(Image source: Tyler Merbler/Flickr)

Progressives often argue that Christian nationalism, or Christofascism, is a deviation or distortion of true Christianity. Liberal Christian pastor John Pavlovitz, for example, argues that, “If you’re a Christian who doesn’t welcome refugees and immigrants, you’re not a Christian.” Progressive minister Chuck Curris echoes that sentiment: “Just because people have weaponized faith in support of evil doesn’t mean they offer an authentic expression of Christianity.” Christianity, in this view, is a religion of empathy and love. Those who use Christianity to spread hate and violence are twisting true Christianity. MAGA, they say, has corrupted the church’s original teachings.

This is an appealing argument psychologically and strategically. Christians want to feel that their religion is virtuous, and they want to be able to argue, contra Trump, that progressives are the real heirs of a virtuous Christianity.

But the insistence that real Christianity is compassionate can contradictorily end up reinforcing the very Christian supremacy and exceptionalism that progressive Christians are trying to combat. To claim a pure Christianity is to abrogate to yourself a unique tradition of virtue that can ultimately be used to justify arrogance and even abuse of power.

While the debates around MAGA Christianity are (unfortunately) a contemporary phenomenon, the dangers of a Christian conviction of purity have been recognized for a long time. James Hogg’s novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, published in 1824, is a searching, bitter, and frightening account of the potential evils of a Christianity convinced of its own goodness.

Hogg’s book was not much celebrated when it was first published. Its reputation has grown, however; it was much praised by novelist Robert Louis Stevenson in the 19^th century, and by influential cultural critic and scholar Eve Sedgwick in the twentieth. Now, in the twenty-first, it’s bleak account of how Christianity can be a form of power and of sadism seems ever more prescient and relevant. In that sense, Confessions of a Justified Sinner is an early description of the dangers of Christofascism, which sees a claim to purity not as virtue, but as an excuse for targeting and exterminating the impure.

Hogg was not a militant atheist who believed Christianity was always and everywhere evil. But neither did he spend much time trying to distinguish “real” Christian values from the excesses of fanaticism. Instead, Confessions of a Justified Sinner acknowledges that Christianity is sometimes an instrument of the Devil. In so doing, it points the way towards a more humane, less bigoted morality, for Christians and for everyone else, with instructive lessons for today.

“The most faithful and true subjects I have”

The good Christian of Hogg’s novel is Robert Colwen, the younger son of a minor Scottish noble. Under the influence of his mother and her spiritual advisor, the Reverend Wringhim, Robert embraces radical antinomian Calvinism, a belief that certain people are predestined to salvation and can do no wrong that God will not forgive. Others, who are not elect, are doomed to hell.

Robert is confirmed in these beliefs by a mysterious companion/double named Gil-Martin. Gil-Martin makes extravagant hints as to his own power, which leads Robert to believe at first that he must be Peter the Great of Russia. It soon becomes clear to the reader, though, that Gil-Martin is some combination of Robert’s worst impulses and the Devil himself. He leads Robert to murder his brother, and then to an escalating series of horrors, including seduction, theft, and matricide. Finally, in an effort to escape Gil-Martin, and with his double’s encouragement, Robert kills himself.

For contemporary readers, Hogg’s narrative foreshadows Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Like Raskolnikov, Robert believes he is above or beyond pedestrian moral strictures and can therefore act with complete impunity, even up to the commission of murder.

Where Dostoevsky presents Raskolnikov’s crimes as the natural endpoint of an atheistic Nietzschean philosophy, though, Hogg repeatedly emphasizes that Robert’s evil, and Gil-Martin’s, are inseparable from their Christian commitments. “Religion is a sublime and glorious thing,” a good minister, Mr. Blanchard, explains. “But there is nothing so dangerous to man as the wresting of any of its principles, or forcing them beyond their due bounds.” He adds, “you and he are carrying your ideas of absolute predestination…to an extent that overthrows all religion and revelation together; or, at least, jumbles them into a chaos, out of which human capacity can never select what is good.”

Blanchard suggests that Robert’s Christianity is a distortion of true Christian principles. But he also immediately argues that the good and evil of Christianity are jumbled together in a “chaos,” from which human beings cannot easily select the better way. This is consistent through the book. Hogg does not denounce or reject Christianity. And while he suggests that there is a Christian path to virtue, he refuses to dismiss Robert’s doctrines as false Christianity with no implications for “real” Christians.

For example, in one passage Robert asks Gil-Martin if his subjects are all Christian. Gil-Martin responds, “All my European subjects are, or deem themselves so…and they are the most faithful and true subjects I have.” Gil-Martin later expands on his own experience of Christian conversion and Christian life:

“The spirit that now directs my energies is not that with which I was endowed at my creation. It is changed within me, and so is my whole nature. My former days were those of grandeur and felicity. But, would you believe it? I was not then a Christian. Now I am. I have been converted to its truths by passing through the fire, and, since my final conversion, my misery has been extreme.”

Gil-Martin, who Hogg implies is the Devil, is here retelling the story of his fall from heaven. He used to be an angel; living in “grandeur and felicity.” But, he says, he “was not then a Christian.”

(Image: Illustration from Private Memoirs & Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Source: Public Domain Review)

You could see this as simply a lie or a reversal of the truth; Satan is saying he was not a Christian when he was, and claiming to be a Christian now when he is not. Or Gil-Martin could be explaining that when he was an angel, he did not hold to the doctrine of predestination, which Robert believes is the one truth that can make you a Christian.

But you could also read the passage as an indictment not of one form of Christianity, but of Christianity itself. Angels are not Christians because to believe oneself among the chosen, to see yourself as having the truth, is infernal. The Devil only became a Christian when he became evil; the first Christian is not Christ or Christ’s first apostle, but Satan, because Christianity is a form of hellfire.

Hogg is careful to maintain this double vision. Robert’s version of Christianity is a distortion of Christian truths—and it’s also a fulfillment of Christian truths. The Devil’s doctrine is both an ugly false double of Christianity, and it’s the essence of Christianity. Just as Robert cannot tell where he begins and Gil-Martin ends, so the true nature of Christianity cannot be teased apart from the evil that Christians do and that Christianity does. “Our essences are one,” Gil-Martin says to Robert, “our bodies and spirits being united, so that I am drawn towards you as by magnetism, and, wherever you are, there must my presence be with you.”

“As constant to me as my shadow”

Gil-Martin and Robert both emphasize the extent to which they have become interrelated and fused: “He was as constant to me as my shadow,” Robert says. Confessions is a story of possession, but Hogg wants to be clear that it is not really a story of outside influence or infiltration. Contrary to Robert’s doctrine, Hogg insists that “no man ever was guilty of a sinful action who might not have declined it had he so chosen.” Everyone can choose good or evil; corruption is a thing you grasp, not a thing someone else inserts into you.

Robert, in contrast, believes that there are pure people and impure people, and that the latter must be destroyed to protect the former. Christianity in this view is a closed community of virtue, and that virtue is defended not through doing virtuous things and making virtuous choices, but through the violent purging of the corrupt, who are always, by virtue of their corruption, outsiders and infiltrators.

Thus, in order to convince Robert to kill the minister, Mr. Blanchard, Gil-Martin compares Blanchard to an army of “enemies of the Church”—a framework that recalls the Crusades and links Blanchard to Islam. “When I saw and was convinced that here was an individual who was doing more detriment to the Church of Christ on earth than tens of thousands of such warriors were capable of doing, was it not my duty to cut him off, and save the elect?” Robert muses, before eventually murdering Blanchard.

Robert’s evil, then, consists in telling himself a specifically Christian narrative in which he is justified (as per the title) in committing any excess of vice and violence in the name of Christian virtue. It is his conviction of himself as a Christian which hands him to the Devil, who is no one but his own constant Christian shadow.

Hogg refuses to deny the Christian core of Robert’s Christian violence. As a result, even though Confessions is a Christian text, it does not link evil to any traditional Christian scapegoats. Muslims, long depicted as enemies of Christianity, are compared to Mr. Blanchard, the novel’s most moral voice. Nor is Hogg’s Satan conflated with Jews or Jewishness. Gil-Martin can change shape, but he is not an outsider duplicitously assimilating or infiltrating, à la antisemitic caricatures like Dracula or Nosferatu. Instead, he takes on different forms in a Christian community because he is Christian himself; he mirrors Robert because he is Robert’s true face. “I am wedded to you so closely that I feel as if I were the same person,” he says.

Purity is a justification for sins 

Confessions of a Justified Sinner refuses to exculpate Christianity because Hogg believed that exculpation is a key to horrors. Convincing yourself that you or your ideas are pure is the first step towards convincing yourself that your worst actions are justified and necessary.

The parallels with Trump are obvious. In his inaugural speech, Trump referenced the failed assassination attempt he survived and declared, “My life was saved by God to make America great again.” Just like Robert, he claims divine sanction for a program of worldly aggrandizement—and a mandate to violence against whomever he declares an enemy, be that Mr. Blanchard, immigrants, or trans people.

Hogg’s novel can be read as a prescient metaphor for MAGA. But it has a warning for progressive Christians too. If you want to avoid bigotry and self-righteousness, it’s not enough to condemn those faults in others, or to insist that Christianity has been misunderstood or taken amiss. To recognize Gil-Martin, you have to see that he is in fact a Christian—not a distortion of Christianity, but rather one face that Christianity can take on. Evil, for Hogg, isn’t something someone else does; rather it’s what you do when you insist that only someone else can do evil.

“I was a being incomprehensible to myself,” Robert writes. “Either I had a second self, who transacted business in my likeness, or else my body was at times possessed by a spirit over which it had no control, and of whose actions my own soul was wholly unconscious.” Robert has lost control of himself, not because he has been taken over by an outside evil, but because he has disavowed his own capacity for evil, and he has therefore become nothing but his own worst self. Christian or non-Christian, when you believe you have found the one true path, that path can only be the one Gil-Martin has laid out, and which he plans to walk with you.

Noah Berlatsky (he/him) is a freelance writer. His books of poetry include Brevity (Nun Prophet Press), Meaning Is Embarrassing (Ranger Press) and Not Akhmatova (Ben Yehuda Press). His newsletter is Everything Is Horrible.