30/04/2026
All are welcome to join the Zoom lecture today.
Public Lecture by Prof. Jeffery Nicholas “All things are equal in Christ”: The Need for a Renewed New Left Church in the Face of Christian Nationalism
5 pm (EET), Thursday, 30 April 2026, CR I-312, MRU, Ateities st. 20, Vilnius
Participants are also welcome to attend online via Zoom (link in comments) (passcode: Critique)
In 2016’s The Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance, the now Vice-President to Donald J. Trump, lamented the loss of community by telling his story of growing up in Middleton, OH, a formerly bustling manufacturing town that lost its factory. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, Vance says nothing to condemn the capitalist economy that drove the company from the town. Rather, he blames the loss of community on widespread diversity and the acceptance of President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. Vance’s memoir can be read as a manifesto of sorts, of Christian Nationalism, which he seems to stand firmly behind. In The Case for Christian Nationalism, Stephen Wolfe defines Christian Nationalism as “Christian nationalism is a totality of national action, consisting of civil laws and social customs, conducted by a Christian nation as a Christian nation, in order to procure for itself both earthly and heavenly good in Christ” (p. 14, Kindle edition). For Wolfe, the desire is to institutionalize Christianity, and, again, the only criticism Wolfe offers of capitalism is when it portends to universality. In contrast to Vance and Christian Nationalism, I argue for a renewal of the New Left Church. In a little known work, The New Left Church from 1966, Terry Eagleton argues for a different kind of Christian approach to politics, one that emphasizes community, an idea that in theory Vance would agree with, but a community that is non-hierarchical, one that both Vance and Christian nationalists in general would disparage. Where Christian nationalists want to institutionalize Christianity, a reading of Eagleton would affirm the need to make our institutions sacred, which had less to do with Christianity than to do with honoring what it means to be human. Only through embracing this understanding of community can we move forward toward a new and better world of human flourishing.
Jeffery L. Nicholas is Professor of Providence College, USA. Currently, Jeffery is a Visiting Professor at Università degli Studi di Udine, Dipartimento di Scienze Giuridiche, Italy. He is also the director of CASEP (Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics), a Research Fellow at MRU’s Centre for Aristotelian Studies and Critical Theory, and the author of numerous papers and books, including Love and Politics (Routledge, 2021).