On the most important feast day of the Christian calendar, the phrase “Christ is King” started to gain a lot of visibility on social media. Even Muslims who profess Islam began to use it, although not quite in the sense that many Christians would wish. I’ve been following some of the buzz and debate around this topic and it raises important aspects of what the kingship of Christ really means for Christians and this world. For example, Andrew Tate, a Muslim convert who has gained popularity, especially among young white men who have been despised by the radical woke feminists, posted on X: “As a Muslim it warms my heart to see the resurgence of spirited Christian declarations. Christ is King. And I pray Christianity regains its strength and protects its societies against the pervasive and constant erosion of morality by the devotees of Satan. If you accept everything you stand for nothing.”
This post sums up well Tate’s worldview and his reasons for rejecting Christianity and converting to Islam. Tate does not proclaim “Christ is King” because Jesus Christ is truly the King of his heart and Lord of his life. He presents it as a kind of political protest against what he sees as the fundamental problem with Christianity. Tate has often said that he wants to believe in a powerful masculine God, whom we should fear, and that he cannot find it in Christianity – which he regards as a joke – because Western Christian societies have become so weak and feminine and Christians themselves are losing more and more of their influence and freedom of expression.
This is why Andrew Tate, who preaches a kind of “gospel of masculinity”, sees Islam as a more attractive religion. The fact that in Muslim countries homosexuals, apostates and blasphemers are sentenced to death is not a reason for Tate why Islam is evil, but on the contrary, it is this aspect of Islam that attracts him. Because such societies fear Allah far more than Christian societies fear God. For Tate, Christianity’s “God is not the greatest” – which is what the Arabic exclamation Alluha Akbar, often repeated by Muslims, means – because He is not feared in the same way that Muslims fear Allah.
This is the fundamental flaw in Tate’s thinking. He views the power and greatness of the God of Christianity from a very earthly and carnal perspective. The Bible everywhere emphasises God’s love for the weak, the poor and the despised, who were nothing to this world.1 The Creator of creation himself, and Lord of all creation, “emptied himself and took the form of a slave, becoming like men, and was found in essence like a man”.2 The little baby Jesus lying in the manger of the stable, or the King of the Jews hanging helplessly on the cross, bruised and bloodied, spat in the face and mocked by men, is a testimony to the uniqueness of the God of Christianity. In the video below, Catholic Bishop Barron highlights the irony of the Gospel story to orthodox Jew Ben Shapiro.
For Pilate and the Roman soldiers who crucified Jesus, Jesus’ kingship is a joke. To them he represents the fool king of the Jews, and with a sign nailed to the cross they are not only making fun of Jesus but also of the Jews. The followers of Jesus believed that He was the Saviour of the Jews, foretold by the prophets, who would free the Jews from the power of the Roman Emperor. Text Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, written on the cross in Greek, Latin and Hebrew and protested by the Jewish high priests3, was a message to all the Jews living in Judea: ” This is what will happen to anyone who opposes the power of the Roman emperor . Pilate, however, found no evidence for the false accusations of the chief priests that Jesus had incited the people against the Roman Emperor4, but crucified Him anyway for fear of falling out of favour with the emperor.5
Jesus’ followers were persecuted by both Jewish high priests and Roman emperors for the next 300 years. They were fed to lions, considered by the people as great entertainment, or made to light up cities at night as burning torches of fire. Many of the early Christians suffered the most terrible torture and persecution for the name of their Saviour, because they saw Christ as King instead of the Roman Emperor. The early Christians had no political influence and Jesus did not even ask them to seek it, for Christ’s kingship is not of this world, as He told Pilate.6 Things did not change until the Fourth Century, when the Emperor Constantine legalised Christianity and gave Christians religious freedom.
The glory of Christ and the greatness and power of the Christian God is seen precisely in His apparent weakness. It is seen in the irony of His hanging bloody and disgraced on Calvary’s cross beside the despised criminals, when He should have been crowned in Jerusalem to rule a greater and more glorious kingdom than the Roman emperor ruled. But Jesus did not come to overthrow the Roman Empire with earthly weapons. He came to overthrow it with His revolutionary message of love that changed people’s hearts and gradually made the world more moral.
Controlling people by force, violence and fear can be a sign of God’s greatness in the eyes of the ungodly like Andrew Tate. But it is quite the opposite. To try to strike fear of God into the “infidels” by killing the weak and defenseless in the name of Allah is sheer cowardice and weakness. When Jesus told us to turn the other cheek, it does not mean that Christians should be cowardly and submissive and never fight back . The bottom line is that we are called to overcome our enemies for Christ with love, not hate. By forgiveness and tolerance of injustice instead of revenge, hatred and violence.
This mainly concerns our personal interactions with people. When it comes to political and militaristic decisions to defeat evil, it makes more sense to follow the example God set for the Israelites to defeat their enemies.
And when the Lord your God gives them up to you, and you overcome them, you shall destroy them; you shall not make a covenant with them, nor show them mercy.8
Passages like these are not about incitement to genocide, as they are often misinterpreted in the modern context. It is the same as saying that you should not negotiate with terrorists. Those who seek our destruction do not value our diplomacy or our desire for peace and co-existence. No alliance should be made with evil. “Peace through strength” as American Presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump often put it. While Tate may speak right things at sometimes, and in December I quoted comments by him, Elon Musk and Alex Jones on the X space forum, with which I largely agreed, he is still a mocker who shares pictures of himself hanging from a cross with a cigar in his mouth and sunglasses on as a clear mockery of the most sacred Christian icon .
His behaviour is also far from Christian morality. Tate has been accused of sexual abuse of women and human trafficking. Although he denies the allegations, in many interviews he has bragged quite openly about how he has become rich as a pimp by luring young women to make pornographic videos for commercial purposes. He also tends to talk about women in very derogatory terms and it is therefore not surprising that he finds Islam such an attractive religion. So why do blasphemers like Tate say they are pleased that Christians are now more boldly proclaiming their faith and the kingship of Christ?
It has nothing to do with the resurgent boldness of Christians, but, in fact, it is a very unscrupulous campaign to stir up anti-Semitism and to associate the kingship of Christ with the Jew-hatred. Not all the Christians who have posted that phrase are anti-Semites, of course, and the intention may well be a perfectly sincere desire to profess their Christian faith in our increasingly anti-Christian culture. But that phrase has been adopted mainly by the followers of a young Trump supporter called Nick Fuentes, known on social media as the Groypers. Nick Fuentes claims to be a Christian, but he has very radical political views that are closer to Islamism and Nazism than to biblical Christianity. Fuentes’ political worldview is often referred to as ‘Christian nationalism’.
Just as the term “alt-right” caused confusion and confusion among Trump supporters and foes in 2016, so today the term Christian nationalism is stirring up similar confusion. Many Christian conservatives and Trump supporters may call themselves Christian nationalists, but they mean something quite different from what Nick Fuentes and his fans would mean by it. Whatever the original meaning of the term, the reason for this ambiguity also stems from the fact that in the liberal mainstream media almost any political activity sympathetic to Christian values and Christianity is often slandered as Christian nationalism or ‘Christian theocracy’. For example, if someone wants to bring back prayer in American schools, that too is Christian nationalism in the eyes of these left-wing journalists.
In the video above, a panelist on the left-wing MSNBC channel explains in a concerned tone how American Christian nationalists believe that our rights come from God, not from man or secular authority. The reporter in question had clearly not read the American Constitution where the founding fathers said they believed exactly the same thing. Thomas Jefferson wrote in the American Declaration of Independence :
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
As Catholic Bishop Barron explains in the video above, the idea that our human rights do not come from God but from the people in power is a very dangerous idea, because unless those rights are based on what is considered the ultimate moral authority for both rulers and ruled, then governments can also take those rights away or redefine them if they are no longer considered in line with the changing times or their new values. For example, for the same reason, many governments now seek to justify the deprivation of the freedom of expression of certain groups of people, because the prevention of vague and subjective “hate speech” or equally vague “disinformation” is claimed to be more important than guaranteeing absolute freedom of expression for all groups of people.
So basically, if the government replaces God and those in power become that supreme moral authority, then they themselves need not submit to the authority of any higher authority, but can impose whatever arbitrary laws and regulations they wish to oppress the citizenry. The history of the 20th century should serve as a cautionary tale of the horrors to which such a political philosophy leads societies. Bishop Barron’s excellent response to the outrages of MSNBC and other left-wing journalists also helps us to make clear the question of what kind of Christian nationalism Christians should or should not support. After all, if Christian nationalism is what Nick Fuentes and his followers define it to be, then Christian nationalism is far from being true Christianity. Fuentes has said that he favours a society that would more closely resemble a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan than a liberal democracy .
Fuentes says he supports Trump’s “America First” policy, but often stirs up hatred against Jews and other minorities, making noise about the excessive influence of Jews and the American “Israel lobby”. He has questioned the mass extermination of six million Jews in the Holocaust and in July 2023 he incited his supporters like Hitler: “We are in a holy war and because we are ready to die in a holy war, we will make them [the Jews] to die in a holy war”. The crowd cheered enthusiastically after him. While Fuentes’ followers represent only a small fringe among American conservatives and Trump supporters, whose views have been condemned by many mainstream conservatives, Fuentes’ Groypers supporters are adept at infiltrating and influencing public debate, including by inciting hatred of Israel.
While the majority of Trump supporters are positive about Israel and Jews (Trump was, after all, perhaps the most pro-Israel president in American history) and anti-Semitism is now much more of a problem for Democrats and the left, many conservatives have also been divided recently over the Israel-Palestine conflict. This conflict came to a head when the influential conservative Daily Wire media outlet fired a black journalist named Candace Owens, who has taken a much more critical view of Israel in the Gaza war and interviewed Jewish Hamas sympathizers such as Norman Finkelstein. On one side of the controversy is the orthodox Jew Ben Shapiro, who is seen by the pro-Candace Owens camp as too pro-Israel, and some even accuse him of not being loyal enough to his own country’s interests (an age-old anti-Semitic accusation about Jews) and instead advocating an ‘Israel first’ policy. To exacerbate matters between them, there is also a “most famous rabbi in America” named Rabbi Shmuley, whose grotesque trolling of antisemites (or those whom he has branded such) have not been the best at bringing peace and mutual understanding to the situation (Rabbi Shmuley is accusing even those who are the allies of the Jews and Israel).
Nick Fuentes’s Groypers troll group has then used this confusion to control public opinion and manipulate those who know absolutely nothing about Fuentes and his world view. By whipping up hatred against conservative Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire media outlet, the Groypers are trying to gain greater support and visibility for their ideas among mainstream conservatives. The “Christ is King” terminology is often used in this context to incite Jew-hatred, because they attach with it anti-Semitic slurs or political messages about how Jews like Shapiro are in their view at war with America’s Christian identity by appeasing the left, and the LGBTQ community, to accelerate America’s moral decline. Anti-Semites have been claiming for decades that Jews control the media and the porn industry and that there is a deliberate Jewish conspiracy to bring down the morals of Christian nations.
Jeremy Boering, managing editor of the Daily Wire, stated in his X-post that when the proclamation of the Kingship of Christ is used for such purposes, it is a form of saying the God’s name in vain, which the Bible warns us against.9 I agree, but people like Nick Fuentes not only say the the name of God in vain, but also misunderstand the Kingship of Christ. The kingship of Christ does not mean that Christians should raise Christ to kingship by force and violence. He does not expect us to create a religious theocracy like Iran where we force Christianity down the throats of the wicked and hang sinners and blasphemers on high gallows as a public deterrent to violators of God’s law.
There is no need to raise Christ as King, because He is already King – the King of kings! But His kingship is not of this world. Christians expect that He will one day reign concretely on earth and defeat His enemies at His second coming. The form of government of His millennial kingdom of peace we can only speculate on, but it will probably not be a theocratic tyranny if He is against the establishment of a theocracy even in this age. Christ’s kingship is not to be imposed on the earth from the top down either, but from the bottom up. This means that the values of Christianity and its power to change hearts must first spread to the wider culture before it can also begin to change political power structures, thrones, lordships and governments.
This development has already taken place in the history of Christianity so far. All the things that make our Western culture unique and superior to, say, Islamic societies, are the legacy of its Judaeo-Christian religion. Even the things that ‘Christian nationalists’ like Nick Fuentes despise, such as human equality, democracy, freedom of speech and religion, women’s rights, human rights, even the rights of sexual minorities, have been directly or indirectly influenced by the teachings of the Bible. This is demonstrated, for example, in the book Dominion by secular historian Tom Holland. This Judeo-Christian heritage of the West – true Christian nationalism – is thus threatened by two opposing ideological forces: at one extreme, far-rightists like Nick Fuentes, who do not hesitate to declare that their goals are very similar to those of Islamists seeking an Islamic theocracy.
At the other extreme are the secular woke fanatics who believe that the idea that human rights come from God is a dangerous idea. This latter group would not hesitate to set up a Marxist tyranny and drag Christians into gulags. I consider this latter group to be a much greater threat to the freedoms of the West, because it already controls the entire mainstream media, the public education system, and many national governing bodies or international organisations. I consider Fuentes’ vociferous trolls to be a threat only because they seek to divide the ranks of conservatives and stir up hatred at a time when all defenders of freedom should be pulling together against the threat posed by the radical far left, Islamists and globalists.
With those words, Blessed Easter to all dear readers!
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