Preferring the household is not becoming its head. Toby Sumpter is right about the father and right about a certain kind of check. He is wrong that a preference for the intact house, inside money that will be spent anyway, is already that check.[1] The father is the ordinary
James White named the empty square. The thin civil sentences he already granted still have to speak in it.
Essays
If you are not already in this fight, the question is simpler than the noise.
Notes
A note on Doug Wilson, two meanings of “postwar consensus,” and a sentence that outruns the argument. Published 4 September 2026.
Essays
Essay V of Christ, the Nations, and the Public Square Earlier essays refused to treat America as Zion, and refused to treat her as a machine without God. They kept particular peoples without turning blood into a gospel. The Two Slogans showed how a popular pair of sentences tries to
Essays
Essay IV of Christ, the Nations, and the Public Square Essay I owned a name and distinguished an affection from a claim. Essay III refused to treat America as Zion. The next charge is almost automatic. If nations are real, you must mean blood. If you love a people, you
Essays
Essay III of Christ, the Nations, and the Public Square Essay I owned a name. Essay II kept a word. This one takes the slogan that is meant to shut the argument before it starts. “America was never a Christian nation.” Say it with enough confidence and you do not
Essays
Essay II of Christ, the Nations, and the Public Square Essay I said that Christian nationalism, in the use we mean, is not Mussolini, and is not religion used as a tool of a pagan state. That sentence will not survive contact with the present dictionary unless we do some
Essays
Essay I of Christ, the Nations, and the Public Square Some Christians want the substance and not the name. Call it patriotism. Call it conservatism. Call it “a Christian view of the magistrate.” Leave “nationalism” to the people who will abuse it, and to the people who will use it
Notes
A note in Christ, the Nations, and the Public Square Two sentences often travel together. One says Christian nationalism is inherently white nationalism. The other says America was never a Christian nation. This note is about that pair, and about why those claims cannot share one past. The pair The
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A front door to Christ, the Nations, and the Public Square If the phrase Christian nationalism makes you flinch, you are not strange. The fright has sources. Some of them are real abuses of the name. Some of them are a story told so often that a moral statute starts