Perhaps it is a sign of unsettled times that there are different ways to hear terms in common use. We tend to forget that when you use a word people do not hear your meaning; they have to fill the meaning in. And it may be that at certain times there are more options – thus there is more opportunity to hear nonsense in what you say.

For instance, suppose I were to say that in the present age two things in tension both seem true to Christians:

There is trouble in the kingdom.

Our kingdom is not of this world.

This is going to prompt quite a few Christians to shake their heads and dismiss what I am attempting to say. Their response?

There is no tension between these facts.

About that they must actually be right, at some level, because trouble in the kingdom, in the nations of this world, is the norm for this world. But now we need precision from the objector: what ‘trouble’ are you talking about: the trouble there is on this earth, everywhere and always? Indeed there is such trouble; where else do we find trouble (sin, crime, evil) but in earthly kingdoms?

But the trouble I am attempting to talk about is not that kind of trouble. – So I suppose the difficulty I began by noting could be summed up in a different way: some discussions are doomed to stall on account of ambiguous terms, like ‘trouble’.

So we get the old lesson of Logic all over again. Energy is demanded of you if the discussion you want to have is ever to focus on one and the same distinct and real thing. You cannot talk about specifics using general terms: species and genus are not the same, and ‘trouble’ is general. Speaking up, only to have your claim instantly shot down, might be the fault of the speaker who never made it clear just what he is talking about.

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What is the ‘trouble’ I am attempting to discuss? It is not so easy to say. This is an achievement made that much harder by our collective indifference to this task that is identifying the trouble of our times.

I am coming to the conclusion that while the ‘signs of this trouble’ are everywhere (and scarcely need mentioning) the nature of the trouble is actually strangely elusive. To be clear, by the nature of the trouble I do not mean the cause. Simply, what is the thing that is wrong? What precisely is the dysfunction?

Is it sin? If so then it is the ancient trouble, and the solution is as it was in the day of Jesus, and it is not political: it is “the power of God” (Mark 12:24).

If the trouble I am talking about is not that – and this is our very question: what is the trouble that is now disturbing us? – it might be some kind of dysfunction, certain kinds of ‘breakdown in the operation of our society’ or ‘our nation’. (Quotation marks here to mark the strictly hypothetical nature of these suggestions, as to answer summarily at this point would just contradict my claim about the difficulty of naming the trouble. You certainly cannot answer impulsively, indifferent to data and argument.)

When I say ‘strangely elusive’, however, this might actually be presumptuous. In medicine, I gather, dysfunction is illness and the two tasks I separated have distinct names: identifying the illness is diagnosis and determining the cause is etiology. Well, would it ever make sense in medicine to say, regarding some case, that ‘diagnosis is strangely elusive’?

That would be an odd remark. There is nothing strange about a diagnostic challenge. In our world I would think that difficulty, encountered in identifying an illness (determining what exactly is going wrong), is pretty normal. I imagine that, as time passes, there are actually new diseases and I would expect that seeing where exactly in a person’s body the trouble lies (maybe their particular dysfunction is a confluence of two or even three troubles) is a fairly common problem, not unexpected at all. That doctor who calls diagnosis strangely elusive turns out to be a stuffed shirt whose remark has nothing to do with diagnosis, everything to do with his own brilliance.

In other words, diagnosis might be ordinarily difficult. Trouble might be, simply, hard to identify.

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We are living in a troubled time but we never bother to single out and identify the nature of the trouble; we just try to fix it. – This looks patently stupid. Identifying the trouble would lead us to the appropriate treatment, that thing best fit to undo this exact trouble, but we do not possess even the impulse to identify it. (We need solutions!)

I am thinking about this having begun to read The Case for Christian Nationalism by Stephen Wolfe, which in the month since its release  has garnered notably strong support – for instance, from Rusty Reno, editor of First Things, who writes,

Clearly argued and forceful in its conclusions, The Case for Christian Nationalism sets the standard for today’s debates.

Others are less sanguine. In a more negative review that I ran across, Baptist minister Timothy Frisch lists some of its good qualities. Wolfe “voices legitimate concerns about present American society”; a few “sentiments with which many [Christians] can relate” are, notes Frisch:

•  Anger at the secularization of culture;
•  Anger at Christians who are not standing up for what is right;
•  Desire to have a society where Christian values reign supreme.

Such feelings, he says, have inclined readers to take Wolfe’s book seriously, so that all of a sudden we are talking about ‘Christian nationalism’ – a term some have adopted

as a sort of badge of honour demonstrating their opposition to secularism and their unashamed desire to see Christianity thrive in the United States of America.

Frisch is quite right about the prevalence of the feelings; let me confirm that I have them.

(But then, if I do, what? What does this call for; what is the trouble? – Is it secularization, … and failure to oppose it? These are exactly our questions.)

These feelings have prompted discussion of a topic on scarcely anyone’s lips till now – presumably now on our lips because of the trouble.

Certainly, why not, discuss Christian nationalism, which would not be a live topic but for the trouble to which it is a response. But will Wolfe’s book identify that trouble – or will it give this no direct attention? Inattention to the nature of our trouble is not an insufficiently recognized problem: it is an unacknowledged problem.

I put it to you that in the present situation to make the case for Christian nationalism is like making the case for radiotherapy in the room of an undiagnosed patient. That is a desperate, even bad thing to do. There is a rationale – a cogent and excellent argument – for the use of radiation and the doctor who urges this path of treatment may know a great deal indeed about its actual good, but isn’t the issue the patient? What is the point of singing the praises of radiotherapy at this person’s bedside? What illness is she suffering from: shingles, paralysis, meningitis?

If you make a ‘case’ for something (if that is your chosen word) there is necessarily a situation, a case file, a patient in trouble whom you are proposing to help, and that is certainly true here: there is a map of the United States on the cover of Wolfe’s book. But the structure of case-making requires that you identify the illness. There is a case for radiotherapy if… – and everyone knows how to complete that sentence: if the trouble, duly identified, is the kind of trouble that radiation is good at stopping. But if the illness has not been diagnosed there is no ‘case’ to be made at all.

If there is not yet a diagnosis, no doctor should be ‘making a case’ for anything but determination of the trouble. That doctor’s so-called ‘case for radiation’ is in reality a wild guess at the illness (it is one of those ‘illnesses treatable by radiation’), but that is not how patients are helped. In fact, that is not even medicine.

This would be a bad doctor equipped with good medical knowledge (the kind of doctor whom “knowledge puffs up” – 1 Corinthians 8:1).

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I am not at all saying that Prof. Wolfe is a bad doctor; as noted, I have just begun to read his book, which I am doing with interest. I am saying that diagnosis of the trouble is a thing that this book (and all books responding to ‘our current trouble’) must provide or this effort is seriously off its chosen course.

If this case for Christian nationalism never identifies the trouble to which it is the solution it will not be a serious response to our situation. Indeed, it will be irresponsible, in just the way that the bad doctor’s advocacy is irresponsible – actually a danger to the patient. (Radiation, chemotherapy, surgery all have drawbacks. They are all good; they are all sometimes life-saving advances of medicine, but in those situations in which they are good treatments. Everywhere else they are not recommended, because there they pose an actual threat to the patient.)

To repeat, so as to be entirely clear, I am not anticipating what Prof. Wolfe will say. I am simply noting how the ‘case’ he presents (like any case) needs to be judged. – If the book begins with diagnosis, then it will be a serious case. If it begins with accurate diagnosis, it will be a credible case. And if it concludes with a treatment well matched to that diagnosis (if it is the sole viable treatment, or one that looks best) then it will offer the patient real hope.

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I confess, however, that I have the fear that our record of behaviour warrants. Why should Wolfe not be wandering in the same shadows the rest of us are drawn to. The story of the culture war is a chronicle of thrashing around, of doing what anyone does who is afflicted with a trouble he does not understand. What reason have we to expect anything different from this book. (As the culture wars have not gone well for conservatives we can expect to see a harder edge emerge just as an untried strategy.) These are simply the unavoidable thoughts provoked in a spectator on fifty years of events, but it is a ray of light that I hope for.

If, however, Wolfe’s book contains only implied diagnosis in and around sensible claims about the general merits (in theory) of Christian nationalism then it will not be what it says it is; it will be an information manual on this treatment and not a case at all. National Conservatism.org calls the book

a tour-de-force argument for the good of Christian nationalism,

but I have already noted that all recognized treatments are good, so this tells us nothing. Christian nationalism may be irrelevant in its goodness if it is not conceived to remove or undo or make less debilitating the trouble we are suffering from. The issue is not the cogency of the idea but its capacity to heal the patient. – And who, by the way, is that patient?

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The thing that most puzzles me about Wolfe’s book – visible at a glance but something I have yet to find any comment on in the browsing I have done – is its cover. We seem to see a patient (the United States of America) glowingly irradiated by the Light of the Cross. By orthodox thinking, that light is Christ. Where in this picture are the people who have rejected that light? Are they getting the treatment? According to the Gospel it isn’t forced on them, unlike the legislation we are staggering under everywhere in the West. (The cover of this book seems to picture a dream for America, not a plan for treatment.)

These two problems of identification – of the patient who is to receive the treatment and the trouble this patient needs treatment for – are united.

If The Case for Christian Nationalism is not in fact a case for therapy, a case for treating the problem that ‘we’ (presumably all the people corralled in the showcased map) are afflicted by – if, that is, the author does not diagnose the patient – then it will be up to someone else to do so, but even then we will not have reason to turn to Christian nationalism as a treatment unless we have been shown, by writers such as Wolfe, what exact trouble Christian nationalism can cure, and why it would not hurt the patient in some other way, moving the trouble to some other part of the body.