Remigration, Recolonization, Rechristianization, Restoration: How Some of America’s Most Extreme Christian Nationalists See the New (Old) World Order

The American right has not been perfectly unified in the wake of Trump’s strike against Venezuela and capture of Nicolas Maduro. Most have celebrated it as an act of manly decisiveness by Trump, a forceful display of America’s superpower status. But there have been those who worried that the move signalled a revival of the Bush-era neoconservatism that is widely loathed on the new right. And there has even been Tucker Carlson’s bizarre assertion that we deposed Maduro in order to spread gay marriage to Venezuela. 

But I want to focus on the responses of some of the most extremist Christian nationalists in particular, figures like C. Jay Engel, Joel Webbon, Matt Walsh, and William Wolfe. For these individuals, the Venezuela strikes augured not only a return to an international order defined by the naked realism of power politics but a renewed opportunity to build a system defined by national categories and their place in a global hierarchy of nations. At the top of this system is a new kind of America, muscular, exploitative, and fundamentally Christian. This can perhaps be best captured by C. Jay Engel’s three-word post on X from the weekend: “Remigration. Recolonization. Rechristianization.” Below, I want to use these three terms to walk through a brief, summary explanation of this worldview. 

Remigration

Remigration has become a watchword on the right across the U.S. and Europe in recent years. The idea is simple and noxious: we should not only be curbing foreign immigration but actively working to deport legal residents and naturalized citizens of undesirable origin. We have seen this discourse flare up most recently around the Minnesota daycare fraud scandal, which the right has turned into a means of arguing for the remigration of Somali-Americans. The excitement over the quick deposition of Maduro has only further energized these demands. And the killing of Renee Good by ICE is another reminder of how anyone who opposes that mission is viewed. 

Christian nationalists, far from embracing traditional gospel messages of charity and hospitality, have eagerly taken up this cause. More importantly, however, the nationalist dimension is heightened by an emphasis on the inherent unsuitability of certain peoples, in this case Somalis, to American life. 

Matt Walsh, the self-styled “theocratic fascist” of The Daily Wire, has spent the last few days openly appealing to race science to argue for the mass deportation of Somali-Americans. He has repeatedly unleashed bilious tirades against Somalis as criminal and biological inferior, insisting that “We all knew that the average Somali has an IQ that hovers around the level of mental retardation—you know, scientifically speaking that’s the case.”

It’s important to understand that the remigration cause isn’t strictly a case against illegal immigration. It’s an argument for applying racial and cultural essentialism to all national groups and deeming certain ones, namely “third world” populations, to be unassimilable. As Engel has put it, “we need a massive and prolonged century of deportation and re-migration [sic].” 

In the Venezuela strikes, people like Engel and Walsh see an opportunity. The discourse around the deposition of Maduro prompted Engel’s remigration, recolonization, rechristianization post. And Walsh, too, sees a chance to restore an older, truer order. For Walsh, that includes using the country as a repository for the unwanted populations he so disdains. He posted that “[Venezuela] should take our undesirables. Hopefully that’s one way we’ll make use of Venezuela.” 

But turning Venezuela into a deportation dumping ground is not the limit of their aspirations. A number of extremist Christian nationalists see a future where America embraces its white Christian heritage at home and imposes its will on the world abroad. The phrase that best captures Engel’s politics is one he and his allies often repeat: repeal the 20th century.

Recolonization, Rechristianization 

For someone like Engel, the project of remaking America has domestic and international implications. Domestically, it is about the reassertion of white supremacy against so-called decolonization efforts by indigenous and minority populations. Engel promotes himself as a vaunted “heritage American.” Internationally, it’s an imposition of 19th-century ethnonationalist hierarchies built on the idea of inherent national characters. Yes, Christian nationalists believe that nationalism is good and appropriate for everyone, but not every nation can make an equal claim to legitimacy or to divine favor.

In many ways this echoes the chauvinism of Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist who lent his name to a colony and the short-lived, white-led unrecognized successor state in southern Africa. Rhodes saw the colonial project as an affirmation of Anglo-Saxon superiority: 

Africa is still lying ready for us[.] [I]t is our duty to take it. It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race[.] [M]ore of the best, the most human, most honourable race the world possesses.

It’s unsurprising then that Rhodesia features prominently in the imaginations of today’s extremist Christian nationalists. For them it’s a kind of ur-example of left-wing great replacement in action. As Eric Conn, the founder of far-right New Christendom Press, has claimed:

Gay race communism, pushed by “liberal democracies” like the U.S., intentionally destroyed Rhodesia.

This is what they want to do to your nation.

To be clear, the extremist nationalist contempt for liberal internationalism is not that they have no international relations theory of their own. Rather, they reject the principles that nations are equal, global politics shouldn’t strive for peace and human rights, and law not power ought to govern relations between states.   

Far from being true isolationists, the appetite for global power is only growing on the Christian far right. Matt Walsh stated this week that he believes Western Hemisphere countries ought to be reduced to “subordinate vassals of the United States.” In another post, Walsh declared that international law is “fake and gay” and that “the only international law is that big and powerful countries get to do what they want.” 

As The New Republic’s Greg Sargent has asserted, Walsh’s rhetoric over the last week amounts to “making it 100% explicit that MAGA is a neo-imperialist movement that's all about pillage and plunder justified by assumed racial superiority.”

This is no less true on the home front. Domestically, figures like Engel are part of a wider effort to cultivate idyllic Christian communities in rural and small-town America, from which they hope to launch the rechristianization of the country. In 2024, Engel and his Contra Mundum podcast partner Andrew Isker relocated to Jackson County, Tennessee, as part of Joshua Abbotoy’s RidgeRunner project. Whereas Abbotoy demurs on the more extreme politics of the new Christian right, Engel has made it clear that his move is in keeping with his hardline beliefs. As David Peisner explained for Rolling Stone, Engel’s position is that America needs to expel its immigrants, abandon its sexual deviancy, and get back to “how it was before the Civil Rights movement.” To reiterate, as Engel and Isker are fond of saying, they want to “repeal the 20th century.” 

So Engel is a kind of internal recolonizer, seeking to re-impose a late-19th century American social order. But those communities are not meant to be monastic. In the long run, Engel wants Christians to conquer America not simply retreat into its hinterlands. His efforts, and those of his fellow Christian nationalists, are also about rechristianization—building up a deeply reactionary form of American Christianity and imposing it on the nation as a whole. 

The “rechristianization” of America for these extreme Christian nationalists is essentially a modern-day Reconquista. They view America as crippled by both degenerate foreign populations and the anti-Christian liberal forces that enable them.

This is as much about making America Christian again as it is about de-liberalizing Christianity. For extreme Christian nationalists, liberalism is incompatible with true Christianity—a heretical philosophy of cosmopolitanism, passivity, and homosexuality. When Austin-based church leader Joshua Torrey posted on Wednesday that “ethnonationalism is a sin,” dozens of right-wing figures attacked him for it. Pastor Joel Webbon perhaps best captured the extreme Christian nationalists view when he quoted the post, saying, 

Liberalism walking around in a hollowed out “Christian” skin suit is finished.

Want a white pill?

Just look at the comments. 

Webbon has recently launched a new series on his New Christian Right YouTube channel (branded as “NXR Studios”) featuring weekly episodes with Nick Fuentes. The project that will amount to ten hours of conversation with the ascendant Neo-Nazi and self-styled Groyper. In the first release, Webbon and Fuentes discuss their shared belief that only Christians should be allowed to occupy positions in America’s government, with Fuentes adding, “If God has a law, I think our country should follow that…I think that’s consistent with what our civilization is.”

Restoration 

A few years ago, I wrote an essay in which I argued that many Christian nationalists view their project as a restorative one. They want to return America to a place before it was sullied by civil rights, multiculturalism, and the welfare state. 

The same can be said for their global outlook. The post-war consensus of the last seventy years is, to them, an aberration that must and will be undone. As Webbon has said, “What’s the post-war consensus? It’s the answer to why America can’t have nice things.”

Engel’s exhortation to repeal the 20th century can be felt here as well. After all, it’s the 20th century settlements on migration, human rights, and cooperation that now constrain their drive to dominate the world. And it’s America’s 20th century consensus derived from FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson that helped make us into the modern, multicultural liberal democracy we have held up as an example to the world. 

Theirs is a masculine, white nationalist, theocratic framework. It’s a synthetic blend of new age fascism and manosphere toxicity masquerading as a return to ancient wisdom. But they want to return all the same. 

Featured image is Empire Makers and Breakers, by Harold Wright