on earth. They believe a government should prefer the interests of its own people. And Christian nationalists add that Christianity is part of the country's inheritance and ought to have some meaningful place in its public life.

You can disagree with any or all of that. But pointing out that 19th-century nationalism helped destroy the Habsburg order doesn't refute it.

Succession concession?

Garen argues that if nationalism is taken seriously as the principle that every distinct people deserves its own sovereign state, then the consistent American nationalist begins to look like a secessionist.

Perhaps. But why must an American nationalist accept that definition? If Americans constitute a nation, there is no nationalist principle requiring the United States to be divided into smaller ethnic republics.

A nation does require common things: a language, institutions, historical memory, loyalties, customs, and some idea of what membership means. It also requires boundaries. A nation that cannot distinguish between its members and everyone else is eventually no nation at all.

Garen's argument about empires has problems of its own. He observes that the three great powers of the present day — the United States, China, and Russia — are enormous, multi-ethnic states capable of projecting power, while many European nation-states are small, dependent, and demographically declining.

Baby bust

True enough. But size is not the same thing as political health, and empire is hardly a guarantee of permanence. The Austro-Hungarian Empire disappeared. So did the Ottoman Empire. So did the Russian Empire, followed eventually by the Soviet Union. The British Empire once governed roughly a quarter of the world's population.

Nor is it obvious that Germany's low birth rate or Italy's aging population is the consequence of being a nation-state. Russia, one of Garen's own examples of a successful multi-ethnic empire, faces serious demographic problems of its own.

Garen points to the demographic decline of European nation-states, but he never establishes the causal connection. Why would Italians have more children if Italy were incorporated into a large Christian empire? Whatever is causing the fertility collapse across developed societies, Garen hasn't shown that the culprit is the nation-state.

But the larger problem with Garen's argument is his conception of what conservatives are supposed to conserve.

Nostalgia nation

Conservatism cannot simply mean fidelity to the political arrangements of Europe before the French Revolution. Conservatives have to conserve something that actually exists. For an American, that something is not the Habsburg Empire or Bourbon France. It is America.

Our inheritance is messy. It contains Christianity and Enlightenment liberalism, English common law and republicanism, individual rights and civic obligations. There are tensions among those things, and Garen is right to point some of them out.

But we don't get to choose our inheritance; the conservative question is what we do with it.

And if there is such a thing as an American conservative, he must presumably believe there is an America to conserve.