10 MAJOR DIFFERENCES
Between German Christian Nationalism And American Christian Nationalism
Recently, I stumbled across an Instagram post from a very popular Christian author—one of those guys who writes books with sepia-toned covers and titles like Windswept Grace: Rediscovering the Ancient Rhythms of Faith—and he was making the bold claim that, after deep and scholarly examination, he had determined that German Christian Nationalism and American Christian Nationalism are practically identical.
I laughed. Then I cringed. Then I did that thing where you rub your temples and briefly question whether the Enlightenment was just a failed experiment. Because the level of cognitive dissonance required to seriously believe this is staggering—like, flat-earther-meets-Kanye-meets-I-know-where-Nessie-lies staggering.
This is the theological equivalent of Obama pointing at Trump and saying, “That guy right there? Literally Adolf Hitler.” Not in the “he isn’t a politician” way, but in the full “We must invade Poland immediately” sense. Not only is that kind of rhetoric despicable, but it fundamentally fails to take actual Nazism seriously. It reduces one of the most horrifying, mechanized systems of genocide in human history to a lazy, culture-war dunk.
But wait, it gets worse.
Because this brand of historical illiteracy also insults the exact people who died fighting the Nazis. And guess what? The vast majority of those men were American Christian Nationalists. Yes, the guys storming Omaha Beach were not storming in the name of secular liberal democracy. They had mom’s Bible in one pocket and a pack of Lucky Strikes in the other. They prayed before battle, they believed America was a chosen land, and they felt no tension whatsoever between their cross necklaces and their M1 Garands. To imply that their core beliefs somehow made them indistinguishable from the goose-stepping lunatics they were actively mowing down? That is not just idiotic—it is historically obscene.
And here’s where I turn my critique directly at the author-pastor-theologian-industrial complex:
If you are a serious person, you are occasionally required to say serious things.
If you are a pastor or theologian, you do not get to wake up, fire up the ol’ Instagram app, and vomit up a moral equivalence so absurd that it makes people question if you’ve ever even read a book, let alone written one. If you are incapable of distinguishing between Evangelicals in Tennessee complaining about secularism and Lutheran Nazis enthusiastically endorsing genocide, then I beg you—keep your little communion wafer hole shut.
Because here’s the thing: when you overplay your hand like this, when you take what should be a serious critique and inflate it into something historically laughable, you become a joke. You go from being a person making an argument to being the guy on Twitter who insists that his HOA is just like the Third Reich. You turn real history into a punchline.
And at that point, why should anyone take you seriously ever again?
Here’s the 10 Ways American Christian Nationalism vastly differs from German Christian Nationalism:
