Stephen Wolfe grew up in Napa, California,
and his father was an admirer of the right-wing pundit and erstwhile GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.
After attending West Point and serving in the Army, Wolfe earned advanced degrees before leaving academia to
“do the Wendell Berry thing”
in North Carolina with his wife and four kids.
Over the summer, Wolfe, 41, agreed to speak with me on the condition that I refer to him as “Dr. Wolfe”
and call him an “expert on Christian nationalism.”
The Dr. Wolfe I spoke with was a more muted version of the firebrand I’d watched online.
He said his ideal version of America would be led by a Caesar figure.
Gay marriage would be strictly prohibited.
Women would not be allowed to vote
—instead, men would vote for their households.
When I brought up the bit from his book about heretics being killed, he grew annoyed.
“I do think it’s permissible, in principle, for a state to suppress theological heresy,
but that doesn’t mean that it’s prudent or proper,
suitable in every circumstance or every tradition or way of life.”
The Founding Fathers, he added, had encouraged religious liberty,
so killing heretics would not be appropriate in the United States that we inhabit.
We turned to remarks he had made at a recent conference convened by Brian Sauvé:
“I think we need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity,
or Judeo-Christian worldview,
or Judeo-Christian whatever,
and really eradicate that from our thinking.
Because if we say that America is a
Judeo-Christian country,
then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?”
What role, I asked him, would Jews play?
After a deep sigh, he told me that they would be allowed to “exercise their religion freely.”
We spoke a week before Vance’s RNC speech,
and Wolfe’s remarks helped me understand what the TheoBros heard in Vance’s phrase about
"America as a people".
The founders, Wolfe noted, intended for their country to be “Anglo-Protestant with an American inflection.”
America, he continued, is “a place of settlement and rootedness,
but it’s an open ethnicity in which people can become one of us.”
Which is to say that, like some others, Wolfe is not necessarily opposed to the idea of nonwhite people in America
—as long as they agree to assimilate to the Anglo-Protestant dominant culture.
In this telling, America is not a pluralistic society at all,
but rather one in which there exists an uneasy truce between Christians and those they reluctantly tolerate.
Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Wolfe what motivated him.
“I want Christians to be more assertive and to recognize the Christian heritage of the American way of life,
and to seek to restore that,” he said.
“This is a Christian country, and we’ve got to work to restore it to what it once was"
In his keynote address at Sauvé’s conference, titled “Why Multicultural Pluralism Fails and What to Build Instead,”
Wolfe called the concept of America as a melting pot
“an early 20th-century idea cooked up by a Jew in New York who despised the confident Anglo-Protestant establishment.”
WASPs were the “distinct ethnicity” of America, he insisted,
and America should only welcome those who aspired to assimilate.
As he put it, “This is our homeland, and we welcome you on the condition of conformity.”
Or, in the words of JD Vance, America “is a group of people.”
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/09/theobros-jd-vance-christian-nationalism/
