Surprise, surprise: Stephen Wolfe, author of “The Case for Christian Nationalism,” and his crackpot ethno-nationalist supporters aren’t the only ones posting his self-proclaimed “Eleven Words” anymore. Recall his infamous post on X from 2023:
Now the Daily Wire’s Megan Basham and American Reformer’s William Wolfe, executive director of AmRef’s “assumed name,” the Center for Baptist Leadership, are publicly echoing him. Here’s what they recently posted :
I’ll explain in a minute why I believe it’s even more foolish now for them to proclaim the “Eleven Words” (or words close to it) than it was in 2023, but allow me a bit of necessary background first.
Stephen Wolfe created an online firestorm when he first posted those “Eleven Words,” because that statement was a tip of the hat to the “Fourteen Words” made infamous by the late white-nationalist terrorist David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."
As the Anti-Defamation League has noted, Lane’s statement “reflects the primary white supremacist worldview in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: that unless immediate action is taken, the white race is doomed to extinction by an alleged ‘rising tide of color’ purportedly controlled and manipulated by Jews.”
Doug Wilson of Canon Press, Wolfe’s publisher, lightly chided his embattled author for his post at the time, saying that posting the “Eleven Words” was both “dumb” and “not dumb,” before writing last year that “the denotation of Wolfe’s claim is spang-on accurate,” before adding: “… if you actually believe that white evangelicals are the lone bulwark against moral insanity in America, as I do, you have to take the total package.”
But the water is sufficiently fine now, it would seem, for Basham and William Wolfe to finally put more than just a toe out of the ethno-nationalist closet. Recall that their toes were out about 15 months ago, when American Reformer sponsored and promoted a True Texas Project conference, with Basham as the featured speaker. This is the group that was abandoned by multiple mainstream Texas conservative speakers in 2024, after they learned that TTP planned to “amplify white nationalist figures and rhetoric.” I posted about it last year:
In other words, it didn’t surprise me one bit that these two now feel confident enough to assert that “white evangelical Christians are the lone bulwark” against “moral insanity in America” or against “all-out leftist domination” and “are the force keeping this nation from total immorality.”
Let me explain why the “Eleven Words” claim about “white evangelicals” is spurious on its face.
First, notice the context in which this crowd hails “white evangelicals” as the great saviors of national morality – not by pointing to statistics about the wonderful morality actually practiced by a majority of evangelicals, but by pointing solely to a small sampling of stated evangelical views in polls.
What we ought to be asking is this: Just how “moral” are self-professed evangelicals in reality? And what kind of impact does actual evangelical morality have on America as a whole?
Consider this observation just two years ago from pollster George Barna, who was remarking upon the dramatic depth of depravity he has found to be rampant in our nation – and note especially what he cites as its cause: “The research shows that much of (America’s) steep cultural decline flows from the dramatic transformation in the evangelical community of the United States in the past 30 years.”
Far from being a triumphant “lone bulwark against moral insanity in America,” Barna reported: “Evangelicals are far fewer in number than typically reported, often are far less biblical in their thinking than one might think and tend to vote in far fewer numbers than expected.
“Although more conservative on moral issues, as a whole evangelicals reflect fewer lifestyle differences from the culture than often thought. Surprisingly, most evangelicals do not possess a biblical worldview—only about one-third do. In fact, the data strongly suggests that evangelicals are more likely to be shaped by the culture around them than they are to influence or ‘evangelize’ it.”
Yes, 74 percent of white evangelicals in the Pew survey that Basham cited did state that abortion should be “illegal in all or most cases,” but are we just supposed to ignore that the remaining quarter of white evangelicals believe abortion should be “legal in all or most cases?”
Barna estimates that there are roughly 30 million evangelicals in America. If 26 percent of them believe in near-absolute legalized abortion, we’re talking about almost 8 million “evangelicals” who are pro-abortion. What’s more, an estimated 13 percent of self-described “evangelical” women have had abortions. Going by Barna’s estimates, that would mean that nearly 4 million evangelical women have killed their children in the womb. Cancel the ticker-tape parade, CNs, because none of this adds up to an evangelical “lone bulwark against moral insanity” to me.
Also keep in mind that since Roe v. Wade was overturned, the total number of abortions nationally has not declined. Depending on which reports you read, the number of abortions either has stayed stable or even slightly increased.
Last year’s Barna-Family Research Council study on social issues and worldview also noted that the overall number of churchgoers calling themselves “pro-life” dramatically decreased by 20 points between 2023-2025.
Isn’t something a “bulwark” only if it fortifies and safeguards? So in what way are “white evangelicals” fortifying the country or serving as a safeguard on abortion if abortion rates are not dropping, but in fact increasing, and churchgoers overall are increasingly less pro-life?
Moreover, Barna noted that the dominant worldview among Christian evangelicals remains Syncretism, which he defines as a “cut-and-paste approach to developing a philosophy of life” culled from ideologies like Marxism and secular humanism. “Very few evangelicals were defined by a worldview other than the biblical worldview or Syncretism. Nearly two-thirds of evangelicals (64 percent) qualified as Syncretists,” Barna stated about his research into the matter.
And Barna’s most recent data indicates that only 5 percent of white evangelicals have a biblical worldview. Non-white evangelicals only trailed them by 2 points, with 3 percent having a biblical worldview, “a small difference that falls within the margin of the survey’s sampling error,” Barna reported.
So essentially, the embarrassingly low number of evangelicals who actually have a biblical worldview cuts across evenly among whites and non-whites. Read it for yourself here.
Another study published in 2024 in the Journal of Beliefs and Values compared 411 evangelical Christians with 942 non-evangelicals and discovered that the evangelicals talked the morality talk, but their lives didn’t reflect any better morals in practice than those of non-evangelicals:
“It was found that while evangelicals scored higher on a measure of commitment to external, public displays of morality, there were no group differences in scores on a measure of internal, private commitments to morality. Public and private commitments to morality are thus sometimes relatively independent of one another,” researchers stated.
What’s more, are Christian Nationalists aware that 83 percent of unmarried evangelical women between the ages of 23 and 32 have had premarital sex? Actually, American Reformer does know this statistic, because it ran this 2022 article authored by Grove City College professor of sociology David Ayers, who addressed the issue of sexual sin among “young evangelical women.”
What’s really interesting, though, is that Ayers cited “white evangelicals” elsewhere, when he wrote that “58 percent of white evangelicals say they believe that cohabiting is acceptable if a couple plans to marry.”
A strong majority of white evangelicals are pro-fornication, Christian Nationalists. Exactly how does that square with a) Scripture and b) your unsubstantiated claim that white evangelicals are the “lone bulwark against moral insanity in America?”
Here’s what I believe: It doesn’t really matter to these people if the claim breaks down in the details, because you’re looking at a group of self-identified and/or functional ethno-nationalists with an unbiblical and morally reprehensible view on the racial superiority of whites. And at the end of the day, everything for these people is about political power. Not Jesus. Not the Bible. Not even morals apart from Jesus. Just political power.
It’s why they didn’t go after heretic Paula White for publicly comparing President Trump to the Lord Jesus Christ in that recent viral clip from the White House. It’s why they didn’t call out Trump himself for his disgusting post cursing Iran repeatedly and saying “praise be to Allah” – on EASTER. It’s why they didn’t call out Trump for threatening Iran yesterday by saying “a whole civilization will die tonight,” a flat-out genocidal threat later abandoned in favor of a two-week negotiation period.
There is no evidence of true personal morality affecting their approach to politics at all, because for Christian Nationalists, the ends always seem to justify the means. How else could William Wolfe brag about praying for Trump under the spiritual headship of a (female) heretic?
You see their own lack of “moral bulwarkness” online all the time. They don’t repent of anything. But they personally attack critics. They lie about people. They libel people. Some even lie about things like their organizational tax-exempt status. And they regularly refuse to listen to any Christian who warns them of their ungodly ideas and actions by pointing to reason, facts or, most importantly, Scripture. Because again, their lust for political power is stronger than — ironically — any moral fiber that would jerk them back from justifying the unjustifiable (along those lines, check out this just-dropped doozy from Joe “Empathy is a Sin!” Rigney at American Reformer’s website).
All of this is why, as dumb as the “Eleven Words” were back in 2023, they sound even dumber now. Two years after Stephen Wolfe wrote those incomprehensibly dumb words, we know much more about the moral character of the people who are trumpeting this ludicrous sentence, as well as the relevant data about the very immoral state of today’s American evangelicals.
Christian Nationalists may claim all day long that “white evangelicals are the lone bulwark against moral insanity in America,” but what they’ve shown in the last few years is that they are actually guilty of moral insanity themselves and compounding their guilt by shamelessly foisting it on both the church and the world, sans any repentance.
It’s why I much prefer these Eleven Words: “Stay away from fools; there is nothing they can teach you.” (Prov. 14:7)
“And at the end of the day, everything for these people is about political power. Not Jesus. Not the Bible. Not even morals apart from Jesus. Just political power.”
Exactly.