A few words on Valerie Hobbs’s memoir No Love in War
I recommend you read (or listen to) Dr. Valerie Hobbs’s book No Love in War: A Story of Christian Nationalism. Dr. Hobbs grew up as an insider in the Christian Reconstruction movement with its hard right politics, and then within the broader but still stifling conservative world of a Southern Presbyterian denominational college. Her story is filled with tales of suffering, abuse, tragedy, oppression, oblivious hypocrisy, and of all the scars to prove it.
The book makes me feel terribly sad, outraged, embarrassed, and made me cringe often. I also found it frequently enlightening and learned quite a bit about myself and my old movement from it.
First, the only criticism I’ll share is a quibble: the subtitle highlights Christian Nationalism. That is timely, but the book is not really about the latest fascination with CN. It is about so much more and deserves a more fitting subtitle. It is above all a memoir; and it is a very well-written, crafty, witty memoir filled with visceral pain and well-placed critique.
There will be some who read her many tales and commentary and accuse her of bitterness. At one time, I myself would have been quick with that retort. I have learned, however, from much of my own experience, and I know certain persons who grew up with her right in the mix: the facts to which she attests, and the suffering derived from them in the name of God’s Law and Biblical Worldview, are all too substantially true. If she is bitter, then hers is a very well-deserved and righteous bitterness, and the withering critique that flows from it is a judgment the likes of Hannah’s. While my rational mind wants to object on some fine points of representations, I have learned that the work of the work of the Lord is to shut up and discern the point of his judgment.
(Too often this work has been utterly missing in a movement that prides itself on debunking and proclaiming. In all our monumental proclamations of God’s law, we rarely attained to God’s law in practice.)
We have been so eager with our formalisms: we have so many books, debates, and sermons exhibiting the formal, systematic structures of God’s law, and almost zero functional understanding of it in terms of the fruit of the Spirit, and power through service (not hierarchy). Dr. Hobbs’s memoirs are relentless tales of these failures to love while we postured ourselves in pulpits and in front of shelves of all the right books.
Here's one example. On page 32, she writes of Dominionists:
They believe that through the blessing of God on their own political, social and economic efforts, the kingdom of God will grow until the earth is as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. . . .
She further says their goals is “a theocratic state or some version of Christian occupation of all secularist institutions, the reclaiming of the land, the cosmos, for Jesus Christ, whether by violence or some other coercion.”
Now, my rational, defending mind wants to quibble over misrepresentations: no Reconstructionist leader I ever heard of believes the kingdom grows by our own efforts. Nor did we ever sanction kingdom by violence or coercion—you know, like jihadis or terrorists.
The problem is that, well, yeah, we actually did—especially functionally, in practice. My debate with Doug Wilson made it clear that he wants to use the power of the State to punish homosexuals—and that even the threat of the death penalty is at least on the table. This view, today, is quite moderate compared to some of the latest proponents of CN.
Of course, many of them have been very careful to hide their full intentions by crafty wording or sly silence (this is, admittedly, less of a feature among the clumsier young leaders today). I’ll share a story from within Dr. Hobbs’s own circle to which she was probably not privy, but was shared with me much later:
One of the church leaders was running for political office. He held the same beliefs about homosexual practice and the death penalty I just described. He was being interviewed about his views, and the reported asked him point-blank if he believed in the Old Testament law prescribing the death penalty for homosexuals. “No, not at all, never!” The reporter, who knew better, was flabbergasted and stifled. As the churchman rode away in a car a few moments later, he stopped and rolled down the window to the reporter, and said, off the record: “What you should have asked me is, do I believe in the death penalty for the homosexual act itself!” And he roared laughing and drove off.
The same is true for blasphemy laws, blue laws, and a host of other religious laws and state-sanctioned destructions of current civil rights law in these circles. Despite all of the talk of decentralization, limited government, and liberty, the truth is that what awaits in all of their regimes is something more akin to Franco, Constantine, or old Christendom (in my own books, I warned about this problem since 2015). I have no doubt that many would not hesitate to enjoin violence and coercion if they thought they would have a viable shot at installing such a regime by doing so.
The many suspicions people have about the more extreme forms of theocratic tyranny, fascism, racism, misogyny, segregationism, antiseimitism, and other such things appearing in these broader CN, southern reformed, CREC, charismatic-dominionist, “7 mountains,” and other such CN-friendly circles are all very well founded. Maybe not every person in such groups sanctions such things, but there are more than enough who do, and they are getting more vocal and explicit about it.
Dr. Hobbs’s book is very good at pulling back the curtain on the type of culture that has been the breeding ground for such views for decades now. She lived through it—right literally through the middle of it. She’s the eyewitness you need.
When I re-read sections of Dr. Hobbs’s book, I find so much to chew on. Simple sentences could be whole studies and books of their own. Much of it is haunting. She describes, for example, the psycho-sociological communities attracted by the early groups:
“[W]hat they share is a hunger for the recovery of something squandered or stolen. . . .” (p. 33).
That, I would say, is the central myth of all conservative countercultures. It is the central myth of much of the Christian Reconstruction and Christian Nationalist movements. It is also the central myth of MAGA and January 6.
More:
Predictably, then, most in our church-school membership were escaping something or someone elsewhere—we drew in society’s white detritus, wounders and wounded, people of privilege who identified as tyrannized, people of intergenerational trauma, anger, arrogance, secret corruption, those born in agricultural poverty, people of conspiracy, tax fraud, suspicion, violence and other abuse, anti-immigration, pro-segregation, people who spanked their children in supermarket aisles, who prayed loudly before meals in restaurants, people of malcontent, families ostracized for objecting to liberalism and inclusion somewhere in some way, now seeking a vessel to weather the coming storm (p. 33.
I could give tons of such favorite quotations from throughout the book. I’ll simply leave you to read the rest yourself.
Dr. Hobbs writes with a deeper and more real understanding than all her teachers. He writes of trauma through trauma, suffering through suffering, etc. She covers all the above topics, plus the very real aspects of the abuse of women, sexual abuse, suicide (an all-too common but rarely-discussed phenomenon in these circles), scandal, and more with keen insights into psychology and humanity.
Again, I personally know people who went through much of this with her. There are many eyewitnesses. There are today plenty of refuges of young and now middle-aged adults dealing with the trauma, depression, anxiety, mental health crises, addictions, and lost and/or dead friends because of it. There are trails of victims in the wake of this kingdom that has grown nothing but power and ego more than a half-century years now. To this, they want to add the power of the State and its sword.
We thought we were full of the knowledge and glory of the Lord. We were only full of ourselves.
Dr. Hobbs’s book is available from the publisher or Amazon, or for FREE in podcast form here:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/no-love-in-war-a-story-of-christian-nationalism/id1726345907